President Bush and many of his political followers are bending over backwards to allow millions of illegal immigrants already in this country to stay, and the incompetent INS is busy not deporting the millions of illegal immigrants like it’s supposed to be doing.

But, by golly, when it comes to people like six-year old Elian Gonzalez, a refuge from communist dictator Fidel Castro, and a Chinese Christian tortured for his beliefs while in China, they have got to go!

WorldNetDaily has the absolutely ridiculous story:

A Chinese man tortured for his Christian faith is fighting for the right to stay in the U.S. and not be deported back to his homeland where he faces two years of imprisonment for illegally practicing his religion.

The Alliance Defense Fund has taken up the asylum cause of Li Xiaodong of Ningbo, China, under the Convention Against Torture Act. On Aug. 9 a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit denied Li’s request to stay in the U.S. The religious-liberty law group says it will appeal the decision.

If you remember the Gonzalez incident, poor Elian’s mother died with a number of other Cubans who were trying to make from Cuba to Florida on a dingy little raft. If memory serves correctly, Elian was the only survivor, and was found by a fisherman off the coast.

But even though Elian had family in Florida, and even though the courts had ruled in favor of Elian’s new caretakers, the Clintons and Janet Reno showed what kind of police state we live in today when they raided the family’s home and took Elian by force.

This case is undoubtedly much worse, however.

The 5th Circuit found that in 1995 Li was a member of an underground evangelical Christian church meeting at his home on Sundays. He was arrested for holding an illegal church service and then interrogated at length at the local police department for “being a reactionary.”

Li was handcuffed, beaten and had his hair pulled. He was then kicked, forced to kneel, and hit with a police bar when the Chinese police did not like Li’s responses to their questions, according to the three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit. Li was jailed for five days and then forced by the police to clean public toilets without pay.

That same year, Li obtained a visa and left China, fearing further torture and imprisonment.

According to the court’s decision in Li v. Gonzales, Li’s case reflected “that the Chinese government … [has] harassed, interrogated, detained, and physically abused members of unauthorized religious groups.”

Even so, the court ruled against Li’s request, agreeing with action by the Board of Immigration Appeals, which had overturned an immigration judge’s decision to honor the Christian’s asylum request.

And get a load of this:

ADF pointed out that on Aug. 13, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals granted asylum to a Mexican national on the grounds that being a homosexual would subject him to persecution in Mexico.

This is truly outragous. But don’t expect Bush or the Republicans, busy trying to keep as many illegal Mexican immigrants in the U.S., to try to do anything about this case.