Blanket detentions of asylum seekers by U.S. draw criticism
By Christopher Drew and Adam Liptak


Homeland Security Department officials said the decision was a precaution to keep terrorists from slipping into U.S.

The Bush administration’s decision to detain people from Iraq and 32 other countries who are seeking political asylum in the United States has raised concerns among U.N. officials and immigration groups, who say such blanket detentions may violate international norms and could undercut America’s traditional role as a beacon for the oppressed.

Homeland Security Department officials said that the decision, made right before the war started in Iraq, was a precaution to keep terrorists from slipping into the United States, the latest in a series of steps to tighten monitoring of foreigners since the Sept. 11 attacks. They pointed to several cases in which terrorists came to this country through asylum applications, particularly Omar Abdel Rahman, the Egyptian sheik who was convicted in 1995 of conspiring to blow up the U.N. headquarters and other landmarks in New York.

But a range of critics, including some former top immigration officials, say they fear that policies governing asylum in the United States, the world’s most powerful magnet for refugees, are being weakened in the administration’s move to treat immigration as more of a national security issue than a social and demographic one.

The change in asylum rules, announced on March 17 by Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, is part of Operation Liberty Shield, which also includes heightened security patrols at points of entry and in major cities, and FBI interviews with more than 11,000 Iraqi-born people in this country. People who enter the United States seeking asylum from countries on a list of those where al-Qaida or other terrorist groups are known to operate will now be automatically detained while their applications are considered, a process that takes six months or more. Before, asylum-seekers were held beyond an initial screening only on a case-by-case basis.

Officials at the new Homeland Security Department say the group of immigrants who will be affected is not large. Only about 600 refugees from the 33 countries, mostly in the Middle East and South Asia, passed initial screenings for asylum at the border last year. Given the added security after the Sept. 11 attacks, many of them were detained.

The department, however, has generated confusion around the measure by refusing to identify publicly the countries covered under the new detention rule, citing law enforcement and diplomatic sensitivities.

Officials at the new Homeland Security Department say the group of immigrants who will be affected is not large. Only about 600 refugees from the 33 countries, mostly in the Middle East and South Asia, passed initial screenings for asylum at the border last year. Given the added security after the Sept. 11 attacks, many of them were detained. The department, however, has generated confusion around the measure by refusing to identify publicly the countries covered under the new detention rule, citing law enforcement and diplomatic sensitivities.

Immigration and civil rights groups have pieced together the list through informal contacts with government officials. They contend that even if only a relatively few people are affected directly, the change could send a chilling message to tens of thousands of refugees all over the world, some of whom have been fighting to come to the United States for years.

“It’s clearly ironic that on the eve of a war to liberate the Iraqi people, we are telling people that those fleeing tyranny there will be deprived of their liberty for extended periods when they arrive here,” said Eleanor Acer, the director of the asylum program at the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, in New York.

U.N. refugee officials reacted swiftly to the new policy. In a letter to American authorities after it was announced, Ruud Lubbers, the U.N.’s high commissioner for refugees, said, “The tendency to link asylum seekers and refugees to terrorism is a dangerous and erroneous one.” The United Nations has long suggested that it is wrong for any country to arbitrarily detain refugees.

Doris Meissner, who was the federal immigration commissioner from 1993 to 2000, said the change was similar to other blanket policies imposed by the Bush administration. After the Sept. 11 attacks, more than 1,200 people from Arab countries were detained on immigration violations, and the administration required most of the deportation hearings to be held in secret rather than allowing immigration judges to decide whether the secrecy was warranted.

“There is a prity in this administration to establish blanket policies that prejudge guilt based on country of origin,” said Meissner, now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, in Washington.

“Those countries of origin are all Arab or Muslim countries, and it’s sending the wrong message,” she added. “It is not improving our safety and security because it’s too blunt an instrument, and it feeds a view of the United States abroad that we are simply against, and are going to do everything we can to harm, people in and around the Middle East.”

Homeland Security officials countered, however, that there had been at least three examples over the past decade of terrorists who were in the United States under the cover of asylum applications. William Strassberger, a spokesman for the immigration services within the department, said that aside from Rahman, they included Mir Aimal Kansi, who killed two employees of the Central Intelligence Agency outside the agency’s headquarters in 1993, and Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer, who was convicted on 1997 charges of plotting to bomb New York subways, had also sought asylum. “You see what a quandary this places us in,” Strassberger said. “We feel strongly that we want to preserve the ability of people to seek refuge here. But at the same time, we have to protect the public, and we do have heightened concerns about individuals coming from some specific countries.”

“The thinking is that we don’t know who they are,” he added. “So although we will detain them while we find that out, there will be no change in their ability to come here and file a claim of asylum.”

David A. Martin, who was the general counsel for the immigration service during the Clinton administration, also said the new policy might be appropriate. “A categorical deterrence policy is in general a legitimate rationale,” Martin said. “In a time of war and a time of risk, to impose it by nationality is defensible.”

The latest change comes after nearly a decade of government efforts to tighten the asylum process. The early 1990s had a surge in asylum requests after word spread that the government was providing work permits to anyone who applied for asylum. Since immigration officials dropped that promise in 1995, the total number of asylum requests has fallen to 65,000 a year from 150,000.

The new detention rule applies only to applicants from the 33 countries arriving at a border or point of entry. Refugees already in the United States are not subject to it.

In the past, once people filed asylum applications at an airport or a checkpoint, immigration officials held them for a minimum of two days while conducting a relatively cursory screening to determine if they had a credible fear of persecution or torture. Most applicants passed that test and then could ask to be released while their cases were studied more thoroughly.

Strassberger said immigration officials estimated that 80 percent of the people who passed the screening were released within 90 days. But the Lawyers Committee found that even before the Sept. 11 attacks, the release rate was actually 10 percent to 40 percent, with New York and New Jersey particularly restrictive, and Florida and California less so. For most people, detention can be humiliating and arduous.

Stephen Yale-Loehr, who teaches immigration law at Cornell Law School, said that general detentions of asylum seekers violated an advisory opinion by the United Nations, which says that detentions should be limited to “a preliminary interview and not for the entire time it may take to make a determination on the merits.”

But Strassberger, the government spokesman, said the U.N. opinion also allowed restrictions on the movements of refugees when necessary. “We feel it’s necessary since we’re at war on two fronts --- with the war on terror and the war in Iraq,” he said.

The Lawyers Committee and other advocates say the 33 countries included in the new rule are: Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Malaysia, Morocco, Oman, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Thailand, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan and Yemen.

Palestinian asylum seekers from Gaza and the West Bank will also face automatic detention.

Given Saddam’s oppressive regime, Iraqi refugees typically have gained asylum much more easily than people from other countries.

(By Permission, The New York Times)