Starting Points: asylum

Showing posts with label asylum. Show all posts

Jan 4, 2010

Somalis seeking asylum take back-door route to U.S.

By Amy Taxin
Monday, January 4, 2010; A11

LANCASTER, CALIF. -- The asylum seeker from Somalia hung his head as an immigration judge grilled him about his treacherous journey from the Horn of Africa. By air, sea and land he finally made it to Mexico, and then a taxi delivered him into the arms of U.S. border agents at San Diego.

Islamic militants had killed his brother, Mohamed Ahmed Kheire testified, and majority clan members had beaten his sister. He had to flee Mogadishu to live.

The voice of the judge, beamed by videoconference from Seattle, crackled loudly over a speaker in the mostly empty courtroom near the detention yard in the desert north of Los Angeles. He wanted to know why Kheire had no family testimony to corroborate his asylum claim.

Kheire, 31, said he didn't have access to e-mail in detention and didn't think to ask while writing to family on his perilous trek.

It seemed like the end of Kheire's dream as he waited for the judge's ruling. He clasped his hands, his plastic jail bracelet dangling from his wrist, and looked up at the ceiling, murmuring words of prayer.

Kheire is one of hundreds of Somalis in the past two years to have staked everything on a wild asylum gamble by following immigration routes to the United States traditionally traveled by Latinos.

With the suspension of a U.S. refugee program and stepped-up security in the Gulf of Aden and along Mediterranean smuggling routes, more overseas migrants from Somalia are pursuing asylum through what one expert calls the "back door."

"The U.S. has closed most of the doors for Somalis to come in through the refugee program, so they've found alternative ways to get in," said Mark Hetfield, senior vice president for policy and programs at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. "This is their new route." About 1,500 people from around the world showed up in U.S. airports and on the borders seeking asylum during the 2009 fiscal year, according to statistics from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Somalis were the biggest group to make the journey, with most arriving in San Diego. More than 240 Somalis arrived during that period -- more than twice as many as the year before.

Most Somalis have reached the United States -- there are about 87,000 here -- through U.S.-sponsored refugee-resettlement programs. But the State Department suspended a family-reunification program for refugees in 2008 over fraud concerns. The number of Somalis admitted by refugee programs dwindled to about 4,000 last year.

Those now traveling through Latin America are taking a path well worn by asylum seekers from other countries. Immigration lawyers say they have worked with clients from Ethiopia and Iraq who also reached the United States through Mexico.

"To get a flight from Africa to Europe is very hard. The easiest place to go is America," said Yahya Idardon, an asylum seeker who fled Somalia last year after his father and brother were killed. "Africa to Latin America is easy. . . . When you are going to Latin America, no one is concerned about you, no one is asking, so it is easy to go there and cross all these countries." Once reaching the U.S. border in San Diego, Somalis are frisked, fingerprinted and screened by an asylum officer to gauge whether they have a credible fear of returning home.

They are then shuttled to an immigration detention center until their cases go to court.

About 80 Somalis are being held in Lancaster, a detention center 50 miles north of Los Angeles. Dozens more have been held in San Diego and the remote border town of El Centro, immigration lawyers said.

On Jan. 4, the government plans to start releasing many asylum seekers while they wait for their immigration cases to be heard. It is unclear how many Somalis will be let out; they must prove their identity and many don't have documents. And still others say they have nowhere to go even if they were freed, their attorneys said.

Compared with asylum seekers from other countries, Somalis have been more likely to win their cases, according to immigration court statistics.

But in the courtroom in Lancaster, Kheire spent the last moments of his hearing worried that the judge would send him back to Mogadishu to face the threat of death -- even after he had survived such a harrowing journey.

The attorneys for Kheire and the government sat quietly in the courtroom, listening to the judge read the ruling as Kheire prayed.

A Somali interpreter whispered urgently into Kheire's ear. He broke into a hesitant smile. He would be allowed to stay.

Kheire left the courtroom in his black, laceless sneakers and jail jumpsuit, escorted by sheriff's officials. Later that night, he was dropped off by authorities at a nearby train station. He had $5 in his pocket.

"They said, 'This is America. Welcome to the United States of America,' " Kheire said.

Dec 18, 2009

Eritrea's national soccer team seeks asylum in Kenya

Image by erjkprunczyk via Flickr

By Barney Jopson
Friday, December 18, 2009; A14

KAMPALA, UGANDA -- Eritrea's entire national soccer team is seeking asylum in Kenya, joining tens of thousands of compatriots who have fled one of Africa's most repressive governments.

The team absconded after traveling to Nairobi for a regional tournament. Eritrea, with only about 4 million people, was the second-biggest source of asylum seekers in the world last year, and the missing players are probably the highest-profile defectors since the country won independence in 1993.

The 11 players and one substitute were reported missing over the weekend when the team plane returned to Eritrea without them after a match against Tanzania.

After going into hiding, the players contacted the U.N. refugee agency in Nairobi, which directed them to file asylum applications at Kenya's Immigration Ministry.

Nicholas Musonye, a Kenyan soccer official who first alerted the authorities to the missing players, said: "I have been informed by the tour guide who was with them that they are in Nairobi and have been seeking political asylum."

The number of Eritrean asylum seekers worldwide last year was second only to the total from Zimbabwe, according to the United Nations.

People are fleeing a combination of political repression, food shortages, open-ended military service and a moribund economy.

More than half of them, about 34,000, fled overland to Sudan, braving harsh terrain and army shoot-to-kill orders. But many more are likely to have escaped without registering with the U.N. refugee agency.

Musonye, the general secretary of the Council of East and Central Africa Football Associations, said he had spoken to officials at the Eritrean National Football Federation, who were "a bit upset."

"The federation has a responsibility to bring the players home, so they have a lot to explain," he said.

Individual players have gone missing from the Eritrean national team before. Musonye said six absconded three years ago after a match in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Ali Abdu, Eritrea's information minister, told the BBC that the players would get a "good welcome" if they returned home in spite of "betraying" their country.

Human rights groups say failed defectors and critics of President Isaias Afwerki's government are often tortured and confined to shipping-container prisons in the desert.

The government denies the allegation.

Oct 13, 2009

Iranian Journalists Flee, Fearing Retribution for Covering Protests - NYTimes.com

Image by harrystaab via Flickr

By NAZILA FATHI

TORONTO — For two months Ehsan Maleki traveled around Iran with a backpack containing his cameras, a few pieces of clothing and his laptop computer, taking pictures of the reformist candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi during the presidential campaign. He did not know that his backpack and his cameras would soon become his only possessions, or that he would be forced to crawl out of the country hiding in a herd of sheep.

Mr. Maleki, 29, is one of dozens of reporters, photographers and bloggers who have either fled Iran or are trying to flee in the aftermath of the disputed June presidential election. Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based organization that promotes press freedom and monitors the safety of journalists, said the number of journalists leaving Iran was the largest since the years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The wave of departures reflects the journalists’ anxiety over the retribution many of them have faced for reporting on the government’s violent suppression of the post-election protests. As bloody clashes unfolded in the streets of Tehran, the government went to great lengths to restrict the flow of information to the outside world. Foreign journalists were banned, and local reporters and photographers were warned to stay at home.

A number of Iranian journalists defied those orders, disseminating information in phone interviews, on Internet sites and through pictures sent to photo agencies. Now, they say, they are paying the price.

Many journalists in Tehran, including a Newsweek reporter, Maziar Bahari, who is also an independent filmmaker, were among the hundreds of Iranians arrested and jailed. Some are defendants in the mass trials the government is conducting. The wife of one journalist, Ahmad Zeidabadi, said he had been tortured while in prison.

The editors of some opposition blogs, which reported the killings and the mass burial of protesters, have gone into hiding, and their whereabouts are not clear. The homes of some journalists, like Mr. Maleki, have been ransacked.

Mahmoud Shamsolvaezin, a veteran journalist and media expert in Tehran, estimated that 2,000 Iranian journalists had lost their jobs recently. He said about 400 of them had approached him for reference letters so they could get work abroad. “Journalists are leaving more than other groups because the government has closed newspapers and it has intimidated and terrorized them,” he said in an interview.

The government, which has closed at least six newspapers in the past three months, has accused the media of lying about the protests. Last week, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the media a major weapon, “worse than nuclear weapons,” in the hands of Western countries, according to the Fars news agency. Almost all news agencies in Iran are affiliated with the government and rely on it for financing. The state news agencies IRNA and Fars are run by arms of the government.

Mr. Maleki was covering a demonstration on June 20 when he and dozens of protesters were chased by members of the Basij paramilitary force. They fled to an apartment building, where Mr. Maleki had enough time to hide his camera inside a chimney before members of the militia arrested them. He was jailed with hundreds of others for a day. Without his camera, authorities could not identify him as a photographer, but they recorded his national identity number.

Mr. Maleki never went home. A few days later a neighbor told him that his house had been ransacked and that his computer and personal documents, including his passport, had been taken. “They found out that I was sending pictures to Sipa,” he said, referring to an international photo agency.

He said he slept in a different place every night and continued to take photos of the protests, but finally decided it was too risky to stay. He paid $150 to a smuggler who drove him to Kheneryeh, near the border with Turkey and Iraq. Accompanied by a Kurdish guide, he crawled among a large herd of sheep for half an hour until they crossed the Iranian border and reached a steep cliff.

“It took us seven hours to climb down and reach a road in northern Iraq,” he said in a telephone interview from Iraq. He would not disclose which city he was in for security reasons.

The journalists leaving Iran come from a range of news organizations, not just those sympathetic to the opposition. A Web site supportive of Mr. Ahmadinejad, Parcham.ir, reported last week that two journalists for state-run television had defected to Italy and Britain. At least two photographers who worked for Fars have also left. Among the journalists who have left is this reporter, who covered the election and subsequent protests before leaving Iran in early July because she felt her safety was threatened.

The exact number of journalists who have left is not clear. Some worry that their families could be harassed if the government learns they are gone. Others are reluctant to reveal their locations in neighboring countries like Turkey and Iraq, fearing that government agents might find them and return them to Iran. Reza Moghimi, a photographer who worked for Fars, acknowledged that he became emotionally invested in the protests.

“The protesters were young, just like me,” Mr. Moghimi, 24, said in a telephone interview from Turkey. “It was impossible to be indifferent. I felt it was my duty to take pictures and reflect their voices abroad.”

With the camera given to him by Fars he began taking pictures every day. He said one of his pictures appeared on the cover of Time magazine anonymously, but he never told anyone he had taken it.

Mr. Moghimi said his fear increased after he saw a former colleague, Majid Saeedi, who was jailed for a month. Mr. Moghimi said he looked terrorized.

A few days later the director of Fars delivered a stern warning. “We have learned two of our photographers have been taking pictures secretly and sending them to foreign media,” he said. “We are just waiting for more information and will confront them soon.”

Mr. Moghimi got on the first plane to Turkey the next day and has applied for asylum.

Aug 15, 2009

Iraqi Refugees Held in Denmark Begin a Hunger Strike

By MATTHEW SALTMARSH and CATHERINE CONTIGUGLIA

PARIS — When Danish police officers raided a church this week in Copenhagen to dislodge Iraqi refugees living there, they hoped to end a three-month-long stalemate.

Instead, the raid, and videos that are said to show the police beating the refugees’ supporters, have generated intensive news coverage, sparked a demonstration by thousands who demanded the Iraqis be allowed to stay in Denmark and led to a hunger strike by some of the refugees.

The trouble began Wednesday when the police arrived at the church to detain about 20 men who had been living there with permission from the church’s leader. Officials said they wanted to round up the men, who had been denied asylum, because they were not keeping in touch with the authorities who were working on their deportations.

When the men refused to leave the church, the police said they began to remove them against their will. But local activists who supported the refugees and had learned of the raid blocked the police vans in an attempt to stop the detentions.

Videos that are said to show the confrontation that followed show some activists being dragged away and one being clubbed by the police. In the end, the police arrested 19 of the refugees, all men, and, according to The Copenhagen Post, numerous protesters as well.

A woman identified as Christina Sondergaard, who was beaten by an officer with a baton , told Denmark’s TV2 on Friday that she would file a complaint against the police.

Katrine Jensen, 27, a spokeswoman for Kirkeasyl, a volunteer group supporting the Iraqis, said the police used batons and pepper spray to clear those trying to block them. She said that she was outside the church during the confrontation and that a number of the demonstrators were injured.

The raid was a joint operation by the National Police and the Copenhagen police. Flemming Steen Munch, a Copenhagen police spokesman, declined to comment on the accusations of brutality.

Justice Minister Brian Mikkelsen was quoted in the Danish news media as saying: “I think we would have preferred not to have to use force. But we happen to live in a democratic society which is built on people abiding by the country’s laws and rules — and there’s no special treatment just because you occupy a church.”

But The Copenhagen Post reported that a former prime minister, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, criticized the police action, saying, “It went beyond the bounds of common humanity and decency.” Iraqi refugees had been living at the Brorson Church since May, and the group that was there this week included about 40 women and children, who were not taken away.

The news of the raid on the church led to a peaceful demonstration on Thursday night in Copenhagen seeking asylum for all the refugees. Organizers said 20,000 people had gathered, but the police put the number at 12,000.

The arrested refugees were sent to the Sandholm immigration holding camp outside Copenhagen and nearly all have refused food since Thursday, according to Helge Norrung, a lawyer representing some of those detained. He said the Iraqis’ lives could be endangered by militants if they returned home.

An immigration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, would not talk about individual cases but said Denmark turned away refugees if it believed they would not be endangered by returning home.

An Iraqi delegation is scheduled to visit Denmark next week to discuss the fate of the refugees, officials and lawyers said.

Danish officials said that 300 Iraqis were granted asylum out of 562 who requested it last year.

Jul 30, 2009

Greece: Halt Crackdown, Arrests of Migrants

July 27, 2009

Greek authorities are arresting large numbers of migrants and asylum seekers in the country's cities and islands and moving many of them to the north, raising fears of illegal expulsions to Turkey, Human Rights Watch said today.

Human Rights Watch received reports from a credible source that, in mid-July 2009, police transferred a group of Arabic-speaking people from Chios Island to the Evros border region, where they were secretly forced to cross the border into Turkey. On July 23, local human rights activists prevented authorities from transferring 63 migrants from Lesvos Island to the north by blocking access to the ferry. On July 25, the police took most of them to Athens under heavy police escort.

"These operations and transfers are very worrying," said Bill Frelick, refugee policy director at Human Rights Watch. "We fear that people are being prevented from seeking asylum, that children arriving alone are not being protected, and that migrants are kept in unacceptable detention conditions and possibly even being secretly expelled to Turkey."

In another recent episode, in a large-scale police operation from July 16 to 18, police in Athens surrounded what appeared to be several hundred migrants and locked them inside an abandoned courthouse. The police arrested anyone who left the building. It is feared that some of them may have needed protection and did not have a chance to file a claim for asylum, the police prevented Human Rights Watch from speaking to the people held inside, and Human Rights Watch does not know the whereabouts of those who were arrested when they tried to leave.

In a November 2008 report, "Stuck in a Revolving Door: Iraqis and Other Asylum Seekers and Migrants at the Greece/Turkey Entrance to the European Union," Human Rights Watch documented how Greek authorities have systematically expelled migrants illegally across the Greece-Turkey border, in violation of many international legal obligations. These "pushbacks" typically occur at night from detention facilities in the northern part of the country, close to the Turkish border, and they involve considerable logistical preparation. Human Rights Watch at that time interviewed 41 asylum seekers and refugees - all privately and confidentially - in various locations in both Greece and Turkey, who gave consistent accounts of Greek authorities taking them to the Evros River at night and then forcing them across.

Human Rights Watch also documented how Greek authorities miscategorize unaccompanied children as adults and detain them for prolonged periods of time in conditions that could be considered inhumane and degrading. (See the December 2008 report, "Left to Survive: Systematic Failure to Protect Unaccompanied Migrant Children in Greece.")

In yet another recent incident, on July 12, police destroyed a makeshift migrant camp in Patras, on the Peloponnese peninsula. In the days before the camp was destroyed, the police reportedly arrested large numbers of migrants there, and according to credible sources, transferred an unknown number to the northern part of the country. On July 17, Human Rights Watch met with several Afghans in Patras, including 12 unaccompanied migrant children now homeless as a result of this operation, who were in hiding in abysmal conditions out of fear of being arrested.

A 24-year-old man told Human Rights Watch: "We're living like animals in the jungle ... we can't take a shower and we don't have proper food ... before I lived in the camp, but all of my things and clothes were burned. Now I have a shirt and a pair of pants, nothing else."

A 14-year-old Afghan boy who arrived in Greece one year earlier said: "The worst situation during the past year is now, in Patras - now that I'm living in this forest .... There's not enough food and we only eat bread with water."

Human Rights Watch also observed on July 17 how more than 1,000 migrants lined up all night, largely in vain, trying to file asylum applications at Athens' main police station. Greece recognizes as few as 0.05 percent of asylum seekers as refugees at their first interview and passed a law at the end of June that abolishes a meaningful appeals procedure, making it virtually impossible for anyone to obtain refugee status. It also extended the maximum length of administrative detention for migrants to 12 months - and under certain circumstances, up to 18 months - from previously 90 days.

"It appears Greece is doing everything it can to close the door on persons who seek protection in Europe, no matter how vulnerable they are," said Frelick. "The European Union must hold Greece accountable for acts contrary to international and European human rights and refugee law, and it needs to act fast, as the lives of many are at risk."

Jul 16, 2009

New Policy Permits Asylum for Battered Women

By JULIA PRESTON

July 16 - The Obama administration has opened the way for foreign women who are victims of severe domestic beatings and sexual abuse to receive asylum in the United States. The action reverses a Bush administration stance in a protracted and passionate legal battle over the possibilities for battered women to become refugees.

In addition to meeting other strict conditions for asylum, abused women will need to show that they are treated by their abuser as subordinates and little better than property, according to an immigration court filing by the administration, and that domestic abuse is widely tolerated in their country. They must show that they could not find protection from institutions at home or by moving to another place within their own country.

The administration laid out its position in an immigration appeals court filing in the case of a woman from Mexico who requested asylum, saying she feared she would be murdered by her common-law husband there. According to court documents filed in San Francisco, the man repeatedly raped her at gunpoint, held her captive, stole from her and at one point tried to burn her alive when he learned she was pregnant.

The government submitted its legal brief in April, but the woman only recently gave her consent for the confidential case documents to be disclosed to The New York Times. The government has marked a clear, although narrow, pathway for battered women seeking asylum, lawyers said, after 13 years of tangled court arguments, including resistance from the Bush administration to recognize any of those claims.

Moving cautiously, the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately recommend asylum for the Mexican woman, who is identified in the court papers only by her initials as L.R. But the department, in the unusual submission written by senior government lawyers, concluded in plain terms that “it is possible” that the Mexican woman “and other applicants who have experienced domestic violence could qualify for asylum.”

As recently as last year, Bush administration lawyers had argued in the same case that in spite of her husband’s brutality, L.R. and other battered women could not meet the standards of American asylum law.

“This really opens the door to the protection of women who have suffered these kinds of violations,” said Karen Musalo, a professor who is director of the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at the University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. Professor Musalo has represented other abused women seeking asylum and recently took up the case of L.R.

The Obama administration’s position caps a legal odyssey for foreign women seeking protection in the United States from domestic abuse that began in 1996 when a Guatemalan woman named Rody Alvarado was granted asylum by an immigration court, based on her account of repeated beatings by her husband. Three years later, an immigration appeals court overturned Ms. Alvarado’s asylum, saying she was not part of any persecuted group under American law.

Since then Ms. Alvarado’s case has stalled as successive administrations debated the issue, with immigration officials reluctant to open a floodgate of asylum petitions from battered women across the globe. During the Clinton administration, Attorney General Janet Reno proposed regulations to clarify the matter, but they have never gone into effect. In a briefing paper in 2004, lawyers for the Department of Homeland Security raised the possibility of asylum for victims of domestic violence, but the Bush administration never put that into practice in immigration court, Professor Musalo said.

Now Homeland Security officials say they are returning to views the department put forward in 2004, refining them to draw conditions sufficiently narrow that battered women would prevail in only a limited number cases.

“Although each case is highly fact-dependent and requires scrutiny of the specific threat an applicant faces,” said Matt Chandler, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, “the department continues to view domestic violence as a possible basis for asylum in the United States.” He said officials hoped to complete regulations governing the complex cases.

The new policy does not involve women fleeing genital mutilation.

Any applicant for asylum or refugee status in the United States must demonstrate a “well-founded fear of persecution” because of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or “membership in a particular social group.” The extended legal argument has been whether abused women could be part of any social group that would be eligible under those terms. Last year, 22,930 people won asylum in this country fleeing all types of persecution; the number has been decreasing in recent years.

Because asylum cases are confidential, there is no way of knowing how many applications by battered women have been denied or held up over the last decade. The issue is further complicated by the peculiarities of the United States immigration system, in which asylum cases are heard in courts that are not part of the federal judiciary, but are run by an agency of the Justice Department, with Homeland Security officials representing the government.

The government has not disputed the painful history that L.R., now 42, recounts in a court declaration. The man who became her tormentor first assaulted her when she was a teenager and he was a physical education coach, 14 years her senior, at a high school in the Mexican state of Guanajuato. He and his family were regarded as wealthy and influential because they owned a restaurant in town, L.R. said.

Over the years, he made her live with him, and forced her to have sex with him by putting a gun or a machete to her head, by breaking her nose and by threatening to kill the small children of her sister. Once when she became pregnant, she said, she barely escaped alive after he had poured kerosene on the bed where she was sleeping and ignited it. He stole the salary she earned as a teacher and later sold her teacher’s license.

Local police dismissed her reports of violence as “a private matter,” the court documents said, and a judge she turned to for help tried to seduce her.

“In Mexico, men believe they have a right to abuse their women because they are like a possession,” she said. With three children born from her involuntary sex with the man, who never married her, she fled to California in 2004.

An immigration judge denied her asylum claim in 2006. In its new filing, the government urged that L.R.’s case be sent back to the immigration court for further review, suggesting she might still succeed. But the government also injected a caveat, insisting that “this does not mean that every victim of domestic violence would be eligible for asylum.”