Lawmakers attack use of antitorture law to block immigrants’ deportation
By Rachel L. Swarns


Deportation

Congressional Republicans on July 11 sharply criticized a four-year-old law that bars the deportation of immigrants, including those with criminal records, who are likely to be tortured when they return to their countries.

Over the last four years, immigration judges blocked the deportation of 1,700 people who were likely to face torture if they returned to their countries, a senior domestic security official said at a House immigration hearing. Of those, 611 had committed crimes in the United States, the official said. Immigrants who pose risks to national security or society can be detained if they cannot be deported because they face torture in their countries, officials said. People who do not pose such risks are typically prosecuted for their crimes and released after serving their sentences. They can be deported if conditions in their countries improve or if officials receive diplomatic assurances that they will not be tortured.

Several Republicans at the hearing described such safeguards as inadequate and proposed changes that would bar criminals and human rights abusers from protection under the antitorture law. Human rights lawyers warned that such changes would violate international law and suggest that the United States was willing to condone torture in certain instances.

Representative John N. Hostettler, Republican of Indiana, described the protection from deportation as a “disturbing and dangerous loophole” for foreign criminals. Hostettler said he was particularly concerned about the treatment of human rights violators who had committed crimes in their home countries and were not typically prosecuted here. “Known foreign torturers are living in our midst untouched,” said Hostettler, chairman of the House subcommittee on immigration. “Nationals from Haiti, Somalia and other countries with former repressive regimes, identify past persecutors and torturers from their country in their American neighborhoods, shocked, and rightly so, that these bad actors live so freely in the U.S.”

Hostettler cited two examples, referring to an immigrant who killed a spectator at a Gambian soccer match and another who was implicated in a deadly shootout in Uzbekistan that was linked to organized crime. He said neither immigrant was deported because they faced the threat of torture in their home countries.

Morton Sklar, executive director of the World Organization Against Torture, a human rights group, said foreign warlords and torturers made up only a tiny fraction of the criminals granted protection under the antitorture law. The rest are immigrants accused of crimes like drug dealing, robbery or assault.“There are no cases that I know of where anybody who represented a serious threat to the United States has been released,” Sklar said.

Other advocates for immigrants said the government should be detaining and prosecuting human rights abusers rather than deporting them to countries where they might be tortured.

“Victims of torture want justice,” said Regina Germain, an immigration lawyer who testified at the hearing. “They do not want to perpetuate the use of torture.”

(By Permission, The New York Times)