Rights Group Criticizes Jailing of Asylum-Seekers

A Chinese refugee won asylum but was held in a California jail for 17 more months until her health broke down. A Sri Lankan--detained by the Immigration and Naturalization Service since 1997--fears he will be raped by inmates at Kern County Jail in Bakersfield. A Liberian asylum-seeker who spent 10 months in detention in Texas attempted suicide before winning asylum.

According to a human rights report released Tuesday, these immigrants are among the asylum-seekers who have been held indefinitely while their cases are considered by U.S. immigration officials.

Asylum-seekers who cannot be housed at overcrowded Immigration and Naturalization Service facilities are sent to county jails across America to live alongside accused murderers and other criminals, the report said.

“Detention is a disproportionate and harsh measure to apply to those seeking asylum,” said Nick Rizza, the refugee program director of Amnesty International USA, which wrote the report, “Lost in the Labyrinth.”

“Congress needs to take a look at this,” Rizza said. “The INS needs to establish national standards, identify all prisoners who are asylum seekers and take detention power away from the authority of district directors.”

An INS statement on the report contended that the vast majority of asylum-seekers are never detained. Of 3,200 immigrants requesting protection at U.S. ports between October 1998 and May 1999, 13% are still in detention, but 67% have been released and 20% of the cases resolved.

The statement said the INS “strives to minimize the detention of asylum-seekers to the extent possible.”

“While we welcome constructive studies and recommendations on how we can improve our administration of U.S. immigration law, we do take issue with some of the points raised in this report,” the agency said. “The [INS] is committed to fair and humane administration of the U.S. asylum system.”

Rizza said that detention procedures isolate immigrants and frustrate their efforts to get a lawyer, effectively denying them due process, Rizza said.

Chinese applicant Sai Quing Jiang was granted asylum but held anyway at the Kern County Jail for 17 additional months while INS officials appealed. She was released in late 1998--against INS counsel--after her health collapsed and a judge reaffirmed the asylum decision, Rizza said.

Sri Lankan asylum aspirant Nixon George has been at Kern County Jail for more than two years. George, a math student in his mid-20s, arrived on a flight to San Francisco in spring 1997 after fleeing his country without immigration documents, according to Los Angeles attorney Judith Wood, who represents him.

Since then, George has been at four facilities, most recently Kern County Jail, where he fears that other prisoners will sexually assault him, she said.

Wood said George, a member of the Tamil ethnicity, became a target of unfounded suspicion by the Sri Lankan military, which is fighting a war against armed guerrillas of the Tamil Tigers insurgency. She said soldiers tortured George with electric shocks until his father was able to bribe soldiers to release him.

A San Francisco judge denied his asylum plea, saying George did not seem credible because he did not tell the entire story of his persecution at the airport, but waited until a subsequent “credible fear” hearing with INS officials, Wood said. His appeal was denied, and although Wood was able to have the case reopened under an international convention against torture, that petition was denied two weeks ago, she said.

Rizza said he believes George would have won asylum had his detention not made it so difficult for him to get a translator and legal advice.

“I think the denial of asylum was bad law,” Rizza said. “The fact that you’re held in isolation and transferred from place to place under circumstances suitable for criminals--not asylum-seekers--corrupts the asylum process.”

As a result, many people who are eligible for asylum are deported, Rizza said.

Even some who win asylum are treated as criminals in the process, and some immigrants have even been shackled, he said.

A Ugandan asylum applicant, Yudaya Nanyonga, says she was sedated, stripped and tied to a bed for two days by Pennsylvania prison guards who were unaware that she was not a criminal, Rizza said. Nanyonga won asylum early this year after a year in detention, he said.

Under such conditions, depression and suicide are not uncommon, Rizza said.

“The conditions of detention are often inhuman,” he said.