Subject: State sanctioned slavery, but thankfully, Sojourners are there for detainees Sun Dec 28, 2008 2:12 am
Part I
ELIZABETH, N.J. (AP) -- "H-26," the guard yelled. "You have a visitor."
Locked in a windowless warehouse for three months, Ibrahim Cisse had long given up hope of anyone finding him. Now, his mind raced. How could he possibly have a visitor when no one in this country knew his name?
Nervously, he shuffled into the visitors room.
There, behind the glass partition, was a small woman with short brown hair and kind green eyes. Cisse stared at her suspiciously as he picked up the phone.
My name is Janet, she said, speaking in a soft voice in French. "I came as a friend."
Cisse's heart warmed at the sound of his own language. Still, he was cautious.
So many terrible things had happened since he had fled a gunfight on the streets of Abidjan and stowed away on a boat filled with crates of chocolate and cocoa. In America he was slapped in shackles, yelled at like a criminal, locked in jail first and then sent to this prison-like detention center. Here, days passed in a mind-numbing blur with little to do but lie on his bunk and ponder an unimaginable future.
An immigration judge had ordered him deported, but because he had no passport or papers, the Ivory Coast refused to take him back. Cisse was a man without a country, without hope, without contact with the outside world.
Gently, Janet Curley coaxed him. How could she help? What did he need?
He wanted to learn English so that he could understand what was happening. He wanted to find out about his family in Africa. Most of all, he wanted to be free.
I will teach you English, she said.
The next Saturday she arrived with alphabet letters and words and pictures. Over the static-filled phone connection, Cisse had his first English lesson. He learned how to say "pineapple."
And so began an extraordinary journey, a friendship forged in the unlikeliest of settings, through a grubby glass partition in the visitors room of a detention center where 300 immigrants - none of whom are charged with a crime - are imprisoned.
Cisse, 27, spent 16 months in detention before being released on parole. Today, he calls the 49-year-old court clerk "Momma." She loves him like her own family.
In those weekly visits, Cisse says, Janet made me feel like a human being again.
---
In a searing, first-person account, Fauziya Kassindja, a Togolese teenager who applied for asylum to escape female genital mutilation, described her 14 months in detention at Elizabeth. The terrible isolation and uncertainty, she wrote, was made even more unbearable by the fact that no one came to visit.
Her 1998 book, "Do They Hear You When You Cry," so disturbed a group of congregants at the Riverside Church in Manhattan that they decided to take action. They would visit detainees who had no other visitors. They would listen to their cries.
And so, on Saturdays and Tuesdays, a small band of people climb into a church van and drive 15 miles to Elizabeth. They come from all backgrounds: social workers, professors, students, doctors, nurses, an engineer, a court clerk. Their mission is simple: just show up, to be a friendly face for an hour and make a commitment to be a real friend.
They call themselves Sojourners. In 10 years of visits they have transformed some detainee lives - but many say their own lives have been transformed as well.
"We try to bring some humanity into a place that is so dehumanizing," Curley says.
It is not an easy task.
The detention center is housed in a brown brick building on a bleak industrial stretch near Newark airport, a place studded with tire shops, warehouses, a strip club and a diner. Outside an American flag flutters next to a red one stamped CCA, for Corrections Corporation of America, the private prison contractor that runs the center. Inside, immigrants are detained indefinitely - some for months and years- while the government decides what to do with them.
Some have fled persecution in their country and applied for asylum after landing at a U.S. airport. Others were rounded up in raids because of problems with their paperwork or because they had no paperwork. Some were caught at the border.
Their numbers have soared in recent years in the wake of tougher immigration laws, an intense new focus on deportation and a reorganization of the system after Sept. 11, 2001. About 350,000 people are now deported annually, up from about 100,000 in the years before 2001. Most spend time in detention.
"Why was I locked up when I had not committed a crime?" cries Speciose Murekatete, a 40-year-old Rwandan who, with her husband, spent a year and a half in Elizabeth. "Why could I not hug my husband for more than a year? Why could I get no fresh air? Why could I not see the sun? Why could I not wear my own clothes?"
Immigration officials refuse to directly answer these questions. But they defend detention as a necessary program, one designed to protect the country from undesirables and terrorists and to protect the detainees as well.
"Our mission is to detain and remove as many illegal aliens as possible, and it is done in a highly humane manner," ICE spokeswoman Pat Reilly says. "Of course there are lots of compelling stories, but a judge has to make a decision based on the law."
But critics question why conditions have to be so harsh.
Detainees wear dark blue prison uniforms. They are addressed by numbers, not their names. Men and women are segregated and even spouses are allowed no physical contact, just two phone conversations a week. There is no outdoor yard at Elizabeth, nor any windows, just an open skylight in the roof of the room they use for one hour of daily recreation. Detainees have no right to a lawyer, though legal aid firms offer their services pro bono.
Some detainees become so disheartened they ask for voluntary deportation back to the country from which they have fled. The government usually quickly obliges. ICE leases a fleet of 10 airplanes for deportation purposes.
"You lose your identity," says Pradeep Thapa, a 36-year-old writer from Nepal, who was detained for 16 months. "You begin to feel like you don't really exist, that maybe the life you had before never really existed either."
About 35,000 are living this alternative reality in a patchwork of detention centers and prisons all over the country. Aliens, they are called, and for many, this is the most alien experience imaginable.
"When I saw my visitor every week," Cisse says. "It was the only time I felt happy."
---
Mary Schoen's Roosevelt Island apartment is a tranquil place filled with books and pictures. There are sweeping views of the East River. A pot of spicy lamb stew simmers on the stove.
For Rwandans Jean-Bosco Ndayishimiye, 47, and his wife, Murekatete, this is the one place they can take a break from their nightmare. Their three children, ages 7, 8 and 12, smile from a framed photograph on the bookcase.
Schoen is a sunny woman with fair hair and twinkling eyes. The 50-year-old nurse practitioner began visiting the couple in Elizabeth shortly after they were detained in September 2006. Today Schoen and her 20-year-old daughter count them as close friends.
Ndayishimiye and Murekatete call her their guardian angel.
For Schoen did far more than simply visit. She gave them money for phone cards so the couple could call their children; brought pictures and news from Rwanda; worked with a pro-bono lawyer, Elissa Steglich of the American Friend Service Committee.
And when the couple were finally released with electronic ankle bracelets in December 2007, it was Schoen who picked them up and brought them to her home. Their release had followed a chaotic few days during which the couple were almost deported after being denied asylum. Steglich managed to get a last-minute reprieve, pending an appeal to a federal court.
While the couple are grateful for their freedom, they are still haunted by their incarceration. "We were treated like we were not human beings," Murekatete says, sobbing.
Their ordeal began after they arrived at Kennedy International Airport for a two-week vacation. An immigration officer informed them that their tourist visas had been canceled and they would have to return to Kigali. They were stunned by the news, and feared what would happen to them if they went back.
According to Ndayishimiye, when they objected, they were handcuffed and taken to Elizabeth, where they spent 15 months fighting deportation as her health deteriorated and his anger grew.
"They wouldn't even let me wear my own underwear," he says.
They had a good life in Rwanda, the couple say. He worked as a clerk for the American Embassy and she ran a small clothing store. Their children were doing well at school. But he had been involved in a bitter court dispute over property with relatives, one of whom is a high-ranking police official. Ndayishimiye says he fears for his life if he returns.
Murekatete has delicate features and a quiet, elegant presence. In detention, she says, she suffered from heart problems and headaches and there were times she wept so hard she thought she would die. She ached for her children, her husband, for warmth, for decent food. Steglich worried about the toll prolonged imprisonment was taking on her client.
For seven months the couple lived in Schoen's apartment while she helped them navigate their new life, find jobs, enroll in English classes, and find a rental room of their own. Now Ndayishimiye works in a commercial warehouse and Murekatete works as a home health aide.
Even if they win asylum, which would mean their children could join them, Ndayishimiye worries about the difficulties of starting a new life "from zero," as he says.
Schoen listens from the kitchen as she prepares dinner. She knows how hard it will also be on her if they are deported.
She has seen detainees disappear before - the 26-year-old Ethiopian woman who languished for two years only to be deported, the 50-year-old teacher from Burma who, knowing she was about to be sent back, pressed her hands and face against the glass and wailed "pray for me, pray for me," as tears flowed down her face.
"It was like watching her drown," Schoen says.
--- _________________ Anarcho-Capitalist, AnCaps Forum, Ancapolis,OZschwitz Contraband “The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.”-- Max Stirner "Remember: Evil exists because good men don't kill the government officials committing it." -- Kurt Hofmann
Subject: Re: State sanctioned slavery, but thankfully, Sojourners are there for detainees Sun Dec 28, 2008 2:12 am
Part II
To receive asylum, immigrants must prove that they have been persecuted or have a "credible fear" of future persecution on the basis of race, nationality, religion, political opinion or a membership in a particular social group.
Immigration judges, who decide their cases in closed courts, are rigid about interpretations. Couples like Ndayishimiye and Murekatete, for example, do not easily fall into one of the specific categories. Men like Cisse and his friend, Lassina Konate, 30, who also stowed away on a boat from the Ivory Coast, have no papers and were illiterate when they arrived; they are in an impossibly difficult position unless they can somehow find a lawyer.
Even lawyers for detainees face enormous challenges. They cannot call their clients directly, scheduling meetings is practically impossible, many of their clients need interpreters, and detainees can be abruptly transferred without any notice.
"What is happening is unjust and inhumane," Steglich says. "We are talking life and death cases, where people have fled intense suffering, where families are often torn apart. A judge's decision can have dire consequences. These people should have an absolute right to counsel."
Nationwide, immigration judges granted asylum to about 37 percent of 35,775 applicants in 2007, according to the Executive Office for Immigration Review.
Human rights groups argue that jailing detainees amounts to criminalizing them. They condemn the limited right of detainees to appeal their incarceration, the lack of accountability at many centers and the psychological sufferings of those detained indefinitely.
Many also criticize the profits earned by the private companies that run detention centers. ICE has an annual budget of nearly $5 billion. ICE officials say it costs about $175 a day to detain someone at Elizabeth. They refused to say how much ICE pays CCA.
Profits are also reaped in smaller ways. Detainees must purchase phone cards, snacks and other small items within the system, some at prices higher than they cost outside. Detainees who work - in the kitchen or laundry of facilities - earn just $1 a day.
ICE spokeswoman Reilly said the average length of stay is a month. Those who remain longer, she said, make their own choice to do so while they appeal deportation orders.
She has little sympathy for detainees who have entered the country illegally - a misdemeanor - even if they have lived here for years. "They broke the law," she says. "When people disregard that law, what other laws will they disregard?"
---
"Today my heart screams for hope...
The hope of waking up one day free of bars and chains...
The hope of waking up, only to find that everything
that has happened to me would only be a dream ..."
In a basement room at the Riverside Church, David Fraccaro's voice cracks as he reads the poem and recalls the 18-year-old asylum seeker from Colombia who wrote it. Her name was Claudia and for eight months Fraccaro visited her in Elizabeth.
Then, because of overcrowding, she was moved to a local jail. There, Fraccaro says, he witnessed her deterioration from a beautiful, spunky young woman to a defeated, depressed inmate who didn't care what happened. Eventually, she was deported.
Fraccaro, 31, has been visiting detention centers for eight years now. When he first stumbled on the Sojourner program at coffee hour after Sunday service, the fair-haired, square-jawed actor from Paradise, Ind. had just lost a major audition and was questioning everything about his life and career.
He knew nothing about asylum seekers or detention centers. And then he went on his first Sojourner visit - to the former Wackenhut detention center near Kennedy airport in Queens.
"They brought out this very skinny and tired looking African man right around my own age," Fraccaro recalls. "His lips were cracked and his eyes were sunken with lack of sleep and his hands were shaking."
Fraccaro had to bend down to speak into the small, wire-covered hole in the partition; there were no phones. He remembers the smell of the man's breath, his fear. The man, a fisherman from the Ivory Coast, was named Charles. "Please help me," he said.
Overwhelmed by disgust and helplessness, Fraccaro knew he had to do more than just visit. He went back to college, got a degree in theology and is now studying human rights at Columbia University. He became a minister. And he became coordinator of the Sojourner program.
On this fall evening Fraccaro is speaking at a training session for about 20 new members. He tells them about Claudia and Charles and the Tibetan woman who screamed and fought so hard at the airport that guards couldn't put her on the plane, so they returned her to Elizabeth and placed her in solitary confinement for 10 days. When she was finally released, Fraccaro said, she had two narrow channels etched into her cheeks from tears.
The group listens quietly, some shaking their heads.
At the detention center, he tells them, their mission is purely friendship. They are not visiting as social workers, advocates or legal advisers. He warns them that sometimes they will go and their friend will not be there, and they may be given no explanation.
And he invites them to a rally outside the detention center a few weeks later.
There, as families huddle and weep and protesters brandish signs saying "Asylum is not a Crime," Fraccaro joins with others in reciting the names of the detainees who are locked inside.
At one point a speaker steps up to the microphone and gazes up at the grim brick building.
"Mr. President," he cries, as the crowd roars, "tear down this wall."
---
The visitors room is a soulless place where stark white lights beam down on the glass partition that separates the imprisoned from the free. In one corner a man tries to comfort a woman sobbing behind the glass. In another a mother holds a baby girl up to the partition so she can press her lips against it and kiss her father on the other side.
On a recent Saturday, Fraccaro visits with a 20-year-old man from the Ivory Coast, an asylum-seeker who has been detained for seven months. They chat about soccer and politics, but depression and monotony have worn the man down.
"It is very hard," he says, head downcast.
After an hour, a guard yells "Golf-26. Your time is up." Fraccaro presses his hand against the glass and the man presses his. Then he shuffles back to his dorm.
One booth over, Sojourner Stephanie Crane, a 21-year-old Fordham University student, chats with a 19-year-old high school student from Trenton, N.J., who was picked up in a raid at his home seven months earlier. His parents emigrated illegally from Guatemala when he was 7.
He tries to stay hopeful, but desperately misses his soccer team buddies, his studies, his mother. She wasn't home during the raid. She cannot visit because she fears being arrested, too.
Crane has been visiting him for months and she senses a change - a weariness of spirit that hurts to watch. "It makes me so angry," she says. "He hasn't done anything wrong."
In some ways, the ordeal of detention is worse for those who have already sampled life in America than for those who are locked up as soon as they arrive. But being released brings its own challenges.
Cisse - the young man from the Ivory Coast - recalls the day he stepped out of the Elizabeth facility, having just been flown back from an Alabama prison, where he spent six weeks because the New Jersey facility needed his bed.
It was a warm September night in 2006 and Janet Curley was waiting.
He remembers how the lights of the city glowed as they drove over the George Washington bridge, how welcoming they seemed. And he remembers Curley's caution. New York is a big exciting place, she told him. Sometimes it is good. And sometimes it is hard.
It is a sunny fall day and Cisse is sitting in a downtown Manhattan restaurant with Curley and Konate sipping tea. Even now, after two years of freedom, the men marvel at their fortune. They can read and write English now. They can take the subway without getting lost. They can ask a police officer for help without feeling frightened.
And yet life is not easy. They work for minimum wage - Cisse in a warehouse and Konate as a dishwasher - and have a hard time making ends meet. They don't know what has become of their families or what will become of them.
Una Tapper, a 76-year-old retired lawyer who was once an administrative law judge for the state of New York, is working on their behalf. Tapper, a former Sojourner, is trying to get a new hearing before an immigration judge on the grounds that the first one - in which they had no representation, couldn't speak English and didn't understand the proceedings - was unfair. She has medical reports from Doctors without Borders, which, she says are consistent with their stories of being beaten by soldiers. But there is still a possibility that they will be returned to detention or deported.
The prospect haunts Curley, even as she marvels at their fortitude.
"They are such respectful, kind, hardworking, prayerful men," she says. "We should be welcoming immigrants like this into our country, not punishing them."
Curley tells them that they have seen the worst of America, and she apologizes for that.
No, they say, smiling. They have seen the best of America.
Because in their darkest moment, when they lay on their bunks in the detention center despairing that even God had forgotten them, a miracle happened. A stranger walked into their lives. She would lift their hearts with her weekly visits.
And she would become their great champion and friend.
Subject: State sanctioned slavery, but thankfully, Sojourners are there for detainees 
Sun Dec 28, 2008 2:12 am
