A Chinese refugee won asylum but was held in a California jail for 17 more months until her health broke down. A Sri Lankan--detained by the Immigration and Naturalization Service since 1997--fears he will be raped by inmates at Kern County Jail in Bakersfield. A Liberian asylum-seeker who spent 10 months in detention in Texas attempted suicide before winning asylum.
According to a human rights report released Tuesday, these immigrants are among the asylum-seekers who have been held indefinitely while their cases are considered by U.S. immigration officials.
Asylum-seekers who cannot be housed at overcrowded Immigration and Naturalization Service facilities are sent to county jails across America to live alongside accused murderers and other criminals, the report said.
"Detention is a disproportionate and harsh measure to apply to those seeking asylum," said Nick Rizza, the refugee program director of Amnesty International USA, which wrote the report, "Lost in the Labyrinth."
"Congress needs to take a look at this," Rizza said. "The INS needs to establish national standards, identify all prisoners who are asylum seekers and take detention power away from the authority of district directors."
An INS statement on the report contended that the vast majority of asylum-seekers are never detained. Of 3,200 immigrants requesting protection at U.S. ports between October 1998 and May 1999, 13% are still in detention, but 67% have been released and 20% of the cases resolved.
The statement said the INS "strives to minimize the detention of asylum-seekers to the extent possible."
"While we welcome constructive studies and recommendations on how we can improve our administration of U.S. immigration law, we do take issue with some of the points raised in this report," the agency said. "The [INS] is committed to fair and humane administration of the U.S. asylum system."
Rizza said that detention procedures isolate immigrants and frustrate their efforts to get a lawyer, effectively denying them due process, Rizza said.
Chinese applicant Sai Quing Jiang was granted asylum but held anyway at the Kern County Jail for 17 additional months while INS officials appealed. She was released in late 1998--against INS counsel--after her health collapsed and a judge reaffirmed the asylum decision, Rizza said.
