Monday, December 21, 2009
ICE Agents' Ruse Operations
By Jacqueline Stevens December 17, 2009
Guatemalans in the Boston area are seeing spies infiltrating factories, buses with tinted windows taking away unidentifiable co-workers, and men with guns grabbing their neighbors. For these survivors of state violence, it's a traumatic reminder of the very thing they thought they had left behind. Twenty-six-year-old Julia, arrested in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid, said, "If they are taking children away and everything, then for me, that's a second war." She told her story in interviews with Professors Brinton Lykes and Dan Kanstroom of Boston College's Post-Deportation Human Rights Project.
Thirteen of the fifteen Guatemalans in the town of Chimaltenango who had organized a group on behalf of loved ones picked up by ICE in the US could not locate them. These Guatemalans, in meetings with Lykes and Kanstroom, also spontaneously brought up the decades-long civil war that ended in 1996, during which 200,000 were killed and thousands vanished. A woman who lost her son and husband in the war and who was desperate to find her grandson asked the two professors, "Are they being disappeared?"The US government is not sending out death squads. But the Guatemalans are onto something. According to an unnamed ICE official responding to questions sent by e-mail, ICE agents regularly impersonate civilians and rely on other tricks, some of which are illegal, in order to arrest longtime US residents who have no criminal history. I found incidents in which ICE agents posed as OSHA inspectors, insurance agents and religious workers. The effect is to corrode trust in the government, neighbors--and even Mormons.
Last summer, a woman came to the office of Marina Lowe, an ACLU attorney in Salt Lake City, saying she believed that ICE agents dressing as Mormon missionaries had been to her house. Lowe's client noticed that the missionaries lacked the black name-tags she'd always seen them wear, and behaved in other ways inconsistent with missionary protocol, including entering her home while her husband was absent. After she confirmed that he lived there, they left. The next day, ICE agents arrived and arrested her husband.
Lowe realized that the woman's husband had been in the sights of ICE undercover agents when she called a phone number the woman gave her. The woman told Lowe that a man purporting to be an insurance investigator had left the number with her earlier. The man who picked up the phone when Lowe called told her he worked for the federal government. When Lowe asked why the federal government had an interest in insurance, the caller admitted to being an ICE agent. As for the missionaries, Lowe said that a colleague of hers described similar ICE missionary disguises, reported in community meetings in Utah County, about an hour south.
When Aaron Tarin, the immigration attorney now representing the husband of the woman who came to see Lowe, called the local ICE office, the ICE supervisor's exonerating evidence against the accusation was that such an action would be "political suicide" and "stupid." Tarin, himself a Mormon, said, "If this gets out it could have a catastrophic effect on missionaries' work in Utah, and it can really put missionaries in danger. Aliens could get hostile and offensive."
In response to a question about whether it was consistent with government policy for ICE agents to impersonate religious workers, the anonymously written ICE e-mail explained that impersonating religious officials is part of "ruse operations" and justified this as a "tool that enhances officer safety."
But "this is unconstitutional. It is a direct interference with the First Amendment rights of people to freely practice their religion," said Jennie Pasquarella, an ACLU staff attorney in Los Angeles, who cited a 1989 Ninth Circuit decision holding that it was unconstitutional for federal agents to infiltrate churches in their efforts to thwart the sanctuary movement. Among the attorneys suing the government, she pointed out, was Janet Napolitano, now Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
A ruse operation about five years ago still rankles Kentucky attorney Julia Thorne. Thorne received a phone call from a man saying he was with a courier service, wanting to confirm her address. Shortly after that, one of her clients, a Polish horse teaser living in the area since 1993, received a call from a man who identified himself as "Bill, the new guy in Julia's office" and asked the client to stop by Thorne's office and sign some papers--despite the fact that Thorne works alone. Two ICE agents were waiting and arrested him in the lobby. Thorne, eight floors above, had no idea until she received a call from her client in ICE custody.
When Thorne complained to the Louisville ICE office, she was told, "No, your client's making that up. We said we were a courier service." When she asked, "How did he happen to show up in my lobby when you were there?" they said it didn't happen.
Thorne worried about the effect on her practice: "What if this gets out? People will say, 'Don't go to that attorney. ICE stands in her lobby waiting for clients to come in,'" but didn't pursue it. "If I gave them too much trouble they could go through my client list. Who knows what they would do? They're lying through their teeth, and there's nothing I can do about it. I'm powerless because they could hurt people that I'm supposed to be taking care of. I felt so violated that they would use me to get my clients." (Thorne now works for the Presbyterian Church and no longer has this concern.)
The anonymously written ICE e-mail stated that impersonating attorneys is also consistent with ICE "ruse operations," but claimed this particular ruse is not used routinely. Ruses, the official wrote, "prevent violators from fleeing, thereby allowing for a safe arrest that does not place the violator, the arresting officers or innocent bystanders at risk."
At other times, immigration law enforcement agents deceptively rely on the authority of their uniforms to conduct interrogations even though people aren't obligated to answer. On August 31, 2009, Border Patrol agents marched onto a Greyhound bus in Twin Falls, Idaho, 450 miles from Canada, and pulled off for questioning "only those who looked brown," Aaron Tarin explained, after which they "unlawfully interrogated them and locked them up in a facility thousands of miles away from home."
According to Mark Qualia, a Border Patrol agent and spokesperson, agents are routinely conducting "transportation checks" across the country. He mentioned Abilene, Texas (400 miles from Mexico), and Albuquerque, New Mexico (266 miles from Mexico), as other examples. Qualia justified these checks by comparing a bus station in Twin Falls, Idaho, to the St. Louis airport as a destination for international flights. He said that the sites are selected based on reports of "undocumented aliens living in this location," not recent arrivals. Spokesperson Mike Emge said Border Patrol agents in Twin Falls picked buses for inspection that were scheduled to be in the station for at least thirty minutes.
These actions are "clearly illegal," said Nancy Morawetz, director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at New York University Law School. She explained that border patrol agents are only authorized to search for people who have "just entered," adding, "It's bad enough they're doing this 100 miles from the border, but I haven't heard of them doing this 450 miles from the border."
Under the Obama administration, ICE is moving away from workplace raids, popular among anti-immigrant activists, and relying more heavily on targeted stealth operations. Lykes, the Boston researcher, explained that this decision may seem more politically palatable, but the effect is to "send the operations underground: the door-to-door arrests send a shudder through the immigrant community, but without the dominant community finding out."
http://bit.ly/7xGCci
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Immigrant crimes: Who deserves deportation?
Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer Tuesday, December 15, 2009
SAN FRANCISCO -- Courts on two fronts looked for boundaries Monday on an important question of federal immigration law: What crimes are so serious that they require deportation for any noncitizen who commits them?A federal appeals court ruled in a case from Solano County that statutory rape doesn't always require deportation. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to decide whether a legal immigrant in Texas must be deported because of a second misdemeanor conviction for drug possession.
Both cases involve a law signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996 that requires deportation of any immigrant, legal or illegal, who commits an "aggravated felony," a category of crimes that courts are still trying to define. It includes some drug and sex crimes that are misdemeanors - punishable by no more than a year in jail - rather than felonies.
If a noncitizen has committed such a crime, "the judge can't take into consideration (U.S.) military service, the effect on a U.S. citizen spouse, parent or kids, or how long (the immigrant has) been here," said Benita Jain of the Immigrant Defense Project, which filed arguments with the Supreme Court in the drug case.
Immigrants convicted of other crimes can be also be deported if a judge decides they are dangerous and do not qualify for exemptions based on such factors as family hardships.
The Solano County case involves Luis Pelayo-Garcia, 42, of Vacaville, who entered the United States illegally from Mexico in 1985 at age 17. He was on the verge of gaining legal residency in 1998 when officials learned that he had recently been convicted of statutory rape.
According to his lawyer, Gloria Martinez-Senftner, Pelayo was working at a restaurant and raising three young children after his wife left him, and took a co-worker into his home along with her husband and daughter.
At age 29, he became involved with the daughter and intended to marry her, believing she was 18, his lawyer said. But when the girl became pregnant, hospital employees learned she was only 15 and called police.
Immigration judges said Pelayo's crime was an aggravated felony and ordered him deported, but they were overruled Monday by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
The federal law defines "sexual abuse of a minor" as an aggravated felony. But California's statutory rape law, prohibiting anyone older than 21 from having sex with a person under 16, does not require proof of physical or psychological abuse for conviction, the court said in a 3-0 ruling.
The Supreme Court case involves Jose Carachuri-Rosendo, who entered the United States with his family as a child and has been a legal resident since 1993. He pleaded guilty in Texas to misdemeanor marijuana possession in 2004 and pleaded no contest a year later to misdemeanor possession of the anti-anxiety drug Xanax without a prescription.
A federal appeals court ordered Carachuri deported, citing a federal law that allows any repeat drug offender to be prosecuted as a recidivist, which is defined as an aggravated felony even if the crimes were misdemeanors.
Carachuri, who was not charged as a recidivist in Texas, appealed to the Supreme Court, which agreed to decide his case by June.
The case is Carachuri-Rosendo vs. Holder, 09-60. E-mail Bob Egelko at begelko@sfchronicle.com.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Friday, December 4, 2009
Agency, advocates assail ICE on detainee transfers
By SUSAN CARROLL Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle
Alejandro Sibaja and his wife, Iris Lopez-Sibaja. Now a legal resident of the U.S., he spent 15 months in the ICE system.
After Alejandro Sibaja was picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Houston 15 months ago, he was transferred six times and finally ended up in Haskell, north of Abilene.
By the time an immigration judge in Dallas granted Sibaja a green card last Wednesday, his wife, Iris Lopez-Sibaja said she had spent countless hours trying to track him through the nation's troubled immigration detention network, which faced criticism on Wednesday from government auditors and immigrant rights advocates for resulting in haphazard detainee transfers.
“It was tough. It was harder on my kids, though,” Lopez-Sibaja said. “They were the ones always asking where their dad was.”
In separate reports released Wednesday, the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security and the nonprofit organization Human Rights Watch criticized the controversial and increasingly common practice of transferring immigration detainees to detention centers far from their families and attorneys.
The OIG report found that ICE frequently fails to follow its own established procedures for detainee transfers, creating hardships for immigration detainees. The shuffling of immigration detainees from center to center, frequently because of a lack of bed space, has resulted in errors, delays and confusion for detainees, their attorneys, their relatives and the immigration court system, auditors found.
Cases, families hurt
ICE officials issued a statement Wednesday saying the agency is in the process of overhauling the immigration detention system and plans to make reforms that will reduce the number of detainee transfers.
The Human Rights Watch report, which was based on data obtained from ICE through a Freedom of Information Act request, found that the agency made 1.4 million detainee transfers from 1999 through 2008, with the numbers growing significantly in the past few years.
Texas, which houses the largest share of the nation's immigration detainees, led the U.S. both in terms of sending and receiving immigrant detainees, accounting for more than 334,000 total transfers, the report found.
Alison Parker, deputy director for Human Rights Watch in the U.S., said the transfers often jeopardize detainees' court cases, separating them from their attorneys and frequently sending them to remote locations, such as rural Texas, where they have a slimmer chance of finding an immigration lawyer to represent them.
The court cases also may suffer because detainees are separated from the evidence or witnesses they may need for deportation or asylum hearings, Parker said.
Attorneys and immigrant advocates conceded that some transfers are inevitable and may be necessary to meet the specialized needs of detainees or to prepare immigrants for removal from the U.S. But some expressed concern about the growth of transfers based on a lack of bed space.
Timothy Hart, a Houston immigration attorney, said he recently had a client transferred from Houston to Oakdale, La. Several clients in the past year were sent to Atlanta, and one ended up in Pennsylvania, he said.
Houston immigration attorney Steven Villarreal said he had to stop representing Sibaja after he was transferred from Houston and ended up in Haskell.
“I told the family it would be too expensive,” Villarreal said, factoring in the plane tickets and hotel bills for hearings and the trial. “I had to refer him to another attorney up there.”
“It happens all the time,” Villarreal said of the transfers.
Sibaja, 33, was picked up in Houston on a bad check warrant in August 2008 and turned over to immigration officials, who found he had a conviction as a teenager for aggravated robbery. Sibaja, who came to the U.S. from Mexico when he was 12 or 13 years old, was put into removal proceedings.
Moved again and again
He was transferred first from Houston to Conroe, then from Conroe to Mississippi just before Hurricane Ike hit. Then Sibaja was sent back to Houston before being transferred to Amarillo and then to Big Spring. Eventually, he ended up in Haskell, and his case was assigned to the immigration court in Dallas.
At first, Sibaja's wife made the seven-hour drive to visit him every other week. But with two kids and a house slipping into foreclosure in Houston, she said she eventually cut the visits back to once a month, and then to once every other month.
Lopez-Sibaja said her husband's detention was hardest on their son, who was 3 when his father was first detained, and their daughter, who celebrated her sixth and seventh birthdays without him.
On Nov. 25, an immigration judge granted Sibaja lawful permanent resident status based on his seven-year marriage to Lopez-Sibaja, a U.S. citizen, and the hardship his deportation would cause for his children. He was home in Houston in time for a Thanksgiving turkey dinner.
“It was a long, emotional and tough journey,” Lopez-Sibaja said. “Sometimes now when I look at him, I can't believe he's here.”
http://bit.ly/7ZNUpc
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Immigration Detention System Lapses Detailed
Growing numbers of noncitizens, including legal immigrants, are held unnecessarily and transferred heedlessly in an expensive immigration detention system that denies many of them basic fairness, a bipartisan study group and a human rights organization concluded in reports released jointly on Wednesday.
Confirmation of some of their critical conclusions came separately from the Homeland Security Department’s inspector general, in an investigation that found detainee transfers by Immigration and Customs Enforcement were so haphazard that some detainees arrived at a new detention center without having been served a notice of why they were being held, or despite a high probability of being granted bond, or with pending criminal prosecutions or arrest warrants in the previous jurisdiction.
The bipartisan group, the Constitution Project, whose members include Asa Hutchinson, a former under secretary of homeland security, called for sweeping changes in agency policies and amendments to immigration law, including new access to government-appointed counsel for many of those facing deportation.
In its report, the human rights organization, Human Rights Watch, revealed government data showing 1.4 million detainee transfers from 1999 to 2008, most of them since 2006. The transfers are accelerating, the report found, with tens of thousands of longtime residents of cities like Philadelphia and Los Angeles being sent to remote immigration jails in Texas and Louisiana, far from legal counsel and the evidence that might help them win release.
“ICE is increasingly subjecting detainees to a chaotic game of musical chairs, and it’s a game with dire consequences,” said Alison Parker, deputy director in the United States for the human rights group, and author of its report. The data underlying the report was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) of Syracuse University, which issued its own report.
The inspector general’s investigation found that the consequences of haphazard transfers include a loss of access to legal counsel and relevant evidence; additional time in detention; and “errors, delays and confusion for detainees, their families, legal representatives” and the immigration courts.
Some detainees were transferred with files lacking a photo and a security classification, field inspectors found in work conducted from October 2008 to February.
Officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is part of Homeland Security, said the agency would issue advisories reminding field offices of 10-year-old national detention standards that require a review of a detainee’s “alien file” before any transfer, and reinforcing the need to coordinate with immigration courts.
In August, the Obama administration announced ambitious plans to overhaul immigration detention, a disjointed network that relies heavily on private prisons and county jails. But taken together, the three reports underscore the gap between the plans and the problems on the ground in a system that, according to the inspector general, is estimated to be detaining more than 442,000 people a year — more than double the number in 2003, ICE’s first year of operation.
John T. Morton, director of the immigration agency, envisions a “truly civil detention system” shaped by more centralized agency control. In contrast, the Constitution Project recommends shrinking the use of detention, in part by adding more constitutional safeguards required in the criminal justice system.
“None of the recommendations being made should in any way compromise national security,” Mr. Hutchinson said Wednesday in an interview before he presented the report at the National Press Club in Washington. “It simply allows for a more humane and more efficient system.”
Immigration law is complex, and the deprivation of liberty is quite similar to the situation in other settings that require court-appointed counsel for the indigent. But 60 percent of noncitizens face deportation without a lawyer, and transfers compound the problem, the reports said.
The immigration agency has said it uses transfers to deal with an imbalance in the number of detention beds at various locations. But the TRAC analysis shows that the number of transfers has grown much more rapidly than the detention population. It found that in the first six months of the 2008 fiscal year, 53 percent of detainees were transferred at least once, and that one in four were transferred multiple times, a fivefold increase since 1999.
Though transfers occur in almost every state, the data show that the jurisdiction receiving the most transferred detainees is the Federal Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, covering Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas — which is widely known for decisions hostile to the rights of noncitizens and has the worst ratio of immigration lawyers to detainees, the human rights report said.
A strong case against deportation sometimes simply evaporates in such a transfer, the report said. It cited a Jamaican New Yorker transferred to Texas after three months in detention in New York and New Jersey.
Immigration authorities contended that he should be deported based on two prior convictions for drug possession.
In New York, his drug misdemeanors were not considered an “aggravated felony,” and based on the man’s 22 years of legal residency and strong family relationships in the United States, he would have been eligible for “cancellation of removal,” a form of relief from deportation. In Texas, he was barred from relief based on Fifth Circuit rulings, and deported.
The bipartisan group said the agency makes it too hard for people to avoid detention while challenging deportation. It recommended a significant easing in the burden of proof, and a hardship waiver from mandatory detention for lawful permanent residents.
In what it called “an aspirational goal,” it recommended that where free counsel is not available, all indigent noncitizens in standard deportation proceedings have access to a government-paid lawyer. It also urged Congress to give immigration judges discretion to appoint counsel, and to require a lawyer in certain cases, including those involving unaccompanied children and the mentally ill.
Mr. Hutchinson said that the immigration agency could make many other changes immediately, including some that would “correct some potential unfairness in the system” unintentionally left by his own efforts when he was in office.
According to the Human Rights Watch report, a memorandum Mr. Hutchinson issued in 2004 is now used as a loophole to hold detainees for weeks without giving them notice of why the government is seeking to deport them. “This can certainly be tightened up and narrowed,” Mr. Hutchinson said.
http://bit.ly/6lwqxC
Start-up Visas Can Jump-Start the Economy
Immigrant entrepreneurs are an engine of jobs and growth. We need more of them.
By PAUL KEDROSKY AND BRAD FELD
While fast-growing companies have long been the main source of new jobs and innovation, this country makes it outrageously difficult for immigrants to launch new companies here. This doesn't make any sense. After all, Google, Pfizer, Intel, Yahoo, DuPont, eBay and Procter & Gamble are all former start-ups founded by immigrants. Where would this country be today without their world-changing innovations?
Immigrants have not only founded big, well-known companies. Foreign-born residents made up just 12.5% of the U.S. population in 2008. But nearly 40% of technology company founders and 52% of founders of companies in Silicon Valley.
Yet we don't seem to care. We send recent, foreign-born university science and engineering graduates back to their own countries after their student visas expire—unless these creative sorts are willing to spend some of the most entrepreneurial years of their lives working in a big company under an H-1B visa after they finish their studies.
For those who studied elsewhere, but who nonetheless want to bring their job-creating ideas here, American policies treat them—the job-creating, trouble-making innovators that they are—as a cross between deadbeats and queue-jumpers. Why can't they wait in line like everyone else to get a visa in five years or so? What's their hurry?
Their hurry is Joseph Schumpeter's hurry: They want to hustle out and disrupt markets when the opportunity arises.
In the 21st century those opportunities don't wait for our interminable, employment-based visa programs. As a result rather than saying "Come and create jobs here" we, in effect, tell them to shove off. Come back when you have a few million in sales— at which point they will be rooted elsewhere and creating jobs somewhere else.
That needs to end now. Immigrants who come here to create companies create jobs. We need the jobs.
One good idea to make this process easier is to create a new visa for entrepreneurs, something that is increasingly being called by venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and angel investors a "start-up visa." It might work like this: If immigrant entrepreneurs want to start a company in the U.S. and are able to raise a moderate amount of money (perhaps as little as $125,000) from an accredited U.S.-based venture capital firm or qualified U.S.-based angel investors, we should let them start a company here. It could be a couple of founders with an idea—that's it. We would give visas to the founders and welcome them in to our country.
Would it work every time? Of course not. It would fail more often than not. Start-ups often fail.
But having failed, the immigrant entrepreneurs could try again, and again. And as long as they are trying, raising money, creating jobs, and making sales, we would let them stay here. Founders of new companies are precious for a vibrant economy, and we should welcome them. Indeed, the country would be better served to find more of them.
Some will say a start-up visa program will be abused. They will say that it will become a way to end-run immigration rules, to jump the queue if you have money.
There are at least two answers to these objections. First, to get such a visa you would have to raise money from real investors. Second, Canada and other countries already allow entrepreneurs to start a company in their country. Shouldn't the U.S. stop worrying so much about keeping these people out, and start worrying about bringing them in?
We also think science and engineering graduates should get visas stapled to their diplomas. You complete your higher education here, you get to stay so that you can get out and create jobs, innovate, and grow the economy. Uncle Sam wants you, if you're a prospective entrepreneur.
The U.S. remains one of the most attractive countries for entrepreneurs. It has a culture of risk taking, capital formation, and an economic dynamism that is the envy of the world. This gives us a competitive edge that we should not let slip through our fingers.
Mr. Kedrosky is a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation and an investor. Mr. Feld is a managing director at Foundry Group, a Boulder, Colo.,-based venture capital firm that invests in start-up companies in the U.S.
http://tinyurl.com/ykwoazj
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Student group fights deportation of peers
By DANIEL SHOER ROTH
The students' efforts were so quick and efficient that after just a few days of being held at an immigration detention center, brothers Jesús and Guillermo Reyes were set free.
With the help of digital technology and a spirit of solidarity, this group of students -- U.S. citizens and immigrants alike, with or without documents -- showed how unity can be stronger than a judge's order in the cause of justice.
In Miami, where activism for one's convictions is scarce -- and youth are pigeonholed, often for good reason, as superficial and materialistic -- the group Students Working for Equal Rights (SWER), which was behind the effort to free the Reyes brothers, gives one hope.
As in the case of Colombian brothers Juan and Alex Gómez, who almost were deported in 2007, the student friends of the undocumented Reyes brothers organized the community to pressure immigration officials and South Florida's members of Congress.
This time, fortunately, they achieved results quickly.
``We focus our strategy on community colleges that are open to everyone, immigrants and citizens alike,'' said SWER organizer José Luis Marante. ``For us, it's unsettling to know that there are young people who talk just like we do, have the same ambitions, but they can't move up in society. That's the paradox.''
Marante, a 26-year-old Cuban American, is part of what sociologists have classified as the Millennial Generation, born between 1980 and 1995, well-versed in digital technology and supportive of progressive ideas.
These young people rally to the cause of their undocumented classmates because they see them as equals and not as violators of the law, since they came to this country as young children with their parents, grow up here and speak English fluently.
SWER is part of the Florida Immigrant Coalition and was founded in 2005 when its members could be counted on one hand and they would meet in friends' homes. Now the student group has 13 college chapters in Florida.
One of the founders is Gaby Pacheco.
Pacheco is a 24-year-old Ecuadoran with a student visa whose family was detained in 2006 for not having their paperwork in order.
On Nov. 14 Pacheco received a call telling her a student from Miami Dade College had been detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The next day, Sunday, she found out her friend Jesús Reyes, who like her had been student president at Miami Dade College's Kendall campus, was the one in trouble.
With experience earned in other cases the group has tackled, Pacheco and her SWER companions started a Facebook page to collect signatures.
In the process they found out that Kelly Vargas, a childhood friend of the Reyes brothers, had collected 600 signatures at El Rey Jesús (Christ the King) church in Tamiami.
``Monday and Tuesday we didn't do much because the priority was to get a lawyer who would represent the brothers,'' Pacheco said.
The Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center in Miami took charge of the case and won a reprieve: a one-year deferral of the brothers' removal order.
By Wednesday, ``we stopped our lives,'' Pacheco said, to organize a demonstration held Thursday, which was followed by an evening vigil.
``This is a group with positive energy. We don't work for our ego, because we know that what we're doing is more important than our own selves,'' she said.
When Guillermo and Jesús, Venezuelans ages 21 and 25, were free to leave detention on Friday, our community -- and especially their classmates -- celebrated another victory.
http://bit.ly/7rDben
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Sharp Drop in Border Arrests Is Tied to Recession, Experts Say - NYTimes.com
Detentions At Border Are Down
By JULIA PRESTON
David McNew/Getty Images
The border at Campo, Calif.By JULIA PRESTON
Detentions of migrants trying to cross the border illegally dropped to 556,000 in the 2009 fiscal year, a decline of 23 percent over 2008 and the lowest number since the early 1970s, according to official figures released this week.
The number of those detained while illegally crossing into the United States fell sharply in the year ending Sept. 30.
The number of detentions of illegal border crossers has been falling since 2000, when it reached a peak of 1.6 million. But the especially sharp decline in the 2009 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, was a sign of a steep decrease in the flow of migrant workers from Mexico and Central America, immigration officials and researchers said.
Migrants have been discouraged from coming by soaring unemployment among immigrants in the United States and tighter enforcement along the Southwest border, officials and scholars said.
Obama administration officials have pointed to the decreasing flow as evidence that they have achieved a major improvement in border security. In a speech this month laying out immigration strategy, Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, argued that a “major shift” in enforcement at the Mexican border had created conditions for Congress to embark on an overhaul of immigration policy, including giving legal status to more than 11 million illegal immigrants.
Ms. Napolitano said that heightened enforcement meant that such a program would not unleash a new flood of illegal migrants across the Southwest border.
Republican lawmakers said they were skeptical, because hundreds of miles of the rugged 2,000-mile-long border are still thinly patrolled and have no fencing. As a backup to border enforcement, they called for worker verification measures to block American employers from hiring illegal workers.
“We think it’s a combination of increased border patrol and the economy,” Fritz Chaleff, a spokesman for Representative Brian P. Bilbray, Republican of California, said of the low numbers. “But we need measures to make sure that the jobs that are available go to the workers who are authorized to take them.”
The Border Patrol hired 2,600 agents in the past year, official figures show, bringing the total to more than 20,000.
But the main factor in the slowing movement of immigrants is the country’s deep recession, which has hit immigrants particularly hard — especially illegal ones, researchers say. By the first months of this year, unemployment among immigrant workers was significantly greater than that of native-born American workers, reversing a trend during the boom years, according to a study by the Migration Policy Institute, a research group in Washington.
Some researchers cautioned that border enforcement would not prevent Latino immigrants from returning if the economy picked up.
http://bit.ly/8DdJ0v
Immigrants, Criminalized
A bedrock premise of smart immigration reform is the sharp distinction it draws between criminal aliens and Americans-in-waiting. While it acknowledges that illegal immigrants need to get right with the law, it treats illegal status as a civil matter to be resolved by the machinery of naturalization, not by the police and prisons.
To hard-line opponents of legalization, illegal immigrants are irredeemable lawbreakers by definition, and the only thing they should be waiting for is deportation.
The administration’s job, as it works on a long-overdue reform bill next year, is to resist that view. So it was disheartening to hear Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, boast recently about identifying “more than 111,000 criminal aliens” through a jailhouse fingerprinting program called Secure Communities.
That was misleading. The program, now in 95 cities or counties in 11 states, will ultimately require all local police agencies to check federal immigration databases for anyone after an arrest. It has so far identified a few thousand serious criminals, rapists and burglars, the kinds of people whose removal from the country must be part of any sane immigration strategy. But it also uncovered minor traffic infractions and visa violations.
It is easy to understand that the administration wants to sound as tough as possible as it gets ready to battle deep-seated resistance to real immigration reform. It is encouraging that Ms. Napolitano recently repeated the president’s insistence that a clear legalization path must be a pillar of reform. That makes it all the more important for the administration to avoid conflating illegal immigration and serious crime.
Laws must be enforced, but doing it this way hurts the innocent, creating a short line from Hispanic to immigrant to illegal to criminal. Having brown skin, speaking Spanish, seeming nervous in the presence of flashing police lights — none of those things say anything about whether you are here illegally or not, are deportable or not. But any one of them can be enough to get you pulled over in jurisdictions across the country.
In Arizona, it can get you jailed. We know of citizens whose homes were mistakenly raided by reckless federal agents on Long Island, day laborers who were targets of indiscriminate sweeps in California, and others who were singled out at roadblocks in upstate New York.
This hurts public safety. If you want to know the consequences of turning the police and jails into instruments of deportation, ask the law-enforcement officials who have complained about programs that muddy the line between local crime-fighting and federal enforcement, and make immigrants fear and shun the police.
President Obama has repeatedly assured 12 million illegal immigrants that he will fight to give them the chance to earn the right to stay. His administration should not undermine that noble effort by carelessly lending credibility to the view that the future citizens living and working among us are a class of criminals.
http://bit.ly/8LceqoTuesday, November 24, 2009
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Choosing Between Family and the Military
Service Members’ Undocumented Spouses Face Deportation
SOURCE: AP/John Amis Approximately 70 immigrant soldiers in the U.S. military from 35 countries pledge their allegiance to the United States during a welcome home naturalization ceremony.
As the nation prepares to celebrate Veterans Day, the flags over the White House and other federal buildings are flying at half staff in tribute to the dozens who were killed or injured at Ft. Hood, TX.
It is unclear whether Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged shooter, was politically motivated or acted because of emotional strain as he awaited deployment to Afghanistan. But the tragedy should remind the nation of the sacrifices our service personnel and their families make, especially during wartime. The stress among military personnel is palpable because for many of them, they are returning to Iraq or Afghanistan for the second, third, or even fourth tour of duty.
And that torment is compounded for an increasing number of military service members when they learn that the federal government has issued deportation orders for a spouse or partner because he or she is an undocumented resident of the United States.
These orders arrive while the service member is in the combat zone, or appear after the soldier has returned home, and occur whether the soldier is alive, killed in action, or missing in action.
In 2007, the federal government issued removal orders for the undocumented immigrant wife of Army Spc. Alex Jimenes while he was missing in action. The proceedings were halted at the request of then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who was spurred into action by Senator John Kerry (D-MA).
More recently, 26-year-old U.S. Army Spc. Jack Barrios returned from Iraq in 2007 suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. He was immediately confronted with deportation orders for his 23-year-old wife Frances, a Guatemalan immigrant, who was six years old when her mother illegally brought her to the United States.
Jack and Frances Barrios have a one-year-old daughter and a three-year-old son, and Frances is helping Jack deal with the hardships related to his mental disorder. Had it not been for DHS’s decision last week to grant a humanitarian parole, Frances’s only option would have been to return to a country she does not know—she grew up in Van Nuys, CA—and wait 10 years before being qualified to return as punishment for being brought here illegally as a child.
Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) has reintroduced the Military Families Act to deal with situations like this. The bill would grant lawful permanent resident status to any parent, spouse, child, son, or daughter of an active military service member or of a service member who died as a result of service. So far, Assistant Majority Leader Richard Durbin of Illinois and Democratic Sens. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, Kirstin Gillibrand of New York, and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin have signed onto the bill.
Some conservatives, such as Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) question the need for this legislation. Soldiers fight to preserve our rule of law, they argue, and when laws are broken, consequences must be paid. But proponents of the legislation have argued correctly that soldiers need to be military ready and focused, not wondering if the government they serve is going to separate them from their families.
Lawmakers must remember just how stretched and stressed our service members are:
- The Army’s 45 active Brigade Combat Teams have spent an average of just under 29 months in combat areas since 2002. Of these, all but the First Brigade of the Second Infantry Division, which is permanently based in South Korea, have served at least one tour.
- Of these brigades, 17 have served more than one tour or have had two tours in Iraq or Afghanistan; 16 brigades have had three tours; and five brigades have had four tours.
These multiple and lengthy deployments without sufficient time at home have had broad consequences for the lives of the troops and their families.
Suicide rates among soldiers are at their highest level since the Army began to keep records of the statistic 28 years ago. The Army’s suicide rate was greater than that of the general population last year, for the first time on record. And one third of the troops returning from deployments face significant mental health problems. One of every five service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan show signs of post-traumatic stress disorder and “an equal number are believed to have suffered traumatic brain injuries.”
Our military is increasingly dependent upon immigrants to fill its ranks. Foreign-born members of our armed forces totaled 114,601 as of June 2009, or almost 8 percent of the 1.4 million military personnel on active duty, according to a new report by the Immigration Policy Center.
When the nation went to war after the September 11 attacks, federal policy was adjusted so that immigrants in the armed forces could become eligible for naturalization, regardless of their time in the United States or status. But the issue of military family members who are in the United States without documentation remains unresolved.
As two immigration law experts noted in a recent article for Clearinghouse Review, a publication of the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, “Servicemen and women, citizens and immigrants alike, deserve a system that works and is a better reflection of the values and traditions that make America the land of liberty and opportunity—the land which they have pledged to protect for all of us.”
At a time when our forces are thinly stretched, it does not make sense for military personnel to face the additional pressure of deciding whether to stay in the armed forces and abandon their families, or leave the service they freely joined and move to another country to be with their loved ones.
Angela Maria Kelley is Vice President for Immigration Policy and Advocacy and Lawrence J. Korb is a Senior Fellow at American Progress.
King County, WA setting a good example:
King County OKs 'don't ask' law on immigration
King County will continue providing services to residents without regard to citizenship or immigration status, under an ordinance adopted Monday by a divided County Council.
By Keith Ervin
Seattle Times staff reporter
King County will continue providing services to residents without regard to citizenship or immigration status, under an ordinance adopted Monday by a divided County Council.
The council voted 5-4 for the law, which sponsor Larry Gossett said is intended to discourage racial profiling and "ratchet down the fear level" when people who are in the country illegally seek public-health services or deal with sheriff's deputies.
The law, which prohibits sheriff's deputies from asking about people's immigration status in most circumstances, continues current practices of the Sheriff's Office and Public Health — Seattle & King County, Gossett said. "The reason we wanted to codify it is in a few years there will be different members on the King County Council and a different executive."
The Metropolitan King County Council passed the ordinance after sheriff's spokesman John Urquhart said the county's "don't ask" policy has assisted law enforcement. "We could not do our job," he said, "if people were afraid to come to us as victims, as witnesses to crimes, if they were afraid that they were going to be deported over it."
Public Health Director David Fleming said, "Denying access to care because of citizenship status is not good medicine and is not cost-effective."
But council member Kathy Lambert said after voting against the ordinance, "We've been doing this since before 1992, so why do we have to put it in code?"
Lambert said she believes the county jails should investigate the citizenship of repeat offenders — something they don't now do.
Craig Keller, of Respect Washington, which advocates local enforcement of immigration laws, told the council, "If you pass this ordinance, you're throwing out a welcome mat to a greater population who are in the country illegally. ... The larger problem is the increasing population of illegal aliens and political corruption that comes with them."
The ordinance was supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, the King County Labor Council and other groups.
Voting in favor were Councilmembers Gossett, Dow Constantine, Bob Ferguson, Julia Patterson and Larry Phillips. Lambert, Reagan Dunn, Jane Hague and Pete von Reichbauer voted no.
County Executive Kurt Triplett will sign the law, first proposed by his former boss, then-Executive Ron Sims, said Triplett spokeswoman Natasha Jones.
Keith Ervin: 206-464-2105 or kervin@seattletimes.com
Monday, November 9, 2009
U.S. readies plan to ID departing visitors
Program would cover only those foreigners who leave by air
One U.S. program fingerprints and photographs foreign visitors, and a plan in the works would screen them at airports as they left, too. (Marcio Jose Sanchez/associated Press)
Sunday, November 8, 2009
The Department of Homeland Security is finalizing a proposal to collect fingerprints or eye scans from all foreign travelers at U.S. airports as they leave the country, officials said, a costly screening program that airlines have opposed.
The plan, which would take effect within two years, would collect fingerprints at airport security checkpoints, departure gates or terminal kiosks, allowing the government to track when roughly 35 million foreign visitors a year leave the country and who might be overstaying their visas, DHS officials said. The department plans to send the proposal to the White House as soon as next month for review and inclusion in President Obama's next budget.
Some experts and former government officials are skeptical. In a concession to industry, DHS said it probably will drop plans to require airlines to pay for the bulk of the program and is looking to cut costs, which could reach $1 billion to $2 billion over a decade, largely to be paid by taxpayers or foreign travelers. In addition, the program would not operate for now at land borders, where 80 percent of noncitizens enter and leave the country, because fingerprinting travelers there could cost billions more and significantly delay commerce.
The ultimate scope of the system -- how rigorous it is and its final price tag -- will signal how the Obama administration and a Democratic Congress balance expensive post-9/11 security mandates against the nation's financial constraints, analysts and former government officials said. Congress might have to reexamine the value of border controls that a few years ago were deemed critical for security and for curbing illegal immigration but that might be less effective than first thought or carry unpopular economic or diplomatic costs, they added.
Meeting a mandate
"It will be up to Congress to put its money where its mandate is," a senior DHS official said, outlining the plans on the condition of anonymity because Secretary Janet Napolitano has not made a final decision. "The administration and Congress have to decide how they want to implement this in times of budget austerity."
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a prominent congressional supporter of the tracking requirement, said she was pleased with DHS's "long overdue" move.
"A biometric exit system is critical to tracking the arrival and departure of foreign nationals -- not just through a paper trail, but through fingerprints, photographs, and other fraud-proof biometric identifiers," Feinstein said in an e-mail statement.
The DHS proposal marks the latest government step to satisfy a 1996 mandate by Congress to automatically track when foreigners enter and exit the country. Independent analysts have estimated that 40 percent of illegal immigrants enter the country legally and overstay their visas.
Congress focused on inbound travelers after the 2001 terrorist attacks -- several of the hijackers held expired visas -- appropriating $3 billion since 2003 on the US-VISIT tracking program. The program collects biological identifiers, such as fingerprints and digital photographs, from all arriving foreigners except Canadians and Mexicans with special border-crossing cards.
In 2004, lawmakers ordered that similar information also be collected from noncitizens upon exit but did not set a deadline.
By the time Bush administration officials unveiled a $3.5 billion program in April 2008, however, political impetus for changes had weakened. Air carriers protested that they had not been consulted and should not bear the bulk of the liability and cost of what they argued was the government's duty to fingerprint travelers. The requirement also bucked industry trends of cutting costs by automating boarding processes and moving passengers away from ticket counters.
DHS officials accused airlines of obstructing the proposal. In the end, industry lobbyists persuaded Congress to delay the plan until tests were completed this year. Industry leaders said they still hope the administration consults them.
"As far along as they are in the process, they haven't spoken a word to trade associations or any of our airlines," said Ken Dunlap, a spokesman for the International Air Transport Association, a trade group for 230 carriers.
Costs vs. risks
DHS officials said they are considering ways to hold down costs. Collecting fingerprints at security checkpoints would be cheaper than doing so at the departure gates, but checkpoints could be more prone to fraud by people who leave the airport instead of boarding their flights. Fingerprinting at departure gates, however, would require more workers, DHS officials said.
Such trade-offs raise more basic questions about the purpose of the program. Supporters say that, by collecting fingerprints and other data, officials can instantly check the identity of a foreign visitor leaving the country against security watch lists. It could also help target foreigners who have violated immigration law.
But critics point out that potential terrorists entering the country present a greater concern than those leaving. And, they say, when it comes to immigration violations, the new system would add only a marginal benefit.
DHS says it already can identify noncitizens who leave the country about 93 percent of the time by comparing passenger records of international airliners on arrival and departure. Officials said they think the rest mostly involve people who leave the country by land or whose names are recorded improperly at some point. Of the 200,000 to 400,000 travelers each year who immigration officials estimate overstay their visas, US-VISIT identifies those deemed a higher priority for investigation based on their nationality, age, sex and other biographical factors.
"The idea that there are serious national security risks that we've identified but we haven't pursued because we don't have an exit system is simply not plausible," said Stewart A. Baker, who was DHS undersecretary of policy from 2005 to 2008.
Among the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants living in the United States, the bigger problem is catching those considered a high priority, whether they overstay visas, commit serious crimes, violate deportation orders or pose other threats, Baker said.
The current system of tracking incoming visitors gave immigration officials leads last year on more than 14,000 who potentially presented a high risk, leading to 750 arrests. But the immigration agency office in charge of catching overstayers spent only $42 million on those investigations. Baker said that, before the government spends more to add names to the list of those in the country illegally, it should expand enforcement efforts.
Others noted that an airport-based system can be evaded by people who drive over the border.
"If you're doing this for immigration control purposes, how can you have a complete system without doing land" borders, said Robert C. Bonner, the head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection from 2003 to 2005. "Other than congressional pressure, the question is, why do this?"
The senior DHS official defended the pending proposal. "This would add a level of certainty to the departures of one category of people who came into the U.S. . . . in the air category," the official said, adding, "It is a partial solution and it should never be seen as more than that."
http://ow.ly/APFJ
Immigrants can make important contributions to society, pope says
By Carol Glatz
Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- People should not look upon immigrants as problems, but as fellow brothers and sisters who can be valuable contributors to society, Pope Benedict XVI said.
The migration of peoples represents a chance "to highlight the unity of the human family and the value of welcoming, hospitality and love for one's neighbor," he said Nov. 9.
The pope spoke during an audience with participants of the Sixth World Congress on the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Refugees taking place Nov. 9-12 at the Vatican.
The pope underlined the dramatic difficulties many migrants face in their efforts to survive or improve living conditions for themselves and their families.
"The economic crisis, with the enormous growth in unemployment, diminishes the possibilities of employment and increases the number of those who aren't able to find even unsteady work," he said.
The economic divide between industrialized and poor countries continues to grow, he said, and many people have no choice but to leave their homeland in search of a living -- even if it means accepting inhuman working conditions and experiencing great difficulties fitting in someplace new with different language, culture and rules.
Many immigrants today are fleeing "humanly unacceptable" living conditions, but they are not finding "the reception they hoped for elsewhere," said the pope.
Globalization means that working for the common good must extend beyond national borders, he said. True development comes through solidarity, addressing the unequal distribution of the world's resources, "dialogue between cultures and respect for legitimate differences," he said.
The pope said today's phenomenon of world migration can offer that needed opportunity to meet new cultures, foster understanding between peoples, build peace and promote development that benefits all nations.
Christians must be open to listening to the word of God who calls people to imitate Christ in caring for others and to "never be tempted to despise and reject people who are different," he said.
Conforming one's life to Christ's means seeing every man and woman as a brother or sister, children of the one God, he said.
This sense of brotherhood leads to being caring and hospitable toward others, especially those in need, he said.
"Every Christian community that is faithful to Jesus' teachings cannot but feel respect and concern for all people ... especially for those who find themselves in difficulty," he said.
"This is why the church invites all Christians to open their hearts to migrants and their families knowing that they are not just a 'problem,' but are a 'resource'" that can contribute to true development and the good of all people, he said.
Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- People should not look upon immigrants as problems, but as fellow brothers and sisters who can be valuable contributors to society, Pope Benedict XVI said.
The migration of peoples represents a chance "to highlight the unity of the human family and the value of welcoming, hospitality and love for one's neighbor," he said Nov. 9.
The pope spoke during an audience with participants of the Sixth World Congress on the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Refugees taking place Nov. 9-12 at the Vatican.
The pope underlined the dramatic difficulties many migrants face in their efforts to survive or improve living conditions for themselves and their families.
"The economic crisis, with the enormous growth in unemployment, diminishes the possibilities of employment and increases the number of those who aren't able to find even unsteady work," he said.
The economic divide between industrialized and poor countries continues to grow, he said, and many people have no choice but to leave their homeland in search of a living -- even if it means accepting inhuman working conditions and experiencing great difficulties fitting in someplace new with different language, culture and rules.
Many immigrants today are fleeing "humanly unacceptable" living conditions, but they are not finding "the reception they hoped for elsewhere," said the pope.
Globalization means that working for the common good must extend beyond national borders, he said. True development comes through solidarity, addressing the unequal distribution of the world's resources, "dialogue between cultures and respect for legitimate differences," he said.
The pope said today's phenomenon of world migration can offer that needed opportunity to meet new cultures, foster understanding between peoples, build peace and promote development that benefits all nations.
Christians must be open to listening to the word of God who calls people to imitate Christ in caring for others and to "never be tempted to despise and reject people who are different," he said.
Conforming one's life to Christ's means seeing every man and woman as a brother or sister, children of the one God, he said.
This sense of brotherhood leads to being caring and hospitable toward others, especially those in need, he said.
"Every Christian community that is faithful to Jesus' teachings cannot but feel respect and concern for all people ... especially for those who find themselves in difficulty," he said.
"This is why the church invites all Christians to open their hearts to migrants and their families knowing that they are not just a 'problem,' but are a 'resource'" that can contribute to true development and the good of all people, he said.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
For immigrants, illness can bring a death sentence
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While outside the prison gates the nation debates whether to overhaul the health care system with a public option, detained immigrants have no option at all. They cannot bring their own doctors to jail or get their own medication, even if they are willing to pay for them. If immigrants become sick in detention, they must rely on a system that has failed time and again to respond to even the most urgent medical needs.
Meanwhile, Massachusetts makes money on locking up immigrants. The Suffolk County jail, which can hold approximately 275 immigration detainees on any given day, receives $90 per detainee per day from the federal government. One alternative to detention - a GPS monitoring ankle device - costs about $12 a day.
As the lead investigator of a recent 18-month ACLU study of detention conditions in Massachusetts, I saw firsthand the systemic denial of medical care at the nine immigration detention sites - and the fear of retaliation for speaking up about problems.
I repeatedly requested and was denied access to reports filed with the government by lawyers from American Bar Association, who had permission to visit detainees at Suffolk and other county jails in Massachusetts. For years, the Bush administration kept these ABA reports a secret. Recently, however, the Obama administration made them public, and the ABA’s findings directly confirm that detained immigrants are often ignored or face excessively long waits to be seen by a doctor. Some reported that they waited months to be seen by medical personnel, while often growing sicker.
I was surprised to learn that detainees had written a letter to the Bar Association on the day Vincent Murphy died, alleging that he had died from a lack of medical care. They said he was “was coughing blood when he arrived, and detainees notified facility staff of his illness, but staff was ‘not willing to listen.’ ’’
Both the American Bar Association and the ACLU found that detainees fear retaliation if they dare to speak up at Suffolk County jail. Such fear is “at a level that the ABA has not encountered in the nearly five years that we have been visiting detention facilities.’’ ABA lawyers reported such difficulty finding detainees who would speak with them about conditions at Suffolk that they ended up talking to only two detainees, both of whom were so agitated and emotional with fear during their interviews that one of them “held his hands together to try to control his shaking.’’
Janet Napolitano, the secretary of Homeland Security, recently announced plans to improve the immigration detention system. The deaths of two immigrants in Boston serve as a tragic reminder that the need for change is urgent and that the stakes are literally a matter of life and death.
Laura Rótolo is a staff attorney at the ACLU of Massachusetts and author of the recent ACLU report “Detention and Deportation in the Age of ICE.’’
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Monday, November 2, 2009
Immigrant Jail Tests U.S. View of Legal Access
A startling petition arrived at the New York City Bar Association in October 2008, signed by 100 men, all locked up without criminal charges in the middle of Manhattan.
In vivid if flawed English, it described cramped, filthy quarters where dire medical needs were ignored and hungry prisoners were put to work for $1 a day.
The petitioners were among 250 detainees imprisoned in an immigration jail that few New Yorkers know exists. Above a post office, on the fourth floor of a federal office building in Greenwich Village, the Varick Street Detention Facility takes in 11,000 men a year, most of them longtime New Yorkers facing deportation without a lawyer.
Galvanized by the petition, the bar association sent volunteers into the jail to offer legal counsel to detainees — a strategy the Obama administration has embraced as it tries to fix the entire detention system.
“Immigration and Customs Enforcement considers the access to legal services at Varick Street as a good model,” said Sean Smith, a spokesman for Janet Napolitano, secretary of homeland security, who oversees immigration enforcement.
But the lawyers doing the work have reached a different conclusion, after finding that most detainees with a legal claim to stay in the United States are routinely transferred to more remote jails before they can be helped. The lawyers say their effort has laid bare the fundamental unfairness of a system where immigrant detainees, unlike criminal defendants, can be held without legal representation and moved from state to state without notice.
In a report to be issued on Monday, the association’s City Bar Justice Center is calling for all immigrant detainees to be provided with counsel. And an article to be published this month in The Fordham Law Review treats the Varick jail as a case study in the systemic barriers to legal representation.
The new focus on Varick highlights the conflict between two forces: the administration’s plans to revamp detention, and current policies that feed the flow of detainees through the system as it is now. A disjointed mix of county jails and privately run prisons, where mistreatment and medical neglect have been widely documented, the detention network churns roughly 400,000 detainees through 32,000 beds each year.
“Any attempt to get support or services for them is stymied because you don’t know where they’re going to end up,” said Lynn M. Kelly, the director of the Justice Center.
When she asked that the lawyers’ letters of legal advice be forwarded to detainees who had been transferred from Varick, she said the warden balked, saying he had to consider the financial interests of his private shareholders: 1,200 members of a central Alaskan tribe whose dividends are linked to Varick’s profits under a $79 million, three-year federal contract.
Federal officials would not discuss their transfer policies, but asked for patience as they try to make the detention system more humane and cost-effective.
“We inherited an inadequate detention system from the previous administration that does not meet ICE’s current priorities or needs,” said Matthew Chandler, a Homeland Security spokesman. Officials say they are committed to a complete overhaul, including less-penal detention centers with better access to lawyers.
The volunteer lawyers and the petition’s author, an ailing refugee from torture in Romania who spent eight months inside Varick, say many problems persist there, though the added scrutiny has led to improvements. Detainees who want a Gideon Bible no longer have to pay the commissary $7. Immigration officials are more responsive when a lawyer complains that a detainee in pain is not getting treatment.
But most detainees do not have a lawyer, and the few who do include men who have fallen prey to incompetent or fraudulent practitioners. Recurrent complaints include frigid temperatures, mildew and meals that leave detainees hungry and willing to clean for $1 a day to pay for commissary food. That wage is specified in the contract with the Alaskan company, which budgeted 23,000 days of such work the first year, and collects a daily rate of $227.68 for each detainee.
The Alaska connection is one of the stranger twists in the jail’s fitful history. Opened as a federal immigration detention center in 1984, Varick became chronically overcrowded after 1998, when new laws mandated the detention of all noncitizens who had ever committed a crime on a list of deportable offenses, expanded to include misdemeanors like drug possession.
A Dominican man there died of untreated pneumonia in 1999 — the first reported death in the nationwide detention system, which now counts 106 since October 2003.
The Varick facility, which is on the corner of Houston Street, fell short of national detention standards adopted in 2000, because it lacks any outdoor recreation space. But under a grandfather clause, it was allowed to remain open until 9/11, when the terror attack, blocks away, forced its evacuation. For years, it was shuttered. It quietly reopened in February 2008, operated by Ahtna Technical Services Inc., a subsidiary of Ahtna Inc. — still with no access to fresh air.
As an Alaska Native corporation, Ahtna has won numerous federal contracts without having to compete with other companies; last year it paid its tribal shareholders about $500 each in dividends. It hires a Texas subcontractor to supply guards and transportation, along with the shackles and belly chains routinely used on detainees being moved in or out.
Varick’s population includes illegal immigrants, asylum-seekers and legal immigrants who face deportation because they have past criminal convictions. Almost half of those screened by the volunteer lawyers have already been in detention for four to six months, according to the bar association report, and nearly 40 percent have legal grounds to contest deportation.
A few, the report says, have a possible claim to citizenship, which would make their detention unlawful. But the volunteers, including lawyers from 16 corporate firms, say they can offer only rudimentary legal triage to a handful of detainees a week.
The Department of Justice is asking Congress for money to expand the law project, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement invites Washington officials to visit the weekly triage sessions. The agency allowed a reporter to observe a session, but not to tour the jail. On a recent Thursday, only 11 of 35 detainees who had signed up made it into one of five glassed-in booths where they could consult with pairs of legal volunteers.
One, a 25-year-old Mexican, had been delivering food for an Italian restaurant on Madison Avenue until his detention. After a week in Varick, the government had not served him with a “notice to appear” telling why he was detained and setting the date and place where he would be heard by an immigration judge.
Volunteers were researching his case a week later when he was transferred to Atlanta. It could just as easily have been Louisiana or Texas, far from any free legal help, said Maria Navarro, a Legal Aid lawyer who supervises the volunteers. Even in cities, she said, lawyers are reluctant to represent detainees who may be suddenly moved far away.
Another 25-year-old, who had come to New York as a legal immigrant from Belize at age 2, told lawyers he had worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken to support his 5-year-old daughter, a citizen, when his sickle-cell anemia permitted. After a standing huddle, the lawyers told him that because his notice listed old convictions for possession of marijuana, he was ineligible for release on bond or with an electronic monitoring bracelet.
A Haitian, who had served time for at least one drug-related offense, had a lawyer but wanted a second opinion after being held in Varick for 16 months. He described himself as a barber, interpreter and legal resident of Brooklyn for 23 years.
“It is double jeopardy,” he protested, nursing a swollen jaw with teeth missing. “I become a diabetic here, because of anxiety, stress and suicidal conditions.”
Yet a detainee from the former Soviet Union praised the jail. “Varick is heaven” compared with some county jails in New Jersey (Bergen and Monmouth) and Florida, he said, citing abuse by anti-immigrant guards.
A century-long line of Supreme Court decisions holds that immigration detention is not a punishment or deprivation of liberty, and does not require legal counsel for fundamental fairness.
But Daniel I. Miller, 39, the Romanian whose petition reached the bar association, said his own case showed how high the stakes can be. Mr. Miller, a chef, fled his native land in 1994 after the secret police mutilated him for advocating gay rights. In New York, he had already been paroled for a criminal conviction — for signing his partner’s name on a contract — when immigration authorities detained him.
To no avail, records show, his lawyer and an outraged doctor at St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan urged his release from Varick for treatment of tumors on his liver. Instead, he was transferred in April to the Orange County Jail in Goshen, N.Y., where he said he also circulated a petition. The authorities there accused him of trying to start a riot and sent him to segregation with a murder defendant.
“These people have no rules, that’s the main problem,” Mr. Miller said, speaking from the Midtown office where he is starting an organic catering business. He credits his lawyer, Howard Brill, for that turnaround: On Sept. 2, after almost a year in custody, an immigration judge granted him the right to stay in the United States.http://bit.ly/39MfhF
Saturday, October 31, 2009
It's About Time
President Obama on Friday announced the end of a 22-year ban on travel to the United States by people who had tested positive for the virus that causes AIDS, fulfilling a promise he made to gay advocates and acting to eliminate a restriction he said was “rooted in fear rather than fact.”
President Obama signed an order Friday allowing people who had tested positive for the AIDS virus to enter the country.
At a White House ceremony, Mr. Obama announced that a rule canceling the ban would be published on Monday and would take effect after a routine 60-day waiting period. The president had promised to end the ban before the end of the year.
“If we want to be a global leader in combating H.I.V./AIDS, we need to act like it,” Mr. Obama said. “Now, we talk about reducing the stigma of this disease, yet we’ve treated a visitor living with it as a threat.”
The United States is one of only about a dozen countries that bar people who have H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.
President George W. Bush started the process last year when he signed legislation, passed by Congress in July 2008, that repealed the statute on which the ban was based. But the ban remained in effect.
It was enacted in 1987 at a time of widespread fear that H.I.V. could be transmitted by physical or respiratory contact. The ban was further strengthened by Congress in 1993 as an amendment offered by Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina.
Because of the restriction, no major international conference on the AIDS epidemic has been held in the United States since 1990. Public health officials here have long said there was no scientific or medical basis for the ban.
Under the ban, United States health authorities have been required to list H.I.V. infection as a “communicable disease of public health significance.” Under immigration law, most foreigners with such a disease cannot travel to the United States. The ban covered both visiting tourists and foreigners seeking to live in this country.
Once the ban is lifted, foreigners applying to become residents in the United States will no longer be required to take a test for AIDS.
In practice, the ban particularly affected tourists and gay men. Waivers were available, but the procedure for tourists and other short-term visitors who were H.I.V. positive was so complicated that many concluded it was not worth it.
For foreigners hoping to immigrate, waivers were available for people who were in a heterosexual marriage, but not for gay couples. Gay advocates said the ban had led to painful separations in families with H.I.V.-positive members that came to live in this country, and had discouraged adoptions of children with the virus.
Gay advocates said the ban also discouraged travelers and some foreigners already living in the United States from seeking testing and medical care for H.I.V. infection.
“The connection between immigration and H.I.V. has frightened people away from testing and treatment,” said Rachel B. Tiven, executive director of Immigration Equality, a group that advocates for gay people in immigration matters. She said lifting the ban would bring “a significant public health improvement.”
“Stigma and exclusion are not a sound basis for immigration policy,” Ms. Tiven said.
Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, who led the effort to repeal the ban, said it had now “gone the way of the dinosaur.”
But, Mr. Kerry added, “it sure took too long to get here.”
International health officials said lifting the ban would end a much-criticized inconsistency in United States health policy, with Washington playing a leading role in AIDS prevention in Africa and other countries with severe epidemics, but preserving restrictions that in practice prevented international AIDS researchers and activists from gathering at conferences here.
In 1989, a Dutch AIDS educator, Hans Verhoef, was detained for several days in St. Paul when he tried to attend a conference. Since then, people involved with AIDS issues have not organized meetings here.
“We think this is going to give a very positive image of where the United States is going in terms of eliminating stigma and discrimination in relation to H.I.V.,” Dr. Socorro Gross, assistant director of the Pan American Health Organization, said Friday.
http://bit.ly/CvBUm
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
More immigrants cite sexual orientation for asylum
By RUSSELL CONTRERAS (AP) http://tiny.cc/Cb57V
WORCESTER, Mass. — For weeks, Nathaniel Cunningham and his boyfriend secretly lived together in rural Jamaica. They showed no affection in public and rarely spoke to neighbors.
Then one morning, Cunningham picked up a local newspaper with a front-page story under the headline, "Homosexual Prostitutes Move into Residential Neighborhood." His address was listed below.
For days afterward, Cunningham said an angry mob gathered on his lawn hurling rocks and bricks and calling them "batty boys" — a Jamaican slang term for gay. Eventually, the pair grabbed what they could and fled on foot. Cunningham said neither he nor his boyfriend were prostitutes — the slur was just another example of the abuse gay men faced in Jamaica.
The story was one of many that Cunningham, now 32 and living in Worcester, recently shared with a federal immigration judge in his successful bid to win asylum in the United States. And it's similar to other stories cited by a small but growing number of other gay, lesbian and transgender asylum seekers who are using U.S. immigration courts to argue that their sexual orientation makes it too dangerous for them to return home.
"I had no choice," said Andre Azevedo, 39, a transgender man from Brazil who recently won asylum and now lives in New York. "Where I'm from, heterosexual men practice hate crimes against us like a sport, and the police do nothing to stop it."
Since 1994, sexual orientation has been grounds for asylum in the United States. That's when former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno ruled in a case that persecution based on sexual orientation could be potential grounds for asylum.
Until recently, those grounds have been rarely used and such cases represent only a fraction of all asylum cases.
But now immigrant and gay activists say more asylum seekers from the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean are citing sexual orientation as reasons for seeking asylum. Activists say the asylum seekers are escaping rape, persecution, violence, and threats of death from places where homosexuality is either outlawed or strongly, socially shunned.
Federal immigration law allows individuals asylum if they can prove a well-founded fear of persecution in their country of origin based upon race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. Those applying for asylum are already in the United States, legally or illegally.
No one knows for sure just how many have sought asylum on sexual orientation grounds. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services doesn't keep data on asylum cases won on that basis.
Still, last year Immigration Equality, a New York-based nonprofit group that helps gay clients with immigration cases, successfully won 55 asylum cases using sexual orientation as grounds, a record for the organization, said the group's legal director Victoria Neilson. That's up from 30 wins in 2007 and 27 in 2006, Neilson said.
And a Worcester, Mass.-based nonprofit group, Lutheran Social Services, has recently won five cases and is looking to help others.
"I think more people are finding out that this is an option," said Lisa Laurel Weinberg, an attorney with the group.
However, not all cases for asylum based on sexual orientation have been successful. For example, a gay Brazilian man who was married in Massachusetts and whose American husband remains in the state was recently denied asylum by the Obama administration on humanitarian grounds, despite pleas from Sen. John Kerry. Genesio "Junior" Januario Oliveira had originally requested asylum because he was raped as a teenager, but an immigration judge denied the application, saying Oliveira repeatedly said in the hearing that he "was never physically harmed" by anyone in Brazil.
He was forced to return to Brazil in 2007.
Cunningham said he decided to file for asylum after working for a few years in the United States on a work visa. He conducted research online but couldn't find an immigration group to help him with the case. "One group said my case clashed with their Christian values," Cunningham said.
Many gay rights groups, he said, also had limited services for immigrants.
It wasn't until Cunningham connected with Jozefina Lantz, the director of immigrant services at Lutheran Social Services, that Cunningham gained support.
To win, however, Cunningham had to revisit painful moments of running from mobs in Jamaica. Even the police would point him out for persecution, he said. In successfully arguing Cunningham's case for asylum, Weinberg also said Jamaica's sodomy laws banning sex between men and "dancehall" music — whose lyrics often advocate violence against gays — made life for Cunningham unbearable.
Cunningham won asylum in January 2008.
During his asylum hearing, Azevedo had to recall violent episodes in Brazil when he and a group of transsexuals were attacked in bars. He recalled a transgender woman set on fire. Each time Azevedo said he went to police about an attack or a threat, the officers didn't even bother to file a report.
"I had such a horrific experience," said Azevedo, who was granted asylum in July. "I was always in fear of being raped, maybe even killed."
After winning their cases, both Cunningham and Azevedo have become advocates for other asylum-seekers by giving them counseling and directing them toward legal help.
In Worcester, for example, Cunningham has helped a Lebanese and three others Jamaicans win asylum with the legal help provided by the Lutheran Social Services' "LGBT Human Rights Protection Project." Another case, involving an Ugandan woman, is pending in the courts.
But while those who have been granted asylum are eager to help, Azevedo said many still haven't resolved the pain from the past and can't go back home to visit family — those who haven't disowned them.
Cunningham said he hasn't gotten over the fear that, at any moment, he may be forced to flee.
"I've never really owned furniture," Cunningham said. "You just never know."
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