Asylum seekers treated poorly, panel finds
WASHINGTON -- Many people who come to the United States seeking political asylum are treated like criminals, in some cases held in prisons and jails, a federal commission said yesterday.
Some asylum seekers are shackled, kept in solitary confinement or strip-searched, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom said in a report required by Congress. The conditions are unnecessarily severe, said Craig Haney of the University of California at Santa Cruz, a specialist on the psychological effects of incarceration who helped prepare the report.
The government detains people to ensure that they will show up for their asylum hearings, among other reasons. The practice the facilities employ track those used in traditional prisons and jails, the report said.
It also found that the system, run by the Department of Homeland Security, has wide variation in who is detained and who is granted asylum. The outcomes differed based on where people landed in the United States, their country of origin, which immigration judge heard their case, and whether they had a lawyer.
All asylum seekers are supposed to be detained for as long as 48 hours while immigrations officials weigh whether they have a legitimate claim for seeking refuge, said Victor Cerda, acting director of the Homeland Security Department's Office of Detention and Removal. That policy was put in place to ensure that terrorists do not use the immigration system to get into the country, he said.
In New Orleans, authorities detained all except one of the 191 people who were awaiting an immigration judge's decision on asylum between October 2002 and September 2003, the report said. By contrast, in Harlingen, Texas, 620 of 635 asylum seekers were released in the same period. Six thousand people were held nationwide.
The commission recommended that the Homeland Security Department create a refugee coordinator and take other steps to make the process more consistent; allow those who pose no security risk to be released; and ease conditions for detainees.
