[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: Ashcroft's Quiet Prisoner

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Ashcroft's Quiet Prisoner

August 13, 2004
 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. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/13/opinion/13herb.html?ex=1093415580&ei=1&en=5191122eddb50a92


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