Help Wanted
Fleeing torture and death threats in their home countries, asylum seekers face a rocky road to freedom in the U.S.
(continued from previous page)
By 1999, De la Sierra was finally granted political asylum status and a was living again in Chicago. She had married a chaplain at Children’s Memorial Hospital who was a former volunteer at Su Casa. She applied to the public health program at the University of Illinois Chicago, but was denied. Discouraged and plagued with low self-esteem since her torture, she gave up on trying to work in medicine again. Today, she’s a library assistant in the quiet children’s library of Sacred Heart School. The few times she’s returned to Guatemala – including a trip last year for her mother’s funeral – she has received more threats. With nowhere else to turn, she has become a permanent resident of the U.S.
**
Civil war, military coups and brutal dictatorships are the breeding grounds for asylum seekers. In the 1980s, thousands escaped to the U.S. from civil wars in Central America and Southeast Asia. Between 1988 and 2000, the former Soviet Union and Bosnia were the hot spots. Since 2000, the U.S. has seen an increase in African refugees, mostly escaping civil war in Ethiopia, Somalia and the Sudan. Today, refugees come from Burundi, China, Tibet and Burma. Beginning in September, the first refugees will arrive from Iraq.
Fleeing torture or death threats, many asylum seekers come to this country not because they want to leave their homes or look for work. They come because they are hunted. In that way, asylum seekers are close in circumstance to refugees. Refugees, however, are chosen for relocation at refugee camps in their home countries and arrive in the U.S. with their papers in order. They usually come in family groups and are met at the airport by resettlement agencies. From day one, they have access to housing, food, health care, child care and work assistance from the U.S. government.
“Asylees and refugees are effectively the same. But refugees come in an orderly fashion,” says Ed Silverman, refugee program bureau manager at the U.S. Bureau of Refugee & Immigrant Services. “Asylees just show up.”
And while the government is able to keep track of refugees— the U.S. admits tens of thousands of refugees annually for permanent resettlement, including 3,380 documented refugees in Chicago between 2001 and 2006—asylum seekers are much harder to monitor, in large part because of how they’re treated once they arrive on our shores. From 2001 to 2006, Silverman’s agency served and identified only 592 asylees. Nobody believes that less than 200 victims of political violence arrive in the United States in any given year, though.
Asylum seekers are not identified and part of a system. They are individuals who have been persecuted individually, usually for political reasons and often tortured and jailed. They take busses and trains in the middle of the night to escape, with money scraped together by friends and family. They leave with the clothes on their backs, with no idea of what will happen the next day. Most asylum seekers arrive in the U.S. unintentionally. Desperate to leave their country, they get on planes not knowing where they’ll arrive, traveling at the whim of flight patterns, ending up at the first point of entry to the U.S.
“These people are fleeing immediate danger. They don’t get to choose when and where they go,” says Maryanne Joyce, a social worker at The Marjorie Kovler Center for the Treatment of Survivors of Torture. “They end up at O’Hare and it’s like ‘now what?’”
Since asylum seekers can’t apply for a passport or visa through their government, many carry fake travel documents or have real visas that allow them to enter the country as tourists, students or workers. For many, that situation sets up a Catch-22 that lands them in trouble as soon as they arrive.
“If someone bribes someone and they are able to get a visitor’s visa, and then they’re so excited when they’re at the port of entry that they blurt out, ‘But I’m really here to get asylum,’ they’ve entered the country fraudulently as a visitor,” says Mary Fabri, senior director of The Kovler Center. And that lands them in jail.
Foreigners entering the country seeking asylum with no documents or fraudulent documents are sent to detention centers. For anyone coming into the Midwest, the U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) uses Dodge and Kenosha County jails in Wisconsin and McHenry County and TriCounty jails in Illinois. There, he or she is given a “credible fear” interview by an asylum officer, according to ICE spokesperson Gail Montenegro. She says if the detainee has a credible fear of returning to their country, they will have a hearing with an immigration judge, and are detained until that hearing, although they can be released on parole if they meet certain criteria: identity verification, community ties, likelihood of appearing for future hearings, medical or humanitarian issues and whether they pose a threat if released.
However, according to the judges, many detainees don’t meet those criteria for parole, says Tara Magner, director of policy at the National Immigrant Justice Center, and the kicker is that when an asylum seeker goes before the federal immigration judge, they are required to have a lawyer. And although detainees are given a list of legal help when they enter the jail, if they don’t speak English, the list is worthless. Some detainees sit in jail for up to a year, waiting to have a lawyer to represent them, but unaware of how to access the system.
“Asylees can be detained indefinitely,” says Silverman. “It’s sort of a glitch.”
“It’s not the responsibility of the jail to help these people. Asylum seekers have the right to counsel, but not at the public’s expense. It’s not the responsibility of immigration officials, jail guards or judges to do any more than keep them detained,” Magner says. “It doesn’t hurt [county jails] if people are there for a long time. It keeps money coming into cash strapped counties.” She says pro bono attorneys sometimes go to jails to talk with detainees one-on-one, but if asylum seekers are in remote areas, there are very few legal providers.
