Re: The States: North Dakota? Come On, Ohio Is The Worst State Ever.
BAD INFORMATION
Border Patrol Arrest Reports Are Full of Lies That Can Sabotage Asylum Claims
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BAD INFORMATION
Border Patrol Arrest Reports Are Full of Lies That Can Sabotage Asylum Claims
ON DECEMBER 29, 2017, the night his daughter was born, Augusto left the hospital and rode his motorcycle to his home in Matagalpa, Nicaragua, to pick up a change of clothes for his wife. On his way back, he was stopped at a police checkpoint and taken into custody. Police officers questioned him for hours about his father, a former mayor and member of the opposition party to Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. At one point, a police detective pushed Augusto into a windowless room and beat him with a plastic Pepsi bottle loaded with sand. The next morning, caked with blood and bruised to a pulp, Augusto was released without charges.
The beating, along with more threats against his father, inspired Augusto to join in the mass protests against the Ortega government that erupted in April 2018. A month later, a little after midnight on May 29, police broke down Augusto’s door, pulled him barely dressed out of his house, and took him back to the police station to question him again about his father. He was told that his father was accused of plotting a coup against Ortega, a charge Augusto strongly denies. (Augusto, like other asylum-seekers named in this story, is referred to by a pseudonym for his protection.) Scared to return home after his release — “They told me the next time they came, they were going to kill me” — he moved in with his grandfather. A couple months later, someone spray-painted “plomo, plomo, FSLN,” on his front door; “plomo” means “lead” in Spanish, in reference to a bullet, and FSLN is Ortega’s political party, the Sandinista National Liberation Front. To Augusto, it was a clear death threat. In the following days, Augusto, his father, and his sister-in-law decided to flee the country.
The beating, along with more threats against his father, inspired Augusto to join in the mass protests against the Ortega government that erupted in April 2018. A month later, a little after midnight on May 29, police broke down Augusto’s door, pulled him barely dressed out of his house, and took him back to the police station to question him again about his father. He was told that his father was accused of plotting a coup against Ortega, a charge Augusto strongly denies. (Augusto, like other asylum-seekers named in this story, is referred to by a pseudonym for his protection.) Scared to return home after his release — “They told me the next time they came, they were going to kill me” — he moved in with his grandfather. A couple months later, someone spray-painted “plomo, plomo, FSLN,” on his front door; “plomo” means “lead” in Spanish, in reference to a bullet, and FSLN is Ortega’s political party, the Sandinista National Liberation Front. To Augusto, it was a clear death threat. In the following days, Augusto, his father, and his sister-in-law decided to flee the country.
After an arduous three-week trip, they made it to the U.S.-Mexico border in Juárez, Mexico. As they approached the port of entry, a man came up to them and told them that they needed to pay $300 each to access the bridge and cross into the United States. Not having the money, they walked a mile along the border until they saw a Border Patrol truck. They climbed the fence, dropped to their knees on American soil, put their hands behind their heads, and told the agent who approached them that they had come to the U.S. to ask for asylum.
When in custody, Augusto had a brief interview with a Border Patrol agent, Daniel Chavira. Augusto explained again why he had come to the U.S., and said that he was seeking asylum and had a USB drive in his backpack full of evidence. Yet Chavira confiscated the USB drive (Augusto would never see it again) and recorded on the arrest report, using capital letters, that Augusto “stated that he DOES NOT fear harm and/or persecution should he be returned to his native country.” Chavira also wrote that Augusto intended to go to Los Angeles, “where he planned to reside and seek unauthorized employment.”
Neither of those statements were true. But Augusto didn’t know at the time what the document claimed he had said, nor that contradictory information on a government document can severely complicate, or even completely derail, an asylum claim. And it would be months before Augusto, with the help of an immigration attorney, was able to stand before a judge to confront the concocted statements.
When in custody, Augusto had a brief interview with a Border Patrol agent, Daniel Chavira. Augusto explained again why he had come to the U.S., and said that he was seeking asylum and had a USB drive in his backpack full of evidence. Yet Chavira confiscated the USB drive (Augusto would never see it again) and recorded on the arrest report, using capital letters, that Augusto “stated that he DOES NOT fear harm and/or persecution should he be returned to his native country.” Chavira also wrote that Augusto intended to go to Los Angeles, “where he planned to reside and seek unauthorized employment.”
Neither of those statements were true. But Augusto didn’t know at the time what the document claimed he had said, nor that contradictory information on a government document can severely complicate, or even completely derail, an asylum claim. And it would be months before Augusto, with the help of an immigration attorney, was able to stand before a judge to confront the concocted statements.
Human Rights Watch’s ongoing investigation has turned up numerous cases of Border Patrol pressuring asylum-seekers not to claim fear, or officers simply lying and saying that people did not fear being returned, when in fact they had stated otherwise.
“The evidence we have gathered raises serious concerns that Border Patrol officers consistently deny asylum-seekers the opportunity to make a claim for protection or falsify records in a way that undercut those claims,” said Clara Long, senior researcher in the U.S. program at Human Rights Watch.
“The evidence we have gathered raises serious concerns that Border Patrol officers consistently deny asylum-seekers the opportunity to make a claim for protection or falsify records in a way that undercut those claims,” said Clara Long, senior researcher in the U.S. program at Human Rights Watch.
It’s hard to know for sure why a Border Patrol agent might include specious statements on an intake form. Cursory interviews and a reliance on stock answers to fill out forms would certainly be a draw to an overworked and overwhelmed agency. “Anything to make the job easier,” said a former Border Patrol agent I asked about falsifying I-213s. (He came forward last year as a whistleblower about the agency’s anti-immigrant culture.)
Some of these cases do seem like hurried clerical errors made by officers triaging sometimes hundreds of cases a day, said Jodi Ziesemer, director of immigrant protection at New York Legal Assistance Group; it’s as if an immigration officer “clearly put someone’s name and [alien registration number] on the top of someone else’s form.” Genevra Alberti, a private attorney in Kansas City, Missouri, described a client who was picked up by ICE on her way to work while wearing her work uniform. Her I-213, however, said she claimed she was unemployed. “I’m not sure if they were not paying attention, wrote the document a day later, or just winged it,” Alberti hazarded.
Some of these cases do seem like hurried clerical errors made by officers triaging sometimes hundreds of cases a day, said Jodi Ziesemer, director of immigrant protection at New York Legal Assistance Group; it’s as if an immigration officer “clearly put someone’s name and [alien registration number] on the top of someone else’s form.” Genevra Alberti, a private attorney in Kansas City, Missouri, described a client who was picked up by ICE on her way to work while wearing her work uniform. Her I-213, however, said she claimed she was unemployed. “I’m not sure if they were not paying attention, wrote the document a day later, or just winged it,” Alberti hazarded.
The more nefarious reason for erroneous information appearing on these forms would be deliberate falsification to save time or scuttle asylum claims — something that’s harder to prove. But lawyers say it’s difficult to otherwise explain how completely off-base the information often is. Shunting apprehended migrants into expedited removal — which is only possible if a migrant doesn’t claim that they are afraid to return to their country of origin — saves the agents both time and paperwork. It may also serve an ideological goal of denying more people entry. Indeed, the White House may see Border Patrol’s flippancy with asylum-seekers’ stories as an asset; Trump adviser Stephen Miller reportedly wants Border Patrol to do more asylum screenings because he thinks they will be less credulous of claims.
Agents may also lie on forms to give themselves cover for detaining someone on the basis of racial profiling. Zittlau, the attorney in San Diego, describes this as “reverse-engineering.” ICE or Border Patrol agents stop and search brown-skinned Latinos, Zittlau explains, and when they come across someone who doesn’t have authorization to be in the U.S., they then fabricate a story for why they stopped them. The Intercept cross-referenced some of Zittlau’s client affidavits with their I-213s and found a host of inconsistencies or boilerplate language.
For instance, Zittlau showed me two I-213s prepared by the same Border Patrol agent after two separate traffic stops in Southern California where he questioned Latino drivers on their legal status. The stops, both on Interstate 15, were three months apart, but he wrote down an identical justification: “the driver’s posture appeared to be stiff, rigid, and appeared to be white knuckling the steering wheel from being overly nervous.” In both instances, the agent claimed that the vehicle slowed down “dramatically” from 70 to 60 mph; except for the make and model of the vehicle, the descriptions were verbatim. The false information in cases like these may or may not influence a person’s claim to remain in the U.S., but either way, it underscores the impunity with which officers present a manhandled version of the truth.
Agents may also lie on forms to give themselves cover for detaining someone on the basis of racial profiling. Zittlau, the attorney in San Diego, describes this as “reverse-engineering.” ICE or Border Patrol agents stop and search brown-skinned Latinos, Zittlau explains, and when they come across someone who doesn’t have authorization to be in the U.S., they then fabricate a story for why they stopped them. The Intercept cross-referenced some of Zittlau’s client affidavits with their I-213s and found a host of inconsistencies or boilerplate language.
For instance, Zittlau showed me two I-213s prepared by the same Border Patrol agent after two separate traffic stops in Southern California where he questioned Latino drivers on their legal status. The stops, both on Interstate 15, were three months apart, but he wrote down an identical justification: “the driver’s posture appeared to be stiff, rigid, and appeared to be white knuckling the steering wheel from being overly nervous.” In both instances, the agent claimed that the vehicle slowed down “dramatically” from 70 to 60 mph; except for the make and model of the vehicle, the descriptions were verbatim. The false information in cases like these may or may not influence a person’s claim to remain in the U.S., but either way, it underscores the impunity with which officers present a manhandled version of the truth.
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