History > 2008 > USA > Immigration (II)

Leaving Home Behind

to Escape a Nightmare

June 22, 2008
The New York Times
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Murtaja Kamal Aldeen, a 26-year-old Iraqi refugee, no longer recites the opening verse of the Koran, the Fatiha, as he exits his modest garden apartment here.

Everyone in his family recited the Fatiha each time they left their house in Baghdad, he said, ensuring that if they died amid that city’s bloody mayhem, the traditional prayer for their dead body had already been said.

But these days, Mr. Aldeen, a trim, serious man of medium height, says he no longer needs the comforting verse.

He is settling into his new American homeland. He has a Social Security number and a driver’s license; he watches a lot of “Oprah” and “Seinfeld”; he has figured out how to navigate the online help-wanted advertisements and has landed a minimum-wage job at a local electronics chain.

Living in a spare room in an elderly uncle’s house, Mr. Aldeen, like many refugees, rides an emotional roller coaster. Sometimes he lives the euphoria of escaping a nightmare, and sometimes he plunges into the sadness of having left his family, and all that is familiar, behind.

“I feel lonely,” he said over a chicken dinner recently. “I need friends; I need American friends. Maybe after 10 years or even 5, I will have the life I always dreamed about — living safe, living well, living with all my family in a healthy environment.”

Mr. Aldeen is one of just 4,742 refugees from Iraq that the Bush administration has allowed into the United States since October 2007 — eligible because he worked for an American organization and his life was considered to be in danger. Several of the company’s employees were kidnapped.

The administration has reserved 12,000 slots for Iraqi refugees for this year. But it has been slow to fill them. Critics call the program miserly, particularly since the United States ignited the chaos that pushed an estimated 1.5 million Iraqis to flee, mostly to Syria or Jordan, where they often struggle to make ends meet.

The United States government has a reputation for being tight-fisted with refugees compared with, say, Sweden, which grants newcomers benefits for life. By contrast, Mr. Aldeen is entitled to about $400 a month for four months, plus $100 in food stamps. He turns over $375 a month to his aunt and uncle for room and board. Moving out is not affordable, he said.

In fact, very little is affordable. A dentist offered to let Mr. Aldeen observe in his San Francisco clinic, but after spending $15 on train tickets from San Jose two days in a row, he decided it would deplete his meager cash.

Mr. Aldeen landed in San Jose near midnight on Feb. 25, from Amman, Jordan, where he had been living for two years. All the clothes he owned fit into two large suitcases, marked with bright orange tags that read “heavy.” They included four suits, three overcoats and lots of sweaters. He laughs about it now; he has barely worn any of them in San Jose’s gentle climate. But he had formed a mental image of the United States buried in snow all winter, compounded by a documentary he once saw on Arab satellite television that said chilly fog shrouded nearby San Francisco year-round.

Mr. Aldeen said he felt instantly at home when he arrived at Kennedy International Airport in New York. The immigration officials smiled at him, he marveled. J.F.K. reminded him of Baghdad — before the war, that is.

Years ago, Mr. Aldeen’s dreams did not include emigrating to America. He had a good life in Iraq and anticipated a bright future, graduating from Baghdad University’s college of dentistry in 2005. But the new reality sank in as one professor after another was assassinated and Mr. Aldeen faced mounting threats.

He was a Shiite Muslim living in a predominantly Sunni area, and he worked part time coordinating events for the Iraqi-American Chamber of Commerce. To the Sunni gang dominating his neighborhood, the first made him an infidel; the second, a traitor. A threatening letter was stuck to his family’s front door, then his father was badly beaten and left with a broken leg. Then a bullet was left on their stoop.

“We lost everything; we can’t ever go back to Iraq,” he said, blaming his fellow Iraqis for the magnitude of his changed circumstances. “Secular people have nothing to go back to.”

The International Rescue Committee, one of some 10 nongovernmental organizations that help refugees assimilate nationwide, agreed to oversee his settling in San Jose because he had distant relatives here.

He lives with Dr. Hameed Tajeldin and his wife, Leyla, who left Iraq in 1982. They are happy to help, although Mr. Aldeen’s living in their spare bedroom means their own children stay less often. Most visitors are other Iraqis. When a reporter arrived, an Iraqi woman turned to Mrs. Tajeldin in surprise and asked in Arabic, “What brings an American here?”

He misses his family badly, and on each visit to the I.R.C. pressed his case officer to speed their arrival. Last week, he was ecstatic when he learned they had been granted permission to come, most likely before the end of the summer. He has a sweetheart in Amman, too, a Jordanian English literature major named Rana, and he speaks to them all every two days free over the Internet. “I need to hear their voices,” he said, a rare painful look clouding his face. “When I hear their voices, I feel that everything is going to be O.K.”

Their discussions range from talk about the lives of various cousins back in Baghdad to what kind of house they might afford if they all make it to San Jose. After they speak is the only time he spreads a prayer rug on the floor and bows toward Mecca. He fears his parents do not have many years left, and every passing day feels like precious time wasted that should have been spent together.

He finds the pace of life here too fast, but attributes that to the fact that time moved so slowly in Baghdad. Sometimes he wishes time would swirl away even faster, actually, so his family would come and he could work as a dentist again.

He has about $100 left of the $500 he brought with him. He has spent $61 on a monthly bus pass, and $50 on a cellphone that costs an additional $40 per month. He bought three white shirts for his salesman’s job, for $39, and shoes with gel soles, for $45, because he is on his feet all day selling computer accessories. Commuting by bus requires an hour and several transfers for a trip that takes less than 10 minutes by car. Mr. Aldeen dreams of buying his own car, but despairs of saving the sum needed.

Cars are a little bit of a sore subject. His family sold their 1998 Volkswagen for $3,000 — half of its value — as well as a Peugeot left behind in Baghdad to defray the cost of heavy medical expenses in Amman.

Mr. Aldeen tries not to spend anything. He counts every dollar toward the day when he hopes to help his family settle here. They include his father, 67; his mother, 63; a younger brother still in high school; and two older brothers with their own families.

About a month after he arrived, the I.R.C. enrolled him in weekly training sessions to prepare him for job interviews. His English is so good that he skipped the usual first grueling language lessons, although occasionally he catches an unfamiliar word on the news. “What’s a mortgage?” he asked.

A good chunk of the training was cultural. You should shake hands with a woman. Do not wear heavy gold chains, excessive cologne or white socks. Show up clean-shaven. He worries about that last point — shaving three times a week was fine in Baghdad, and daily shaving gives him a rash.

But the rescue committee’s lessons proved useful, forcing him to think about unfamiliar interview questions like “What’s your main fault?” He has been coached to turn that into a positive, saying he worked too much when he ran his own computer business in Baghdad.

Mr. Aldeen said his first weeks here were like walking through fog. “When I was first here and didn’t know what to do, I was a little depressed,” he said, “but that went away as I gained confidence.” Globalization and technology mean that life is not so completely foreign as it was for earlier immigrants. Amman had a Safeway rather like the one here; after work, Mr. Aldeen watches an Egyptian television series via satellite. Still, some differences proved disorienting, like the lack of people walking on the streets.

Rachel Lau, the resettlement coordinator here for the rescue committee, believes that Mr. Aldeen is likely to do well because he has realistic expectations — or as he put it, “I am not a dreamy man.” He accepts taking a simple job while studying American dentistry. Some refugees believe they can completely reinvent themselves from Day 1, Ms. Lau noted.

Most immigrants spend their first six months happy — buoyed by having made it to the land of their new dreams, she said. After that, the expenses and other difficulties of daily life often bring despair.

Mr. Aldeen is braced for it. “I know I am going to have a hard time; it will come,” he said. His first shock was seeing $50 deducted for taxes from his weekly $250 paycheck. But the idea of Social Security convinced him it was all right.

He would have liked to have found work as a dental technician, or even a receptionist, during the two or three years it should take to get the certificate needed to practice here. But most dentists want someone who speaks Spanish.

“Nobody is looking for an Arabic speaker!” he lamented, then laughed.

Few people ask him about Iraq. He suddenly started pronouncing it the American way, “eye-RACK” instead of “ee-ROCK,” and laughed when the change was pointed out.

Over all, he feels that worrying about how to earn a living is a vast improvement over worrying about staying alive. “This is an open society,” he said. “I don’t feel different from anyone. If you stick to the rules you are fine. Nobody will come knock on your door in the middle of the night and take you out and kill you.”

Leaving Home Behind to Escape a Nightmare, NYT, 22.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/us/22resettle.html

States Take New Tack

on Illegal Immigration

June 9, 2008
The New York Times
By DAMIEN CAVE

MILTON, Fla. — Three months after the local police inspected more than a dozen businesses searching for illegal immigrants using stolen Social Security numbers, this community in the Florida Panhandle has become more law-abiding, emptier and whiter.

Many of the Hispanic immigrants who came in 2004 to help rebuild after Hurricane Ivan have either fled or gone into hiding. Churches with services in Spanish are half-empty. Businesses are struggling to find workers. And for Hispanic citizens with roots here — the foremen and entrepreneurs who received visits from the police — the losses are especially profound.

“It was very hard because the community is very small, and to see people who came to eat here all the time then come and close the business,” said Geronimo Barragan, who owns two branches of La Hacienda, Mexican restaurants where the police arrested 10 employees.

“I don’t blame them,” Mr. Barragan added. “It’s just that it hurts.”

Sheriff Wendell Hall of Santa Rosa County, who led the effort, said the arrests were for violations of state identity theft laws. But he also seemed proud to have found a way around rules allowing only the federal government to enforce immigration laws. In his office, the sheriff displayed a framed editorial cartoon that showed Daniel Boone admiring his arrest of at least 27 illegal workers.

His approach is increasingly common. Last month, 260 illegal immigrants in Iowa were sentenced to five months in prison for violations of federal identity theft laws.

At the same time, in the last year, local police departments from coast to coast have rounded up hundreds of immigrants for nonviolent, often minor, crimes, like fishing without a license in Georgia, with the end result being deportation.

In some cases, the police received training and a measure of jurisdiction from the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, under a program that lets officers investigate and detain people they suspect to be illegal immigrants.

But with local demand for tougher immigration enforcement growing, 95 departments are waiting to join the 47 in the program. And in a number of places, including Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas, police officers or entire departments are choosing to tackle the issue on their own.

State lawmakers, in response to Congressional inaction on immigration law, are giving local authorities a wider berth. In 2007, 1,562 bills related to illegal immigration were introduced nationwide and 240 were enacted in 46 states, triple the number that passed in 2006, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. A new law in Mississippi makes it a felony for an illegal immigrant to hold a job. In Oklahoma, sheltering or transporting illegal immigrants is also a felony.

It remains unclear how the new laws will be enforced. Yet at the very least, say both advocates and critics, they are likely to lead to more of what occurred here: more local police officers demanding immigrants’ documents; more arrests for identity theft; more accusations of racial profiling; and more movement of immigrants, with some fleeing and others being sent to jail.

“It is a way to address illegal immigration without calling it that,” said Jessica Vaughan, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports intensified local enforcement. She added, “They don’t just have to sit and wait for Washington.”

Community Complaints

Police officers here in a handful of Gulf Coast counties from Pensacola to Tallahassee said they started hearing complaints about illegal immigrants last year. With the national debate raging and the local economy sagging, many residents began to question whether illegal immigrants were taking Americans’ jobs.

It did not show up in statistics — the unemployment rate in Santa Rosa County was 3.6 percent in 2007, below state and national averages — so the arguments focused in part on unfair competition.

Donna Tucker, executive director of the Santa Rosa County Chamber of Commerce, said illegal immigration “creates havoc within the system” because businesses that used illegal labor often did not pay into workers’ compensation funds and paid workers less.

“Those businesses can survive a lot longer than the ones that are trying to do things right,” Ms. Tucker said.

Some of the frustrations also veered into prejudice.

George S. Collins, an inspector in charge of the illegal trafficking task force in Okaloosa County, said many people wanted to know “why we weren’t going to Wal-Mart and rounding up the Mexicans” — a comment Mr. Collins said was racist and offensive.

Usually though, the complaints were cultural and legal.

Interviews with more than 25 residents and police officers suggest that the views of Harry T. Buckles, 68, a retired Navy corpsman, are common. Outside his home in Gulf Breeze, Mr. Buckles said the main problem with today’s Hispanic immigrants was that they did not assimilate.

Even after hundreds flowed in to rebuild Santa Rosa County, Mr. Buckles said: “They didn’t become part of the community. They didn’t speak the language.”

Echoing the comments of others, he said he became irritated when he heard Spanish at the Winn-Dixie and saw a line of immigrants sending money home at the Western Union. Mr. Buckles said he feared his community would lose its character and become like Miami, with its foreign-born majority and common use of Spanish.

“We see things nationwide and we know that we could be overwhelmed,” he said.

In fact, only about 3 percent of the population of Santa Rosa County is Hispanic, according to census figures compiled in 2006. As a proportion of its population, the Hispanic community here is less than half the size of what is in Omaha or Des Moines — mostly white cities where the Hispanic population is still below the national average.

Santa Rosa is hardly the only place to use a tough approach against a small immigrant population. In Mississippi, where strict laws on false documentation recently passed, only about 1.7 percent of the state’s 2.9 million people were born abroad and more than half of them are in the United States legally, according to estimates from the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors tightening restrictions on immigration.

But here, the result is a divide often marked by a lack of in-depth interaction.

On one side are longtime residents like Sheriff Hall, who said immigrant laborers were not involved in fixing his office or home after the hurricanes, and Mr. Buckles, who said his relationship with Hispanics was based mainly on seeing them at stores or construction sites.

On the other side are a smaller number of immigrants and employers who use immigrant labor.

Some of the immigrants are newly arrived, sticking mostly to themselves. But the group also includes Antonio Tejeda, 38, a roofer and naturalized American citizen from Mexico who wears an N.F.L. jersey to church and speaks English with a slight drawl; and Ruben Barragan, 19, one of the workers arrested in one of the La Hacienda restaurant raids who, though illegal, spoke English and called his infant son Eric because he wanted him to have an American name.

When told about such men, Mr. Buckles said perhaps the government could find ways to create exceptions. But he was not convinced they deserved to stay.

“They got here illegally,” Mr. Buckles said. “They broke the law as soon as they came.”

The Raids

The half-dozen officers involved in the Santa Rosa operations did not announce their arrival. They detained 13 workers at Panhandle Growers. At the two branches of La Hacienda the police quietly detained 10 workers without resistance. And at Emerald Coast Interiors, a boat-cushion factory, the police arrested a handful more.

Sheriff Hall said that his department received tips that led him to all the locations he visited and that he was responding to a steep rise in complaints about illegal immigration. He said he had been frustrated a year ago by a lack of response from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And this time, customs officials said, he did not contact the agency for input before forming a multicounty task force that led to the February operation.

Sheriff Hall said his men were focused on identity theft and did not need special training because “it’s the same thing we do every day.” He insisted that the officers treated everyone fairly. Unlike Bay County officers, who surrounded construction sites last year and arrested immigrants who ran, “we didn’t chase anyone,” he said.

And at many locations witnesses said the police treated all workers equally.

Managers at the restaurants Okki, El Rodeo, China Sea and La Hacienda said police officers checked all employees’ documents, regardless of their ethnicity.

But other business owners, employees and residents said the police focused disproportionately on Hispanics or the foreign born and seemed determined to scare immigrants out of the area. In many cases, employers said, the officers did not even mention identity theft, narrowing their scope to immigrants.

“They were targeting all the places with Hispanic workers,” said Elvin Garcia, 26, a waiter at El Rodeo.

At Red Barn Barbecue, witnesses said that skin color clearly influenced police procedure. When several officers visited and saw no one who was Hispanic in the kitchen, they moved on. “We offered to give them records, and they said, ‘No, it’s not necessary,’ ” said Randy Brochu, whose family owns the business.

Meanwhile, at Emerald Coast Interiors, three employees — one black, one white, one Hispanic — independently said the police did, in fact, chase a handful of Hispanic employees who ran. Three women, they said, were caught in a ditch behind the main building.

Luis Ramirez, the plant’s operations manager, said the officers asked to see documentation only for the workers who fled. “It was racial profiling,” Mr. Ramirez said.

His company has not filed a lawsuit, so his accusations have not been tested. But Florida courts have repeatedly held that flight alone is not enough to justify a suspicion of criminal activity or arrest. In Bay County, officials said they tried to avoid chasing people now because prosecutors have warned that it undermines their cases.

Even without a chase, immigrant advocates say that local efforts to track down illegal immigrants undermine community safety by scaring immigrants from reporting violent crimes.

“It’s a dangerous route to take,” said David Urias, a staff lawyer with the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, which sued Otero County in New Mexico this year after the police raided Hispanics’ homes for minor violations like an unleashed dog. “What you’re going to see,” Mr. Urias said, “is more people pushed into the shadows.”

The Aftermath

Indeed, three months after the sweeps, nearly everyone agrees that the fabric of this community has changed. Hundreds of Hispanic families, both legal and illegal, seem to have disappeared.

John Davy, a co-owner of Panhandle Growers, said some employers “treated their guys humanely” by helping them flee to other areas. “What we’re victims of is a system that’s broken,” he said.

Many residents said they felt torn between competing loyalties to compassion and the law.

“On one hand, I’m sitting here thinking when Ivan was here, you could not get enough people to do the thing that needed to get done,” said Mrs. Tucker at the Chamber of Commerce. “And these illegal aliens, people welcomed them with open arms because they were working hard, they were helping our community. But from a chamber standpoint, you’re operating on the side of the law. It’s a hard thing.”

In the immigrant community, fears now cloud the most basic routines. Many Hispanics said they avoided being seen or heard speaking Spanish in Wal-Mart, even if they live here legally. Others detailed their habit of meticulously checking their cars’ headlights, blinkers and registration to avoid being pulled over.

The message many Hispanics have taken from the raids is simple. “We’re Mexican — they don’t want us here,” said Erika Barragan, 20, whose husband, Ruben, came here illegally roughly six years ago and was one of 23 people scheduled to be deported after the February raids. She said she would go back to Mexico this summer.

Her husband’s employers, Geronimo Barragan (no relation) and his wife, Guilla, are trying to remain positive.

They are citizens and parents of four American-born children, ages 2 to 16. They have lived in Santa Rosa County for more than a decade, founding a Baptist church here and working 16-hour days, six days a week to build two restaurants known for their affordable food and Christian atmosphere, which extends to a ban on alcohol.

They said the raids came as a shock.

“We love the community, and we always tried to do our best,” Mr. Barragan said.

Mrs. Barragan put it more bluntly. “This,” she said, “is like our promised land.”

The Barragans said they did not know their workers were illegal because they provided Social Security numbers and other information that was required. Like most employers, they asked for nothing more.

They have not publicly opposed the sheriff’s actions, and in their effort to move on, they have distanced themselves from his critics. Mr. Barragan even visited Sheriff Hall at his office to tell him he had no hard feelings and would do everything he could to comply in the future.

And yet, the cost has been significant. Both of the restaurants were closed for more than two months. Only one has recently reopened.

Unable to find people in the area who can cook Mexican food, Mr. Barragan, 41, has been scouring the nation, recruiting in Houston, Chicago and Baton Rouge. He has yet to find all the workers he needs, relying on a handful of new hires with work visas that expire in November. He said he wished that Congress could find a way to bring more foreign workers to America legally.

For Mrs. Barragan, 39, a warm, thin woman with hair to her waist, the consequences have been more personal. On a recent Wednesday night, her church’s prayer service was half-empty. Many of her friends have left. And many of the employees that her family mentored in the ways of America are gone, taken away by the police.

“That’s what had the most effect on our lives,” Mrs. Barragan said, speaking in Spanish so she could be more specific. “Not closing La Hacienda, or ‘we’re not going to make money,’ or ‘how are we going to pay our bills?’ I personally didn’t think about that. It hurt me more to see them there — handcuffed. The way they went out.”

Her husband agreed, explaining between bouts of tears that some of the deported workers’ families had become victims of more violent crime. “One of them has a small daughter and someone robbed their house while he was in jail,” Mr. Barragan said. “Twice.”

    States Take New Tack on Illegal Immigration, NYT, 9.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/us/09panhandle.html

270 Illegal Immigrants

Sent to Prison in Federal Push

May 24, 2008
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

WATERLOO, Iowa — In temporary courtrooms at a fairgrounds here, 270 illegal immigrants were sentenced this week to five months in prison for working at a meatpacking plant with false documents.

The prosecutions, which ended Friday, signal a sharp escalation in the Bush administration’s crackdown on illegal workers, with prosecutors bringing tough federal criminal charges against most of the immigrants arrested in a May 12 raid. Until now, unauthorized workers have generally been detained by immigration officials for civil violations and rapidly deported.

The convicted immigrants were among 389 workers detained at the Agriprocessors Inc. plant in nearby Postville in a raid that federal officials called the largest criminal enforcement operation ever carried out by immigration authorities at a workplace.

Matt M. Dummermuth, the United States attorney for northern Iowa, who oversaw the prosecutions, called the operation an “astonishing success.”

Claude Arnold, a special agent in charge of investigations for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said it showed that federal officials were “committed to enforcing the nation’s immigration laws in the workplace to maintain the integrity of the immigration system.”

The unusually swift proceedings, in which 297 immigrants pleaded guilty and were sentenced in four days, were criticized by criminal defense lawyers, who warned of violations of due process. Twenty-seven immigrants received probation. The American Immigration Lawyers Association protested that the workers had been denied meetings with immigration lawyers and that their claims under immigration law had been swept aside in unusual and speedy plea agreements.

The illegal immigrants, most from Guatemala, filed into the courtrooms in groups of 10, their hands and feet shackled. One by one, they entered guilty pleas through a Spanish interpreter, admitting they had taken jobs using fraudulent Social Security cards or immigration documents. Moments later, they moved to another courtroom for sentencing.

The pleas were part of a deal worked out with prosecutors to avoid even more serious charges. Most immigrants agreed to immediate deportation after they serve five months in prison.

The hearings took place on the grounds of the National Cattle Congress in Waterloo, in mobile trailers and in a dance hall modified with black curtains, beginning at 8 a.m. and continuing several nights until 10. On Wednesday alone, 94 immigrants pleaded guilty and were sentenced, the most sentences in a single day in this northern Iowa district, according to Robert L. Phelps, the clerk of court.

Mr. Arnold, the immigration agent, said the criticism of the proceedings was “the usual spate of false allegations and baseless rumors.”

The large number of criminal cases was remarkable because immigration violations generally fall under civil statutes. Until now, relatively few immigrants caught in raids have been charged with federal crimes like identity theft or document fraud.

“To my knowledge, the magnitude of these indictments is completely unprecedented,” said Juliet Stumpf, an immigration law professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore., who was formerly a senior civil rights lawyer at the Justice Department. “It’s the reliance on criminal process here as part of an immigration enforcement action that takes this out of the ordinary, a startling intensification of the criminalization of immigration law.”

Defense lawyers, who were appointed by the court, said most of the immigrants were ready to accept the plea deals because of the hard bargain driven by the prosecutors.

If the immigrants did not plead guilty, Mr. Dummermuth said he would try them on felony identity theft charges that carry a mandatory two-year minimum jail sentence. In many cases, court documents show, the immigrants were working under real Social Security numbers or immigration visas, known as green cards, that belonged to other people.

All but a handful of the workers here had no criminal record, court documents showed.

“My family is worried in Guatemala,” one defendant, Erick Tajtaj, entreated the federal district judge who sentenced him, Mark W. Bennett. “I ask that you deport us as soon as possible, that you do us that kindness so we can be together again with our families.”

No charges have been brought against managers or owners at Agriprocessors, but there were indications that prosecutors were also preparing a case against the company. In pleading guilty, immigrants had to agree to cooperate with any investigation.

Chaim Abrahams, a representative of Agriprocessors, said in a statement that he could not comment about specific accusations but that the company was cooperating with the government.

Aaron Rubashkin, the owner of Agriprocessors, announced Friday that he had begun a search to replace his son Sholom as the chief executive of the company. Agriprocessors is the country’s largest producer of kosher meat, sold under brands like Aaron’s Best. The plant is in Postville, a farmland town about 70 miles northeast of Waterloo. Normally it employs about 800 workers, and in recent years the majority of them have come from rural Guatemala.

Since 2004, the plant has faced repeated sanctions for environmental and worker safety violations. It was the focus of a 2006 exposé in The Jewish Daily Forward and a commission of inquiry that year by Conservative Jewish leaders.

In Postville, workers from the plant, still feeling aftershocks from the raid, said conditions there were often harsh. In interviews, they said they were often required to work overtime and night shifts, sometimes up to 14 hours a day, but were not consistently paid for the overtime.

“We knew what time we would start work but we did not know what time we would finish,” said Élida, 29, a Guatemalan who was arrested in the raid and then released to care for her two children. She asked that her last name not be published because she is in this country illegally.

A 16-year-old Guatemalan girl, who asked to be identified only as G.O. because she is illegal and a minor and was not involved in the raid, said she had been working the night shift plucking chickens. “When you start, you can’t stay awake,” she said. “But after a while you get used to it.”

The workers said that supervisors and managers were well aware that the immigrants were working under false documents.

Defense lawyers, who each agreed to represent as many as 30 immigrants, said they were satisfied that they had sufficient time to question them and prepare their cases. But some lawyers said they were troubled by the severity of the charges.

At one sentencing hearing, David Nadler, a defense lawyer, said he was “honored to represent such good and brave people,” saying the immigrants’ only purpose had been to provide for their families in Guatemala.

“I want the court to know that these people are the kings of family values,” Mr. Nadler said.

Judge Bennett appeared moved by Mr. Nadler’s remarks. “I don’t doubt for a moment that you are good, hard-working people who have done what you did to help your families,” Judge Bennett told the immigrants. “Unfortunately for you, you committed a violation of federal law.”

After the hearing, Mr. Nadler said the plea agreements were the best deal available for his clients. But he was dismayed that prosecutors had denied them probation and insisted the immigrants serve prison time and agree to a rarely used judicial order for immediate deportation upon their release, signing away their rights to go to immigration court.

“That’s not the defense of justice,” Mr. Nadler said. “That’s just politics.”

Christopher Clausen, a lawyer who represented 21 Guatemalans, said he was certain they all understood their options and rights. Mainly they wanted to get home to Guatemala as quickly as possible, he said.

“The government is not bashful about the fact that they are trying to send a message,” Mr. Clausen said, “that if you get caught working illegally here you will pay a criminal penalty.”

Robert Rigg, a Drake University law professor who is president of the Iowa Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said his group was not consulted when prosecutors and court officials began to make plans, starting in December, for the mass proceedings.

“You really are force feeding the system just to churn these people out,” Mr. Rigg said.

Kathleen Campbell Walker, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said that intricate issues could arise in some cases, for example where immigrants had children and spouses who were legal residents or United States citizens. Those issues “could not be even cursorily addressed in the time frame being forced upon these individuals and their overburdened counsel.”

Linda R. Reade, the chief judge who approved the emergency court setup, said she was confident there had been no rush to justice. In an interview, Judge Reade said prosecutors had organized the immigrants’ detention to make it easy for their lawyers to meet with them. The prosecutors, she said, “have tried to be fair in their charging.”

The immigration lawyers, Judge Reade said, “do not understand the federal criminal process as it relates to immigration charges.”

    270 Illegal Immigrants Sent to Prison in Federal Push, NYT, 24.5.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/24/us/24immig.html?hp

Editorial

Death by Detention

May 6, 2008
The New York Times

A chilling article by Nina Bernstein in The Times on Monday recounted the secrecy, neglect and lack of oversight that are a few of the shameful symptoms of the booming sector of the nation’s prison industry — the detention of undocumented foreigners.

Ms. Bernstein chronicled the death of Boubacar Bah, a tailor from Guinea who was imprisoned in New Jersey for overstaying a tourist visa. He fell and fractured his skull in the Elizabeth Detention Center early last year. Though clearly gravely injured, Mr. Bah was shackled and taken to a disciplinary cell. He was left alone — unconscious and occasionally foaming at the mouth — for more than 13 hours. He was eventually taken to the hospital and died after four months in a coma.

Nobody told Mr. Bah’s relatives until five days after his fall. When they finally found him, he was on life support, soon to become one of the 66 immigrants known to have died in federal custody between 2004 and 2007. Mr. Bah’s family still does not know the full story of when or how he suffered his fatal injuries.

It is shameful, though hardly a surprise, that they remain in the dark. There is no public system for tracking deaths in immigration custody, no requirement for independent investigations. Relatives and lawyers who want to unearth details of such tragedies have found the bureaucracy unresponsive and hostile. In the case of Mr. Bah, records were marked “proprietary information — not for distribution” by the Corrections Corporation of America, a private company that runs the Elizabeth Detention Center and many others under contract with the federal government.

Secrecy and shockingly inadequate medical care are hardly the only problems with immigration detention. Immigrants taken into federal custody enter a world where many of the rights taken for granted by people charged with real crimes do not exist. Detainees have no right to legal representation. Many are unable to defend or explain themselves, or even to understand the charges against them, because they don’t speak English and lack access to lawyers or telephones.

What standards do exist for the treatment of immigrants in federal custody are only recommendations. A detainee, family member or lawyer who finds a violation has no way to force the government to correct it.

As authorities at the federal and local level continue rounding up illegal immigrants in these harsh days of ever-stricter enforcement, the potential for abuse will continue to grow — largely out of sight. Although immigration law is every bit as complex as tax law — and the consequences for violators more dire — the detention system seems designed to sacrifice thoughtful deliberation and justice to expediency and swift deportation.

Many detainees may have a valid defense — and at any rate have committed only administrative violations such as overstaying a visa or entering the country without authorization. Yet their cases are handled with a toxic mixture of secrecy and inattention to basic rights. This mistreatment of a vulnerable population, which advocates for immigrants trace to the roundups of Muslims after 9/11 and the subsequent clamor for tougher immigration laws, is hostile to American values and disproportionate to the threat that these immigrants pose.

Congress has failed repeatedly to enact meaningful immigration reform, and the prospects in the next year or so are slim. It can act on this. The government urgently needs to bring the detention system up to basic standards of decency and fairness. That means lifting the veil on detention centers — particularly the private jails and the state prisons and county jails that take detainees under federal contracts — and holding them to the same enforceable standards that apply to prisons. It also means designing a system that is not a vast holding pen for ordinary people who pose no threat to public safety, like the 52-year-old tailor, Boubacar Bah.

    Death by Detention, NYT, 6.5.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/06/opinion/06tue1.html

Few Details on Immigrants Who Died in Custody

May 5, 2008
The New York Times
By NINA BERNSTEIN

Word spread quickly inside the windowless walls of the Elizabeth Detention Center, an immigration jail in New Jersey: A detainee had fallen, injured his head and become incoherent. Guards had put him in solitary confinement, and late that night, an ambulance had taken him away more dead than alive.

But outside, for five days, no official notified the family of the detainee, Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea who had overstayed a tourist visa. When frantic relatives located him at University Hospital in Newark on Feb. 5, 2007, he was in a coma after emergency surgery for a skull fracture and multiple brain hemorrhages. He died there four months later without ever waking up, leaving family members on two continents trying to find out why.

Mr. Bah’s name is one of 66 on a government list of deaths that occurred in immigration custody from January 2004 to November 2007, when nearly a million people passed through.

The list, compiled by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after Congress demanded the information, and obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act, is the fullest accounting to date of deaths in immigration detention, a patchwork of federal centers, county jails and privately run prisons that has become the nation’s fastest-growing form of incarceration.

The list has few details, and they are often unreliable, but it serves as a rough road map to previously unreported cases like Mr. Bah’s. And it reflects a reality that haunts grieving families like his: the difficulty of getting information about the fate of people taken into immigration custody, even when they die.

Mr. Bah’s relatives never saw the internal records labeled “proprietary information — not for distribution” by the Corrections Corporation of America, which runs the New Jersey detention center for the federal government. The documents detail how he was treated by guards and government employees: shackled and pinned to the floor of the medical unit as he moaned and vomited, then left in a disciplinary cell for more than 13 hours, despite repeated notations that he was unresponsive and intermittently foaming at the mouth.

Mr. Bah had lived in New York for a decade, surrounded by a large circle of friends and relatives. The extravagant gowns he sewed to support his wife and children in West Africa were on display in a Manhattan boutique.

But he died in a sequestered system where questions about what had happened to him, or even his whereabouts, were met with silence.

As the country debates stricter enforcement of immigration laws, thousands of people who are not American citizens are being locked up for days, months or years while the government decides whether to deport them. Some have no valid visa; some are legal residents, but have past criminal convictions; others are seeking asylum from persecution.

Death is a reality in any jail, and the medical neglect of inmates is a perennial issue. But far more than in the criminal justice system, immigration detainees and their families lack basic ways to get answers when things go wrong.

No government body is required to keep track of deaths and publicly report them. No independent inquiry is mandated. And often relatives who try to investigate the treatment of those who died say they are stymied by fear of immigration authorities, lack of access to lawyers, or sheer distance.

Federal officials say deaths are reviewed internally by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which reports them to its inspector general and decides which ones warrant investigation. Officials say they notify the detainee’s next of kin or consulate, and report the deaths to local medical authorities, who may conduct autopsies. In Mr. Bah’s case, a review before his death found no evidence of foul play, an immigration spokesman said, though after later inquiries from The Times, he said a full review of the death was under way.

But critics, including many in Congress, say this piecemeal process leaves too much to the agency’s discretion, allowing some deaths to be swept under the rug while potential witnesses are transferred or deported. They say it also obscures underlying complaints about medical care, abusive conditions or inadequate suicide prevention.

In January, the House passed a bill that would require states that receive certain federal money to report deaths in custody to their attorneys general. But the bill is stalled in the Senate, and it does not cover federal facilities.

The only tangible result of Congressional concern has been the list of 66 deaths, which names Mr. Bah and many other detainees for the first time, but raises as many questions as it answers.

For Mr. Bah’s survivors, the mystery of his death is hard to bear. In Guinea, his first wife, Dalanda, wept as she spoke about the contradictory accounts that had reached her and her two teenage sons through other detainees, including some who speculated that Mr. Bah had been beaten.

In New York, a cousin who is an American citizen, Khadidiatou Bah, 38, said she was unable to bring a lawsuit, in part because other relatives were afraid of antagonizing the authorities.

“They don’t want to push the case, or maybe they will be sent home,” she said. “This guy was killed, and we don’t know what happened.”

Lingering Questions

The list of deaths where Mr. Bah’s name surfaced is often cryptic. Along with 13 deaths cited as suicides and 14 as the result of cardiac ailments, it offers such causes as “undetermined” and “unwitnessed arrest, epilepsy.” No one’s nationality is given, some places of detention are omitted, and some names and birth dates seem garbled. As a result, many families could not be tracked down for this article.

But when they could be, they posed more disturbing questions.

In California, relatives of Walter Rodriguez-Castro, 28, said they were rebuffed when they tried to find out why his calls had stopped coming from the Kern County Jail in Bakersfield in April 2006. Then in June, his wife went to his scheduled hearing in San Francisco’s immigration court and learned that he had been dead for many weeks, his body unclaimed in the county morgue.

The coroner found that Mr. Rodriguez-Castro, a mover from El Salvador in the country illegally, had died of undiagnosed meningitis and H.I.V., after days complaining of fever, stiff neck and vomiting. The cause of death on the government’s list: “unresponsive.”

Immigration authorities said on Friday that the case was now under review, but would not answer questions about it or other deaths on the list. Sgt. Ed Komin, a spokesman for the jail, said the death had been promptly reported to immigration officials, who were responsible for notifying families.

Four sons in another family, in Sacramento, described trying for days to get medical care for their father, Maya Nand, a 56-year-old legal immigrant from Fiji, at a detention center run by the Corrections Corporation in Eloy, Ariz. Mr. Nand, an architectural draftsman, had been ailing when he was taken into custody on Jan. 13, 2005, apparently because his application for citizenship had been rejected, based on an earlier conviction for misdemeanor domestic violence. In collect calls, the sons said, he told them that despite his chest pains and breathing problems, doctors at the detention center did not take his condition seriously.

The Corrections Corporation said he had been seen and treated “multiple times.” But a letter to the family from an immigration official said his treatment was for a respiratory infection. The letter said that Mr. Nand was taken to an emergency room on Jan. 25, where congestive heart failure was diagnosed, and that he “suffered an apparent heart attack while at the hospital.” He died on Feb. 2, 2005, shackled to a hospital bed in Tucson.

Boubacar Bah had more going for him than many detainees. He had a lawyer and many friends and relatives in the United States, and his detention center in New Jersey was one of the few frequented by immigrant advocates.

But three days after he suffered a head injury in detention last year, no one in his New York circle knew that he was lying comatose in a Newark hospital, where he had already been identified as a possible organ donor.

“Thank you for the referral,” an organ-sharing network wrote on Feb. 3, 2007, according to hospital records. “This patient is a potential candidate for organ donation once brain death criteria is met.”

Four days after the fall, tipped off by a detainee who called Mr. Bah’s roommate in Brooklyn, relatives rushed to the detention center to ask Corrections Corporation employees where he was.

“They wouldn’t give us any information,” said Lamine Dieng, an American citizen who teaches physics at Bronx Community College and is married to Mr. Bah’s cousin Khadidiatou.

On the fifth day, they said, a detention official called them with the name of the hospital. There they found Mr. Bah on life support, still in custody, with a detention guard around the clock.

“There was one guard who knew Boubacar,” Ms. Bah said. “He told me on the down-low: ‘This guy, you have to fight for him. This guy was neglected.’ ”

Within the week, word of the case reached a reporter at The Times, through an immigration lawyer who had received separate calls from two detainees; they were upset about a badly injured man — named “something like Aboubakar” — left in an isolation cell and later found near death.

But advocacy groups said they were unaware of the case. And Michael Gilhooly, the spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said that without the man’s full name and eight-digit alien registration number, he could not check the information.

For those who knew Mr. Bah, it was hard to understand how such a man could lie dying without explanations.

“Everybody liked Boubacar,” said Sadio Diallo, 48, who has a tailor shop in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where he and Mr. Bah had shared an apartment with fellow immigrants since arriving in 1998. “He’s a very, very, very good man.”

For six years, Mr. Bah had worked for L’Impasse, a clothing store in the West Village, sewing dresses that sold for up to $2,000 with what a former manager, Abdul Sall, called his “magic hands.” Mr. Bah often spent Sundays at the Bronx townhouse his cousins had inherited from the family’s first American citizen, a seaman who arrived in 1943.

In Africa, Mr. Bah’s earnings not only supported his first wife, sons and ailing mother, but in Guinean tradition, allowed him to wed a second wife, long distance. It was his longing to see them all again after eight years that landed him in detention. When he returned from a three-month visit to Guinea in May 2006, immigration authorities at Kennedy Airport told him that his green card application had been denied while he was away, automatically revoking his permission to re-enter the United States. An immigration lawyer hired by his friends was unable to reopen the application while Mr. Bah waited for nine months in detention, records showed.

Mr. Bah died on May 30, 2007, after four months in a coma. His lawyer, Theodore Vialet, requested detention reports and hospital records under the Freedom of Information Act. But by the time the records arrived last autumn, the idea of a lawsuit had been dropped.

So Mr. Vialet just filed the records away — until a reporter’s call about a name on the list of dead detainees prompted him to dig them out.

After the Fall

There are 57 pages of documents, some neatly typed by medics, some scrawled by guards. Some quote detainees who said Mr. Bah was ailing for two days before his fall on Feb. 1, and asked in vain to see a doctor.

The records leave unclear exactly when or how Mr. Bah was injured in detention. But they leave no doubt that guards, supervisors, government medical employees and federal immigration officers played a role in leaving him untreated, hour after hour, as he lapsed into a stupor.

It began about 8 a.m., according to the earliest report. Guards called a medical emergency after a detainee saw Mr. Bah collapse near a toilet, hitting the back of his head on the floor.

When he regained consciousness, Mr. Bah was taken to the medical unit, which is run by the federal Public Health Service. He became incoherent and agitated, reports said, pulling away from the doctor and grabbing at the unit staff. Physicians consulted later by The Times called this a textbook symptom of intracranial bleeding, but apparently no one recognized that at the time.

He was handcuffed and placed in leg restraints on the floor with medical approval, “to prevent injury,” a guard reported. “While on the floor the detainee began to yell in a foreign language and turn from side to side,” the guard wrote, and the medical staff deemed that “the screaming and resisting is behavior problems.”

Mr. Bah was ordered to calm down. Instead, he kept crying out, then “began to regurgitate on the floor of medical,” the report said. So Mr. Bah was written up for disobeying orders. And with the approval of a physician assistant, Michael Chuley, who wrote that Mr. Bah’s fall was unwitnessed and “questionable,” the tailor was taken in shackles to a solitary confinement cell with instructions that he be monitored.

Under detention protocols, an officer videotaped Mr. Bah as he lay vomiting in the medical unit, but the camera’s battery failed, guards wrote, when they tried to tape his trip to cell No. 7.

Inside the cell, a supervisor removed Mr. Bah’s restraints. He was unresponsive to questions asked by the Public Health Service officer on duty, a report said, adding: “The detainee set up in his bed and moan and he fell to his left side and hit his head on the bed rail.”

About 9 a.m., with the approval of the health officer and a federal immigration agent, the cell was locked.

The watching began. As guards checked hourly, Mr. Bah appeared to be asleep on the concrete floor, snoring. But he could not be roused to eat lunch or dinner, and at 7:10 p.m., “he began to breathe heavily and started foaming slightly at the mouth,” a guard wrote. “I notified medical at this time.”

However, the nurse on duty rejected the guard’s request to come check, according to reports. And at 8 p.m., when the warden went to the medical unit to describe Mr. Bah’s condition, the nurse, Raymund Dela Pena, was not alarmed. “Detainee is likely exhibiting the same behavior as earlier in the day,” he wrote, adding that Mr. Bah would get a mental health exam in the morning.

About 10:30 p.m., more than 14 hours after Mr. Bah’s fall, the same nurse, on rounds, recognized the gravity of his condition: “unresponsive on the floor incontinent with foamy brown vomitus noted around mouth.” Smelling salts were tried. Mr. Bah was carried back to the medical unit on a stretcher.

Just before 11, someone at the jail called 911.

When an ambulance left Mr. Bah at the hospital, brain scans showed he had a fractured skull and hemorrhages at all sides of his swelling brain. He was rushed to surgery, and the detention center was informed of the findings.

But in a report to their supervisors the next day, immigration officials at the center described Mr. Bah’s ailment as “brain aneurysms” — a diagnosis they corrected a week later to “hemorrhages,” without mentioning the skull fracture. After Mr. Bah’s death, they wrote that his hospitalization was “subsequent to a fall in the shower.”

The nurse, Mr. Dela Pena, and the physician assistant, Mr. Chuley, said that only their superiors could discuss the case. The Public Health Service did not respond to questions, and the Corrections Corporation said medical decisions were the responsibility of the Public Health Service.

Mr. Bah’s cousins demanded an autopsy, but the Union County medical examiner’s confidential report was not completed until Dec. 6. It was sent to the county prosecutor’s office only as a matter of routine, because the matter had been classified as an “unattended accident resulting in death.”

Prosecutors said they did not investigate. “According to the report, Bah suffered a fall in the shower,” Eileen Walsh, a spokeswoman for the prosecutors, said in an e-mail message. “We are not privy to any other bits of information.”

In the home movies Mr. Bah made of his last journey home, he is only a fleeting presence: a slim man with a shy smile. But without his support, relatives in Africa say they have little money for food and none for his sons’ schooling.

His body went back to Guinea in a sealed coffin.

“I stayed here seven years, waiting for him,” his second wife, Mariama, said in French, recalling their long separation and the brief reunion that led to the birth of their son, now a toddler, while Mr. Bah was in detention.

“I wanted them to open the casket,” she added, “to know if it was him inside. Until today, I cry for him.”

Margot Williams contributed reporting.

    Few Details on Immigrants Who Died in Custody, NYT, 5.5.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/05/nyregion/05detain.html?ref=opinion

Sidebar

Power to Build Border Fence Is Above U.S. Law

April 8, 2008
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

Securing the nation’s borders is so important, Congress says, that Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, must have the power to ignore any laws that stand in the way of building a border fence. Any laws at all.

Last week, Mr. Chertoff issued waivers suspending more than 30 laws he said could interfere with “the expeditious construction of barriers” in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas. The list included laws protecting the environment, endangered species, migratory birds, the bald eagle, antiquities, farms, deserts, forests, Native American graves and religious freedom.

The secretary of homeland security was granted the power in 2005 to void any federal law that might interfere with fence building on the border. For good measure, Congress forbade the courts to second-guess the secretary’s determinations. So long as Mr. Chertoff is willing to say it is necessary to void a given law, his word is final.

The delegation of power to Mr. Chertoff is unprecedented, according to a report from the Congressional Research Service. It is also, if papers filed in the Supreme Court last month are correct, unconstitutional.

People can disagree about the urgency of border security and about whether it is more or less important than, say, the environment. Congress is entrusted with making those judgments, and here it has spoken clearly. In the process, it has also granted the executive branch more of the sort of unilateral power the Bush administration has so often claimed for itself.

No one doubts that Congress may repeal old laws through new legislation. But there is a difference between passing a law that overrides a previous one and tinkering with the structure of the Constitution itself. The extraordinary powers granted to Mr. Chertoff may test the limits of how much of its own authority Congress can cede to another branch of the government.

Mr. Chertoff explained the reasoning behind the law in a news release last week. “Criminal activity at the border,” he said, “does not stop for endless debate or protracted litigation.”

Mr. Chertoff has issued three similar waivers, and a challenge to the constitutionality of one of them has just reached the United States Supreme Court. If the court decides to hear the case, its decision will almost certainly apply to last week’s waivers as well.

The case was brought by two environmental groups, Defenders of Wildlife and the Sierra Club. They sued Mr. Chertoff last year over his decision to suspend 19 laws that might have interfered with the construction of a border fence in the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area in Arizona.

Congress, the groups said, had given Mr. Chertoff too much power.

“It is only happenchance that the secretary’s waiver in this case involved laws protecting the environment and historic resources,” the groups told Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle of Federal District Court in Washington. “He could equally have waived the requirements of the Fair Labor Relations Act to halt a strike, or the provisions of the Occupational Safety and Health Act in order to force workers to endure unsafe working conditions.”

(Happenchance? You don’t see that word every day, and certainly not in a court filing.)

The groups said Congress cannot hand over unbridled power to the executive branch even as it cuts the courts out of the picture. They relied mostly on a 1998 Supreme Court decision striking down the Line Item Veto Act, which had allowed the president to cancel parts of laws.

In December, Judge Huvelle rejected the challenge and allowed construction to proceed. She said she had no jurisdiction to decide whether Mr. Chertoff was correct in saying the waivers were necessary, and she ruled that the delegation of power to him was constitutional.

“The court concludes that it lacks the power to invalidate the waiver provision merely because of the unlimited number of statutes that could potentially be encompassed,” Judge Huvelle wrote.

A petition asking the Supreme Court to hear the case was filed three months later.

Did you notice the missing step? In addition to forbidding judges from second-guessing Mr. Chertoff’s decisions, Congress forbade federal appeals courts from becoming involved at all. After losing before Judge Huvelle, the groups’ only recourse is to hope the Supreme Court decides to hear their appeal.

In their petition, the environmental groups said the Supreme Court had never upheld a broad delegation of power like that given to Mr. Chertoff without the possibility of judicial review of executive branch determinations. Nor, they said, has any appeals court.

It is the combination of those two factors — the broad granting of power to the executive branch and cutting the judicial branch out of the process — that makes the 2005 law so pernicious, the groups say.

The government’s response is due next week. In a brief filed in the district court last year, Justice Department lawyers told Judge Huvelle that the urgency of border security must trump other interests. They added that Congress may delegate particularly broad powers in the areas of national security, foreign affairs and immigration because the Constitution gives the executive branch great authority in those areas.

The line-item veto decision does not apply, the government lawyers said, because Mr. Chertoff is not repealing laws for all purposes, just suspending them for his fences.

It is true, of course, that Congress gave up its powers here voluntarily. But Justice Anthony M. Kennedy had a response to that point in his concurrence in the line-item-veto case.

“It is no answer, of course, to say that Congress surrendered its authority by its own hand,” he wrote. “Abdication of responsibility is not part of the constitutional design.”

Justice Kennedy made a broader point, too, one perhaps more apt today than it was 10 years ago.

“Separation of powers was designed to implement a fundamental insight,” he wrote. “Concentration of power in the hands of a single branch is a threat to liberty.”
 

Online: Court documents and an archive of Adam Liptak’s articles and columns: nytimes.com/adamliptak.

    Power to Build Border Fence Is Above U.S. Law, NYT, 8.4.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/08/us/08bar.html?hp

Government Issues

Waiver for Fencing Along Border

April 2, 2008
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

In a sweeping use of its authority, the Department of Homeland Security said Tuesday that it would bypass environmental reviews to speed construction of fencing along the Mexican border.

Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, issued two waivers covering 470 miles of the border from California to Texas well as a separate 22-mile stretch in Hidalgo County, Tex., where the department plans to build fencing up to 18 feet high into a flood-control levee in a wildlife refuge.

“Criminal activity at the border does not stop for endless debate or protracted litigation,” Mr. Chertoff said in a statement.

The announcement angered environmental groups, which have raised concerns through lawsuits and public hearings about the damage that fencing could cause to wildlife. Property owners, particularly along the Rio Grande, have also objected to what they considered federal intrusion on their land and access to the river.

Previously, Mr. Chertoff had used his waiver authority three times to overcome environmental hurdles along limited segments of the border in San Diego and Arizona. But as the department strives to meet a deadline of year’s end for nearly 700 miles of fencing, he has now greatly expanded the use of his waiver authority, which was granted by Congress.

So far, 309 miles of fencing has been put up, varying from tall metal barriers to impede pedestrians to simpler concrete posts designed to block vehicles.

“Congress and the American public have been adamant that they want and expect border security,” Mr. Chertoff said. “We’re serious about delivering it, and these waivers will enable important security projects to keep moving forward.”

Mr. Chertoff’s waiver power has drawn concern from some members of Congress.

Jodi Seth, a spokeswoman for the House Commerce and Energy Committee, said Tuesday, “When we asked the department to justify the need to waive these environmental laws, we were stonewalled.”

But Representative Brian P. Bilbray, a Republican from San Diego who heads the House Immigration Reform Caucus, a mostly Republican group, praised Mr. Chertoff as “recognizing the importance of moving forward with this fence without any further delays.”

“The American people demand that our borders be secured,” Mr. Bilbray said, “and this decision will go a long way toward accomplishing that.”

Under the Secure Fence Act of 2006, the department was authorized to build up to 700 miles of fencing along the 2,000-mile Southwest border, where most illegal immigrants cross.

Amy Kudwa, a homeland security spokeswoman, said the department had contacted 600 property owners and held 100 meetings and open houses as part of planning for the fencing.

In his statement, Mr. Chertoff said the department would continue to listen to environmental concerns. “We value the need for public input on any potential impact of our border infrastructure plans on the environment,” he said, “and we will continue to solicit it.”

Defenders of Wildlife, an environmental group that had already asked the Supreme Court to review the waiver of environmental law in an Arizona fence project, said it would amend its petition to the court to reflect Mr. Chertoff’s new decision.

“Clearly, this is out of control,” said Rodger Schlickeisen, president of Defenders of Wildlife.

The Interior Department, which controls several tracts where the fencing is planned, said it had also raised objections to some fencing.

“We will continue to work with them closely to protect environmental values and mitigate impacts,” the department said.

    Government Issues Waiver for Fencing Along Border, NYT, 2.4.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/02/us/02fence.html

Arkansas Woman, Left in Cell, Goes 4 Days With No Food or Water

March 12, 2008
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

A woman was locked for four days in a tiny holding cell in a northern Arkansas courthouse, forgotten by the authorities and left without food or water, the local Sheriff’s Department said Tuesday.

The woman, Adriana Torres-Flores, 38, a longtime illegal immigrant from Mexico, slept on the floor with only a shoe for a pillow, and with nothing to drink except her own urine, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported. There was no bathroom in the cell.

A bailiff had apparently forgotten that he placed Ms. Torres-Flores, a mother of three, in the cell last Thursday, and simply left her in the empty courthouse, in Fayetteville, over the weekend, said the chief deputy of the Washington County Sheriff’s Department, Jay Cantrell. A snowstorm meant that there were far fewer people than usual working at the courthouse on Friday.

“He just flat forgot about her,” Mr. Cantrell said, adding that the bailiff, Jarrod Hankins, had been placed on administrative leave, having been on the job a few months. “It was just a horrible mistake,” Mr. Cantrell said.

When the bailiff opened the door of the cell on Monday, Ms. Torres-Flores was lying on the floor, the deputy said. The cell typically holds prisoners for no more than an hour, measures 9 feet by 10 feet and contains only a metal table with benches that swing out from it. It has a steel door and concrete walls.

“From what I understand — it sounds horrible to say — it was an oversight,” said Nathan Lewis, Ms. Torres-Flores’s lawyer. “No one is walking around there Friday, and she just got left in there over the weekend.”

“There’s no water, there’s no food,” Mr. Lewis added. “She basically said it was really bad.”

She was taken to a hospital and treated, and is now recovering at home, Mr. Lewis said, “very worn out from the whole ordeal.”

Ms. Torres-Flores has been in the United States for 19 years, and her children were born here, though she is in the country illegally, said her immigration lawyer, Roy Petty. Mr. Petty said she had been among numerous people arrested at a flea market on charges related to the sale of pirated DVDs and CDs.

She went to court Thursday for a hearing on a plea agreement over the charges, but decided to plead not guilty. She was then placed in the holding cell for transfer to the county jail, since the new plea was contrary to the terms of her original release on bond. Instead, she was forgotten.

“Everybody is backing away from it as fast as they can,” Mr. Petty said. “Frankly, that’s how they treat Hispanics down here. They treat Hispanics like cattle, like less than human.”

Mr. Cantrell, the deputy, said there would be an investigation. “There was no malicious intent,” he said. “The whole thing is terrible.”

In Little Rock, Rita Sklar, executive director of the A.C.L.U. of Arkansas, said the organization was very concerned.

“There certainly have been a lot of problems in that corner of the state, in terms of police treatment of Latinos and bigoted statements by government officials,” Ms. Sklar said. “We’re looking into the general problem in northwest Arkansas of racial profiling and abuse of power.

Arkansas Woman, Left in Cell, Goes 4 Days With No Food or Water, NYT, 12.3.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/12/us/12jail.html

Despite fences,

immigrants still broach U.S. border

Sun Mar 2, 2008
11:38pm EST
Reuters
By Tim Gaynor

SAN LUIS, Ariz (Reuters) - Daily, U.S. Border Patrol agents in this Arizona town faced groups of up to 200 illegal immigrants who would swarm across the border from Mexico, sprinting past the agents to a new life in the United States.

That was until 18 months ago, when the single fence was bolstered by two taller, steel barriers, watched over by video cameras and lit by a blaze of stadium lighting. Now the incursions known by the agents as "Banzai Runs" have all but stopped.

"It was overwhelming," said agent Andrew Patterson. "This used to be a huge trouble area, now we are almost down to zero."

The troubled patch of borderlands in this speck of a town in far west Arizona is among many places along the almost 2,000-mile (3,200-km) U.S.-Mexican border that are getting new fencing as part of a U.S. initiative to stem the flow of illegal immigrants.

Washington plans to build 670 miles of barriers, including pedestrian and vehicle fences, by the end of 2008. So far, more than 300 miles have been built, and the government is pushing hard in this election year to finish them, as mandated by the U.S. Congress.

While they are controversial -- some border landowners resent what they see as unwelcome government intrusion and some conservationists argue it disrupts wildlife flows -- border police say this stretch of new fencing has been highly effective.

"It has been a massive success. It has allowed our agents to gain control over the area and acted as a deterrent for people thinking of crossing," said Jeremy Schappell, a spokesman for the Border Patrol's Yuma sector, which includes San Luis.

SLOWING THE FLOW

Illegal immigration is a hot-button topic in the United States. A pledge to secure the porous southwest border with a combination of new barriers, increased manpower and new surveillance technologies is routinely made by both Democratic and Republican candidates seeking to be their party's pick to run for president in November.

The barrier erected in San Luis is similar in design to those pioneered in San Diego, California, and El Paso, Texas, in the 1990s, which helped the Border Patrol regain control of what were then the most heavily transited areas of the border, crossed by hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants each year.

The El Paso barrier -- two parallel chain link fences over 15 feet in height spaced 30 feet apart along the bed of the Rio Grande -- helped cut the number of illegal border crossers and curbed crime in the city, residents say.

The barrier has no barbed wire and includes several formal breaks, one where a freight train crosses from Ciudad Juarez, in Mexico, another to give access to the river bed, and is watched around the clock by border police spaced at intervals along the line.

But without 24-hour monitoring, as well as the stadium flood lights, and the directional cameras linked to a central control room manned by National Guard troops, the El Paso fence would be little deterrent.

"Along this stretch, the fence in itself doesn't stop anyone, but it does slow them down and gives us time to react. Those extra seconds are vital, and that's what a lot of people don't realize," said agent Jose Cisneros.

"You don't just put up a fence and say that is the end of it."
 

MOMENTS TO REACT

Graffiti is scrawled on the Mexican side of the gray concrete bed of the Rio Grande, while huge, cross-border highway bridges run over the top.

Every day, agents in El Paso face off against Mexican people smugglers who form groups to wait on the banks of the Rio Grande in broad daylight and wait for a moment to storm the fence, and sprint the few yards (meters) to the streets of El Paso.

"While in the countryside they cross under coverage of darkness. In the city, they wait until daylight so they can blend into the city population," Border Patrol agent Joe Romero told Reuters reporters during a recent tour of the area to see the barrier in action.

Reuters' correspondents witnessed two men crawl through the shallow, muddy Rio Grande and up the bank through the shaggy undergrowth on the U.S. side. There they climbed over the first fence, waded through a concrete irrigation canal and squeezed through a gap under the second fence, before running across the busy highway and into El Paso, where they were arrested.

"Whenever they think an agent is distracted or a camera is down, the smugglers tell the aliens to go for it," Romero said, highlighting the need for vigilance and rapid response for the fences to be effective in this urban strip.

"We are talking 10 to 15 seconds from the edge of the Rio Grande to the housing complex on the other side of the highway," he added.
 

SCALED BY PREGNANT WOMEN

As new barriers -- including single, double and triple layered pedestrian fences and lines of hefty steel posts sunk into the ground to stop vehicles -- carve out over hundreds of miles (kms) of borderlands amid political pressure for an end to illegal immigration, not all stretches of fencing are proving to be as effective.

A new single layer of steel mesh fence 10-13 feet tall stretches out across the rugged, high plains deserts and grasslands on either side of the small town of Naco, Arizona. The Border Patrol credits it with contributing to a fall in arrests, but some residents say it has done little to stop illegal immigrants.

In two recent visits to the area, Reuters correspondents found an improvised wooden ladder and stretches of garden hose used to scale the barrier, along with dozens of pieces of clothing and rucksacks apparently tossed by illegal border crossers as they breached it.

Local rancher John Ladd said some 300 to 400 illegal immigrants continue to clamber over the new steel barrier flanking the southern reach of his farm for some 10 miles (16 km) each day, as an effective combination of technologies and manpower remains elusive.

"It's so easy to climb that I've seen two women that were pregnant, I've seen several women in their sixties and all kinds of kids between five and ten years old climb over it," Ladd said, as he leaned on a section of the steel mesh fence that stretches like a rusted veil westward toward the rugged Huachuca Mountains.

"They're getting some help, but when you put it in perspective, its pretty amazing to have a nine-month pregnant woman climbing over that son of a gun, and thinking that this is going to be the answer to solve our immigration problem."
 

(Reporting by Tim Gaynor; Additional reporting by Robin Emmott in El Paso, Texas; Editing by Eddie Evans)

    Despite fences, immigrants still broach U.S. border, R, 2.3.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN2920408420080303

FACTBOX-Illegal immigration in the United States

Sun Mar 2, 2008
7:30pm EST
Reuters

(Reuters) - Following are some facts on illegal immigration and efforts to secure the U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada.

* An estimated 11 million to 12 million undocumented immigrants live and work in the United States, roughly one in every 20 workers, according to a study by the Pew Hispanic Center based on government figures.

* The nearly 2,000-mile (3,200-km) border with Mexico is the principal route of entry for illegal immigrants. The U.S. Border Patrol arrested some 880,000 people crossing the border illegally in 2007, most of them from Mexico and Central America, down from 1.1 million a year earlier.

* The U.S. government had built 284 miles of pedestrian and vehicular fence along the U.S.-Mexico border by the close of 2007, and aims to complete roughly 670 miles

by the end of 2008.

* The U.S. Border Patrol now has roughly 15,000 agents deployed on the Mexico and Canadian borders, and aims to have more than 18,300 agents by the end of 2008 -- more than double the number since President George W. Bush took office in 2001.

* The U.S. government signed off on an experimental stretch of hi-tech "virtual fence" last month, built by Boeing Co along a 28 mile section of the Arizona-Mexico border. It consists of nine sensor towers equipped with cameras and ground radar, relaying a "common operating picture" to Border Patrol vehicles equipped with laptops.

* The U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency has a growing fleet of Predator B unmanned surveillance drones. Three were in operation at the start of the year on the Mexico border, a fourth Predator drone is due to be deployed to Grand Forks, North Dakota, on the Canadian border, in 2008.

* The United States has 5,560 miles of borders with Canada, including 1,550 miles in Alaska).

(Compiled by Tim Gaynor in Phoenix, Arizona;

Editing by Eddie Evans)

FACTBOX-Illegal immigration in the United States, R, 2.3.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN2927923620080303