Asylum Seekers at Risk by U.S. Immigration

by Jim Lobe

"A year of experience reinforces our fears that 'expedited removal' (of undocumented migrants) is a system designed to fail," said Michael Posner, director of the New York-based Lawyers Committee for Human Rights in a report on the problem.

"The barriers are just too high and the process too summary to avoid sending some refugees back to persecution and torture by mistake."

Worse, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which administers the new law, had not collected information on what happened to people deported under the expedited removal procedure, according to Sen. Edward Kennedy. He joined human rights groups, along with film actress Sigourney Weaver at a Capitol Hill news conference today to protest the law.

"Expedited removal is a silent crisis occurring behind closed doors," Kennedy said.

An INS spokesman, however, denied the charges, insisting that more than 80 percent of individuals placed into expedited removal procedures have gained a formal hearing with an immigration judge.

The spokesman, Russ Bergeron, also cited a new report by the Congress' investigative arm, the General Accounting Office (GAO), that found that the expedited removal procedures are working as Congress intended.

"Our responsibility is to implement the law fairly, impartially and humanely," said Bergeron. "All the data collected to this time indicate that this has been done," he noted, adding that the new law had been approved over the opposition of the administration of President Bill Clinton.

Before then, arriving asylum-seekers were guaranteed a hearing, at which they could retain an attorney and present witnesses and documentation, before an immigration judge whose decisions could be appealed to higher levels.

The IIRIRA, which was approved by Congress amid increasing public concern about illegal immigration and alleged abuse of the asylum system, set up an expedited removal procedure. In effect, it permits the INS to summarily deport asylum-seekers who arrive without valid documents, such as a passport or a visa, unless they can persuade a low-level INS inspector that they face persecution if they are returned further establish, before another INS official, that their fear is "credible."

"By giving what amounts to judicial power to low-level INS officials, the new process invites mistakes and abuse," according to the 20-page report, "Slamming 'The Golden Door.'"

According to the report, the first INS contact, called a "secondary inspection," offers the greatest risk to potential applicants, because the official involved can order immediate deportation. It is at this state that the officials are supposed to assess whether the individual harbors a "fear" of being returned.

"Here, life and death decisions are made by low-level inspection officials with little expertise in recognizing bona fide refugees, and the refugees themselves have no access to legal assistance," the report says.

The most serious problems encountered by refugees at this stage, according to the report, include the denial of information to potential applicants, abusive treatment, inadequate translation, and the denial of access to lawyers or outside agencies which could monitor the process. The report likens this procedure to a "black box out of which little information has emerged."

In one case, however, two Ecuadorians who fled to the United States after allegedly receiving death threats for having exposed police corruption requested asylum at the airport but were accused of lying at the secondary inspection and were returned home after being handcuffed to a hotel bed overnight.

Both the Lawyers Committee and Amnesty International USA, have reported accounts about verbal abuse directed by officials at asylum applicants who are frequently handcuffed or shackled for long periods of time.

"The INS inflicts asylum-by-ordeal on people who already have suffered enormously," noted Weaver, who serves on the Lawyers Committee's board of directors. Individuals who make it through this stage must then, within days, persuade an asylum officer within days that their fear of being returned is "credible."

The Lawyers Committee found that, at this stage, problems included inconsistencies among asylum offices in the way they conducted interviews; poor translations; and review processes in which asylum seeks are not given adequate time or access to counsel.

In one case, an Albanian asylum-seeker, who had been gang-raped because of her family's political opinions, was too ashamed to talk about her experience through a male translator. She was later returned home.

The INS' Bergeron argued that the expedited removal process is applied to only a relatively few cases. Of the 100 million non-citizens who sought entry into the United States at various ports in the six-month period before Feb. 1 this year, he said, only 300,000 were found to be inadmissible.

Of these, 240,000 either returned home voluntarily or had their cases referred to an immigration judge. Of the remaining 60,000, about half were removed through the new procedures and, more than 90 percent of these were Mexican nationals, he added.

But Posner and several lawmakers claimed there is still far too much scope in the system for arbitrary decisions and assailed the INS for not permitting outside groups monitor the process.

"One year after these provisions went into effect," observed Sen. Patrick Leahy, "we still do not know how many refugees have been returned to their home countries because they could not establish a 'credible fear of persecution' under these new expedited procedures."