Sanctuary and Asylum

A Social and Political History

Linda Rabben

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780295999135
• eBook ISBN:
  9780295999142
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The practice of sanctuary—giving refuge to the threatened, vulnerable stranger—may be universal among humans. From primate populations to ancient religious traditions to the modern legal institution of asylum, anthropologist Linda Rabben explores the long history of sanctuary and analyzes modern asylum policies in North America, Europe, and elsewhere, contrasting them with the role that courageous individuals and organizations have played in offering refuge to survivors of torture, persecution, and discrimination. Rabben gives close attention to the mid-2010s refugee crisis in Europe and to Central Americans seeking asylum in the United States. This wide-ranging, timely, and carefully documented account draws on Rabben's experiences as a human rights advocate as well as her training as an anthropologist. Sanctuary and Asylum will help citizens, professionals, and policy makers take informed and compassionate action. A Capell Family Book

1 Asylum and Sanctuary Seekers’ Stories

A well-founded fear of being persecuted

—Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, 1951

Every day, thousands of individuals seek asylum in scores of countries.¹ In so doing they are exercising a basic human right as defined in article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948): “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution” (Center for the Study of Human Rights 1992: 7). The vast majority do not immediately obtain refuge through the elaborate systems established by international and national laws and policies. Many wait years for a definitive decision. In the meantime they may go underground, living precariously or in destitution, denied social welfare benefits, the right to work legally, and the right to participate freely in their adopted society. Others, including torture survivors, children, pregnant women, the elderly, and the seriously ill, may be detained for indefinite periods in jails, prisons, or detention centers. Only a few have the opportunity to tell their story to the public. Often these stories remain unread, except by government officials and lawyers. For the most part, asylum seekers are voiceless, invisible, forgotten. As a result, many citizens of the countries in which asylum seekers exist have only the vaguest notion—or none at all—of what or who they are.

An asylum seeker could be said to be a person who is trying to become a refugee. According to the UN Refugee Convention of 1951, a refugee is a person who “owing to a well founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it” (chapter 1, article 1[2]).²

Governments use this rather narrow definition to exclude or accept asylum seekers.³ In many countries, they are confused or conflated with illegal immigrants or even criminals and treated as scapegoats, falsely accused of causing economic and social problems. They may be subjected to xenophobic reactions and even lethal violence that deepen their isolation and suffering.

A relatively small proportion—usually no more than 30–40 percent in major receiving countries such as the United States and Britain—do gain asylum and the benefits that go along with this legal status.⁴ They may succeed because they arrive with copious documentation of the persecution they have suffered and with the financial resources to hire a good lawyer or the luck to find skillful pro bono representation. But most do not.

Then there are the sanctuary seekers, who arrive under varying circumstances, usually outside the law. These days they are called by different names: illegal aliens, illegal immigrants, undocumented, unauthorized, migrants, overstayers. They remain in the shadows, hoping to escape notice, until some mischance—a broken tail light, missing identification, an injury while crossing the desert—brings them to the attention of the authorities. Some of them end up in detention and are served, after a perfunctory or prolonged legal process, with a deportation order. Some look for refuge “underground.” Others are sent back to the place they came from, only to return again and again.

The following are a few of the stories of asylum and sanctuary seekers that have come to light in recent years. They give an idea of what thousands of people experience when they search for refuge. Some of their stories remain unfinished, the protagonists lost in a Kafkaesque maze of red tape and systematic cruelty. Other seekers eventually find their promised land.

Mary in Limbo

The most dangerous moment of Mary’s year in prison came in the solitary confinement cell, when a guard demanded that she kneel before him.⁵ She refused, saying, “That is an act of worship, and I worship only God; I will not kneel before any man.” Mary is not sure what he did to her after that; the next thing she remembers is waking up in the intensive care unit of the local hospital, shackled to the bed.

After much pleading and bargaining, she was unshackled and the guards were allowed to watch television in her room (against regulations). She stayed in the hospital for a week. Eventually she was released and allowed to work, but she was instructed to keep immigration authorities informed of her whereabouts until her case was decided—if it ever was decided.

Mary was no criminal; she was an asylum seeker. In the early 1990s, after the assassination of a relative who was a high-ranking government official, she fled her home country in Africa. Most members of her family also fled and now live in various European and Asian countries. She sought refuge in the United States.

In her search for asylum, Mary was unfortunate to encounter a series of incompetent, overcommitted, or crooked lawyers who took her money but did nothing. Her case got lost in a backlog of hundreds of thousands of cases. After several years, having heard nothing from her lawyer or the immigration authorities, she presented herself at the district office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS, now known as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, whose grimly apposite acronym is ICE). There she learned that an immigration judge had signed an order to deport her after she failed to appear at a hearing she had known nothing about. She was taken into custody at the immigration office and sent first to a local jail, then to a maximum security prison two hundred miles from the town where she had been living.

The next year was a trial by ordeal, marked by physical and psychological abuse that violated federal detention guidelines, not to mention international law. Transferred to a prison in another state in the middle of the night without warning or explanation, malnourished because she was lactose intolerant, kept in a cell with a murderer, denied vegetarian food required by her religious beliefs, unable to contact her lawyer because she had no money to pay for a long-distance call, Mary kept her sanity by documenting the mistreatment she and other detainees endured. After she and two others threatened to expose conditions at the prison to federal authorities, they saw some improvements. The detainees were taken out of cells housing convicted felons and placed in a warehouse with no windows.

It took months of dedicated efforts by a pro bono attorney and Amnesty International to secure Mary’s release on parole. Years later, she was unwilling to discuss her experience publicly for fear of retaliation by ICE or corrections officials. She had to pay the government a hefty annual fee for permission to work. In 2006, asked how it felt to have her case still unsettled, she replied, “Dreadful—I cannot make plans. I cannot visit my family. I cannot leave the country.” Asked when she began seeking asylum, Mary said sadly, “1992.” How long could the process go on? “Forever,” she thought. Mary finally gained asylum in 2013, after more than twenty years in limbo.

Lydia Besong Tells Her Story

“I would not have left my own country if I had not been in danger for my life.⁶ I was a member of the political group South Cameroon National Council, and members of the group are always persecuted by the government. They came for me one day in 2006. They took me into prison, and the conditions in prison are very filthy. When I was in prison I suffered a lot. I was tortured. If you look at my legs you will see the scars. Women suffer many things that it is hard to stand in public and speak about. It is very hard for a woman to say that she has been raped. I myself felt very shy to speak about this. I suffered a lot of beatings. I was released not because they wanted to release me but because my health was so bad. As soon as I was released I went into the hospital. When I knew they were going to come for me again, I had to run away for my life.

“When I arrived in the UK with my husband, I thought that I would be safe. I went to the Medical Foundation [for the Care of Victims of Torture], and they saw the scars. They supported my claim for asylum. But then I realized it wasn’t going to be as I thought. I was refused asylum. The Home Office just said that they didn’t believe me. I was not allowed to work, but I kept myself busy by volunteering with a women’s group and I wrote a play with Women Asylum Seekers Together Manchester. This play, How I Became an Asylum Seeker, tells the story of what we go through in the asylum process. The first time it was performed was in Manchester on 3 December 2009.

“But just six days later I was arrested by the Home Office. I spent Christmas in Yarl’s Wood Detention Centre. I thought I was going to be deported, and then I knew my government would put me back into prison. The thing that kept me going was that I received many, many Christmas cards from my supporters. Every time I opened a card, I felt very emotional, to know that many people were thinking of me and I could not be with them.

“But in Yarl’s Wood there were many women who did not even receive one card. I met one girl who was only eighteen, who had come here seeking asylum from Nigeria because of the harm she had suffered in her traditional community. Nobody knew she was in detention. She was totally alone. She was crying all the time.

“Although I was released after Christmas and appealed against my refusal, I was refused asylum again and put in detention again on 10 January 2012. For me, being locked up reminded me so much of being put in prison back home, it brought back all the memory of torture. They put me on suicide watch because I was so depressed; they were watching me 24/7. I don’t know how I would have kept going except that I had so much support from people outside.

“The second time I was detained, Women for Refugee Women made sure that people like Michael Morpurgo and Joan Bakewell were writing to the newspapers.⁷ And the grassroots groups I work with in Manchester were my support. They made calls, they faxed the airline, so no matter what the immigration was doing to me, I still felt strong. Sometimes you think, should you give up—but then you think, no, you are not fighting the fight alone. Other people act like your pillar: if you feel you are going to fall, they keep you standing. And in the end I was given refugee status. It was agreed that I had been tortured and I would be in danger if I was returned to my home country. I should be free of all the dark times now.

“But when I left detention, Yarl’s Wood followed me to Manchester. Sometimes I feel like I’m in a trance, I feel I hear the footsteps of the officers, I hear the banging of the doors and the sound of their keys. Even though I’m out of detention, I’m not really out—I still have those dreams. I wish the politicians could understand what they are doing to women by detaining us like this when we have already been through so much. Asylum seekers are not criminals. That’s why I wanted to speak out … because I believe that if people speak out, then change will come one day. If we do not speak out, then we are dying in silence.”

Detained to Death: Two Stories

HIU LUI (JASON) NG

At age seventeen in 1992, Hiu Lui (Jason) Ng entered the United States from China on a tourist visa. According to a New York Times article of August 13, 2008, he “stayed on after [the visa] expired and applied for political asylum. He was granted a work permit while his application was pending, and though asylum was eventually denied, immigration authorities did not seek his deportation for many years” (Bernstein 2008).⁸

Jason worked his way through community college and became a computer engineer, working in the Empire State Building. In 2001 he married, and his wife petitioned for him to be granted a green card (permanent residence) as the spouse of a US citizen. The couple waited more than five years for this request to be processed.

Meanwhile the immigration bureaucracy was looking for him as a rejected asylum seeker. A notice ordering him to appear in court went to a nonexistent address, and as a result Jason did not show up for a hearing in 2001. At that time the judge automatically issued a deportation order for him.

Unaware of this turn of events, Jason and his wife appeared for a green card interview in July 2007. ICE agents arrested him under the old deportation order and sent him to two jails and then a federal detention center in New England. “Over the next year,” the Times reported, “his family struggled to pay for new lawyers to wage a complicated and expensive legal battle.”

In April 2008, still in detention, Jason began complaining to his family about severe back pain and skin irritation. At the time, he was in a county jail in Vermont that had no medical personnel. He asked to be transferred to Wyatt Detention Facility in Rhode Island because it had medical staff who he hoped could provide treatment for his extreme pain. For the first three days at Wyatt, he was kept in a dark isolation cell. “Later,” the Times reported, “he was assigned an upper bunk and required to climb up and down at least three times a day for head counts, causing terrible pain.” He told his sister he had informed the nursing department he was in pain, “but they don’t believe me…. They tell me, stop faking.” The Times described him as “once a robust man who stood nearly six feet and weighed 200 pounds…. Mr. Ng looked like a shrunken and jaundiced 80-year-old.”

Other detainees helped Jason go to the toilet, brought him food, and called his family. “He no longer received painkillers, because he could not stand in line to collect them,” the Times reported. When his lawyer tried to visit him on July 26, 2008, he was too weak to walk to the visiting area, and he was denied use of a wheelchair. Detention center officials refused to arrange for an independent medical evaluation of his condition.

Jason’s final ordeal began on July 30. According to affidavits obtained by the Times, “Guards … dragged him from his bed …, carried him in shackles to a car, bruising his arms and legs, and drove him two hours to a federal lockup in Hartford, where an immigration officer pressured him to withdraw all pending appeals of his case and accept deportation.” Then they drove him back to the detention center.

Calling this treatment “torture,” one of his lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition on his behalf. A US District Court judge ordered that Jason be taken immediately to a hospital for testing. “The results were grim: cancer in his liver, lungs, and bones, and a fractured spine,” the Times reported. After waiting three days for the detention center director to give permission, his family visited him in the hospital, “hours away from death and still under guard.” Jason died on August 6, 2008. He was thirty-four years old and left a wife and two children, all US citizens.

TIOMBE CARLOS

Born on the Caribbean island of Antigua, Tiombe Carlos came legally with her family to the United States as a four-year-old in the early 1980s. At age fourteen, she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, “She was often in and out of hospitals and had convictions for trespass, shoplifting and assaults, mostly fighting with police when they arrested her” (Matza 2013). Eventually she spent several years in prison for various crimes. Her status as a legal permanent resident was revoked, and ICE moved to deport her because of her criminal convictions when her sentence ended in 2010. Carlos then spent almost three years in immigration detention, in an ICE facility in Boston and at York County Prison in Pennsylvania, which contracts with the federal government to hold immigration detainees.

Tiombe was not easy to detain. According to a review of her case by ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility, she spent much of her time at York “in segregation due to her assaultive nature, and misconduct and mental health issues…. [She] had a history of violent criminal activity to include arrests for assault, robbery and resisting arrest” (Division Director 2014: 1, 3). She was physically and verbally abusive at times, suffered from extreme mood swings, and was considered a danger to herself and others.

In 2011, at her lawyer’s request, a clinical psychologist affiliated with Physicians for Human Rights interviewed Tiombe at York. He determined that she was severely mentally ill. Her lawyer wrote to ICE asking that they suspend her deportation because of her condition. He cited “Carlos’ arrival in the United States as a young child; long-term permanent residency; lack of immigration-specific violations; lack of ties to Antigua; close family bonds in America; and a U.S. citizen daughter, born in 1999 during one of Carlos’ hospitalizations. The child, now 14, lives with her grandparents” (Matza...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Asylum and Sanctuary Seekers’ Stories
• 2. Sanctuary’s Beginnings
• 3. A Thousand Years of Medieval Sanctuary
• 4. From Religious Sanctuary to Secular Asylum
• 5. Nineteenth-Century Sanctuary outside the Law
• 6. The Pleasures of Holocaust Rescue
• 7. The Twentieth-Century Heyday of Asylum
• 8. Asylum Now in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom
• 9. Asylum Now in Europe and Beyond
• 10. The Golden Door Ajar: US Asylum Policy
• 11. Contemporary Sanctuary Movements
• 12. The News from Tucson
• Afterword: Does Asylum Have a Future?
• Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Illustrations