Thousands and thousands of Third World refugees are languishing behind bars in the land of the free. They're not criminals. They're "detainees," impoverished and desperate people who entered the United States without the proper credentials. Most have been held for months; some for years. Many are seeking asylum from political persecution in their countries; some now just want to go home. All have to wait until U.S. immigration authorities determine their fate.
Some, however, have had their "sentences" shortened, thanks to the Catholic Legal Immigration Network and its team of attorneys who know their way around the detention centers, federal courtrooms, and what was formerly the INS bureaucracy.
"CLINIC" can point with pride to scores of success stories. In the past year the agency interceded on behalf of immigrants from Somalia to Lebanon, from Iraq to Haiti, Brazil, and beyond.
Take the case of two young Haitian men who fled to Florida in a rickety boat to escape political persecution. One had been imprisoned and beaten severely for speaking out against abuses by President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's government. The other had witnessed the assassination of an uncle, who was an opposition leader. CLINIC lawyers presented their appeals for asylum and the two were freed after four months of detention.
"We've had a lot of success," said Kathleen Sullivan, CLINIC's director of detention projects in Boston. It demonstrates that justice is served "when people who are indigent have competent, hardworking representation."
UNFORTUNATELY, most detainees don't have access to such counsel. And both their numbers and their lag time in jail are soaring. The 1996 Immigration Act nearly tripled the number of non-citizens in INS custody. In July 2000, the INS was detaining nearly 20,000 people. National security concerns after 9-11 further restricted immigrant freedom and increased the number of detainees.
"There really is a difference of opinion whether a widespread crackdown on immigrant communities makes us safer," Sullivan said. "There are experts who say it doesn't, and we come down largely on that side."
The latest figures from the Department of Homeland Security, the federal agency that now oversees immigration matters, indicate that 272,625 people applied for asylum in the United States in fiscal 2003. In the same period, the government sent 134,730 people packing. This is not just a matter of deportation, as ominous as that is to one who fled a murderous regime. It's long, long days in crowded prisons and jails, separated from spouses and children. It's being sentenced to indefinite terms for committing no crime.
Today there are more than 500 holding pens for illegal aliens spread across the United States. They range from major federal detention centers such as Krome in Florida to state prisons and even county jails. The federal government pays as much as $75 a day to house each immigration detainee. Some, most notably Cuban Marielitos who came in the 1980 Freedom Flotilla, have been jailed for two decades.
"Detention is a particularly unjust and unnecessary response to thousands of non-citizens in INS custody," said Donald Kerwin, CLINIC's executive director in Washington, D.C. Kerwin heads a legal support staff of 63 persons for a growing network of Catholic immigration programs. CLINIC was formed in 1988 and grew out of a project of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in the 1960s. It now serves 131 member agencies, which in turn represent more than 100,000 low-income immigrants each year.
The network focuses on the most vulnerable, such as INS detainees, refugees, asylum-seekers, families in need of reunification, and victims of trafficking and domestic violence. For the past seven years, CLINIC especially has been on "detention watch."
"As the population of administrative detainees continues to increase, the United States must decide whether it can afford—economically and morally—to lock up persons who readily could be reunited with families and become productive members of society," Kerwin said. "For too long, the INS detention system has dishonored our heritage as a nation of immigrants." —Peter A. Geniesse
Peter A. Geniesse, a former newspaper editor, is a free-lance writer from Neenah, Wisconsin.
Catholic Legal Immigration Network Inc.
415 Michigan Ave. NE
Washington, DC 20017
(202) 635-2556
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