Refugees Screwed by Patriot Act

Legal Times has the depressing details:

In 1993 a Mandingo family in Liberia was kidnapped by rebels working for Charles Taylor, the former Liberian president now facing war crimes charges in the Hague. The wife and her 13-year-old daughter were repeatedly raped and, with the husband and three other children, forced to work for two weeks as slaves for the rebels, fetching water and cooking for them.

Now living in a refugee camp in West Africa while awaiting resettlement to the United States, the family members were interviewed in February by a Department of Homeland Security adjudicator, who found they had the “credible and well-founded fear of persecution” required for refugee status.

But the official discovered something else, as well.

The slave labor the wife and children provided violated a provision of U.S. immigration law, one that forbids admittance of anyone who provides “material support” to a terrorist organization.

Whether that support — the cooking and the fetching of water — took place under threat of torture or death is irrelevant. Whether the “support” is as minimal as fixing one meal instead of many does not matter, either. According to the family’s case file, their refugee claim was put on hold, and they remain in the camp.

“Everyone realizes there are cases that are quite sympathetic,” says Igor Timofeyev, the DHS special adviser on refugee and asylum affairs. But the language of the immigration statute is “pretty plain and pretty uncompromising,” he says. “There is no exception depending on the amount of support, and it does not exempt cases of duress,” adds Timofeyev, a former Sidley Austin associate and law clerk to Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Welcome to the latest unintended consequence of a post-9/11 world. In its zeal to keep real terrorists out, the United States is also barring entry to thousands of legitimate refugees and asylum seekers who now fit a new definition of terrorist so broad that it includes membership in and aid to rebel groups the United States supports — and who are fighting against regimes that Washington condemns.

I've seen occasional mentions of this in the papers, but not much (and only that I can recall in an editorial). Anyway, how about Congress address this wee snafu?

Comments

[Michael Roston]

This problem isn't only coming up in refugee hearings; it's also coming up in hearings under Article 3 of the Convention Against Torture to determine whether an immigrant will face torture if removed from the US.

My favorite/the most terrifying example came in the case of Tarrawally v. Ashcroft, in which the Bureau of Immigrations and Custom Enforcement argued that "because there were “gross human rights abuses on a large scale,” [R. 333] and that many civilians are killed arbitrarily even if they do not oppose the AFRC/RUF [R. 344], [the claimant’s statements of the particular risks he faces] alone are insufficient to demonstrate that it is more likely than not that a particular civilian, in this case Tarawally, will be tortured by AFRC/RUF if returned to Sierra Leone.”

Read that again - it's chilling.

Which is to say that I'm sure ICE is happy to have another tool in the box, the one you point to, to exclude people from surviving in our country.