Asylum seekers detained, frustrated Lawyers say program undercuts due process
MICHAEL RILEY
Published in The Denver Post April 16, 2004
Even on Sharon Healey's good days, the pro bono asylum lawyer from Denver juggles half a dozen cases of people fleeing some of the worst torture and brutality the globe's dictators can dish out. But since a pilot program that jails immigrants whose deportation cases are under appeal started operating in Denver on April 5, something has happened that Healey thought impossible. Her job has gotten harder. Healey said she has spent the last several days explaining to many of her clients that, in their quest to find freedom in the United States, some may have to spend the next several months in jail. "Given the trauma that some of our clients have faced, the whole idea is just terrifying to them," said Healey, a lawyer for the Asylum Project at the University of Denver. As word of the pilot program - which jails people who used to go free after paying a small bond - has spread among immigrants in Colorado, lawyers say they are being inundated with fearful phone calls from immigrants, clients with pending cases or friends and family of those already detained. Some clients have asked whether they should leave Denver or ask for a change of venue. Others who have been arrested are weighing the prospect of a long wait in jail versus giving up their appeals and going home. "I don't know what they are going to do to me, but even if they send me back now it would be better than spending a year here," Amadou Wouldou Diallo, a Mauritanian asylum seeker who was jailed last week, said through a translator. Diallo was the first to be imprisoned under the program. Federal officials say there will be 500 a year in Denver - and critics say the number will be much higher. Immigration attorneys in Colorado and Washington fear the same chilling effect will dissuade immigrants from pursuing appeals at all, short-circuiting one of their basic legal protections. "You're taking people who are not criminals and putting them in jail. This is an extremely aggressive, distressful way to tell somebody they are not welcome here," said Laura Lichter, a Denver immigration lawyer. Federal immigration officials point out that the test program is just beginning, is likely to affect only a few immigrants and may lose out to alternative methods judged more efficient or less controversial.
They concede that the program is already drawing poor reviews from immigrants' advocates but say those defenders ignore a problem plaguing the system: More than 400,000 people who are ordered to leave the country never go, and that number has grown by tens of thousands each year. At least 2,500 people are unaccounted for in Denver. "There is a lot of hyperactivity going on with the attorneys. Those that refuse to listen or try to understand what's happening continue in this (line) that this is violating their clients' civil rights," said Doug Maurer, director of detention and removal for the Department of Homeland Security in Denver. "I've told many of them that if they have a new idea about how to address this whole problem, please let us know," he said. "I have yet to have anybody call me back." But critics say federal immigration officials are using the cover of a test program to undercut the long-established due process of immigrants. Elsewhere in the country, immigrants who are given deportation orders by a judge are routinely released into the community on a small bond, allowing them to continue working and living with family for the months or years the appeal process can run. Those who don't appeal usually are released to tie up personal affairs before leaving the country. But immigration officials say many of those people simply disappear. The problem became a national policy priority for the Bush administration after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, when Attorney General John Ashcroft announced an aggressive effort to find and deport hundreds of thousands of these "absconders." Under the test program - which is also operating in Atlanta and has no set termination date - four agents are permanently stationed at the immigration court in downtown Denver. When an immigration judge issues a removal order, agents handcuff and jail the immigrant. The two immigrants who were arrested in Denver's immigration court last week under the program were held on bails of $20,000 - an amount that attorneys say virtually guarantees their clients will sit in prison during their appeals. Immigration officials say the program will most likely affect about 15 percent of cases in Denver's immigration courts, or about 10 people a week. Immigration lawyers say the number will be much higher. Lawyer John Reardon said that as the judge read a deportation order to his client, a Mexican national, on April 6, the government's attorney used a cellphone to summon agents into the courtroom. "We walked past them; they jumped up, grabbed my client and yelled that they were arresting him," said Reardon, whose client has lived in the U.S. for 13 years.
Diallo, the Mauritanian asylum seeker, also lost his claim that day. Diallo speaks no English and has had difficulty communicating with doctors at the immigration detention center in Aurora about getting medication for his persistent headaches, said Healey, his attorney. Diallo and his family were expelled from their farm in the West African country in the early 1990s as part of a purge conducted by President Maaouiya Ould Taya against tens of thousands of Mauritanian blacks who, unlike Ould Taya, are not Muslims. Most of Diallo's teeth are missing, and his body is covered with scars from machete slashes from detention-camp guards, his attorney says. Diallo said his sister and father were killed during the purge. Critics say Diallo's case illustrates how the pilot program uses scarce law-enforcement resources and detention space to lock up people with no criminal record or violent history, rather than go after the 80,000 or so absconders the Justice Department says are accused of serious crimes. "Given what I've been told about the fact that detention space in Denver is at a premium, why would you be doing this?" said Judy Golub, spokesman for the American Immigration Lawyers Association in Washington. But Maurer, the Denver immigration official, said immigrants like Diallo have had their day in court and lost. "This country is very gracious in its immigration laws. Those who do come in illegally or violate their status have many, many processes they can go through to develop their case and explain what occurred," Maurer said. "But when that process is completed, there is an ending out there, and people have to recognize that."