Month: November 2011

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Testing Alabama’s and ICE’s deportation process

Isaac Perez and Jonathan Berrera are currently in immigration detention in Louisiana

[quote]”Hey, what’s going on, Boss?”[/quote]

The cell phone video below shows two young activists going into a Border Patrol office in Mobile, Alabama and basically turning themselves in. Their names are Jonathan Perez and Isaac Barrera. They turned themselves in to the Border Patrol on Nov. 10 in order to test the Obama Administration’s use of prosecutorial discretion in pursuing deportations.

[quote]”What’s it to ya?”

“I’m undocumented too.”[/quote]

“We want to reveal the truth and show [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] for what they really are, as a rogue agency which has no accountability while they separate families,” Perez, a 24-year-old activist from Los Angeles, told Colorlines.com after being detained and sent to the South Louisiana Correctional Center in Basile. Perez and Barrera are interviewing other detainees and collecting other deportation stories from inside .

The action was supported by Dream Activist, a national network of grassroots groups that support passage of the Dream Act and The National Immigrant Youth Alliance. According to the Colorlines story, Perez and Barrera have been issued deportation orders, but an ICE spokesperson told Cololines that the agency has not issued detainers against them. Either way, they are still being detained and activists are trying to pressure the agency to release them before Thanksgiving.

By organizing around specific cases, mostly through online petitions and flooding ICE offices with phone calls, immigrant youth activists have managed to prevent many deportations of low priority, low risk immigrants such as Perez and Barrera—Dream Act eligible youth, people with family ties in the United States or long term residents without criminal records. These are the people that Obama has pledged and ICE has been directed not to deport.

Still, the vast majority of people being deported do not have criminal records: From October 2010 through July 2011, 81.2 percent of people ordered removed from the country had only violated immigration rules—illegal entry, overstaying visas or other administrative violations, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. That is 152,488 people. None of them had committed any other crimes.

Perez and Barrera have not gotten any press aside from the Colorlines report, as far as I can tell. But their action, along with a sit-in at the Alabama Statehouse last week and a rally at the historic 16th Street Baptist Church last night, the same church where four young black girls were killed in 1963 when white supremacists set off a bomb, is a powerful symbolic act in this time of renewed protest spirit in the United States. Risking arrest and, now, deportation, has a long history in this country of successfully demonstrating injustices to the public. The media needs to pay more attention to it.

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On persecution, human rights and immigration

Eleanor Roosevelt examines the Declaración Universal de Derechos del Hombre

This morning I was looking at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, trying to find relevant sections for the final chapter of Amor and Exile (I’m taking stabs at the chapters out of order now … though we are getting close to finishing the manuscript). I was a bit disappointed that migration was not considered more of a human right, though the right to seek “asylum from persecution” is protected:

Article 14.

  • (1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.
  • (2) This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

I tweeted: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is weak on rights to movement between nations …. bummer bit.ly/vds3th.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights displayed in Mauritius / duncan on flickr

And then I drafted this sentence: “When taken in the context of other universal human rights—the right to a livelihood, to security and to family—’persecution’ can include a host of justifications for seeking out life in the United States.”

I’m not sure I’m legally right about that, but I figured I’d check it out this week.

Then, tonight, via @redhotdesi I discovered, The @asylumist and his recent post on persecution, citing an article by law professor Scott Rempell:

Persecution is the core concept of asylum and refugee protection. Although thousands (if not tens of thousands) of decisions hinge on its meaning, a consistent definition is yet to emerge. Unmoored to any unified understanding of the term, immigration agencies and federal courts of appeals continue to articulate many different conceptions of persecution – conceptions that lack internal consistency and a coherent analytical foundation. Moreover, legal scholars have not attempted to aid adjudicators’ understanding of persecution because, by and large, scholars do not believe that a unified definition is possible. Meanwhile, the divergent definitions and understandings of persecution continue to produce unfair results for those seeking asylum, as asylum applicants receive disparate outcomes despite presenting claims based on similar situations. This Article challenges the conventional wisdom that persecution defies unified meaning. It provides a comprehensive assessment of persecution’s central underpinnings to isolate the three pillars that represent persecution’s fundamental core: harm, severity, and legitimacy. At the same time, this Article critiques a number of false dichotomies and shaky definitions that have troubled and obscured the persecution definition up to this point. Based on the analyzed core aspects of persecution and the elimination of erroneously included definitional components, this Article proposes that decision-makers define persecution as “the illegitimate infliction of sufficiently severe harm.” Because it is grounded in an examination of persecution’s true underpinnings, the proposed definition will aid courts in their review of asylum claims, and help administrators render consistent decisions. The stakes are simply too high, and the issue too prevalent, to let decades of abdication continue in any effort to form a unified definition.

Mostly I share this for its awesome serendipity. I am not a lawyer and I have not read the entire law review article yet. But I have a hunch that my definition of persecution is overly simplistic, optimistic and probably serves to detract from truly life threatening asylum cases as opposed to merely lifestyle or quality of life or life plan threatening immigration cases, though that line can be difficult to draw. But I do think that a case can and should be made for a universal right to migrate. Perhaps the United Nations is not the body to make such a case, but the United States certainly could try harder.

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George W. Bush on a path to citizenship for undocumented spouses

The remarkable thing about this 2001 letter from former President George W. Bush to Congress, is the numbers: 500,000 undocumented immigrants eligible for green cards with their U.S. citizen or permanent resident relatives, a majority of whom are spouses and 200,000 who missed the deadline because of Congressional inaction. That was 10 years ago:

The White House,
Washington, May 1, 2001
Hon. J. Dennis Hastert,
Speaker of the House of Representatives,
Washington, DC.

Dear Mr. Speaker: I am a strong proponent of government
policies that recognize the importance of families and that
help to strengthen them. To the extent possible, I believe that
our immigration policies should reflect that philosophy. That
is why I support legislation to extend the window created under
section 245(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act during
which qualified immigrants may obtain legal residence in the
United States without being forced to first leave the country
and their families for several years.

According to agency estimates, there are more than 500,000
undocumented immigrants in the country who are eligible to
become legal permanent residents, primarily because of their
family relationship with a citizen or legal permanent resident.
However, the law generally requires them to go back to their
home country to obtain a visa, and once they do so, they are
barred from returning to the United States for up to 10 years.
Many choose to risk remaining here illegally rather than to be
separated from their families for those many years. This issue
has been the subject of discussion in the Working Group that
Attorney General Ashcroft and Secretary of State Powell co-
chair with officials of the Mexican government, and should be
addressed to ensure a more orderly, legal, and humane migration
flow between our countries.

I encourage the Congress to consider whether there was
adequate time for persons eligible under section 245(i) to
apply for adjustment of status before the filing deadline
expired yesterday. Information indicates an estimated 200,000
were eligible to file but did not meet the deadline.
Preliminary reports suggest that many applicants were unable to
complete their paperwork in time, due in part to the fact that
the rules explaining how the provision would be applied were
not issued until late March. It remains in our national
interest to legitimize those resident immigrants, eligible for
legal status, and to welcome them as full participants of our
society. But we will only be able to do this if the path to
legalization encourages family reunification. For this reason,
I would support legislation that temporarily extends the
recently expired April 30, 2001, filing deadline, while
maintaining the requirement that the applicant was physically
present in the United States on December 21, 2000.

I look forward to working with you on this important
legislation.

Sincerely,
George Bush

Also remarkable: the civil language on strengthening the family, the use of “undocumented” rather than “illegal” and the assertion that undocumented husbands, wives, parents and children, are actually eligible for visas, not merely “deportable aliens.”

Did I mention that was (only) 10 years ago?

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Days of impending reunions

We had 24 hours of intense conversation and experience of family separation and impending reunion, in several formats this weekend.

Friday night, my wife and I went to see One Way: A Tuareg Journey, a very thoughtful documentary about a Tuareg family from Niger that immigrates to Northern Italy, where the father works at an electronics assembly plant. The father left first, in the hopes of earning some money for his family. A year or two later, he sent for his wife and two older children, who quickly adapt to life in Italy, thriving in Italian and soaking up knowledge and culture.

For about three years, the family is separated from the youngest son, who did not have a birth certificate or some other identity document and was not able to join the family in Italy. (In a particularly compelling scene, the boy takes a piece of scrap paper and fills it with geometric shapes, calling it his papers.) Filmmaker Fabio Caramaschi captured the intense reunion of father and young son in the desert, when the softening, westernizing father returns to collect his Tuareg son, who was left with grandpa to work the camel train and survive in the harsh Saharan climate. The son, al-Kassoum, is a brilliant 6-year-old upon his arrival in Italy, and is able to reflect on the stark cultural differences and opine that he’d rather return to Niger, to the desert.

On Saturday, we went to a birthday party for 1-year-old Sara, whose parents, Veronica and Juan, will appear in Amor and Exile. Sara has never met her father because he is in Mexico and barred from returning to the United States for a long time. Juan called from Mexico while we were at the house and spent a long time on the phone with his brother, his nieces and singing Happy Birthday to his baby. While he was emotional about missing the pink cake and kid games (as was I), Juan and Veronica are planning to reunite in Mexico before year’s end and their excitement was palpable.

Then we rushed home to meet another friend, a man from the Congo who had a kind of life changing experience this past week that is nearly unimaginable to me. I am just going to give the rough outlines here, because I think he is going to be telling his own story soon, but on Friday, Benjamin located his wife and two daughters in Kampala, Uganda after 14 years of searching. They spoke on the phone—well hardly spoke, they mostly cried on the phone, both in a state of shock. Benjamin lived in a refugee camp in Zambia after fleeing the Congo in 1997 and recently resettled in Boise. He had spoken to my wife, who works for a refugee organization here, about being unsure when to admit that he would never see his family again. And then, all of a sudden, some newly resettled Congolese refugees in Ohio got to talking and connected the dots between Benjamin in Idaho and his wife and kids in Uganda and all of a sudden they were on the phone, talking to one another again. Now he is trying to figure out how to meet them, again.

These disparate, yet related stories of family separation—whether through government policy, economics, war or some combination of the three—are all connected in my mind. And they serve as a reminder that the conservative talking point of “Family Values” is perhaps a good starting point, or re-starting point, for a national discussion on migration policy. The stories I have been reporting for the past year and a half all make that point and my discussions this weekend make the same point on a global scale: in a world of globalized culture and markets, the family is still a basic unit that requires some basic protections.

While brushing my 6-year-old’s teeth last night I was careful to avoid the two, extremely loose front chompers. She asked me if kids in the Congo lose their teeth because Benjamin had been quite impressed with the way she pushed them out with her tongue. I choked up a bit explaining that he missed his own daughters’ tooth-losing period. But I am confident that he will soon find a way to reunite with his now-teenage daughters and that Juan will soon get to meet his baby and that Sidi’s family’s one-way trip will not rob them of the essential wisdom of the desert.