New Lutheran chief Wants to Make US Welcoming to Migrants

Ekklesia – The newly announced president of the US Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, Linda Hartke, has said she will work to make the United States a more welcoming place for immigrants and refugees – writes Peter Kenny.

The LIRS board of directors announced in a statement made available to Ecumenical News International on 28 January, that it has appointed Hartke to take up her post in Baltimore on 22 February. The announcement followed a LIRS board meeting on 22 January 2010.

Of her appointment as president and CEO, Hartke said, “I look forward to working together with the LIRS board, staff, partners and friends across the country to make the United States a more welcoming place for immigrants and refugees.”

Until the end of 2009, Hartke headed the Geneva-based Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance, a broad international network of churches and Christian organisations cooperating in campaigning on food and HIV/AIDS issues.

Read more

USA Government Hailed for Doubling Refugee Funding

Ekklesia – Refugee programme staff from the relief agency, Church World Service and their colleagues in local resettlement agencies across the United States, have hailed the US government’s recent announcement that it has doubled to US$1,800 the amount of the per capita grant to assist refugees resettling in the United States.

The funds help new arrivals to pay for such expenses as security deposits, initial rent payments, household furnishings, start-up pocket money and other basic necessities, along with local case management to ensure that each refugee gets a fair start in his or her new country.

“This is very welcome news,” declared CWS Immigration and Refugee Programme Director, Erol Kekic, upon receiving the announcement last Friday from Eric Schwartz, Assistant Secretary for Population, Refugees and Migration in the US State Department.

Church World Service is one of 10 national voluntary agencies and one state agency entrusted by the US State Department to provide services to help newly arriving refugees move quickly toward becoming self-supporting members of their new communities.

Read more

Tougher rules on policing illegal immigrants

Mayor courts immigrant vote

By Josh Lohmer

Before a speech on immigrants held at the CUNY Graduate Center in Midtown Manhattan, Mayor Michael Bloomberg was introduced by Carmen Ledesma, of Queens. Ledesma started a beauty salon in Woodside called Parisien shortly after emigrating from Paraguay 16 years ago.

Accompanied by an interpreter and speaking with the poise and dignity of a self-made woman, Ledesma described in Spanish what her success has meant to her family.

“I have been able to achieve one of my dreams – to send my three children to college,” she said on Thursday, October 8.

Parisien employs nine stylists, and, with the help of a New York City small business solution center, Ledesma will soon open a cosmetology school so that more Latinos in Queens can get work in the industry. She also hopes to teach English at the salon.

Ledesma thanked the mayor for sending a message to the immigrant community that, “We all make New York, and New York is for all of us.”

Bloomberg pointed to Ledesma’s story as an example of his administration’s support for the city’s foreign-born residents and he praised the crucial role immigrants have played in New York’s history.

“Immigrants are why New York City became America’s economic engine,” said Bloomberg. Without them, he added, “The city would still be a forest.”

After reiterating his call for federal immigration reform, the mayor went on to announce a series of policy proposals he said will make it easier for the city’s estimated three million immigrants – roughly 40 percent of the population – to live and work in their adopted home.

First on the mayor’s list was English language education for the approximately 1.8 million New Yorkers who speak little or no English.

“You need to learn English to fully participate in the great American dream,” said the mayor, promising to spend an additional $3 million in 2010 to open more English language classes to immigrants.

More than 50 percent of Queens’ residents speak a foreign language at home, according to the last census.

“We’ll develop a 10-year plan so that every New Yorker who wants to learn English has the opportunity to do so,” said Bloomberg.

Last summer Bloomberg directed city agencies to offer language services to non-English speakers. The mayor, who tried a few phrases in Spanish during his speech, said he would lobby the state to follow the city’s lead.

“Other states have taken this step,” said Bloomberg, “and I believe it’s time for New York, a state which defines immigration, to do it, and shame on us for not doing this sooner.”

Bloomberg went on to advocate helping entrepreneurs in ethnic communities, noting that enterprising immigrants like Ledesma have long provided a boost to the overall economy.

“The way out of the recession is more immigration, not less,” said the mayor, to loud applause.

Among the mMayor’s other initiatives were proposals focused on education. The mayor committed to creating a task force that will study how teachers can help students with limited English skills do better in school. He also promised to ensure that immigrants are not barred from access to college financial aid.

Bloomberg also pledged that, if reelected next month, the city would recruit first-year law school graduates to represent immigrants in need of legal assistance.

Following his speech, the mayor took about 40 minutes to answer questions from ethnic community media, something he promised to do more of in the future.

Article originally published Tuesday 13 October 2009 Queens Newspaper

Obama Allows Asylum for Battered Women

Calling it one of the best options the Obama administration has made available to foreign battered women, women’s advocacy groups in the United States lauded the administration for making it possible for those women to begin a new life in this country.

Earlier last week, the administration said that if women in foreign countries could show, in addition to meeting other strict conditions to asylum, that they had been treated by their abuser as little more than chattel, and that their home countries wink at such behavior, then the women could seek to make the United States their permanent home.

“This restoration of gender-based asylum should be celebrated,” said Purvi Shah, executive director of the 20-year-old New York-based support group for South Asian abused women, Sakhi. “We all deserve to live free of abuse, and immigration status should not be a barrier to that vision of a healthy life.”

“It’s a very positive policy change,” asserted Karen Musalo, director of the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. “It’s going to benefit many women.”

The administration’s position stemmed from a case filed in an immigration appeals court by a Mexican woman who said she would likely be murdered by her common law husband in Mexico if she were sent back to her homeland. In court documents, the woman claimed she had been repeatedly raped at gunpoint by her husband, and threatened to be burnt alive when he found out that she was pregnant.

Several other such claims by other battered women seeking asylum have been tied up in the U.S. courts in the last dozen years. The Bush administration did not want to recognize those claims, the first of which was filed in 1996 by a Guatemalan woman. After many years of litigation, an immigration court declared that she was not a part of any persecuted group under U.S. law.

Three years ago, Congress gave some relief to undocumented abused women in the form of the so-called U-visa, which allowed them a temporary work permit, which could eventually lead to a green card.

But last week’s move by the Obama administration would allow abused women to file for legal residency status through asylum.

“Asylum gives you permanent status without having to go through any other steps,” said Sheela Murthy, an immigration lawyer in Baltimore, Md., who also advocates for women.

Most requests for asylum currently filed in the United States are based on claims by applicants that they fear persecution if they are sent back to their homeland because of their race, religion, nationality, political beliefs or any particular party they may belong to. Murthy said nearly 80 percent of those applicants are denied asylum for lack of providing adequate evidence.

Asylum seekers generally arrive in the United States on fake travel documents. Upon arrival at the airport, they ask for asylum.

“Getting asylum is not going to be a slam dunk” for abused women, Murthy reiterated, noting that they have to meet the most stringent of requirements.

Even so, Atashi Chakravarty, executive director of the Berkeley-based help line for South Asian battered women, said she believes that scores of people from the Indian sub-continent will benefit from the new policy change.

“We have clients who are taken to India by their abusive spouses and abandoned there, only to face more physical and emotional abuse from their in-laws,” Chakravarty said.

Shah and other women’s advocates say there is no danger of the new policy opening the floodgates of applications from women who claim they were battered.

“Anyone who believes such a thing has never filed for asylum,” said Shah, noting: “The fact that this route exists again doesn’t negate the need for significant evidence of abuse and the need to meet very rigorous parameters to qualify for gender-based asylum.

“This is why other strategies for immigration relief must still exist – so that any immigrant survivor understands she can be safe, and that in the United States, violence against women is a crime which will not be condoned.” – NAM

New report blasts U.S. on immigrant detainees

By Tyche Hendricks, SFChronicle Staff Writer

More than 400,000 people a year are detained by immigration officials in the United States – including undocumented immigrants, legal immigrants who run afoul of the law and asylum seekers who come fleeing persecution – but according to a report released today by Amnesty International, conditions are often deplorable and detainees are routinely denied due process.

It’s the second major human rights report in a week to indict the nation’s immigration detention system. The system is attracting increased attention in part because the number of people in detention has grown exponentially in recent years and in part because of dozens of in-custody deaths and a lawsuit over the treatment of children.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano last month ordered her department to examine all aspects of Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations and hired a special assistant, Dora Schriro, to oversee detention and removal conditions.

A spokeswoman for ICE, as the immigration enforcement agency is known, acknowledged Tuesday that concerns have been raised about the treatment of immigration detainees.

“We have already made appreciable gains in improving the detention system by adopting detention standards and monitoring the compliance with those standards,” said Cori Bassett. “All that said, the care and treatment that some detainees receive does not yet meet our shared expectation of excellence, and we can all agree this is a reason for concern.”

The cases of two Bay Area men illustrate two of the problems highlighted by the Amnesty report: Detainees often are denied due process, and the burden is on the detainees to prove they don’t belong in custody.

Afghanistan-born Lemar Nasir of Fremont and Thailand-born Yuttasak Simma of San Francisco were taken into ICE custody in 2007, though both are naturalized U.S. citizens.

Though the men told immigration officials of their citizenship, neither had papers to prove it, and both languished in immigration custody in Santa Clara County jail – Nasir for 11 months, Simma for seven – before a lawyer finally secured their release.

Sin Yen Ling, an attorney with San Francisco’s Asian Law Caucus who represented the men, called the cases a violation of the men’s constitutional right to due process.

“Absent congressional authorization, you cannot use immigration laws to lock up a citizen,” she said. “And this is not unusual: I have on my docket right now five to seven of these cases. People have legitimate claims to citizenship, and they inform ICE, yet there’s no formal procedure to figure out what to do with these folks.”

The Amnesty International report, “Jailed Without Justice: Immigration Detention in the USA,” noted a variety of concerns over due process and the conditions of detention:

– People in immigration custody don’t have the same guarantees as criminal detainees to challenge their detention before a court, make a phone call or obtain legal representation.

– Detainees can be transferred from one facility to another, sometimes in another state, with no notice given to their families or attorneys.

– Two-thirds of people in federal immigration custody are housed in state or county detention facilities, usually alongside criminal detainees, even though violations of immigration law are considered administrative, not criminal, and asylum seekers have committed no violation.

– Immigrants are subject to excessive use of restraints such as handcuffs, waist chains and leg restraints.

“In the criminal justice system, anyone arrested is assumed innocent, but in the immigration system, they’re put in detention, and then it’s the individual’s burden to prove they shouldn’t be detained,” said Sarnata Reynolds, an author of the report. “That’s why you’ll see long periods of detention, because it’s an incredibly high burden.”

Both the Amnesty report and a study released last week by Human Rights Watch faulted ICE for failing to provide adequate medical and mental health treatment to detainees. Human Rights Watch, which focused on women’s access to health care, emphasized problems with perinatal care and care for survivors of sexual violence.

Since 2003, 90 people have died in immigration custody, according to Schriro of Homeland Security. Immigration authorities last year pointed out that the death rate in immigration detention is a small fraction of that in other U.S. jails and prisons.

But earlier this month, Schriro testified before Congress that detainees did not always receive timely and appropriate medical care. She vowed improvements.

A 2007 lawsuit over the treatment of children in immigration custody led to improvements in the conditions at a private Texas prison where families are held.

The Amnesty report called on the Obama administration to consider alternatives to detention for immigrants who are neither a flight risk nor a danger to others. That’s a proposal endorsed by San Jose Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee’s immigration subcommittee.

“Oftentimes there are alternatives, like these ankle bracelets and bonds and other ways to make sure the person doesn’t disappear into the woodwork,” said Lofgren, who is particularly incensed that asylum seekers are locked up until they can make the case they’d face persecution in their home countries.

“You’ve got people now waiting six months for a 20-minute (asylum) interview,” she said. “Well, at $90 a day, the meter’s running here. How can it possibly be cost-effective to postpone a 20-minute interview? It’s stupid.”

E-mail Tyche Hendricks at thendricks@sfchronicle.com.