Sentenced to a Life in Limbo

Juan Alonso Gonzalez and Mesa Kasem struggle to see a future in the same bleak present. “The way things are going, I cannot even imagine freedom now,” Kasem said. Or, as Alonso put it: “It is torture when you have no hope.”

Alonso is here on the fringe of the balmy Caribbean, Kasem at the edge of the Mojave Desert. One is Cuban, the other Cambodian. Once welcomed as refugees from communism and given green cards, they are now U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service prisoners held in isolated county jails.

Both are convicted felons who have completed their sentences, only to be swept up in lingering Cold War suspicions and Congress’ zeal to detain and deport foreigners who commit crimes.

In INS parlance, they are “lifers,” languishing in indefinite detention. Their native countries will not take them back, and the INS will not return them to American society.

INS detainees represent the fastest-growing segment of the nation’s exploding jail population. While the increase in federal and state inmates actually slowed in 1997--to 5.2% from a decade average of 7%--the number in INS custody soared by 42% over the previous year.

The Clinton administration is pushing for congressional extension of a policy that has given local INS directors some flexibility to release nonviolent offenders marked for deportation. Without that discretionary authority, due to expire next month, INS officials say the detained population could double within the year.

“There’s no possible way we can detain all of these people--nor should we,” INS Commissioner Doris Meissner said in a recent interview.

The looming crisis has INS officials scrambling. The almost $700 million now budgeted annually for detention and deportation soon will have to be doubled if the population continues to grow at current rates, officials say.

To help alleviate the pressure, the INS is trying to persuade the U.S. Bureau of Prisons to take custody of all its “lifer” detainees, now numbering about 2,800. The vast majority are Cuban and Southeast Asian.

In the meantime, the INS is going further afield, often renting beds in remote county jails, not easily accessible to attorneys and far from the detainees’ families and cultural communities.

A financial boon for local sheriffs and for-profit prisons, this far-flung INS detention network is subject to little oversight and operates with a patchwork of standards and practices, critics say. They call the system a veritable gulag--”a secret detention world which is out of the public eye and subject to little scrutiny by the INS itself,” according to a report by the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center.

“This is a real time-bomb waiting to go off,” said Miami attorney Cheryl Little, the center’s executive director.

Report Criticizes Holding INS Detainees

In fact, in a report to be released in Washington on Thursday, Human Rights Watch, which monitors developments in more than 70 countries, charges that holding INS detainees in local jails wrongfully punishes them and violates international standards.

INS officials concede that tensions in overcrowded facilities are near the flash point, especially among frustrated lifers.

“Just from a human standpoint, we’re left with very unhappy detainees who are virtually hopeless and have little motivation to be well-behaved,” noted Kristine Marcy, INS senior counsel on detention and deportation. “This population, when they don’t think they are going to get out soon, are hard to manage.”

Those in direct INS custody typically live in dormitory-style barracks, where they may spend up to 23 hours a day--often eating there--with little privacy and an hour for exercise in adjacent yards.

Sometimes, tensions erupt.

Two disturbances already this year have rocked the INS lockup in El Centro, 220 miles southeast of Los Angeles. Angry prisoners in March barricaded themselves in their barracks and burned mattresses, resulting in the indictment of a dozen prisoners from five different nations for assaulting security officers.

In June, Alonso and 33 other INS detainees were moved to the Key West jail following allegations that they had been subjected to racial and ethnic taunts, shackled in spread-eagled positions to their beds, beaten and shocked with electric riot shields and batons while held in the Jackson County jail in north Florida.

Their complaints have been forwarded to the U.S. Justice Department.

At the cramped INS jail in San Pedro, a Mexican prisoner was stabbed last month following days of tension between rival Asian and Latino gang members. He was treated and sent back to jail, where officials fear retaliatory strikes.

“This is the worst-case scenario,” said Leonard Kovensky, INS assistant district director in Los Angeles. “These kinds of tensions are aggravated by both a lack of detention space and the absence of hope that many will have any kind of resolution to their case.”

In 1995, INS overseers at Florida’s Krome detention center orchestrated a cover-up by hastily releasing or transferring more than 100 detainees to mask overcrowding before the arrival of a congressional delegation. A Justice Department inquiry resulted in the disciplining of 12 INS staffers.

The number of people in INS custody now averages more than 15,000 a day, the highest in history. The vast majority are deported within two months or so, the INS says, their beds quickly occupied by the next waves.

According to agency estimates, about 170,000 prisoners will pass through INS custody during the current fiscal year--more than double the caseload of four years ago. And that does not include those arrested along the Southwest border and quickly expelled back to Mexico, usually within 24 hours.

Tough Laws Spur Prison Increase

Behind the rapid growth in the number of INS prisoners are tough laws passed by Congress in 1996 that expanded the grounds for expulsion, especially for noncitizens convicted of a range of crimes. In addition, the laws mandated the holding of asylum-seekers, ex-convicts and others who could previously be released awaiting final word on their appeals, which can take years.

The legal bind in which lifers now find themselves results from the confluence of two strong currents in recent public opinion: anti-terrorism and anti-immigration. After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York, in which anti-American fanatics were suspected, lawmakers came up with the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act as a way of quickly rounding up and deporting foreigners suspected of plotting terrorist acts or other crimes of violence. When the federal building in Oklahoma City was blown up in 1995, the bill was broadened to include acts of domestic terrorism as well.

Several months after President Clinton signed that bill into law, he also put his pen to the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act--a Republican-sponsored measure that was backed by California’s two Democratic senators, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, and reflected the anti-immigrant sentiment in the state and the nation.

The law requires asylum-seekers to request a hearing within a year of entering the U.S., and allows the INS to more easily deport illegal entrants who do not make asylum claims.

Under the 1996 statutes, the fact that a legal immigrant may have been a model resident for 20 years after completing his or her criminal sentence doesn’t make a difference. They still face deportation if their crime qualifies as an “aggravated felony,” a broad term encompassing everything from simple theft to virtually any drug-related offense.

Agents Pursue Deportable Prisoners

Immigration agents now regularly comb jails and prisons nationwide in search of deportable inmates. The INS even has a 24-hour watch at the L.A. County Jail, one of the nation’s steadiest sources of deportable immigrants. Still others are picked up more casually, often while returning to the United States from trips abroad, unaware that their criminal pasts may expose them to deportation.

That is what happened to the 47-year-old Alonso, who arrived during the Mariel boat-lift summer of 1980. He found work as a laborer in Miami, eventually settling down with Josefa Ferreiro. Alonso became a surrogate father to her grandson, Gustavo, now 16. “Gus loves him like his own papi,” said Ileana Ferreiro, 34, the boy’s mother.

But Alonso has made mistakes. Police twice arrested him for possession of an unregistered firearm. For those offenses he picked up two felony convictions and served a year’s probation.

When Alonso heard in 1995 that his father was near death in Cuba, he sold his truck, got help from the Red Cross to obtain a humanitarian visa and went back to his hometown of Ciego de Avila. His father died two weeks after his arrival.

Upon his return to Florida, INS officials at Miami International Airport ran Alonso’s name through standard law-enforcement databases.

The gun offenses flashed up on a computer screen. Alonso has been locked up ever since, most recently here in the C Pod of the Monroe County jail--where on a recent day most of the men milling around him were serving time for violent crimes and other misdeeds, counting down the days until their release.

Lifers, however, have no expectation of release since the U.S. has no deportation agreements with Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos--where residual Cold War ill-will blocks normal relations. Stateless Palestinians, former Soviet subjects, Africans, Iranians and others also can slip into the lifer category.

Immigrant advocates say such indefinite detention violates the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment, as well as international human rights accords.

According to the INS, all detainees’ histories are reviewed regularly to see if they qualify for release, typically to relatives, halfway houses or on bond.

And Mariel Cubans are entitled to an annual review by a panel set up after 1987 riots among marielitos held in indefinite detention in Atlanta and Oakdale, La. But there are no guarantees that lifers will get another chance at freedom.

“Sometimes, I give up hope,” Kasem, a 21-year-old native of Cambodia, said recently at L.A. County’s Mira Loma Detention Facility in Lancaster. “I just feel like I’m going crazy.”

Kasem, who admittedly ran with gangs in the Stockton area since his teens, has been in INS custody for almost two years. He is desperate to be out by October so he can pay tribute to his father on the 100th day following his death, a Cambodian tradition.

Kasem came here as a refugee at age 3 and landed in California’s prison system as a result of his conviction for shooting a woman in Stockton. The INS took custody as he completed his state time.

Now, he cannot imagine what life would be like in a country he doesn’t remember.

His older sister, Raksan Kasem, has tried to convince the INS to release her brother.

“What are we going to do? Sit here and wait for my brother to rot?” asked Raksan Kasem, who regularly makes the five-hour trip from the Central Valley to visit her brother, her disconsolate mother in tow. “Sending my brother back to Cambodia is like sending a baby to the jungle. He’ll die there. He has nothing there.”

Clary reported from Key West and McDonnell from Los Angeles.

* POLICY ASSAILED: Asylum-seekers in Southland say the INS has no reason to hold them for so long. B1

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Rising INS Costs

The Immigration and Naturalization Service is deporting and holding more and more people--and costs are rising.

Detention and deportation costs:

1998: $692 million

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Total number of people moved through INS detention:

1998: 170,000*

* Projected.

NOTE: Most INS detainees are released or deported within 60 days. Numbers do not include short-term detentions along the U.S.-Mexico border. All years are fiscal years.

Source: U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service