Victor Toro, Tortured in Chile, Fights Deportation

Perhaps because he faces imminent deportation to his native Chile, after the authorities discovered that he had been living illegally in the United States since 1984.

A well-known advocate for immigrants and the needy in New York, Mr. Toro has been in and out of immigration court for nearly four years, unsuccessfully battling a deportation order and trying to win asylum. But unlike most supplicants there, he has remained stubbornly outspoken outside the courtroom — corralling colleagues for May Day rallies, demanding changes in immigration laws and criticizing the United States government, which has accused him of having belonged to a Chilean terrorist group in the 1970s.

Even as he announced a last-ditch legal appeal last month, he went out of his way to fault President Obama for not apologizing for the role of the United States in the 1973 coup that ousted a Chilean president, Salvador Allende, and installed Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

“It’s not just about my situation,” Mr. Toro later explained, “but about the crisis facing different communities and anyone who is confronting oppression.”

At 68, Mr. Toro has many reasons to resist a return to Chile. He was imprisoned and tortured there during the Pinochet regime. He has few relatives and even fewer prospects there, having built a life and family in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx, where he established La Pe?a, a popular cultural and political center.

Some of his staunchest supporters wish that for his sake, he would focus more closely on his own predicament.

“He wants to see himself as a fighter and part of a collective struggle, but in U.S. jurisprudence it’s about the individual,” said Temma Kaplan, a Rutgers University historian who has written about Chile. “It’s like a time warp. We are fighting these immigration cases in the 21st century, but he’s a person who was formed in the 1960s.”

Inside the loft that La Pe?a shares with the Rebel Diaz arts collective, Mr. Toro plopped down in a chair, his heavy-lidded eyes framed by white hair pulled back into a ponytail. Political posters and fliers lay about the space, where concerts and film screenings are regularly held.

“We always said it’s not enough to express yourself culturally,” he said. “You are in the midst of all these great social problems, and you have to put that in the mix.”

He admitted he was among the founders of the Revolutionary Movement of the Left, known by its Spanish acronym, MIR, a Chilean socialist group that emerged in the 1960s. Though the group financed its activities through bank robberies it called “expropriations,” Mr. Toro said he never participated, but organized working people.

Mr. Allende’s overthrow in September 1973 sent Mr. Toro into hiding, though he was eventually arrested and interned at a series of camps, where he was tortured. He speaks little about these degradations, which included being bound to a metal bed frame and shocked repeatedly. He was freed in 1977, and left the country. The government declared him dead — a message, he said, that if he returned he could disappear.

After stays in Cuba and Nicaragua, Mr. Toro won asylum with his wife and infant daughter in Mexico. But feeling vulnerable to agents of the Pinochet regime, they crossed the border illegally into Texas, and finally settled in the South Bronx.

“I saw here the third world that I had come from,” he said.

Mr. Toro threw himself into local activism, helping to organize unlicensed street vendors, staging music and art events, and providing a meeting space for immigrants from Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Honduras. Then, in July 2007, after attending conferences on immigrant rights in several cities, he was on an Amtrak train outside Buffalo when immigration agents asked for identification. All he had was an expired Chilean passport. He was arrested.

Hearings were held late last year, and in March an immigration judge, Sarah Burr, denied Mr. Toro’s asylum request, saying his homeland was now safe because democracy was restored in 1990.

Still, she rejected the government’s claim that Mr. Toro had engaged in terrorism. And she seemed sympathetic, saying she thought it “incomprehensible” that he had not tried before his arrest to seek asylum or a green card, especially since his wife and daughter are legal residents.

Mr. Toro said he had not applied for asylum earlier because he distrusted the United States government for its support of the Pinochet dictatorship. Rather than risk deportation, he said, he had waited for a change in immigration laws.

An appeal has won him a temporary stay of deportation. He and his lawyer plan to argue that Mr. Toro’s support for the rights of indigenous groups could put him at odds with the Chilean government.

But human rights advocates say Chile is not the repressive country Mr. Toro fled. “Chile has made significant strides,” said Jose Miguel Vivanco, director of the Americas division of Human Rights Watch.

Mr. Toro’s supporters fear that simply returning there could wreak havoc on him. His physician, Dr. Clyde Lanford Smith, testified that Mr. Toro’s past torture had lingering effects.

“His mental health is not going to be good because of what happened to him 25 years ago, where he saw so many of his friends knocked off,” said Dr. Smith, who works with torture survivors. He noted that since Mr. Toro was arrested, he had become quieter, and afraid of crowds.

Yet Mr. Toro continues to volunteer at La Iglesia Evangélica Espa?ola, a church where hundreds of people go each week for a hot meal and a sack of groceries. He has counseled teenagers to quit gangs and helped drug addicts enter detoxification.

The Rev. Danilo Lachapel, the church’s assistant pastor, said that, yes, Mr. Toro remains unapologetically political. Should he mute himself?

Mr. Lachapel voiced doubt that Mr. Toro ever could. “I think he has become more radical,” he said with a chuckle. “Given his trajectory, if he became a moderate, all of a sudden it would only make the government more suspicious of him.”