[NYTr] Ashcroft's Quiet Prisoner

[nytr at olm.blythe-systems.com]

The New York Times - August 13, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/13/opinion/13herb.html


Ashcroft's Quiet Prisoner

by Bob Herbert

Miami — David Joseph is a little guy, about 5-foot-5, maybe 115 pounds.
He's 20 years old, looks younger, and has the sluggish demeanor and sad
expression of one who is deeply depressed. He has nightmares and
headaches. He spends his days dressed in the blue fatigues of detainees at
the federal Krome Detention Center, washing dishes at mealtimes, staring
listlessly at television images broadcast in a language he doesn't
understand, and praying.

"I thought I would come here for a few days and be released," he told me
in a soft voice, his words translated by an interpreter. "But I watch the
other people come and go, and I am stuck here."

Mr. Joseph is a refugee from Haiti who is seeking asylum in the United
States. He is not a terrorist, and no one has even suggested that he is a
threat to anyone. And yet he's been in federal custody for nearly two
years.

An immigration judge and the Board of Immigration Appeals have ruled that
he should be freed on bond, pending a final ruling on his asylum request.
But the attorney general of the United States, John Ashcroft, won't let
him go.

Playing his ever-present, all-encompassing terrorism card, Mr. Ashcroft
personally intervened in Mr. Joseph's case, summarily blocking his
release. According to the attorney general, releasing this young Haitian
would tend to encourage mass migration from Haiti, and might exacerbate
the potential danger to national security of nefarious aliens from
Pakistan and elsewhere who might be inclined to use Haiti as a staging
area for migration to the U.S.

Mr. Ashcroft has been out in the Washington sun too long. Terrorism is not
an issue here. Mr. Joseph is a nervous, nail-biting young man who has an
uncle in Brooklyn who's a U.S. citizen and would be only too happy to take
in his nephew. Keeping Mr. Joseph imprisoned for years is inhumane.

What's really at work here is the Bush administration's unwillingness to
budge even an inch from its unfair and frequently cruel treatment of
Haitians seeking refuge in the United States.

Mr. Joseph and a younger brother, Daniel, were among more than 200
Haitians aboard a boat that landed at Key Biscayne, Fla., in October 2002.
The boys' immediate family had been viciously attacked in the political
turmoil that wracked their homeland, and David Joseph still does not know
whether the mother and father he left behind are alive. (Daniel, a
teenager, is reportedly in foster care in New York.)

The United States may be a beacon of liberty, but when someone like David
Joseph sails toward that beacon he can find himself perversely embraced in
the barbed wire of a place like Krome.

"He was fleeing persecution,'' said Selena Mendy Singleton, a vice
president of TransAfrica Forum, a research and policy group that is among
several organizations supporting Mr. Joseph's request for asylum. "He is
not a threat to the community. He is not a terrorist. And he meets the
criteria to be released on bond. David needs to be let out."

Mr. Ashcroft was pointedly questioned about the Joseph case by Senator
Arlen Specter during an appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee
in June.

"On April 17 of last year," said Mr. Specter, "an issue came before you
where there was a young Haitian refugee where there had not been any
showing of a problem with respect to terrorism. And you overruled both the
immigration judge and the Board of Immigration Appeals. And then the
inspector general of the Department of Justice criticized the department
for the failure to distinguish between immigration detainees who are
connected to terrorism and those who don't have any reason for
detention.''

Senator Specter urged Mr. Ashcroft to consider a policy in which the
Justice Department would address cases like Mr. Joseph's on a less
sweeping, "more individual" basis, which would enable officials to
determine whether there was any real basis for concern about terrorism.

Mr. Ashcroft was unmoved. He told Senator Specter: "Sometimes individual
treatment is important. Sometimes it's important to make a statement about
groups of people that come."

So David Joseph, a threat to no one, sits and waits and prays at Krome.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company