Death and Secrets: Immigration Policy under Obama Hasn't Changed Much

Felix Franklin Rodriguez

The death of Felix Franklin Rodriguez was in the news back in 2007. That same year, Senator Richard Durbin tried to pass the DREAM Act.

When Obama was elected, I was relieved. I thought, oh yes, the DREAM Act will pass, immigration will get straightened out. People won't die in detention camps anymore. I'll never be harassed at the airport again.

None of this has happened. The DREAMers are still languishing. Hundreds of thousands of undocumented workers are still being detained.

The airports haven't changed much. I flew to Buenos Aires a few days ago. They have a new security device that looks like an MRI that stands up. My daughter and I were told to stand in the middle while it photographed us. I've seen articles about this thing. The workers can see your naked body very very well. At first I thought that everyone was being expected to be X-Rayed. But then I saw a few middled aged white guys coming through the other "free" lane...

When I came out of the machine the worker asked me to stretch out my arms.... of course she didn't find anything sinister.

Maybe I was delusional thinking the Obama Administration could really do something. But I conveniently forgot that its the Congress that makes the rules, and puts pressure on the agencies to change... Having the person at the top be a nice guy isn't enough. Its our whole society that has to re-invent itself.

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August 21, 2009

Immigrant’s Death Shows Hard Path to Detention Reform

By NINA BERNSTEIN

In the fall of 2006, a man’s death brought a team of government investigators to the large privately run immigration jail in Eloy, Ariz., in the desert between Phoenix and Tucson. Medical care was so poor, the team later warned federal immigration officials, that “detainee welfare is in jeopardy.”

Another death there soon spurred another inquiry, and another scathing report was issued about the care provided by the private company, the Corrections Corporation of America.

But the government scrutiny did not add up to much for Felix Franklin Rodriguez-Torres, 36, an Ecuadorean construction worker who wound up in Eloy that fall as an unauthorized immigrant after being jailed for petit larceny in New York City. By mid-December, a fellow detainee told the man’s relatives, Mr. Rodriguez lay pleading for medical help on the floor of his cell, unable to move.

He died weeks later of testicular cancer, a typically fast-growing but treatable disease, which had gone undiagnosed and untreated during his two months at Eloy, which holds more than 1,500 detainees. And despite a high-level discussion of his case among federal immigration officials while he was dying — captured in e-mail messages between Washington and Arizona — his death on Jan. 18, 2007, was not even listed on the roster of detention fatalities that the agency produced under pressure last year and updated in April....link to complete article

The List

link to photo

Surely I have written about this before. It's about flying while named Jose and Maria. Those are my parent's first names. They are in their mid eighties. Every time they fly they are searched. Why? Because their names are Jose and Maria. As Juan Fernando Gomez writes in his article in today's WaPo, too bad for any kid named Juan (or Jose and Maria). Think twice before you name your newborn.

Somebody out there, who the TSA is afraid of, has the same name as my parents. Every time their wheelchairs are pushed through security, someone says "stop!."

Of course, this isn't as bad as what Gomez experiences. The first time this happened to them, four years ago, the porter who was helping with their baggage had a quiet talk with the airline clerk at the check in counter. I called Continental and they assured me it wouldn't happen again. They were wrong.

Luckily, when we flew my Dad to New York for the opening of the 2007 Yankees season, the guy who searched him was sympathetic. With an apologetic smile, he gently searched my 84 year old father.

Let's hope Obama gets some sense back into our Department of Homeland Security. He needs to have a talk with the head of the TSA.

My Dad fought in the Pacific Theater in WWII. He was part of the invasion of Luzon. He even took his kids to see the Alamo. That's pretty American for a guy born in Mexico. He doesn't deserve to be on anybody's list of questionable travelers. Neither does Juan Fernando Gomez.

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MISSED CONNECTIONS
Why Can't I Get Off This List?
Washington Post
By Juan Fernando Gómez
Sunday, December 28, 2008; Page B03

I call it the little room. In most cases it's actually not that small, but my claustrophobia seems to kick in as soon as the immigration officer separates me from the other passengers on my flight and escorts me through a door into my own private travel hell.

As you sit in crowded airports waiting for your long-delayed flights, cursing yourself for traveling over the holidays, remember: It could be worse. You could be me. My ordeal begins before the plane touches down in the United States, some time between the moment when the flight attendant begins handing out blank immigration and customs forms and when I hear the wheels disengaging in the belly of the plane. Will I sail through immigration and customs, I wonder, or will this be the time that they get me? Might I even be whisked off to Guantanamo?

The crazy thing is that I have done nothing wrong. I am a U.S. citizen and have no criminal record. I pay my taxes (well, except for those few years when, right out of grad school, I was convinced that taxes did not apply to me). I don't litter. The problem is that I happen to share a name with at least one shady character on the Terrorist Screening Center's watch list. At least, that's the list that I believe I am on, although no official will tell me for sure.



My name is common in Latin America, the Spanish equivalent of John Smith. It also seems to be particularly popular among law-breakers. I once sneaked a peek at an immigration officer's computer and saw an entire screen full of my doppelgangers. Who knows how many of them were bad guys and how many were law-abiding saps like me?

It doesn't help that my travel habits are similar to those of people who actually belong on a watch list. I grew up in Medellín, Colombia, during the height of the Pablo Escobar drug wars and have worked for the better part of the past decade in some of the most dangerous places in the world. In countries such as Afghanistan and Colombia, I help farmers find legal, profitable and sustainable alternatives to growing coca and poppies, the raw material for cocaine and heroin. So I guess it's understandable that my passport -- packed with added pages and stamps marking my entry into and exit from countries such as Cambodia, Bolivia and Haiti -- raises eyebrows.

It seems to me, though, that airport security should know enough to tell me from the terrorists. I'm not easily offended, but being treated like a dangerous criminal every time I enter the country is getting a little old...more


Juan Fernando Gómez is a director in the Afghanistan and Pakistan region for Chemonics, a Washington-based international development consulting firm.

Face scans at airports in the E.U.?

Detail of photo: Image Source/Getty

what movie would this remind you of?
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Face scans for air passengers to begin in UK this summer

Officials say automatic screening more accurate than checks by humans

* Owen Bowcott
* The Guardian - London,
* Friday April 25 2008

Airline passengers are to be screened with facial recognition technology rather than checks by passport officers, in an attempt to improve security and ease congestion, the Guardian can reveal.

From summer, unmanned clearance gates will be phased in to scan passengers' faces and match the image to the record on the computer chip in their biometric passports.

Border security officials believe the machines can do a better job than humans of screening passports and preventing identity fraud. The pilot project will be open to UK and EU citizens holding new biometric passports.

But there is concern that passengers will react badly to being rejected by an automated gate. To ensure no one on a police watch list is incorrectly let through, the technology will err on the side of caution and is likely to generate a small number of "false negatives" - innocent passengers rejected because the machines cannot match their appearance to the records.

They may be redirected into conventional passport queues, or officers may be authorised to override automatic gates following additional checks.

Ministers are eager to set up trials in time for the summer holiday rush, but have yet to decide how many airports will take part. If successful, the technology will be extended to all UK airports.

The automated clearance gates introduce the new technology to the UK mass market for the first time and may transform the public's experience of airports.

Existing biometric, fast-track travel schemes - iris and miSense - operate at several UK airports, but are aimed at business travellers who enroll in advance.

The rejection rate in trials of iris recognition, by means of the unique images of each traveller's eye, is 3% to 5%, although some were passengers who were not enrolled but jumped into the queue.

The trials emerged at a conference in London this week of the international biometrics industry, top civil servants in border control, and police technology experts. Gary Murphy, head of operational design and development for the UK Border Agency, told one session: "We think a machine can do a better job [than manned passport inspections]. What will the public reaction be? Will they use it? We need to test and see how people react and how they deal with rejection. We hope to get the trial up and running by the summer.

Some conference participants feared passengers would only be fast-tracked to the next bottleneck in overcrowded airports. Automated gates are intended to help the government's progress to establishing a comprehensive advance passenger information (API) security system that will eventually enable flight details and identities of all passengers to be checked against a security watch list.

Phil Booth of the No2Id Campaign said: "Someone is extremely optimistic. The technology is just not there. The last time I spoke to anyone in the facial recognition field they said the best systems were only operating at about a 40% success rate in a real time situation. I am flabbergasted they consider doing this at a time when there are so many measures making it difficult for passengers."

Gus Hosein, a specialist at the London School of Economics in the interplay between technology and society, said: "It's a laughable technology. US police at the SuperBowl had to turn it off within three days because it was throwing up so many false positives. The computer couldn't even recognise gender. It's not that it could wrongly match someone as a terrorist, but that it won't match them with their image. A human can make assumptions, a computer can't."

Project Semaphore, the first stage in the government's e-borders programme, monitors 30m passenger movements a year through the UK. By December 2009, API will track 60% of all passengers and crew movements. The Home Office aim is that by December 2010 the system will be monitoring 95%. Total coverage is not expected to be achieved until 2014 after similar checks have been introduced for travel on "small yachts and private flights".

So far around 8m to 10m UK biometric passports, containing a computer chip holding the carrier's facial details, have been issued since they were introduced in 2006. The last non-biometric passports will cease to be valid after 2016.

Home Office minister Liam Byrne said: "Britain's border security is now among the toughest in the world and tougher checks do take time, but we don't want long waits. So the UK Border Agency will soon be testing new automatic gates for British and European Economic Area [EEA] citizens. We will test them this year and if they work put them at all key ports [and airports]."

The EEA includes all EU states as well as Norway, Switzerland and Iceland.

*
This article appeared in the Guardian on Friday April 25 2008 on p1 of the Top stories section. It was last updated at 01:00 on April 25 2008.



* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 20