From suffering to detention: why does the US put asylum seekers behind bars?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/13/why-us-put-asylum-seekers-behind-bars

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Middle Eastern and African asylum seekers are languishing in US detention centers – completely removed from the political radar. Despite increased attention in recent years over the plight of undocumented people and the Obama administration’s deportation boom, detainees from Africa and the Middle East are often forgotten. The incarceration of some now even borders on indefinite detention.

Hisham is one of them.

“I am finished from here,” he said over the phone on September 1.

Speaking in broken English, Hisham, an Arab migrant, was calling to notify one of us, Gabriel, his immigration sponsor, that a major Western government just denied his plea for humanitarian asylum. The often cheerful young man had taken a sinuous journey over ocean, jungles and deserts halfway across the world – detained by multiple governments along the way – to escape persecution and poverty.

Though it may sound like it, this globe-trekking migrant wasn’t calling from an aid shelter in Eastern Europe, where hundreds of thousands of refugees have arrived, fleeing violence and poverty in the Middle East and Africa. He was calling from a cluster of large detention centers in Southern Arizona run or contracted out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice).

An undocumented Palestinian from Gaza, Hisham’s indirect route to the Arizona detention center included roughly a year cooped up in a Cypriot refugee camp before being sent to Venezuela. From there, speaking little-to-no Spanish, he and his travel companion, Mounis, also from Gaza, traveled north to the Arizona/Mexico border trudging several thousand miles through Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico.

Hisham and Mounis aren’t an anomaly. Right now, according to data provided to us by Ice spokesperson Virginia Kice, as of 5 September the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is keeping 1,387 undocumented African and Middle Easterners from 22 countries in detention facilities across the US.

By far, the highest number of migrants hail from countries convulsing from armed conflict and economic destabilization over recent years, in large part thanks to US foreign and economic policy.

A review of the top origin-countries for those detained reads like a checklist of the migrants making up the European immigration crisis: Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Nigeria, Eritrea, Somalia and so on. Among the lowest numbers of detainees on the list hail from the Persian Gulf countries where there’s plenty of state control and repression but relatively stable, lucrative economies.

Ice has taken custody of the detainees because they are undocumented, transferred from local police custody in the US interior or apprehended by Border Patrol along the nation’s northern or southern borders. The detainees remain in Ice custody for an undefined period of days or weeks until deportation or release.

Hisham and Mounis, however, have been detained for 11 months. Without any set release or deportation date now that his asylum case has been denied, Hisham’s imprisonment in particular now pushes towards indefinite detention.

Of the more than 1,300 Middle Eastern and African migrants in custody as of last month, Ice Spokesperson Kice speculates: “Probably most of them are violent criminal offenders …”

But asylum sponsors like Gabriel have met many asylum applicants over the years, all of them without criminal histories, so we are skeptical of this broad-stroke claim labeling them as violent criminals. According to the US government lawyer at a bond hearing this past May, Hisham himself “lacks a criminal history and doesn’t pose a danger” to US society.

Hisham and Mounis joined a swelling migration flow from the Middle East and Africa in recent years.

The rates of Middle Eastern and African migrants moving through Mexico have increased nearly 400% from 306 in 2011 to 1,152 as of June 2015, according to data provided by Mexican immigration authorities.

US Border Patrol apprehensions of migrants from the same 22 countries referred to above also reflects this migration flow. As of August, 209 of these migrants were held in short-term Border Patrol custody on their way to ICE. This number is down slightly from 250 in 2014 but still higher than the 194 apprehensions in 2013.

This sort of apprehension data is often a crude, least-of-all estimate of total undocumented populations present in the country. And it suggests the desperate measures that so many migrants like Hisham and Mounis, left without any other option, take to enter the US.

Their odyssey-like migrations, riddled with obstacles, highlight both the inaccessibility and inadequacy of the refugee aid offered to these migrants in the US.

So why isn’t the White House talking about these refugees now in detention? The Obama administration has only mentioned those formally conferred refugee status, referred by overseas agencies; not those already lingering here in immigration enforcement limbo.

The administration should satisfactorily explain why these migrant detainees are being held. There’s enough evidence to demand that the Obama administration urgently review their cases in view of a migration crisis that not only continues worsening in Eastern Europe. It’s also stoking a detention crisis of refugees ignored in the US.

Obama granting emergency stays to undocumented, non-criminal Middle Eastern/African people currently in detention, who also fled persecution and violence, are just as necessary as his pledges to raise refugee acceptance rates in the future. Concrete measures like these would show the world that the US can better directly start doing its part to aid those in need, regardless of whether they fled after or before the world started noticing their straits.

The day Hisham arrived at the US-Mexico border, according to his case file, he was asked by the Homeland Security officer who interviewed him why he sought asylum in the United States. Hisham replied: “Because it is a free country and you have the right to live as a human being.”

Hisham’s answer could have been the answer of his many migrant counterparts in refugee camps overseas, as well as his neighbors who today remain in Ice facilities across the country.

As a nation that claims to believe in human rights, what will Obama’s answer to them be?