How Many Other Rapes Have There Been?

Two years ago, just before Christmas I was returning home from Mexico. There were two of us traveling in my car. My friend Yolanda was accompanying me - she is a resident of Monterrey. We crossed at the Pharr International Bridge, in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas.

The immigration officer who issued her a visa was extremely rude and angry with her. As usual we didn't say anything, because as we all know, if you call them on something you will get bounced back in a hurry.

But his inapproapriate demeanor wasn't enough. As Yolanda and I were about to leave the parking lot of the Immigration office at the bridge, she decided to go through her purse to make sure she had all her documents in order, especially since she was so stressed from being mistreated by the ICE officer. She found that her "matricula" was missing. This is a very important identification card used by Mexican citizens - in the United States it can be used to board airplanes...

The card was not in her purse, she had not dropped it on the floorboard of the car, it was not somewhere in the parking lot. We both walked back into the ICE office and before we said anything, another officer walked towards us with his hand raised in the air. He was holding her matricula. The officer who had kept the card was in the back.

Was the first officer stealing her card? He handed her documents back to her in a group - minus the matricula. We decided not to complain at that moment because we didn't want to risk Yolanda being stopped at the border (which had happened before because she was not carryiing her proof of employment card).

Later as we told friends about the incident, similar stories came up, about lost papers, lost matriculas, lost passports... ICE agents who sell these documents.

No one wants to report them. I know a DREAM ACT student whose mother complained to ICE and was deported - and had to leave her children behind.

How many women have been raped by ICE agents, but were afraid to report the crime? As we know, if ICE gets angry, they can go to your home and take everyone who isn't documented - and even a few citizens if they want to.


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Posted on Sat, Nov. 17, 2007
Miami Herald
Immigration agent charged with raping woman

BY ALFONSO CHARDY AND JAY WEAVER
An immigration agent driving a Jamaican woman from a Miami-Dade detention center to one in Broward took her to his home instead and raped her, according to federal criminal charges filed late Friday.
A criminal complaint filed in Miami federal court alleges that Wilfredo Vazquez, 35, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, sexually assaulted the 39-year-old Jamaican mother of two on the afternoon of Sept. 21 at his Tamarac home.

The woman said she was ''afraid'' of Vazquez, according to the three-count criminal complaint. She ``emphasized that Vazquez was wearing his firearm at all times, and she did not know what he was capable of doing to her.''

Federal authorities are poring over computer records and other documents that track Vazquez's involvement in previous detainee transfers to see if other women were attacked but feared coming forward.

Vazquez, who worked for the agency for less than a year as an immigration enforcement agent, was picked up Friday evening in Tampa, where he had been on rotation with an unidentified military reserve unit. He is scheduled to make his first appearance in Tampa federal court on Monday.

Cheryl Little, executive director of Miami-based Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, which represents the victim, said the woman was released from immigration detention Nov. 1. The Miami Herald, as a policy, does not identify rape victims.

''I was scared for my life,'' the woman said in a telephone interview before being released. ``He had a gun. He's a big man, and I was in his custody. I expected him to protect me, not to take advantage of me.''

Little said the woman cried with relief when told Friday night about the arrest.

''It was such an emotional moment when I told her,'' Little said.

Vazquez denied several times to investigators that the incident happened or that he stopped other than to get gas, according to an affidavit by Homeland Security agent David Nieland.

But records from Florida's Turnpike SunPass electronic toll system showed Vazquez's official vehicle left the highway at a Commercial Boulevard ramp near his home, the affidavit said, and the woman described his home and neighborhood to investigators.

The sexual assault case is the first since 2000, when officials at the Krome detention center opened an investigation into sexual misconduct by guards and officers at the west Miami-Dade detention facility.

At least one officer and one contract employee were convicted. The scandal prompted immigration authorities to remove female detainees from Krome. Most women are now housed at the Broward Transitional Center at Pompano Beach, though some are first processed at Krome.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a statement late Friday saying Vazquez was fired ``shortly after the allegation was lodged against him.''

''ICE takes employee misconduct very seriously,'' the statement said. ``As such, Wilfredo Vazquez was arrested [Friday] following a thorough criminal investigation by the ICE Office of Professional Responsibility, the [Department of Homeland Security] Office of Inspector General and the Broward County Sheriff's Office.''

The Broward Sheriff's Office first opened the investigation in late September after the victim disclosed the episode to authorities. The U.S. attorney's office in Miami then developed the case under prosecutor Daniel Rashbaum.

The Jamaican woman was being processed at Krome for transfer to Pompano Beach after being sentenced to time served in connection with a false claim to U.S. citizenship. Immigration officials planned to put her in deportation proceedings after having lived in in the United States for 12 years. She has a 20-year-old daughter and a young son.

She was at Krome's intake room when Vazquez noticed her among a crowd of male detainees, according to a statement she gave to her attorneys.

In that statement, the woman said the officer told intake officials he would drive her to the Pompano Beach facility. Then he turned to the woman and said: ``I'll rescue you, so you don't have to wait for them to process all the men.''

Before putting her in the back of a van, Vazquez took the handcuffs off the woman and allegedly said: ``I don't cuff females.''

A Broward Sheriff's Office report said Vazquez later stopped the van, after asking the woman if she was hungry, and said: ``You can sit in the front if you are going to be a good girl.''

Vazquez then asked the woman if she needed to make a phone call, handed her an earpiece and dialed calls to the woman's daughter and a friend.

After she finished the calls, the officer asked her if she was wearing ''federal underwear'' and to show it to him. ''I told him no,'' according to the statement.

Later, the officer called his wife on his cellphone to check if she was at home. ''He told me that she was not,'' the woman said in the statement.

Inside his home he asked her to ``take off those federal clothes.''

'I just stood there praying to myself, saying, `God, please don't let this man hurt me.' I was asking God to have mercy so this man wouldn't kill me. . . . All I could think of was . . . if he was crazy enough to bring me to his house and rape me, then what would he be willing to do to cover it up?''

After about 15 minutes, the agent ordered her to get dressed and walk to the van.

She noticed a van parked across the street with lights on.

''I thought about running over there and screaming for help,'' she stated. ``But then I thought he might just shoot me in the back and say that I tried to escape from him.''

After arriving at the Broward facility, the woman was taken to her room. ``I just laid on my bed in the fetal position crying.''

A short time later, another Jamaican female detainee asked why she was crying. The woman shared what happened. The next day, the other detainee reported the conversation to facility officials, who took the victim to the BSO and a treatment center.

The woman told The Miami Herald that she keeps replaying the episode in her mind and wondering whether she could have done something to prevent it.

'I keep thinking, `What could I have done to stop him?' '' she asked.


http://www.miamiherald.com/519/v-print/story/311312.html

More Than 30,000 Immigrant Detainees in the U.S.

A few facts:

1. November 2007 - more than 30,000 immigrant detainees in the U.S.
2. 66 detainee deaths since 2004.
3. 261,000 deportations by the end of the 2007 fiscal year.
4. In 2007 ICE spent more than $10 million dollars transporting 19,400 detainees.
5. One million immigrants in custody since 2004.
6. More than 3,700 detainees in California alone.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-immig5nov05,1,4224180.story?ctrack=3&cset=true
From the Los Angeles Times
Immigration detainees are at record levels
To cope with the numbers, federal officials speed up deportations, transfer more people between facilities and use more private jails.
By Anna Gorman
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

November 5, 2007

Aggressive immigration enforcement has led to record numbers of detainees in California and around the nation, prompting the federal government to speed up deportations and increasingly rely on transfers and contracts with local jails and private companies.

The detainee population jumped to nearly 27,900 nationwide in fiscal year 2007, up from about 19,700 the previous year, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In California, the population increased to more than 3,700, up from a little more than 3,200 last year.

Two weeks ago, the population surpassed 30,000 nationally and nearly reached 4,000 in California.

The main reason cited for the upward trend is the government's decision to end its practice of catching immigrants and immediately releasing them.

Detention is the only way to guarantee that people leave the country when their deportation is ordered, immigration officials said. Fewer than a third of people out of custody leave the country when ordered to do so, despite being under intensive supervision.

"If we have them detained and they are ordered removed, it's almost a virtual certainty that they will, in fact, be removed," said Gary Mead, assistant director of the immigration agency's Detention and Removal Operations.

"Everything short of detention is less effective to one degree or another."

The number of immigrants deported has risen to more than 261,000 in fiscal 2007, up from about 177,000 two years ago. The 2007 fiscal year ended Sept. 30.

Organizations opposing illegal immigration praise the government for locking up and deporting more immigrants.

"The administration has finally realized they needed to dramatically ramp up their detention capacity if immigration enforcement is ever to be credible," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the conservative Center for Immigration Studies.

But immigrants and their advocates say the high numbers have led to crowded conditions and have limited some immigrants' access to medical care.

Detainees at the San Pedro Processing Center on Terminal Island often had to sleep on inflatable beds on the floor and had difficulty getting access to phones, immigrants and their attorneys said.

The detention center, opened in the 1930s, was temporarily shut down last month for maintenance.

"The overcrowding at San Pedro was crazy," said former detainee Eugene Peba, who was denied asylum from Nigeria and is awaiting a federal appellate court ruling. "They didn't have enough employees to take care of the detainees' day-to-day problems."

In July, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported that populations at four facilities, including San Pedro and a center in San Diego, were over capacity. The report also noted "systemic" problems with telephones in detention centers and isolated problems with medical care and use-of-force policies.

"When the number of people in detention is increasing but the number of people assigned by the government to oversee that detention is not, problems are bound to increase and keep increasing," said Ranjana Natarajan, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.

Immigration officials defended conditions and said there is no overcrowding. In fiscal 2007, they said, the facilities run by ICE were at 95% capacity and the contracted private centers were at 98% capacity. The phone situation has been fixed and the centers' telephones, along with speed-dial numbers for attorneys and consulates, are checked weekly to make sure they are working, they said.

The agency also has taken several steps in recent months to improve oversight, including working with a private company that provides full-time inspectors and placing outside "quality assurance" specialists at the 40 biggest facilities, authorities said. Previously, inspections were done once a year at each facility.

"When we find a deficiency, we correct it," Mead said. "I don't believe we have any systemic problems."

The immigration agency's budget for bed space skyrocketed to $945 million last year, up from $641 million in fiscal year 2005.

The majority of detainees, about 63%, are held at hundreds of city and county jails around the nation. The rest are housed at eight centers operated by the immigration agency and seven private facilities run by companies such as the Corrections Corp. of America and the GEO Group.

The agency releases some detainees on bond or electronic monitoring, depending on the risk of flight.

Because of the cost of maintaining aging facilities such as San Pedro, the immigration agency has no plans to build more of its own detention centers and is considering whether to transfer more facilities to private control. Contracting with private facilities provides two main benefits: flexibility in placing centers where they are needed and speed in getting them open, Mead said.

The agency is also contracting more with city and county jails, which accept immigrants when space is available.

Advocates and attorneys criticize the government's reliance on local jails, saying immigrants are being mixed with the regular criminal population. Many immigrant detainees have not committed any crime other than being in the U.S. illegally, they said.

"You have 300 jails running in 300 different ways, and it's hard for ICE to manage that," said Natarajan of the ACLU. "There is no training of local jail officials and guards on ICE detention standards."

But Krikorian said the use of city and county jails is an ideal way to increase detention space without building new centers. "It's not as if arsonists and bank robbers are being let go to make room for illegal immigrants," he said. "That is unused capacity."

Immigrant rights advocates also criticize the use of transfers because they separate families, can delay cases and make it hard for detainees to communicate with their attorneys.

"Attorneys are constantly complaining about literally losing their clients," said Alison Parker, a deputy director at Human Rights Watch, who has researched immigration detention.

Fernando Cabrera, a Salvadoran green card holder fighting to stay in the U.S. despite a criminal conviction, said he was transferred suddenly in December 2006 from California to Alabama. Some of his legal papers were lost in the transfer, he said. Cabrera was sent back to California and then to Texas after San Pedro shut its doors.

The immigration agency began transferring large numbers of detainees at the end of 2006, when it created a center to coordinate the movement of detainees. In 2007, the agency spent more than $10 million to transfer nearly 19,400 detainees.

The transfer system enables the agency to balance the population and plan enforcement operations. For example, when more than 1,300 fugitives and criminals were arrested in the Los Angeles area this fall, immigration agents prepared for the influx by locating open beds around the country.

To keep immigration court cases moving, the agency changes venues in some and relies on videoconferencing in others. Mead said that security concerns prevent advance notification of detainees or their attorneys but that the agency informs attorneys of record as soon as the transfer takes place.

Mead acknowledged that families are affected but said immigrants have access to telephones.

"That's just an unfortunate circumstance," he said. "But the reason they are in custody is because of an immigration violation, and that is going to present a hardship on their family regardless of where they are."

One of the areas of immigration detention that has drawn the most controversy is medical treatment. Since 2004, 66 people have died in custody, including a detainee at San Pedro with AIDS who advocates say died after being denied vital medical care.

"When there are too many people in a facility, medical personnel are overwhelmed and their ability to respond effectively completely breaks down," said Parker of Human Rights Watch.

Peba, the Nigerian immigrant, said it was very difficult to get medical attention at San Pedro and at a facility in Lancaster run by the L.A. County Sheriff's Department.

"It takes months even begging to see a doctor," said Peba, who said he has post-traumatic stress disorder and chronic wrist pain. "That's inhuman treatment."

Immigration officials defend the agency's medical treatment, saying it spent almost $100 million during fiscal 2007 to treat detainees for myriad physical and mental health issues, including cancer, diabetes and heart disease. Mead said the agency takes every death seriously but that more than 1 million immigrants have been in agency custody since 2004.

"Given the number of people that go through our custody and given the fact that many of them do not come from a history of exceptional healthcare and health habits, our mortality rate is extremely low," he said.

anna.gorman@latimes.com

Investigation into Alleged Mistreatment in Immigrant Detention Centers

Photo: Mother Jones Magazine



A group from the Organization of American States is planning to investigate reports of abuse in U.S. detention centers. When a U.N. inspector tried to visit a Texas detention center earlier this year, he was refused entrance. Perhaps the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights will have better luck.

If the IACHR can't get in either, then we know we really have a serious problem on our hands.

_____

IMMIGRATION
Detention centers under fire
A human rights group alleged that immigrants in U.S. detention centers are denied contact with families and receive inadequate healthcare.
Posted on Sat, Oct. 13, 2007
Miami Herald
BY LESLEY CLARK
lclark@MiamiHerald.com

WASHINGTON --
An international human rights watchdog group said Friday that it plans to investigate allegations of mistreatment among immigrants held in the nation's detention centers.
The interest from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, or IACHR, a branch of the Organization of American States, comes just a week after a House subcommittee held its first hearing to look at complaints about healthcare in the detention centers, including one in Miami.

The enhanced scrutiny of the facilities that hold both undocumented immigrants and legal immigrants who are being held for deportation and other proceedings comes as the number of detainees increases, along with a crackdown on illegal immigration.

Representatives of immigrant advocacy groups who appeared before the commission to ask it to look into conditions at the centers said they were encouraged by the move.

''We really need the attention of the international community and the public to force the Congress and the administration to require that detainees are treated humanely,'' said Kerri Sherlock Talbot, director of policy at the Rights Working Group, a coalition of human rights, civil liberties and immigrant-rights organizations in the United States.

The immigration advocates depicted detention centers as modified prisons where even children are forced to wear prison uniforms, are denied contact with family and where pleas for medical attention are ignored. They noted that 66 people in U.S. custody have died since 2004...



for link to article click title of this post

photo: posted on gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com, from http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2006/05/cellblock_04_600x726.jpg

ACLU Files Suit Against ICE for Drugging Deportees

"The new information shows the government's forcible drugging policy is more widespread than previously suggested," said ACLU attorney Ahilan T. Arulanantham.

----
Deportees file motion over forced sedation

A pastor in Riverside is one of two men who accuse immigration officials of injecting them with potentially lethal doses of anti-psychotic drugs against their will.
By Joe Mozingo, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 10, 2007

The ACLU filed a motion Tuesday in federal court to stop immigration authorities from forcibly drugging deportees in order to send them back to their home countries on commercial airlines.

The motion comes after an official with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement testified before the Senate last month that 50 immigrants had been given psychotropic drugs against their will over a seven-month period. Thirty-three of them had no previous psychiatric diagnosis.

One deportee, a Christian pastor in Riverside, was pinned down in a holding cell in Los Angeles the day before he was scheduled to be flown to his native Indonesia, the ACLU contended in court papers. Another, a Senegalese man, was wrestled down in the aisle of a plane parked at LAX and injected with medication. Those two deportees were in addition to the 50 cited during the Senate hearing.

"The new information shows the government's forcible drugging policy is more widespread than previously suggested," said ACLU attorney Ahilan T. Arulanantham.

"It's both medically inappropriate and shocking that the government believes it can treat immigrants like animals and shoot them up with powerful anti-psychotic drugs that can be fatal -- without a doctor's examination or court oversight."

The motion comes as part of a lawsuit the American Civil Liberties Union filed in June on behalf of the Riverside pastor and the Senegalese man, who were detained at Terminal Island and then forcibly drugged during the deportation process. The civil rights group contends that practice violates both the Bill of Rights and federal law regarding the medical treatment of detainees, and may constitute torture.

Both men are appealing their asylum claims. They ultimately were not deported and have been released, pending their appeals.

ICE spokeswoman Lauri Haley would not comment about the pending litigation, but said the forced medications were exceedingly rare. When they are necessary, they are both legal and overseen by "medical professionals," she said.

"Medical sedation is an act of last resort and is rarely used," she said.

According to a brief filed by the government, ICE policy allows for forcibly medicating detainees only if "a medical professional from the U.S. Public Health Service. . . determined that they present a danger to themselves or to others."

The government has not disclosed the circumstances of the forced medications. Only one of the two ACLU plaintiffs even knows what drugs he was given, according to documents recently filed in the case.

The day before he was to be sent back to his native Indonesia, Raymond Soeoth said, two officers pinned him down on a bench in a holding cell and injected him in the buttocks. His medical records show that they gave him two powerful anti-psychotic medications -- Haldol (haloperidol) and Cogentin -- even though he had no history of psychosis.

No doctor had examined Soeoth, an ethnic Chinese and Christian who fled his predominantly Muslim country in 1999 to escape religious persecution, he said. An unsigned note in his medical record, which was attached to the motion, said "psyche meds requested. . . for patient's threats to kill self if deported." Another note said Soeoth was given the medication for "telling officers he would not board airplane."

Dr. Mark Mills, a Columbia University professor of psychiatry retained by the ACLU to review the case, called the involuntary medication "profoundly disturbing."

If Soeoth was suicidal, the appropriate medication would not be Haldol, which can cause serious side effects, but "an anti-depressant or mood-stabilizing drug," Mills wrote in a sworn declaration. Haldol "is never clinically appropriate for patients who are not suffering from some form of psychosis," Mills wrote.

Mills also said that the dose of Cogentin was twice the standard dose of 2 milligrams. "In more than 30 years of psychiatric practice, I have never seen or heard of a case where 4 milligrams was delivered at once, particularly as an initial matter."

The case of the second plaintiff, Amadou Laime Diouf, was equally troubling to Mills, particularly because authorities made no note of the medication they used and because they injected him through clothing, which "greatly increases the likelihood of site infection."

In a sworn statement, Diouf said the incident occurred while on the tarmac at LAX waiting to be flown to his native Senegal. When Diouf asked a flight attendant to talk to the captain because he felt he was being deported in violation of an appeals court order, his immigration escorts grew angry, wrestling him to the floor and injecting him through his pants, he said.

Hearing the commotion, the captain ordered Diouf and the escorts off the plane. But the drug made Diouf's legs numb. He fell going down the stairs, and was disoriented and sleepy for days, he said.

Arulanantham of the ACLU said the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals had ordered a stay on Diouf's deportation at the time immigration authorities were trying to remove him.

He said that the Soeoth and Diouf cases showed that the practice has not been limited to plaintiffs posing a danger.

The men and their lawyers asked U.S. District Judge Terry J. Hatter Jr. to issue an order halting the practice while the lawsuit is being settled. Hatter declined to immediately rule on an earlier request to do the same.

Government attorneys, in turn, asked Hatter to dismiss the injunction motion because the plaintiffs could not "demonstrate they face an immediate threat of irreparable injury as they allege occurred in the past."

They also said the policy has changed so that ICE now must get an order from a judge to medicate a detainee.

ACLU attorneys said it was not clear what type of hearing the detainees would get and whether they could appeal.

In Tuesday's filing, they argued that testimony provided by Julie Myers during her Senate confirmation hearing to become chief of ICE contradicted "government officials' repeated assertions that the practice is rare and reserved only for emergencies."

"Based on the numbers Ms. Myers provided, it appears that every month the government forcibly drugs about five noncitizens who are not mentally ill."



joe.mozingo@latimes.com

Switzerland and the U.S. are not Alone in Their Treatment of Immigrants

8 October 2007 20:56
Inhumanity, hypocrisy, and a policy that shames Britain
Published: 05 October 2007
London Independent

The Government's policy for removing asylum-seekers is under the spotlight as never before. We report today chilling allegations of brutality by immigration officers against deportees. And yesterday the Home Office asked the Law Lords to overturn a Court of Appeal ruling concerning the fate of three asylum-seekers from Darfur.

The Asylum and Immigration Tribunal had originally decreed that the three men should be sent back to the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, because there was no likelihood that they would be persecuted on their return. That ruling was subsequently struck down by the Appeal Court, which ruled that, although it agreed with the Home Office that there was no risk of persecution, terrible conditions in the refugee camps around the capital made it inhumane to order their resettlement there.

...What lies behind this inhumanity? The Government wants to boost the deportation figures so it can win plaudits from the right-wing press for being "tough" on matters of immigration. The treatment of those who have fled here under threat of death in their home country, or merely in search of a better life, shames our government. It also shames Britain.


For complete article click title to this post