Yearning to Breathe Free

Felix Oviawe was a state assemblyman in his native Nigeria, a respected leader in his home state of Benin, but when a military coup overthrew the democratically elected government there in 1993, he feared for his life. Oviawe thought he would find political asylum in America.

But after arriving in the United States, Oviawe says he was detained by agents of the now-defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service and sent to the Union County Jail in Elizabeth, N.J. There, he told author Mark Dow, he was forced to undress in a cell with two other detainees. The guards forced them to kneel in a circle and hold the ear of one of the other detainees. They weren't allowed to get up for three hours.

It's a scene reminiscent of the pictures of American soldiers humiliating Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad earlier this year and, Dow argues, one worthy of similar outrage and investigation. In his book, American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons (University of California Press, 2004), Dow paints a dispiriting picture of widespread abuse by INS agents, as well as contractors and state and local jailers the agency relied on to detain immigrants awaiting deportation hearings.

The Abu Ghraib abuses "were sadistic acts of individual soldiers in the absence of leadership that would have set up a different culture," Dow says. "That's what we are talking about here."

Dow's findings aren't a surprise. The INS was long maligned for poor management oversight, especially at its detention facilities, one of many factors that led to the agency's dissolution last year. Dow was completing his research as INS was subsumed by the Homeland Security Department in March 2003. DHS' Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau now oversees immigration detention.

Most of American Gulag's stories are told secondhand. But the book is built on 10 years of research and interviewing by Dow, who also served a stint as an English teacher at Miami's Krome Detention Center. Internal INS investigations confirmed some of the accounts.

Among the stories are those of Tony Ebibillo, another Nigerian asylum seeker, who was allegedly beaten and injected with sedatives before the INS deported him; Anser Mehmood, a Pakistani detained after Sept. 11 for overstaying a visa, who was held for more than four months before being deported; female detainees at the INS' Elizabeth, N.J., detention center who were forced to wear male underwear with a large question mark drawn on the crotch; and Laurie Kozuba, a U.S. citizen whose husband-a legal permanent resident-nearly was deported after serving time for drug possession.

Beyond a lack of leadership, though, Dow blames poor congressional oversight and two 1996 laws, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which expanded the types of crimes for which legal immigrants can be deported. Before the laws took effect, immigration judges could use their discretion to decide whether to release in the United States legal permanent residents who had committed crimes but served their sentences. The laws rescinded that authority, deeming even minor crimes deportable offenses.

Additionally, the laws required INS to hold almost all asylum seekers and gave inspectors authority to expedite the deportation of asylum seekers they believed to be making illegitimate claims. The United States grants asylum to immigrants who can prove fear of persecution based on their membership in a particular social, political, or religious group.

Since the laws took effect, the average number of immigrants detained by Homeland Security on any given day more than tripled from 5,500 to 20,000. About 200,000 detainees now pass through the detention system in a year. INS detention budgets didn't allow the agency to build more facilities, leading to overcrowding. Many asylum seekers were sent to state and local prisons as well as to privately run facilities where they were held alongside common criminals. For that, Dow blames a "blurring of any distinction between alien, criminal and terrorist," under law and in the INS culture.

In response to his book, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau released a statement arguing that Dow presents an "extremely distorted view of immigration detention in the United States." The statement also notes that "ICE's detention standards are more stringent than even those of the Bureau of Prisons. . . . [and] reflect ICE's commitment to treat all detainees with dignity and respect."

But in June 2003, the Justice Department's inspector general released a report detailing "a pattern of physical and verbal abuse" in the detention of about 1,200 immigrants held after the Sept. 11 attacks. That, Dow says, is a good indication that not much has changed.