**please forward widely, apologies for cross-posting**
To sign online: http://www.gopetition.com/online/20400.html
Justice for Marichu! End Trafficking and Modern Day Slavery of Filipino Domestic Workers!
Date: July 9, 2008
To: Philippine President Gloria Macapagal- Arroyo
Department of Foreign Affairs Secretary Alberto Romulo
United Nations Human Rights Council Vice President Erlinda Basilio
Filipino domestic workers in New York and New Jersey, and our families, allies and supporters are demanding that Phil. Pres. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo's administration and the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) conduct a full investigation of former United Nations Ambassador Lauro Baja, wife Norma Baja, daughter Elizabeth Baja Facundo and their travel agency, the Labaire International Travel Inc. on charges of human trafficking, involuntary servitude, racketeering and US wage and hours violations filed by our fellow domestic worker Marichu Boaonan on June 24, 2008 at the US District Court Southern District of New York.
We call on the United Nations Human Rights Council Vice President Erlinda Basilio to head the DFA investigation on the charges against the former Ambassador who was also the former UN Security Council President.
We also support the demand of Marichu Baoanan for a public apology from the Bajas for violating her human dignity and subjecting her to involuntary servitude.
Like Marichu, about 30,000 Filipino domestic workers in New York work for very long hours and low wages, for less than the US minimum wage, and no overtime pay. In the private homes of our employers, we have no protection against abuse, maltreatment and slavery. We suffer from exclusion from major federal and state labor laws. We are also subjected to discrimination and harassment due to immigration status.
According to the preliminary results of a DAMAYAN survey of 210 Filipino domestic workers in the New York metropolitan area, 63 percent reported experiencing one or more wage and hour violations, and 34 percent of survey respondents reported being abused.
We are outraged by the thought that the Department of Foreign Affairs is not our haven, and that even top ranking Philippine officials could be traffickers instead of our protectors.
We are the lifeline of the Philippine economy. We will remit about $16 billion dollars, and more than $20 billion including informal channels to the Philippines this year. We were forced to leave our homeland due to the poverty and lack of opportunities in the Philippines. For these reasons, we demand respect and dignity.
We are appalled at the abuse, exploitation, inhumane treatment and suffering that Marichu and her family have undergone. We call on all Filipino and non-Filipino domestic and low-wage workers, professionals, women, immigrants, racial and social justice advocates, allies and supporters in New York, the US and internationally to show and build solidarity and power for Marichu and all Filipino domestic workers. Justice for Marichu! Justice for all Filipino domestic workers!
-- Ana Liza Caballes
Overall Coordinator
DAMAYAN Migrant Workers Association
406 West 40th Street, 3rd Floor
New York City, NY 10018
E-mail: contact@damayanmigrants.org
Office Telephone: (212) 564-6057
Fax: (718) 502-9965
Sunday, July 27, 2008
South Asian Network Bears Witness to Migrant Deaths on the US-Mexico Border
In Solidarity…
Migrant Trail: We Walk for Life
June 6, 2008
During the week of May 26 – June1, 2008, South Asian Network (SAN) staff Joyti Chand, Prakash Ghimire and Hamid Khan walked in the 5th annual Migrant Trail -Walk for Life. SAN walked with 65 others in the migrant rights movement to bear witness to the thousands of migrants who have died crossing the border and to raise awareness about the unjust policies of the U.S. government.
Migrant Trail: We Walk for Life
June 6, 2008
During the week of May 26 – June1, 2008, South Asian Network (SAN) staff Joyti Chand, Prakash Ghimire and Hamid Khan walked in the 5th annual Migrant Trail -Walk for Life. SAN walked with 65 others in the migrant rights movement to bear witness to the thousands of migrants who have died crossing the border and to raise awareness about the unjust policies of the U.S. government.
The Migrant Trail - Walk for Life is a 75 mile walk on the Arizona/U.S and Sonora/Mexico border. It allowed SAN staff to walk in the footsteps of other migrant men, women and children who attempt to cross the border. This walk was sponsored by a coalition of more than a dozen organizations, including Coalicion de Derechos Humanos, No More Deaths, BorderLinks and Witness for Peace - Mexico.
South Asian Network is a grassroots, community based organization dedicated to advancing the health, empowerment and solidarity of persons of South Asian origin. Fundamental to the mission of SAN is equality for all. SAN is working to improve the lives of the South Asian community, immigrants, and people of color.
SAN staff had the opportunity to learn about the negative impact that immigration and trade policies have had on communities on both sides of the border. These policies include Operation Gatekeeper, passed in 1994, which has forced migrants to cross through the most dangerous and hazardous routes. Extreme hot and cold temperatures, lack of food and water, violence by bandits and border patrol agents, and animal/insect bites, all lead to high rates of death and/or detention for migrants attempting to cross.
During the walk, the participants were approached by two migrant men who had been traveling with two women in a larger group when a border patrol helicopter spotted them and forced the group to separate. The men told the walkers that the women were unable to walk and ran out of food and water. Three walkers went back with these men but were unable to locate the women. The men feared that the women had been picked up by border patrol or bandits.
Since 1994, more than 5000 dead bodies have been recovered along the border. Many more remain missing. One family has been searching for their missing loved ones for eight years, hoping to find them. This is common. Entire communities have been displaced from their land.
Migrant women who are attempting to cross the border have increased risks of being sexually assaulted and raped. According to the organizers, about 90% of women begin taking birth control pills two weeks prior to crossing because of being raped and impregnated by border enforcement, coyotes (smugglers), or other people.
Migrant women who are attempting to cross the border have increased risks of being sexually assaulted and raped. According to the organizers, about 90% of women begin taking birth control pills two weeks prior to crossing because of being raped and impregnated by border enforcement, coyotes (smugglers), or other people.
The experience of the migrants crossing through the US/Mexico border resonates with many of the experience of immigrants from the South Asian community in the U.S.
In the past several years there has been much debate in the South Asian community about immigration issues and policies. False messages are being spread in the community that there will be a large legalization program that will legalize people soon. Unfortunately, a majority of the policies that have been proposed by the U.S. government will compromise the rights and dignity of all immigrants and people of color in the U.S. If passed, they will further dramatically increase the current internal and external militarization and policing in our communities, such as local police and immigration enforcement partnerships, F.B.I. surveillances, warrant less wiretapping, increase numbers of detention centers being built, more reasons to deport non-citizens, and will give power to local law enforcement to ask for immigration status.
Although the media and politicians are giving this false message that a full legalization program is under way and that the immigration debate only impacts Latinos, we know that the South Asian community and other people of color will continue to be negatively impacted across the board by this militarization.
Participating in The Migrant Trail – Walk for Life was a stark reminder of our own history of colonial oppression and affirmed SAN's position against supporting any policy that would lead to increase militarization and more death on the border, reduction of immigrant rights, and increased deportation of immigrants. As a community, we must not compromise!
For more information about the Migrant Trail – Walk for Life, please contact South Asian Network at 562-403-0488. You can also visit our office at 18173 South Pioneer Blvd., Ste I, Artesia, CA 90701 or log onto http://www.southasiannetwork.org/.
Joyti Chand
Lead Community Advocate
Civil Rights Unit
South Asian Network
18173 S. Pioneer Blvd, Suite I
Artesia, CA 90701
Tel: 562 403 0488 x 108
Fax: 562 403 0487
http://www.southasiannetwork.org/
Joyti Chand
Lead Community Advocate
Civil Rights Unit
South Asian Network
18173 S. Pioneer Blvd, Suite I
Artesia, CA 90701
Tel: 562 403 0488 x 108
Fax: 562 403 0487
http://www.southasiannetwork.org/
Indian Workers Decry Recruitment Tactics
Protesters Cite 'Lifetime Settlement' Offer
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 12, 2008; A12
Vijay Kumar was working as a contract welder in the sweltering United Arab Emirates two years ago, far from his wife and family in southern India, when he spotted an advertisement offering welders and pipe fitters "permanent lifetime settlement in the USA for self and family."
Kumar answered the ad to find that workers were being recruited to rebuild oil rigs in Mississippi and Texas destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. He returned to India, signed a contract and paid a recruiter $20,000 to travel to the United States. He told his wife, who had just given birth to a son, that he would send for them as soon as he could.
"I sell my house, my wife sell her jewels, we borrow money from friends. We dream of living in America together," Kumar, 34, said yesterday. He stood outside the U.S. Justice Department during a protest with several dozen other Indian workers, all of whom have been staging a hunger strike in Washington for weeks.
When about 500 Indian recruits reached Mississippi in the fall of 2006, Kumar and the others said, they found that they had been deceived. Their new employer, Signal International Corp., had hired them as temporary "guest" workers with 10-month H2B visas. There was no possibility of obtaining permanent residency for themselves, let alone their families back home. Signal denies that it knew the workers had been promised U.S. residency.
With support from the AFL-CIO, law firms and advocacy groups, more than 100 of the recruited Indians have filed a federal lawsuit in Louisiana against Signal and several recruiting agents, under a federal law that prohibits "human trafficking" by fraud or force for labor or services.
The group also asked for a Justice Department investigation and for permission to remain in the United States, even though they are no longer employed here, while their court case is pending. Some of the workers, who quit Signal in March and made their way to Washington, have staged an intermittent hunger strike outside the Embassy of India to draw attention to their case. Eighteen members of Congress have signed a letter to Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey on their behalf.
In addition to the hiring process, the workers complained about their treatment in the United States. They said they were squeezed into crowded bunk rooms with too few toilets, given bad food and little freedom to leave the work site and had to labor in hot and dirty conditions, cleaning and repairing the damaged oil rigs.
"None of the promises were kept," said Shivan Raghavan, 45, another Indian worker at yesterday's protest, who said he paid the recruiter an additional $4,500 to send later for his wife and two children. "The work was dirty and dangerous. There was little air, and it was hard to breathe. When we complained, we were told we could be deported.
"We were cheated, and we want justice," he said.
Signal International officials said yesterday that they had been shocked to learn that recruiters had lured the foreign workers with false offers of permanent immigration, and that Signal had played no part in that process. They also said the living arrangements they offered at their U.S. operations were not only of good quality but also tailored to the needs and tastes of South Asian immigrant workers.
"The company was incredibly angry when we found the recruiters had misled people and charged them outrageous fees to come over. Signal feels betrayed by the recruiters, and to an extent betrayed by the workers for making false allegations," said Erin Casey Hangartner, counsel for Signal, in a telephone interview from Mississippi.
She said she did not know whether Signal officials knew of the deceptive advertisements, only that "we did not fully understand the green card process. We acted in good faith at every turn." She also said Signal has entered the Indians' lawsuit as a plaintiff, accusing several recruiters in India and the United States of hiring workers under fraudulent conditions.
Attempts were made to reach lawyers at an immigration law firm in New Orleans that allegedly acted as a central conduit in the recruitments. An assistant at the firm said the lawyers would have no public comment. Documents filed in the federal lawsuit show numerous large checks from recruiters in India paid to the firm, plus receipts. Some are marked, "H2B visa and employment based permanent residence visas for USA."
Hangartner defended Signal's treatment of the workers, saying the company built them living quarters with Internet access, billiard tables, laundry service, meals provided by an Indian caterer and free shuttles to the nearest towns. She said that the protesting workers received the same pay and benefits as the others and that a number of Indian immigrants are still happily employed there.
According to labor and political groups helping the Indians, the case was an important example of illegal human trafficking, abetted by the complex rules governing the U.S. guest worker program and exacerbated by the urgent and chaotic conditions that characterized the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
"These workers came to help rebuild the Gulf, and on arrival their nightmare began," Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ill.) said at yesterday's protest. "We recognize that modern-day slavery exists, but the U.S. Congress has passed laws that protect the victims. We have faith in the U.S. system of justice, and we believe these workers should place their faith in the U.S. system of justice, too."
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 12, 2008; A12
Vijay Kumar was working as a contract welder in the sweltering United Arab Emirates two years ago, far from his wife and family in southern India, when he spotted an advertisement offering welders and pipe fitters "permanent lifetime settlement in the USA for self and family."
Kumar answered the ad to find that workers were being recruited to rebuild oil rigs in Mississippi and Texas destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. He returned to India, signed a contract and paid a recruiter $20,000 to travel to the United States. He told his wife, who had just given birth to a son, that he would send for them as soon as he could.
"I sell my house, my wife sell her jewels, we borrow money from friends. We dream of living in America together," Kumar, 34, said yesterday. He stood outside the U.S. Justice Department during a protest with several dozen other Indian workers, all of whom have been staging a hunger strike in Washington for weeks.
When about 500 Indian recruits reached Mississippi in the fall of 2006, Kumar and the others said, they found that they had been deceived. Their new employer, Signal International Corp., had hired them as temporary "guest" workers with 10-month H2B visas. There was no possibility of obtaining permanent residency for themselves, let alone their families back home. Signal denies that it knew the workers had been promised U.S. residency.
With support from the AFL-CIO, law firms and advocacy groups, more than 100 of the recruited Indians have filed a federal lawsuit in Louisiana against Signal and several recruiting agents, under a federal law that prohibits "human trafficking" by fraud or force for labor or services.
The group also asked for a Justice Department investigation and for permission to remain in the United States, even though they are no longer employed here, while their court case is pending. Some of the workers, who quit Signal in March and made their way to Washington, have staged an intermittent hunger strike outside the Embassy of India to draw attention to their case. Eighteen members of Congress have signed a letter to Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey on their behalf.
In addition to the hiring process, the workers complained about their treatment in the United States. They said they were squeezed into crowded bunk rooms with too few toilets, given bad food and little freedom to leave the work site and had to labor in hot and dirty conditions, cleaning and repairing the damaged oil rigs.
"None of the promises were kept," said Shivan Raghavan, 45, another Indian worker at yesterday's protest, who said he paid the recruiter an additional $4,500 to send later for his wife and two children. "The work was dirty and dangerous. There was little air, and it was hard to breathe. When we complained, we were told we could be deported.
"We were cheated, and we want justice," he said.
Signal International officials said yesterday that they had been shocked to learn that recruiters had lured the foreign workers with false offers of permanent immigration, and that Signal had played no part in that process. They also said the living arrangements they offered at their U.S. operations were not only of good quality but also tailored to the needs and tastes of South Asian immigrant workers.
"The company was incredibly angry when we found the recruiters had misled people and charged them outrageous fees to come over. Signal feels betrayed by the recruiters, and to an extent betrayed by the workers for making false allegations," said Erin Casey Hangartner, counsel for Signal, in a telephone interview from Mississippi.
She said she did not know whether Signal officials knew of the deceptive advertisements, only that "we did not fully understand the green card process. We acted in good faith at every turn." She also said Signal has entered the Indians' lawsuit as a plaintiff, accusing several recruiters in India and the United States of hiring workers under fraudulent conditions.
Attempts were made to reach lawyers at an immigration law firm in New Orleans that allegedly acted as a central conduit in the recruitments. An assistant at the firm said the lawyers would have no public comment. Documents filed in the federal lawsuit show numerous large checks from recruiters in India paid to the firm, plus receipts. Some are marked, "H2B visa and employment based permanent residence visas for USA."
Hangartner defended Signal's treatment of the workers, saying the company built them living quarters with Internet access, billiard tables, laundry service, meals provided by an Indian caterer and free shuttles to the nearest towns. She said that the protesting workers received the same pay and benefits as the others and that a number of Indian immigrants are still happily employed there.
According to labor and political groups helping the Indians, the case was an important example of illegal human trafficking, abetted by the complex rules governing the U.S. guest worker program and exacerbated by the urgent and chaotic conditions that characterized the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
"These workers came to help rebuild the Gulf, and on arrival their nightmare began," Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ill.) said at yesterday's protest. "We recognize that modern-day slavery exists, but the U.S. Congress has passed laws that protect the victims. We have faith in the U.S. system of justice, and we believe these workers should place their faith in the U.S. system of justice, too."
Indian trafficking survivors suspend hunger strike on Day 29 after huge political gains
www.neworleansworkerjustice.org
*** JUNE 11, 2008 - FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE ***
Indian trafficking survivors suspend hunger strike on Day 29 after huge political gains
Workers celebrate support, vow to fight on as allies hold solidarity rallies in 10 US cities
WASHINGTON, DC – On Wednesday, June 11, 2008, about 150 Indian labor trafficking survivors and supporters rallied at the Department of Justice headquarters, where the workers suspended their hunger strike on Day 29 after an unprecedented outpouring of support from US Congressmen and leaders from labor, civil rights, and religious communities.
"Congress passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act because we recognized that modern day slavery exists and that workers trafficked into the United States should be able to place their faith in the United States justice system," Rep. Dennis Kucinich said at the rally, one week after he and 17 Congressional colleagues sent a letter to the Department of Justice urging legal protections for the workers while it investigates their case. "Today, we must make sure we don't betray their faith in us."
"After 29 days, we are suspending a hunger strike that has brought us more power than any group of H2B guest workers in the United States has ever had," said Sabulal Vijayan, an organizer with the Indian Workers' Congress. "We have the confidence to suspend our hunger strike today because we have faith in these allies to fight alongside us until the traffickers are brought to justice."
The vast support for the workers' fight for justice against the labor trafficking chain of Signal International and its recruiters was clear from the speakers at Wednesday's rally, which included:
US Congressman Dennis Kucinich
Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickeled and Dimed
Rev. Graylan Hagler, Senior Minister, Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ
Jon Hiatt, General Counsel, AFL-CIO
John Cavanagh, director, Institute of Policy Studies
John Flynn, President, International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers
Sarita Gupta, Executive Director, Jobs With Justice
Indian Workers' Congress organizer Sabulal Vijayan
Saket Soni, director, New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice
Pics at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jwjnational/sets/72157605558256422/.
In addition, labor rights group Jobs With Justice held solidarity actions in 10 cities across the US on Wednesday: Atlanta, GA; Boston, MA; Portland, OR; Knoxville, TN; Richmond, VA; Chicago, IL; Salt Lake City, UT; New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA; and San Francisco, CA. Last week, Jobs With Justice members wrote over 9,000 letters to US Congress in support of the workers.
"But our victory today is not yet complete," Vijayan added, referring to the Department of Justice's failure to release the labor trafficking survivors from the terror of deportation by granting them continued presence in the US, as requested by Rep. Kucinich and his 17 colleagues.
"We live in constant terror of deportation. We cannot work. We cannot see our families. We cannot provide for our families. We are listening to our children grow up over long distance phone calls. Because of the DOJ's inaction, our lives are in limbo," Vijayan said.
After the workers broke the fast in a ceremony blessed by Rev. Graylan Hagler and other faith leaders, a delegation of ten workers' allies went into the Department of Justice and met with Constituent Relations Associate Director Julie Warren, who agreed to set a meeting between the workers and the DoJ Civil Rights Division for the week of June 16th.
"Scripture says: 'Is this not the fast which I choose to loose the bonds of wickedness, and to let the oppressed go free?'" Rev. Hagland said, before he and other clergy distributed pieces of bread to the workers. "That is what we're standing here to do, to loose the bonds of wickedness, and to let the oppressed go free."
The hunger strike followed nearly 18 months of organizing by the workers, who paid US and Indian recruiters up to $20,000 apiece for false promises of permanent residency and green cards. Instead they received 10-month temporary H2B guest worker visas and worked at Signal's Gulf Coast shipyards under deplorable conditions. A total of 20 workers participated in the strike, five of whom were hospitalized. One of them, Paul Konar, fasted for 23 straight days before being stopped by health problems.
The workers escaped Signal's labor camps in March 2008 and made a 10-day "journey for justice," largely on foot, from New Orleans to Washington, DC. They launched their hunger strike on May 14 to demand temporary legal status in the US, Congressional hearings into abuses of guest workers, and talks between the US and Indian governments to protect future guest workers.
"The Department of Justice has remained cold while these workers have taken extraordinary risks to open the world's eyes to the reality of guest worker programs," said Saket Soni, workers' advocate and director of the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice. "This suspension of the hunger strike gives the DoJ one last chance to fulfill its responsibility to combat the brutal reality of human trafficking."
The Indian Workers' Congress is an affiliate of the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice.
Read statements and see pictures from the rally at our blog: nolaworkerscenter.wordpress.com.
CONTACT: Stephen Boykewich, Media Director, New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice, spboykewich@gmail.com, US Mob. +1-504-655-0876
Ricardo Valadez, Program and Communications Director, Jobs with Justice, Ricardo@jwj.org, US Mob. +1-703-340-0610
*** JUNE 11, 2008 - FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE ***
Indian trafficking survivors suspend hunger strike on Day 29 after huge political gains
Workers celebrate support, vow to fight on as allies hold solidarity rallies in 10 US cities
WASHINGTON, DC – On Wednesday, June 11, 2008, about 150 Indian labor trafficking survivors and supporters rallied at the Department of Justice headquarters, where the workers suspended their hunger strike on Day 29 after an unprecedented outpouring of support from US Congressmen and leaders from labor, civil rights, and religious communities.
"Congress passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act because we recognized that modern day slavery exists and that workers trafficked into the United States should be able to place their faith in the United States justice system," Rep. Dennis Kucinich said at the rally, one week after he and 17 Congressional colleagues sent a letter to the Department of Justice urging legal protections for the workers while it investigates their case. "Today, we must make sure we don't betray their faith in us."
"After 29 days, we are suspending a hunger strike that has brought us more power than any group of H2B guest workers in the United States has ever had," said Sabulal Vijayan, an organizer with the Indian Workers' Congress. "We have the confidence to suspend our hunger strike today because we have faith in these allies to fight alongside us until the traffickers are brought to justice."
The vast support for the workers' fight for justice against the labor trafficking chain of Signal International and its recruiters was clear from the speakers at Wednesday's rally, which included:
US Congressman Dennis Kucinich
Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickeled and Dimed
Rev. Graylan Hagler, Senior Minister, Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ
Jon Hiatt, General Counsel, AFL-CIO
John Cavanagh, director, Institute of Policy Studies
John Flynn, President, International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers
Sarita Gupta, Executive Director, Jobs With Justice
Indian Workers' Congress organizer Sabulal Vijayan
Saket Soni, director, New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice
Pics at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jwjnational/sets/72157605558256422/.
In addition, labor rights group Jobs With Justice held solidarity actions in 10 cities across the US on Wednesday: Atlanta, GA; Boston, MA; Portland, OR; Knoxville, TN; Richmond, VA; Chicago, IL; Salt Lake City, UT; New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA; and San Francisco, CA. Last week, Jobs With Justice members wrote over 9,000 letters to US Congress in support of the workers.
"But our victory today is not yet complete," Vijayan added, referring to the Department of Justice's failure to release the labor trafficking survivors from the terror of deportation by granting them continued presence in the US, as requested by Rep. Kucinich and his 17 colleagues.
"We live in constant terror of deportation. We cannot work. We cannot see our families. We cannot provide for our families. We are listening to our children grow up over long distance phone calls. Because of the DOJ's inaction, our lives are in limbo," Vijayan said.
After the workers broke the fast in a ceremony blessed by Rev. Graylan Hagler and other faith leaders, a delegation of ten workers' allies went into the Department of Justice and met with Constituent Relations Associate Director Julie Warren, who agreed to set a meeting between the workers and the DoJ Civil Rights Division for the week of June 16th.
"Scripture says: 'Is this not the fast which I choose to loose the bonds of wickedness, and to let the oppressed go free?'" Rev. Hagland said, before he and other clergy distributed pieces of bread to the workers. "That is what we're standing here to do, to loose the bonds of wickedness, and to let the oppressed go free."
The hunger strike followed nearly 18 months of organizing by the workers, who paid US and Indian recruiters up to $20,000 apiece for false promises of permanent residency and green cards. Instead they received 10-month temporary H2B guest worker visas and worked at Signal's Gulf Coast shipyards under deplorable conditions. A total of 20 workers participated in the strike, five of whom were hospitalized. One of them, Paul Konar, fasted for 23 straight days before being stopped by health problems.
The workers escaped Signal's labor camps in March 2008 and made a 10-day "journey for justice," largely on foot, from New Orleans to Washington, DC. They launched their hunger strike on May 14 to demand temporary legal status in the US, Congressional hearings into abuses of guest workers, and talks between the US and Indian governments to protect future guest workers.
"The Department of Justice has remained cold while these workers have taken extraordinary risks to open the world's eyes to the reality of guest worker programs," said Saket Soni, workers' advocate and director of the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice. "This suspension of the hunger strike gives the DoJ one last chance to fulfill its responsibility to combat the brutal reality of human trafficking."
The Indian Workers' Congress is an affiliate of the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice.
Read statements and see pictures from the rally at our blog: nolaworkerscenter.wordpress.com.
CONTACT: Stephen Boykewich, Media Director, New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice, spboykewich@gmail.com, US Mob. +1-504-655-0876
Ricardo Valadez, Program and Communications Director, Jobs with Justice, Ricardo@jwj.org, US Mob. +1-703-340-0610
How Signal preyed on immigrant workers
June 16, 2008
http://socialistworker.org/2008/06/16/preyed-on-immigrant-workers
Interview: Sabulal Vijayan
THE STRUGGLE of immigrant guest workers at the Signal International shipyard in Pascagoula, Miss., captured national attention March 6, when more than 100 workers walked off their job to protest abuses by management and the extortion methods used by labor recruiters in India who had brought them to the U.S. to work.
Since then, the workers have taken their case to Washington to pressure politicians into taking action against both Signal and the recruiters. A hunger strike launched on May 14 in Washington underscored their determination.
The walkout at Signal came a year after five workers were fired for organizing. One of them, Sabulal Vijayan, remained in the area to keep organizing, aided by the New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice, Southern Poverty Law Center and other activists and organizations.
Keith Rosenthal and Alpana Mehta spoke with Vijayan about the struggle and its importance for the immigrant rights and labor movements.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
HOW DID you come to work for Signal?
I WAS working in the Middle East, in Dubai. While I was on vacation from Dubai in Kerala, India, I saw an advertisement in the local newspaper saying that Dewan Consultants of Mumbai was recruiting to take some welders to America on a green card, or permanent residency, program.
I attended a seminar in a hotel in the city of Cochin. The seminar organizer told us in detail that they were sending people in a green card program and permanent residency program. At that time, they told us that it would take 18 months, and they asked for $20,000 that should be paid in three installments.
I paid the first installment, then returned to Dubai. Dewan eventually collected about $20,000 from me. This was just after Hurricane Katrina happened. At the end of 2006, the consultant said that due to the hurricane, I was going to Signal International in a permanent residency program on an H-2B visa.
Signal's lawyer, Michael C. Berman, went to Dubai and India with his colleagues, and said to us that "You will get H-2B visa in early 2006 for residency." The company delegates then came to the city of Chennai, and we underwent a trade test in front of them. They told me, "You're selected," and then I paid the last installment and came to the U.S.
SO YOU were under the assumption that you would get a green card and be allowed to bring your family.
IN THE Gulf region of the Middle East, most of the workers have been working alone, and their families aren't allowed to enter into the country. So we were separated from our families for long, long years. I had continuous years in the Gulf region without my family.
I thought that if I spent some money, I could get a visa to the U.S., which is a country of liberty and justice. We heard a lot about the U.S.--that there is freedom for everyone. So I decided to come--especially since they were offering permanent residency for my family. They even collected my family members' visa processing fees and proceeded with my visa papers.
YOU'VE NEVER gotten that money back?
NO. THIS was money that I saved from the Middle East job to build a home. I also sold my wife's jewelry, and I borrowed from my friends. That's how I raised the $20,000.
WHAT WERE conditions like at Signal International?
IT WAS horrible--the worst experience of my life. When I set foot in the labor camp on December 5, 2006, they gave me a bed in a room with 23 other people. They called them bunkhouses. Actually, it was a trailer. And there was no space to move; there was no space to keep our belongings. It was like a pig sty.
There was no privacy. There were two toilets and four showers. People started duty at 6 a.m., but people started to wake up at 3:30 a.m. to rush to the bathrooms. If somebody was infected or diseased, everybody got the disease. They served substandard food. They treated us like slaves.
Whenever we raised our voice, they said, "This is not India, this is America--if you want to stay in this country, you must stay quiet and shut up and sit down." They told us, "We know the living conditions of Indians. You're getting better food and accommodations in this country, why are you asking for more?" They told us that Indians behave like animals.
Because of the bad accommodations and food, everybody was mentally tortured. Yet the company deducted $1,050 a month from each person [for room and board]. When we told them that we could live outside the camp and spend $500 a month [on an apartment], the company told us that they wanted us to stay in the camp.
CAN YOU talk about the experiences you had there as compared to other countries?
IN THE Gulf region, it's not always like that. I worked for petroleum construction companies with very nice accommodation, with food and everything provided. But in some places, the conditions are horrible, like at Signal.
In the Middle East, they are a little bit hard on people during duty time, forcing people to get the job done. But after the job is finished, after eight or 10 hours, people are totally free. They are human beings.
The companies aren't controlling their lives in sitting rooms; they're not tending to a labor camp with armed guards; they're not isolating them from society. After the job, they let the people be free. They can do whatever they need or go wherever they need.
But Signal International forced us to be in the labor camp, and made the camp only for Indians. They set the rules--what you can do, and what you can't. Even if we brought something from Wal-Mart, the security guards strictly inspected it. And when we took something out of the camp, the guards checked it.
This was at every point--in the mess halls and in the rooms. At all times, there were restrictions or some control by the company. We didn't have the right to meet. We didn't have the right to ask for our rights.
THE ARMED guards were in the labor camp?
NORMALLY, SIGNAL guards were at the gate and doing inspections in the camp. But on March 9, 2007, when we realized that we were not going to get a green card, and that Signal International was controlling our lives, we started to raise our voice.
We conducted about three meetings in the nearest Catholic church with the help of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Atlanta and the New Orleans Workers' Center. They came to educate us about our human rights.
Then the company found out that we were organizing and asking for our rights, and started to retaliate against us, reducing our salaries. Again, we held some meetings, and the company sent armed guards into the camp at 5 a.m. They pulled three of our organizers and locked them up in a room for six hours. Armed guards were standing inside the room to take them into custody.
I was in the cafeteria, packing my lunch and taking my breakfast, when the camp manager came to me with armed guards. He told me, "You are under my custody, come to the hall where the people are locked up." I started shivering. I asked him, "Why?" And he told me, "Just come into my custody."
I walked to my room, and the security guard shouted at me, the camp manager chased me. I went into my room and told them that I wanted to wash my hands. But while I was washing my hands, I found some razor blades in the bathroom. I slit my wrists to commit suicide. I had spent so much money, I couldn't go back home.
I was admitted to the hospital for three days. And after six hours of interviews, the people inside the room were released, and five of us were fired from the company.
HOW DID the organizing get started?
FROM THE beginning, I was speaking for the people because of communication problems. Because of that, I was noticed by the company as a leader. But we were just peacefully fighting for justice. We were trying to live like human beings, and we became educated about the existing law.
It was very clear that the company was breaking the rules. The people came to know that the company wasn't going to change the H-2B visas into a green card, because according to the law, this can't be done. This reality--and the fact that people had sold their homes, given up good jobs in other countries, sold their jewelry, taken money from loan sharks and lenders--made everyone disappointed about the deception.
WHEN THE workers walked out, you chose as one of your slogans, "I Am a Man." Did you know that this was a slogan of a strike in Memphis by African American garbage workers in 1968, which Martin Luther King was supporting when he was shot?
WE WERE not that much aware of the struggles in the U.S. But we came to know that King said, "I am a man." I said this thing several times myself, "I am a man; I am a human being, and you should not treat us like we are slaves."
After I was fired on March 9, 2007, I went to New Orleans, and I saw that the Black people were sleeping under bridges and living in pitiful conditions. And I realized that the system is totally exploiting us--the system is exploiting the poor Black people in this country. It was amazing.
The company told us that there was no manpower in the U.S.--"that's why we are calling you." The reality was that people, working people, were wandering on the roads, looking for food.
But instead of taking these people and relocating them to jobs, the government is looking for ways to bring other poor people from other countries, in a guest-worker program. The recruiters, the company and the system are exploiting the lives of the poor ones and workers, and exploiting the rights of the citizens, too.
The system lets citizens and immigrants fight each other. Citizens think, "Because of the immigrants, I am not getting jobs." The reality is not that. The poor people aren't encouraged to go to the company, because the government isn't letting them take these jobs.
If citizens were employed in these kinds of jobs, the company couldn't practice their slavery on them. And if they can't push them to get the job done in such harsh conditions, they can't gain more profits.
WHAT DO you think about the debate in this country about immigrant guest-worker programs?
THE PEOPLE who are making the law are thinking and planning in terms of strengthening the economic power of this country. But the reality is experienced by workers like me. The reality is that they can get good manpower and good technicians from poor countries. The companies can exploit them as they wish. But they can't practice this on U.S. citizens.
It's a very good system for getting employees from outside. But they should be protected. The present system only protects the employers, not the employees. An H-2B visa allows an immigrant worker to work with only one employer. If the worker is employed by another employer, they will be illegal.
Also, the H-2B visa workers who are coming into this country should be getting more time to stay here. Ten months is nothing in this country. And these people should be with their families. For the last 16 months, the Signal workers have been without our families.
WHY DID the workers decide to launch a hunger strike?
MORE THAN 120 people walked out of the company on March 6, 2008. On March 7, they reported to a federal court that they were victims of trafficking and filed a suit against the company. On March 12, 2008, they walked from New Orleans to Washington to meet with members of Congress.
Lots of members of Congress promised that we would get justice. We waited for two months, up to May 14, and there was no justice in sight. We didn't want to work illegally in this country, so we tried to come to Washington again, and show the reality to the world by following in the footsteps of Mahatma Gandhi's nonviolent program--Satyagraha.
So we did the hunger strike to open the eyes of the U.S. and the Indian governments. There were about 29 days of hunger strike. One worker, Mr. Paul Konar, continued his hunger strike for 23 days.
We got signatures from 18 members of Congress. Rep. Dennis Kucinich was the sponsor of the letter, which asked the Department of Justice to allow our continued presence in the U.S. to continue our struggle against the recruiters. Also, the head of three House committees--covering immigration, the judiciary and labor--gave letters to the Department of Justice asking for our continued presence.
We are not doing this to get a green card or to get a permanent residency. And we are not only fighting for Indians. We are fighting for all the poor ones who are coming to this country, and for the citizens of this country, to change the system to benefit the poor.
That's why we started the hunger strike. We suspended it only because 18 members of Congress signed on to the letter to the Department of Justice. And 10,000 people have signed a petition of support.
We are waiting on the Department of Justice to respect these letters and signatures. So for the time being, we have suspended the hunger strike. If we don't succeed, we will come back.
Our demands are to show the reality of the H-2B visa--that it's a blight on the system. We need to get some congressional hearings and to punish recruiters and companies like Signal International. Those people should be punished and sent to jail. We need to eliminate recruiting fees and change the system.
WHAT CAN others do to support you?
THERE ARE a lot of organizations helping us: the metal trades unions, the bricklayers union, and allies like AFL-CIO, South Asian Americans Learning Together, Jobs with Justice. Churches from all over the U.S. have been supporting us, along with the Institute for Policy Studies and the Indian Workers Congress.
The movement is growing in a good way, because people realize that we're fighting for justice and peace. Now we're waiting for the results of the letters to the Department of Justice. If they deny our rights, then we will come forward to fight again.
The citizens of this country should understand that we are not fighting against them. We are not fighting for just us, but for all human beings who are living in this country. Like the words say, "Liberty and justice for all."
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
What you can do
Sign a petition [1] in support of the Signal workers and against human trafficking and forced labor.
For more information on the Signal workers' struggle and how you can support them, visit the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice [2] Web site.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Material on this Web site is licensed by SocialistWorker.org, under a Creative Commons (by-nc-nd 3.0) [3] license. Readers are welcome to share and use articles and other materials for non-commercial purposes, as long as they are attributed to the author and SocialistWorker.org.
[1] http://nolaworkerscenter.wordpress.com/sign-the-petition/
[2] http://www.neworleansworkerjustice.org
[3] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0
http://socialistworker.org/2008/06/16/preyed-on-immigrant-workers
Interview: Sabulal Vijayan
THE STRUGGLE of immigrant guest workers at the Signal International shipyard in Pascagoula, Miss., captured national attention March 6, when more than 100 workers walked off their job to protest abuses by management and the extortion methods used by labor recruiters in India who had brought them to the U.S. to work.
Since then, the workers have taken their case to Washington to pressure politicians into taking action against both Signal and the recruiters. A hunger strike launched on May 14 in Washington underscored their determination.
The walkout at Signal came a year after five workers were fired for organizing. One of them, Sabulal Vijayan, remained in the area to keep organizing, aided by the New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice, Southern Poverty Law Center and other activists and organizations.
Keith Rosenthal and Alpana Mehta spoke with Vijayan about the struggle and its importance for the immigrant rights and labor movements.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
HOW DID you come to work for Signal?
I WAS working in the Middle East, in Dubai. While I was on vacation from Dubai in Kerala, India, I saw an advertisement in the local newspaper saying that Dewan Consultants of Mumbai was recruiting to take some welders to America on a green card, or permanent residency, program.
I attended a seminar in a hotel in the city of Cochin. The seminar organizer told us in detail that they were sending people in a green card program and permanent residency program. At that time, they told us that it would take 18 months, and they asked for $20,000 that should be paid in three installments.
I paid the first installment, then returned to Dubai. Dewan eventually collected about $20,000 from me. This was just after Hurricane Katrina happened. At the end of 2006, the consultant said that due to the hurricane, I was going to Signal International in a permanent residency program on an H-2B visa.
Signal's lawyer, Michael C. Berman, went to Dubai and India with his colleagues, and said to us that "You will get H-2B visa in early 2006 for residency." The company delegates then came to the city of Chennai, and we underwent a trade test in front of them. They told me, "You're selected," and then I paid the last installment and came to the U.S.
SO YOU were under the assumption that you would get a green card and be allowed to bring your family.
IN THE Gulf region of the Middle East, most of the workers have been working alone, and their families aren't allowed to enter into the country. So we were separated from our families for long, long years. I had continuous years in the Gulf region without my family.
I thought that if I spent some money, I could get a visa to the U.S., which is a country of liberty and justice. We heard a lot about the U.S.--that there is freedom for everyone. So I decided to come--especially since they were offering permanent residency for my family. They even collected my family members' visa processing fees and proceeded with my visa papers.
YOU'VE NEVER gotten that money back?
NO. THIS was money that I saved from the Middle East job to build a home. I also sold my wife's jewelry, and I borrowed from my friends. That's how I raised the $20,000.
WHAT WERE conditions like at Signal International?
IT WAS horrible--the worst experience of my life. When I set foot in the labor camp on December 5, 2006, they gave me a bed in a room with 23 other people. They called them bunkhouses. Actually, it was a trailer. And there was no space to move; there was no space to keep our belongings. It was like a pig sty.
There was no privacy. There were two toilets and four showers. People started duty at 6 a.m., but people started to wake up at 3:30 a.m. to rush to the bathrooms. If somebody was infected or diseased, everybody got the disease. They served substandard food. They treated us like slaves.
Whenever we raised our voice, they said, "This is not India, this is America--if you want to stay in this country, you must stay quiet and shut up and sit down." They told us, "We know the living conditions of Indians. You're getting better food and accommodations in this country, why are you asking for more?" They told us that Indians behave like animals.
Because of the bad accommodations and food, everybody was mentally tortured. Yet the company deducted $1,050 a month from each person [for room and board]. When we told them that we could live outside the camp and spend $500 a month [on an apartment], the company told us that they wanted us to stay in the camp.
CAN YOU talk about the experiences you had there as compared to other countries?
IN THE Gulf region, it's not always like that. I worked for petroleum construction companies with very nice accommodation, with food and everything provided. But in some places, the conditions are horrible, like at Signal.
In the Middle East, they are a little bit hard on people during duty time, forcing people to get the job done. But after the job is finished, after eight or 10 hours, people are totally free. They are human beings.
The companies aren't controlling their lives in sitting rooms; they're not tending to a labor camp with armed guards; they're not isolating them from society. After the job, they let the people be free. They can do whatever they need or go wherever they need.
But Signal International forced us to be in the labor camp, and made the camp only for Indians. They set the rules--what you can do, and what you can't. Even if we brought something from Wal-Mart, the security guards strictly inspected it. And when we took something out of the camp, the guards checked it.
This was at every point--in the mess halls and in the rooms. At all times, there were restrictions or some control by the company. We didn't have the right to meet. We didn't have the right to ask for our rights.
THE ARMED guards were in the labor camp?
NORMALLY, SIGNAL guards were at the gate and doing inspections in the camp. But on March 9, 2007, when we realized that we were not going to get a green card, and that Signal International was controlling our lives, we started to raise our voice.
We conducted about three meetings in the nearest Catholic church with the help of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Atlanta and the New Orleans Workers' Center. They came to educate us about our human rights.
Then the company found out that we were organizing and asking for our rights, and started to retaliate against us, reducing our salaries. Again, we held some meetings, and the company sent armed guards into the camp at 5 a.m. They pulled three of our organizers and locked them up in a room for six hours. Armed guards were standing inside the room to take them into custody.
I was in the cafeteria, packing my lunch and taking my breakfast, when the camp manager came to me with armed guards. He told me, "You are under my custody, come to the hall where the people are locked up." I started shivering. I asked him, "Why?" And he told me, "Just come into my custody."
I walked to my room, and the security guard shouted at me, the camp manager chased me. I went into my room and told them that I wanted to wash my hands. But while I was washing my hands, I found some razor blades in the bathroom. I slit my wrists to commit suicide. I had spent so much money, I couldn't go back home.
I was admitted to the hospital for three days. And after six hours of interviews, the people inside the room were released, and five of us were fired from the company.
HOW DID the organizing get started?
FROM THE beginning, I was speaking for the people because of communication problems. Because of that, I was noticed by the company as a leader. But we were just peacefully fighting for justice. We were trying to live like human beings, and we became educated about the existing law.
It was very clear that the company was breaking the rules. The people came to know that the company wasn't going to change the H-2B visas into a green card, because according to the law, this can't be done. This reality--and the fact that people had sold their homes, given up good jobs in other countries, sold their jewelry, taken money from loan sharks and lenders--made everyone disappointed about the deception.
WHEN THE workers walked out, you chose as one of your slogans, "I Am a Man." Did you know that this was a slogan of a strike in Memphis by African American garbage workers in 1968, which Martin Luther King was supporting when he was shot?
WE WERE not that much aware of the struggles in the U.S. But we came to know that King said, "I am a man." I said this thing several times myself, "I am a man; I am a human being, and you should not treat us like we are slaves."
After I was fired on March 9, 2007, I went to New Orleans, and I saw that the Black people were sleeping under bridges and living in pitiful conditions. And I realized that the system is totally exploiting us--the system is exploiting the poor Black people in this country. It was amazing.
The company told us that there was no manpower in the U.S.--"that's why we are calling you." The reality was that people, working people, were wandering on the roads, looking for food.
But instead of taking these people and relocating them to jobs, the government is looking for ways to bring other poor people from other countries, in a guest-worker program. The recruiters, the company and the system are exploiting the lives of the poor ones and workers, and exploiting the rights of the citizens, too.
The system lets citizens and immigrants fight each other. Citizens think, "Because of the immigrants, I am not getting jobs." The reality is not that. The poor people aren't encouraged to go to the company, because the government isn't letting them take these jobs.
If citizens were employed in these kinds of jobs, the company couldn't practice their slavery on them. And if they can't push them to get the job done in such harsh conditions, they can't gain more profits.
WHAT DO you think about the debate in this country about immigrant guest-worker programs?
THE PEOPLE who are making the law are thinking and planning in terms of strengthening the economic power of this country. But the reality is experienced by workers like me. The reality is that they can get good manpower and good technicians from poor countries. The companies can exploit them as they wish. But they can't practice this on U.S. citizens.
It's a very good system for getting employees from outside. But they should be protected. The present system only protects the employers, not the employees. An H-2B visa allows an immigrant worker to work with only one employer. If the worker is employed by another employer, they will be illegal.
Also, the H-2B visa workers who are coming into this country should be getting more time to stay here. Ten months is nothing in this country. And these people should be with their families. For the last 16 months, the Signal workers have been without our families.
WHY DID the workers decide to launch a hunger strike?
MORE THAN 120 people walked out of the company on March 6, 2008. On March 7, they reported to a federal court that they were victims of trafficking and filed a suit against the company. On March 12, 2008, they walked from New Orleans to Washington to meet with members of Congress.
Lots of members of Congress promised that we would get justice. We waited for two months, up to May 14, and there was no justice in sight. We didn't want to work illegally in this country, so we tried to come to Washington again, and show the reality to the world by following in the footsteps of Mahatma Gandhi's nonviolent program--Satyagraha.
So we did the hunger strike to open the eyes of the U.S. and the Indian governments. There were about 29 days of hunger strike. One worker, Mr. Paul Konar, continued his hunger strike for 23 days.
We got signatures from 18 members of Congress. Rep. Dennis Kucinich was the sponsor of the letter, which asked the Department of Justice to allow our continued presence in the U.S. to continue our struggle against the recruiters. Also, the head of three House committees--covering immigration, the judiciary and labor--gave letters to the Department of Justice asking for our continued presence.
We are not doing this to get a green card or to get a permanent residency. And we are not only fighting for Indians. We are fighting for all the poor ones who are coming to this country, and for the citizens of this country, to change the system to benefit the poor.
That's why we started the hunger strike. We suspended it only because 18 members of Congress signed on to the letter to the Department of Justice. And 10,000 people have signed a petition of support.
We are waiting on the Department of Justice to respect these letters and signatures. So for the time being, we have suspended the hunger strike. If we don't succeed, we will come back.
Our demands are to show the reality of the H-2B visa--that it's a blight on the system. We need to get some congressional hearings and to punish recruiters and companies like Signal International. Those people should be punished and sent to jail. We need to eliminate recruiting fees and change the system.
WHAT CAN others do to support you?
THERE ARE a lot of organizations helping us: the metal trades unions, the bricklayers union, and allies like AFL-CIO, South Asian Americans Learning Together, Jobs with Justice. Churches from all over the U.S. have been supporting us, along with the Institute for Policy Studies and the Indian Workers Congress.
The movement is growing in a good way, because people realize that we're fighting for justice and peace. Now we're waiting for the results of the letters to the Department of Justice. If they deny our rights, then we will come forward to fight again.
The citizens of this country should understand that we are not fighting against them. We are not fighting for just us, but for all human beings who are living in this country. Like the words say, "Liberty and justice for all."
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
What you can do
Sign a petition [1] in support of the Signal workers and against human trafficking and forced labor.
For more information on the Signal workers' struggle and how you can support them, visit the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice [2] Web site.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Material on this Web site is licensed by SocialistWorker.org, under a Creative Commons (by-nc-nd 3.0) [3] license. Readers are welcome to share and use articles and other materials for non-commercial purposes, as long as they are attributed to the author and SocialistWorker.org.
[1] http://nolaworkerscenter.wordpress.com/sign-the-petition/
[2] http://www.neworleansworkerjustice.org
[3] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
LCLAA Concerned with Increase of Incarceration of Undocumented Migrants
For Immediate Release Contact: Silvana Quiroz
June 30, 2008 202-508-6917
LCLAA Concerned with the Drastic Increase of Incarceration and Criminalization of Undocumented Migrants:
Immigration Offenders Are the Third Largest Group in Federal Jails
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The drastic increase of incarceration rates of undocumented immigrants is a clear indication of the abusive anti-immigrant policies that have been instituted over the past few years. Records obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) illustrate that immigration prosecutions for March 2008 rose to 9,350 - a 50 percent increase from the previous month and a 73 percent increase from the previous year.
The government also reported 8,104 new immigration convictions - a 24.4 increase from the previous month. The greatest number of immigration convictions is occurring in states with large Latino populations. Inmates incarcerated in federal prisons for immigration related offenses now represent the third largest group in our jails.
Violation of immigration law is a civil offense requiring prosecution by an immigration judge. However, current efforts by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) criminalize immigrants and ultimately seek their permanent exclusion. By criminalizing immigrants over these civil offenses, they become ineligible for legalization processes in the future.
It has been well reported that the mass detention of immigrants resulting from immigration raids conducted by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have led to human rights abuses and neglect once detained. The recent Washington Post series on "Careless Detention" underscored the deplorable treatment of immigrant detainees and the deprivation of access to adequate medical care. Jorge Bustamante, Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants for the United Nations, noted in a March 2008 report that policies towards migrants, legal or unauthorized, violate international human rights agreements.
As an organization that advocates for working families and the respect of the human, civil and worker rights of Latinos in the United States and abroad, the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement (LCLAA) is extremely concerned about the implications that higher incarceration rates of immigrants will have on the overall Latino community and its image in the eyes of the American public. LCLAA is particularly concerned that current policy feeds into the myth that immigrants are criminals when studies have consistently demonstrated that until recently, immigrants held the lowest incarceration rates of all groups. Anti-immigrant and anti-Latino sentiments have increased dramatically in recent years, as denoted by a recent FBI report demonstrating that Latinos represent over 60 percent of victims of hate crimes in the nation.
"We need to respect the basic rights of workers regardless of their status. Undocumented workers have been exploited for decades. The criminalization and incarceration of immigrants because of their legal status is not the correct answer. Workers need opportunities in their own country so that they are not forced to leave their homeland out of economic desperation. Economic policies that benefit only a small portion of the population are not an adequate and sustainable way forward for this region," said Dr. Gabriela Lemus, Executive Director of LCLAA.
"The economic policies of the last two decades have been harmful to workers throughout the hemisphere causing dislocation and displacement, resulting in migration. We need to address the root causes of migration and understand that this is a regional problem that requires a combination of both domestic policy as well as comprehensive, humane and commonsense international solutions. Undocumented workers are a voiceless group of people who live in fear and today they are much more exploitable. The administration's current policies and the criminalization of this group of people only exacerbate this situation. Immigrants are not criminals," said Milton Rosado, LCLAA's National President.
The Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, LCLAA, is the home of the Latino Labor Movement. LCLAA is a national Latino organization representing the interests of over 1.7 million Latino trade unionists throughout the country and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. LCLAA was founded in 1973 and is America's premiere national organization for Latino workers and their families. LCLAA advocates for the rights of all workers seeking justice in the workplace and their communities. LCLAA is a constituency group representing Latino workers in both the AFL-CIO and Change to Win Federation.
###
Karla Pineda-Santos
Operations Manager
Labor Council for Latin American Advancement (LCLAA)
815 16th Street N.W 4th floor
Washington, DC 20006
(202) 508-6976
(202) 508-6922 Fax
www.lclaa.org
Local contact:
Gabriel Camacho
(617) 661-6130 ext. 115
gabelac@comcast.net
Join LCLAA in celebrating their
35th Anniversary in Orlando, Florida
August 4th - 8th, 2008
"LCLAA at 35: Unidos en Una Voz"
June 30, 2008 202-508-6917
LCLAA Concerned with the Drastic Increase of Incarceration and Criminalization of Undocumented Migrants:
Immigration Offenders Are the Third Largest Group in Federal Jails
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The drastic increase of incarceration rates of undocumented immigrants is a clear indication of the abusive anti-immigrant policies that have been instituted over the past few years. Records obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) illustrate that immigration prosecutions for March 2008 rose to 9,350 - a 50 percent increase from the previous month and a 73 percent increase from the previous year.
The government also reported 8,104 new immigration convictions - a 24.4 increase from the previous month. The greatest number of immigration convictions is occurring in states with large Latino populations. Inmates incarcerated in federal prisons for immigration related offenses now represent the third largest group in our jails.
Violation of immigration law is a civil offense requiring prosecution by an immigration judge. However, current efforts by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) criminalize immigrants and ultimately seek their permanent exclusion. By criminalizing immigrants over these civil offenses, they become ineligible for legalization processes in the future.
It has been well reported that the mass detention of immigrants resulting from immigration raids conducted by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have led to human rights abuses and neglect once detained. The recent Washington Post series on "Careless Detention" underscored the deplorable treatment of immigrant detainees and the deprivation of access to adequate medical care. Jorge Bustamante, Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants for the United Nations, noted in a March 2008 report that policies towards migrants, legal or unauthorized, violate international human rights agreements.
As an organization that advocates for working families and the respect of the human, civil and worker rights of Latinos in the United States and abroad, the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement (LCLAA) is extremely concerned about the implications that higher incarceration rates of immigrants will have on the overall Latino community and its image in the eyes of the American public. LCLAA is particularly concerned that current policy feeds into the myth that immigrants are criminals when studies have consistently demonstrated that until recently, immigrants held the lowest incarceration rates of all groups. Anti-immigrant and anti-Latino sentiments have increased dramatically in recent years, as denoted by a recent FBI report demonstrating that Latinos represent over 60 percent of victims of hate crimes in the nation.
"We need to respect the basic rights of workers regardless of their status. Undocumented workers have been exploited for decades. The criminalization and incarceration of immigrants because of their legal status is not the correct answer. Workers need opportunities in their own country so that they are not forced to leave their homeland out of economic desperation. Economic policies that benefit only a small portion of the population are not an adequate and sustainable way forward for this region," said Dr. Gabriela Lemus, Executive Director of LCLAA.
"The economic policies of the last two decades have been harmful to workers throughout the hemisphere causing dislocation and displacement, resulting in migration. We need to address the root causes of migration and understand that this is a regional problem that requires a combination of both domestic policy as well as comprehensive, humane and commonsense international solutions. Undocumented workers are a voiceless group of people who live in fear and today they are much more exploitable. The administration's current policies and the criminalization of this group of people only exacerbate this situation. Immigrants are not criminals," said Milton Rosado, LCLAA's National President.
The Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, LCLAA, is the home of the Latino Labor Movement. LCLAA is a national Latino organization representing the interests of over 1.7 million Latino trade unionists throughout the country and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. LCLAA was founded in 1973 and is America's premiere national organization for Latino workers and their families. LCLAA advocates for the rights of all workers seeking justice in the workplace and their communities. LCLAA is a constituency group representing Latino workers in both the AFL-CIO and Change to Win Federation.
###
Karla Pineda-Santos
Operations Manager
Labor Council for Latin American Advancement (LCLAA)
815 16th Street N.W 4th floor
Washington, DC 20006
(202) 508-6976
(202) 508-6922 Fax
www.lclaa.org
Local contact:
Gabriel Camacho
(617) 661-6130 ext. 115
gabelac@comcast.net
Join LCLAA in celebrating their
35th Anniversary in Orlando, Florida
August 4th - 8th, 2008
"LCLAA at 35: Unidos en Una Voz"
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Few Details on Immigrants Who Died in U.S. Custody
By NINA BERNSTEIN
The New York Times, May 5, 2008
Word spread quickly inside the windowless walls of the Elizabeth Detention Center, an immigration jail in New Jersey: A detainee had fallen, injured his head and become incoherent. Guards had put him in solitary confinement, and late that night, an ambulance had taken him away more dead than alive.
But outside, for five days, no official notified the family of the detainee, Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea who had overstayed a tourist visa. When frantic relatives located him at University Hospital in Newark on Feb. 5, 2007, he was in a coma after emergency surgery for a skull fracture and multiple brain hemorrhages. He died there four months later without ever waking up, leaving family members on two continents trying to find out why.
Mr. Bah's name is one of 66 on a government list of deaths that occurred in immigration custody from January 2004 to November 2007, when nearly a million people passed through.
The list, compiled by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after Congress demanded the information, and obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act, is the fullest accounting to date of deaths in immigration detention, a patchwork of federal centers, county jails and privately run prisons that has become the nation's fastest-growing form of incarceration.
The list has few details, and they are often unreliable, but it serves as a rough road map to previously unreported cases like Mr. Bah's. And it reflects a reality that haunts grieving families like his: the difficulty of getting information about the fate of people taken into immigration custody, even when they die.
Mr. Bah's relatives never saw the internal records labeled "proprietary information — not for distribution" by the Corrections Corporation of America, which runs the New Jersey detention center for the federal government. The documents detail how he was treated by guards and government employees: shackled and pinned to the floor of the medical unit as he moaned and vomited, then left in a disciplinary cell for more than 13 hours, despite repeated notations that he was unresponsive and intermittently foaming at the mouth.
Mr. Bah had lived in New York for a decade, surrounded by a large circle of friends and relatives. The extravagant gowns he sewed to support his wife and children in West Africa were on display in a Manhattan boutique.
But he died in a sequestered system where questions about what had happened to him, or even his whereabouts, were met with silence.
As the country debates stricter enforcement of immigration laws, thousands of people who are not American citizens are being locked up for days, months or years while the government decides whether to deport them. Some have no valid visa; some are legal residents, but have past criminal convictions; others are seeking asylum from persecution.
Death is a reality in any jail, and the medical neglect of inmates is a perennial issue. But far more than in the criminal justice system, immigration detainees and their families lack basic ways to get answers when things go wrong.
No government body is required to keep track of deaths and publicly report them. No independent inquiry is mandated. And often relatives who try to investigate the treatment of those who died say they are stymied by fear of immigration authorities, lack of access to lawyers, or sheer distance.
Federal officials say deaths are reviewed internally by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which reports them to its inspector general and decides which ones warrant investigation. Officials say they notify the detainee's next of kin or consulate, and report the deaths to local medical authorities, who may conduct autopsies. In Mr. Bah's case, a review before his death found no evidence of foul play, an immigration spokesman said, though after later inquiries from The Times, he said a full review of the death was under way.
But critics, including many in Congress, say this piecemeal process leaves too much to the agency's discretion, allowing some deaths to be swept under the rug while potential witnesses are transferred or deported. They say it also obscures underlying complaints about medical care, abusive conditions or inadequate suicide prevention.
In January, the House passed a bill that would require states that receive certain federal money to report deaths in custody to their attorneys general. But the bill is stalled in the Senate, and it does not cover federal facilities.
The only tangible result of Congressional concern has been the list of 66 deaths, which names Mr. Bah and many other detainees for the first time, but raises as many questions as it answers.
For Mr. Bah's survivors, the mystery of his death is hard to bear. In Guinea, his first wife, Dalanda, wept as she spoke about the contradictory accounts that had reached her and her two teenage sons through other detainees, including some who speculated that Mr. Bah had been beaten.
In New York, a cousin who is an American citizen, Khadidiatou Bah, 38, said she was unable to bring a lawsuit, in part because other relatives were afraid of antagonizing the authorities.
"They don't want to push the case, or maybe they will be sent home," she said. "This guy was killed, and we don't know what happened."
Lingering Questions
The list of deaths where Mr. Bah's name surfaced is often cryptic. Along with 13 deaths cited as suicides and 14 as the result of cardiac ailments, it offers such causes as "undetermined" and "unwitnessed arrest, epilepsy." No one's nationality is given, some places of detention are omitted, and some names and birth dates seem garbled. As a result, many families could not be tracked down for this article.
But when they could be, they posed more disturbing questions.
In California, relatives of Walter Rodriguez-Castro, 28, said they were rebuffed when they tried to find out why his calls had stopped coming from the Kern County Jail in Bakersfield in April 2006. Then in June, his wife went to his scheduled hearing in San Francisco's immigration court and learned that he had been dead for many weeks, his body unclaimed in the county morgue.
The coroner found that Mr. Rodriguez-Castro, a mover from El Salvador in the country illegally, had died of undiagnosed meningitis and H.I.V., after days complaining of fever, stiff neck and vomiting. The cause of death on the government's list: "unresponsive."
Immigration authorities said on Friday that the case was now under review, but would not answer questions about it or other deaths on the list. Sgt. Ed Komin, a spokesman for the jail, said the death had been promptly reported to immigration officials, who were responsible for notifying families.
Four sons in another family, in Sacramento, described trying for days to get medical care for their father, Maya Nand, a 56-year-old legal immigrant from Fiji, at a detention center run by the Corrections Corporation in Eloy, Ariz. Mr. Nand, an architectural draftsman, had been ailing when he was taken into custody on Jan. 13, 2005, apparently because his application for citizenship had been rejected, based on an earlier conviction for misdemeanor domestic violence. In collect calls, the sons said, he told them that despite his chest pains and breathing problems, doctors at the detention center did not take his condition seriously.
The Corrections Corporation said he had been seen and treated "multiple times." But a letter to the family from an immigration official said his treatment was for a respiratory infection. The letter said that Mr. Nand was taken to an emergency room on Jan. 25, where congestive heart failure was diagnosed, and that he "suffered an apparent heart attack while at the hospital." He died on Feb. 2, 2005, shackled to a hospital bed in Tucson.
Boubacar Bah had more going for him than many detainees. He had a lawyer and many friends and relatives in the United States, and his detention center in New Jersey was one of the few frequented by immigrant advocates.
But three days after he suffered a head injury in detention last year, no one in his New York circle knew that he was lying comatose in a Newark hospital, where he had already been identified as a possible organ donor.
"Thank you for the referral," an organ-sharing network wrote on Feb. 3, 2007, according to hospital records. "This patient is a potential candidate for organ donation once brain death criteria is met."
Four days after the fall, tipped off by a detainee who called Mr. Bah's roommate in Brooklyn, relatives rushed to the detention center to ask Corrections Corporation employees where he was.
"They wouldn't give us any information," said Lamine Dieng, an American citizen who teaches physics at Bronx Community College and is married to Mr. Bah's cousin Khadidiatou.
On the fifth day, they said, a detention official called them with the name of the hospital. There they found Mr. Bah on life support, still in custody, with a detention guard around the clock.
"There was one guard who knew Boubacar," Ms. Bah said. "He told me on the down-low: 'This guy, you have to fight for him. This guy was neglected.' "
Within the week, word of the case reached a reporter at The Times, through an immigration lawyer who had received separate calls from two detainees; they were upset about a badly injured man — named "something like Aboubakar" — left in an isolation cell and later found near death.
But advocacy groups said they were unaware of the case. And Michael Gilhooly, the spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said that without the man's full name and eight-digit alien registration number, he could not check the information.
For those who knew Mr. Bah, it was hard to understand how such a man could lie dying without explanations.
"Everybody liked Boubacar," said Sadio Diallo, 48, who has a tailor shop in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where he and Mr. Bah had shared an apartment with fellow immigrants since arriving in 1998. "He's a very, very, very good man."
For six years, Mr. Bah had worked for L'Impasse, a clothing store in the West Village, sewing dresses that sold for up to $2,000 with what a former manager, Abdul Sall, called his "magic hands." Mr. Bah often spent Sundays at the Bronx townhouse his cousins had inherited from the family's first American citizen, a seaman who arrived in 1943.
In Africa, Mr. Bah's earnings not only supported his first wife, sons and ailing mother, but in Guinean tradition, allowed him to wed a second wife, long distance. It was his longing to see them all again after eight years that landed him in detention. When he returned from a three-month visit to Guinea in May 2006, immigration authorities at Kennedy Airport told him that his green card application had been denied while he was away, automatically revoking his permission to re-enter the United States. An immigration lawyer hired by his friends was unable to reopen the application while Mr. Bah waited for nine months in detention, records showed.
Mr. Bah died on May 30, 2007, after four months in a coma. His lawyer, Theodore Vialet, requested detention reports and hospital records under the Freedom of Information Act. But by the time the records arrived last autumn, the idea of a lawsuit had been dropped.
So Mr. Vialet just filed the records away — until a reporter's call about a name on the list of dead detainees prompted him to dig them out.
After the Fall
There are 57 pages of documents, some neatly typed by medics, some scrawled by guards. Some quote detainees who said Mr. Bah was ailing for two days before his fall on Feb. 1, and asked in vain to see a doctor.
The records leave unclear exactly when or how Mr. Bah was injured in detention. But they leave no doubt that guards, supervisors, government medical employees and federal immigration officers played a role in leaving him untreated, hour after hour, as he lapsed into a stupor.
It began about 8 a.m., according to the earliest report. Guards called a medical emergency after a detainee saw Mr. Bah collapse near a toilet, hitting the back of his head on the floor.
When he regained consciousness, Mr. Bah was taken to the medical unit, which is run by the federal Public Health Service. He became incoherent and agitated, reports said, pulling away from the doctor and grabbing at the unit staff. Physicians consulted later by The Times called this a textbook symptom of intracranial bleeding, but apparently no one recognized that at the time.
He was handcuffed and placed in leg restraints on the floor with medical approval, "to prevent injury," a guard reported. "While on the floor the detainee began to yell in a foreign language and turn from side to side," the guard wrote, and the medical staff deemed that "the screaming and resisting is behavior problems."
Mr. Bah was ordered to calm down. Instead, he kept crying out, then "began to regurgitate on the floor of medical," the report said. So Mr. Bah was written up for disobeying orders. And with the approval of a physician assistant, Michael Chuley, who wrote that Mr. Bah's fall was unwitnessed and "questionable," the tailor was taken in shackles to a solitary confinement cell with instructions that he be monitored.
Under detention protocols, an officer videotaped Mr. Bah as he lay vomiting in the medical unit, but the camera's battery failed, guards wrote, when they tried to tape his trip to cell No. 7.
Inside the cell, a supervisor removed Mr. Bah's restraints. He was unresponsive to questions asked by the Public Health Service officer on duty, a report said, adding: "The detainee set up in his bed and moan and he fell to his left side and hit his head on the bed rail."
About 9 a.m., with the approval of the health officer and a federal immigration agent, the cell was locked.
The watching began. As guards checked hourly, Mr. Bah appeared to be asleep on the concrete floor, snoring. But he could not be roused to eat lunch or dinner, and at 7:10 p.m., "he began to breathe heavily and started foaming slightly at the mouth," a guard wrote. "I notified medical at this time."
However, the nurse on duty rejected the guard's request to come check, according to reports. And at 8 p.m., when the warden went to the medical unit to describe Mr. Bah's condition, the nurse, Raymund Dela Pena, was not alarmed. "Detainee is likely exhibiting the same behavior as earlier in the day," he wrote, adding that Mr. Bah would get a mental health exam in the morning.
About 10:30 p.m., more than 14 hours after Mr. Bah's fall, the same nurse, on rounds, recognized the gravity of his condition: "unresponsive on the floor incontinent with foamy brown vomitus noted around mouth." Smelling salts were tried. Mr. Bah was carried back to the medical unit on a stretcher.
Just before 11, someone at the jail called 911.
When an ambulance left Mr. Bah at the hospital, brain scans showed he had a fractured skull and hemorrhages at all sides of his swelling brain. He was rushed to surgery, and the detention center was informed of the findings.
But in a report to their supervisors the next day, immigration officials at the center described Mr. Bah's ailment as "brain aneurysms" — a diagnosis they corrected a week later to "hemorrhages," without mentioning the skull fracture. After Mr. Bah's death, they wrote that his hospitalization was "subsequent to a fall in the shower."
The nurse, Mr. Dela Pena, and the physician assistant, Mr. Chuley, said that only their superiors could discuss the case. The Public Health Service did not respond to questions, and the Corrections Corporation said medical decisions were the responsibility of the Public Health Service.
Mr. Bah's cousins demanded an autopsy, but the Union County medical examiner's confidential report was not completed until Dec. 6. It was sent to the county prosecutor's office only as a matter of routine, because the matter had been classified as an "unattended accident resulting in death."
Prosecutors said they did not investigate. "According to the report, Bah suffered a fall in the shower," Eileen Walsh, a spokeswoman for the prosecutors, said in an e-mail message. "We are not privy to any other bits of information."
In the home movies Mr. Bah made of his last journey home, he is only a fleeting presence: a slim man with a shy smile. But without his support, relatives in Africa say they have little money for food and none for his sons' schooling.
His body went back to Guinea in a sealed coffin.
"I stayed here seven years, waiting for him," his second wife, Mariama, said in French, recalling their long separation and the brief reunion that led to the birth of their son, now a toddler, while Mr. Bah was in detention.
"I wanted them to open the casket," she added, "to know if it was him inside. Until today, I cry for him."
Margot Williams contributed reporting.
The New York Times, May 5, 2008
Word spread quickly inside the windowless walls of the Elizabeth Detention Center, an immigration jail in New Jersey: A detainee had fallen, injured his head and become incoherent. Guards had put him in solitary confinement, and late that night, an ambulance had taken him away more dead than alive.
But outside, for five days, no official notified the family of the detainee, Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea who had overstayed a tourist visa. When frantic relatives located him at University Hospital in Newark on Feb. 5, 2007, he was in a coma after emergency surgery for a skull fracture and multiple brain hemorrhages. He died there four months later without ever waking up, leaving family members on two continents trying to find out why.
Mr. Bah's name is one of 66 on a government list of deaths that occurred in immigration custody from January 2004 to November 2007, when nearly a million people passed through.
The list, compiled by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after Congress demanded the information, and obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act, is the fullest accounting to date of deaths in immigration detention, a patchwork of federal centers, county jails and privately run prisons that has become the nation's fastest-growing form of incarceration.
The list has few details, and they are often unreliable, but it serves as a rough road map to previously unreported cases like Mr. Bah's. And it reflects a reality that haunts grieving families like his: the difficulty of getting information about the fate of people taken into immigration custody, even when they die.
Mr. Bah's relatives never saw the internal records labeled "proprietary information — not for distribution" by the Corrections Corporation of America, which runs the New Jersey detention center for the federal government. The documents detail how he was treated by guards and government employees: shackled and pinned to the floor of the medical unit as he moaned and vomited, then left in a disciplinary cell for more than 13 hours, despite repeated notations that he was unresponsive and intermittently foaming at the mouth.
Mr. Bah had lived in New York for a decade, surrounded by a large circle of friends and relatives. The extravagant gowns he sewed to support his wife and children in West Africa were on display in a Manhattan boutique.
But he died in a sequestered system where questions about what had happened to him, or even his whereabouts, were met with silence.
As the country debates stricter enforcement of immigration laws, thousands of people who are not American citizens are being locked up for days, months or years while the government decides whether to deport them. Some have no valid visa; some are legal residents, but have past criminal convictions; others are seeking asylum from persecution.
Death is a reality in any jail, and the medical neglect of inmates is a perennial issue. But far more than in the criminal justice system, immigration detainees and their families lack basic ways to get answers when things go wrong.
No government body is required to keep track of deaths and publicly report them. No independent inquiry is mandated. And often relatives who try to investigate the treatment of those who died say they are stymied by fear of immigration authorities, lack of access to lawyers, or sheer distance.
Federal officials say deaths are reviewed internally by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which reports them to its inspector general and decides which ones warrant investigation. Officials say they notify the detainee's next of kin or consulate, and report the deaths to local medical authorities, who may conduct autopsies. In Mr. Bah's case, a review before his death found no evidence of foul play, an immigration spokesman said, though after later inquiries from The Times, he said a full review of the death was under way.
But critics, including many in Congress, say this piecemeal process leaves too much to the agency's discretion, allowing some deaths to be swept under the rug while potential witnesses are transferred or deported. They say it also obscures underlying complaints about medical care, abusive conditions or inadequate suicide prevention.
In January, the House passed a bill that would require states that receive certain federal money to report deaths in custody to their attorneys general. But the bill is stalled in the Senate, and it does not cover federal facilities.
The only tangible result of Congressional concern has been the list of 66 deaths, which names Mr. Bah and many other detainees for the first time, but raises as many questions as it answers.
For Mr. Bah's survivors, the mystery of his death is hard to bear. In Guinea, his first wife, Dalanda, wept as she spoke about the contradictory accounts that had reached her and her two teenage sons through other detainees, including some who speculated that Mr. Bah had been beaten.
In New York, a cousin who is an American citizen, Khadidiatou Bah, 38, said she was unable to bring a lawsuit, in part because other relatives were afraid of antagonizing the authorities.
"They don't want to push the case, or maybe they will be sent home," she said. "This guy was killed, and we don't know what happened."
Lingering Questions
The list of deaths where Mr. Bah's name surfaced is often cryptic. Along with 13 deaths cited as suicides and 14 as the result of cardiac ailments, it offers such causes as "undetermined" and "unwitnessed arrest, epilepsy." No one's nationality is given, some places of detention are omitted, and some names and birth dates seem garbled. As a result, many families could not be tracked down for this article.
But when they could be, they posed more disturbing questions.
In California, relatives of Walter Rodriguez-Castro, 28, said they were rebuffed when they tried to find out why his calls had stopped coming from the Kern County Jail in Bakersfield in April 2006. Then in June, his wife went to his scheduled hearing in San Francisco's immigration court and learned that he had been dead for many weeks, his body unclaimed in the county morgue.
The coroner found that Mr. Rodriguez-Castro, a mover from El Salvador in the country illegally, had died of undiagnosed meningitis and H.I.V., after days complaining of fever, stiff neck and vomiting. The cause of death on the government's list: "unresponsive."
Immigration authorities said on Friday that the case was now under review, but would not answer questions about it or other deaths on the list. Sgt. Ed Komin, a spokesman for the jail, said the death had been promptly reported to immigration officials, who were responsible for notifying families.
Four sons in another family, in Sacramento, described trying for days to get medical care for their father, Maya Nand, a 56-year-old legal immigrant from Fiji, at a detention center run by the Corrections Corporation in Eloy, Ariz. Mr. Nand, an architectural draftsman, had been ailing when he was taken into custody on Jan. 13, 2005, apparently because his application for citizenship had been rejected, based on an earlier conviction for misdemeanor domestic violence. In collect calls, the sons said, he told them that despite his chest pains and breathing problems, doctors at the detention center did not take his condition seriously.
The Corrections Corporation said he had been seen and treated "multiple times." But a letter to the family from an immigration official said his treatment was for a respiratory infection. The letter said that Mr. Nand was taken to an emergency room on Jan. 25, where congestive heart failure was diagnosed, and that he "suffered an apparent heart attack while at the hospital." He died on Feb. 2, 2005, shackled to a hospital bed in Tucson.
Boubacar Bah had more going for him than many detainees. He had a lawyer and many friends and relatives in the United States, and his detention center in New Jersey was one of the few frequented by immigrant advocates.
But three days after he suffered a head injury in detention last year, no one in his New York circle knew that he was lying comatose in a Newark hospital, where he had already been identified as a possible organ donor.
"Thank you for the referral," an organ-sharing network wrote on Feb. 3, 2007, according to hospital records. "This patient is a potential candidate for organ donation once brain death criteria is met."
Four days after the fall, tipped off by a detainee who called Mr. Bah's roommate in Brooklyn, relatives rushed to the detention center to ask Corrections Corporation employees where he was.
"They wouldn't give us any information," said Lamine Dieng, an American citizen who teaches physics at Bronx Community College and is married to Mr. Bah's cousin Khadidiatou.
On the fifth day, they said, a detention official called them with the name of the hospital. There they found Mr. Bah on life support, still in custody, with a detention guard around the clock.
"There was one guard who knew Boubacar," Ms. Bah said. "He told me on the down-low: 'This guy, you have to fight for him. This guy was neglected.' "
Within the week, word of the case reached a reporter at The Times, through an immigration lawyer who had received separate calls from two detainees; they were upset about a badly injured man — named "something like Aboubakar" — left in an isolation cell and later found near death.
But advocacy groups said they were unaware of the case. And Michael Gilhooly, the spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said that without the man's full name and eight-digit alien registration number, he could not check the information.
For those who knew Mr. Bah, it was hard to understand how such a man could lie dying without explanations.
"Everybody liked Boubacar," said Sadio Diallo, 48, who has a tailor shop in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where he and Mr. Bah had shared an apartment with fellow immigrants since arriving in 1998. "He's a very, very, very good man."
For six years, Mr. Bah had worked for L'Impasse, a clothing store in the West Village, sewing dresses that sold for up to $2,000 with what a former manager, Abdul Sall, called his "magic hands." Mr. Bah often spent Sundays at the Bronx townhouse his cousins had inherited from the family's first American citizen, a seaman who arrived in 1943.
In Africa, Mr. Bah's earnings not only supported his first wife, sons and ailing mother, but in Guinean tradition, allowed him to wed a second wife, long distance. It was his longing to see them all again after eight years that landed him in detention. When he returned from a three-month visit to Guinea in May 2006, immigration authorities at Kennedy Airport told him that his green card application had been denied while he was away, automatically revoking his permission to re-enter the United States. An immigration lawyer hired by his friends was unable to reopen the application while Mr. Bah waited for nine months in detention, records showed.
Mr. Bah died on May 30, 2007, after four months in a coma. His lawyer, Theodore Vialet, requested detention reports and hospital records under the Freedom of Information Act. But by the time the records arrived last autumn, the idea of a lawsuit had been dropped.
So Mr. Vialet just filed the records away — until a reporter's call about a name on the list of dead detainees prompted him to dig them out.
After the Fall
There are 57 pages of documents, some neatly typed by medics, some scrawled by guards. Some quote detainees who said Mr. Bah was ailing for two days before his fall on Feb. 1, and asked in vain to see a doctor.
The records leave unclear exactly when or how Mr. Bah was injured in detention. But they leave no doubt that guards, supervisors, government medical employees and federal immigration officers played a role in leaving him untreated, hour after hour, as he lapsed into a stupor.
It began about 8 a.m., according to the earliest report. Guards called a medical emergency after a detainee saw Mr. Bah collapse near a toilet, hitting the back of his head on the floor.
When he regained consciousness, Mr. Bah was taken to the medical unit, which is run by the federal Public Health Service. He became incoherent and agitated, reports said, pulling away from the doctor and grabbing at the unit staff. Physicians consulted later by The Times called this a textbook symptom of intracranial bleeding, but apparently no one recognized that at the time.
He was handcuffed and placed in leg restraints on the floor with medical approval, "to prevent injury," a guard reported. "While on the floor the detainee began to yell in a foreign language and turn from side to side," the guard wrote, and the medical staff deemed that "the screaming and resisting is behavior problems."
Mr. Bah was ordered to calm down. Instead, he kept crying out, then "began to regurgitate on the floor of medical," the report said. So Mr. Bah was written up for disobeying orders. And with the approval of a physician assistant, Michael Chuley, who wrote that Mr. Bah's fall was unwitnessed and "questionable," the tailor was taken in shackles to a solitary confinement cell with instructions that he be monitored.
Under detention protocols, an officer videotaped Mr. Bah as he lay vomiting in the medical unit, but the camera's battery failed, guards wrote, when they tried to tape his trip to cell No. 7.
Inside the cell, a supervisor removed Mr. Bah's restraints. He was unresponsive to questions asked by the Public Health Service officer on duty, a report said, adding: "The detainee set up in his bed and moan and he fell to his left side and hit his head on the bed rail."
About 9 a.m., with the approval of the health officer and a federal immigration agent, the cell was locked.
The watching began. As guards checked hourly, Mr. Bah appeared to be asleep on the concrete floor, snoring. But he could not be roused to eat lunch or dinner, and at 7:10 p.m., "he began to breathe heavily and started foaming slightly at the mouth," a guard wrote. "I notified medical at this time."
However, the nurse on duty rejected the guard's request to come check, according to reports. And at 8 p.m., when the warden went to the medical unit to describe Mr. Bah's condition, the nurse, Raymund Dela Pena, was not alarmed. "Detainee is likely exhibiting the same behavior as earlier in the day," he wrote, adding that Mr. Bah would get a mental health exam in the morning.
About 10:30 p.m., more than 14 hours after Mr. Bah's fall, the same nurse, on rounds, recognized the gravity of his condition: "unresponsive on the floor incontinent with foamy brown vomitus noted around mouth." Smelling salts were tried. Mr. Bah was carried back to the medical unit on a stretcher.
Just before 11, someone at the jail called 911.
When an ambulance left Mr. Bah at the hospital, brain scans showed he had a fractured skull and hemorrhages at all sides of his swelling brain. He was rushed to surgery, and the detention center was informed of the findings.
But in a report to their supervisors the next day, immigration officials at the center described Mr. Bah's ailment as "brain aneurysms" — a diagnosis they corrected a week later to "hemorrhages," without mentioning the skull fracture. After Mr. Bah's death, they wrote that his hospitalization was "subsequent to a fall in the shower."
The nurse, Mr. Dela Pena, and the physician assistant, Mr. Chuley, said that only their superiors could discuss the case. The Public Health Service did not respond to questions, and the Corrections Corporation said medical decisions were the responsibility of the Public Health Service.
Mr. Bah's cousins demanded an autopsy, but the Union County medical examiner's confidential report was not completed until Dec. 6. It was sent to the county prosecutor's office only as a matter of routine, because the matter had been classified as an "unattended accident resulting in death."
Prosecutors said they did not investigate. "According to the report, Bah suffered a fall in the shower," Eileen Walsh, a spokeswoman for the prosecutors, said in an e-mail message. "We are not privy to any other bits of information."
In the home movies Mr. Bah made of his last journey home, he is only a fleeting presence: a slim man with a shy smile. But without his support, relatives in Africa say they have little money for food and none for his sons' schooling.
His body went back to Guinea in a sealed coffin.
"I stayed here seven years, waiting for him," his second wife, Mariama, said in French, recalling their long separation and the brief reunion that led to the birth of their son, now a toddler, while Mr. Bah was in detention.
"I wanted them to open the casket," she added, "to know if it was him inside. Until today, I cry for him."
Margot Williams contributed reporting.
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