Amnesty USA board member Chip Pitt worries that three years after 9/11, America's fear of terrorism is giving cover to a wider xenophobia. A new Department of Homeland Security plan may not only be unfair, but discriminatory—Tom Ridge said it would apply to citizens of some nations but not others. Because the people affected have no political clout, the policy is being implemented with little attention.
International attorney and businessman Chip Pitts is board chair of Amnesty International USA. This column was distributed by MinutemanMedia.org and is reprinted with permission.
The Department of Homeland Security has announced a new "expedited removal" policy that is almost guaranteed to send more people threatened with torture, rape and death back to their persecutors.
Foreigners claiming fear upon arrival in this country are supposed to be referred to asylum officers and, if the fear is deemed credible, given full-fledged asylum hearings by immigration judges. In theory, this safeguard remains under the new expanded expedited removal policy. But in practice, Border Patrol agents' broad new summary deportation powers make it much more likely that they—and not immigration judges—will be the first and last judge of asylum claims.
Low-paid airport and port inspectors have exercised expedited removal for foreignerswho arrive without proper travel documents since 1996, to the consternation of immigrant—and civil rights—advocates. A confidential U.N. report recently obtained by The New York Times confirms numerous abuses of power by these inspectors, ranging from open prejudice to strip searches, excessive shackling and racial and sexual insults. Now those expedited removal powers have been extended beyond inspectors at ports of entry to Border Patrol agents operating up to 100 miles from the border, and apply to foreigners up to two weeks after arrival (who have the burden of proving when they crossed the border).
Shifting de facto asylum decision-making power to Border Patrol agents risks the same abuses found by the U.N. report, and it puts both Border Patrol agents and vulnerable refugees in untenable positions. Border Patrol agents already do difficult and dangerous work, focused overwhelmingly on keeping people out. Charged with the vital task of defending the nation's borders, they wear guns and uniforms and represent an intimidating presence likely to remind many refugees of the authorities who persecuted them back home. This isn't exactly conducive to encouraging refugees to express their fears of return. And Homeland Security's planned eight-hour training sessions for Border Patrol agents on their new expedited removal responsibilities will hardly overcome this defect.
At a minimum, the new policy calls into question U.S. government compliance with longstanding treaty obligations of "non-return" of refugees to conditions of persecution—and the right to seek asylum under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To that extent, the policy is yet another example of the administration's
obliviousness to international law and to how its actions are perceived by other nations.
Such insularity recalls some of the most disgraceful episodes of American history: the Chinese exclusion orders of the 1880s, the racist immigration quotas early last century, World War I arrests and deportations of hyphenated Americans, World War II's Japanese internment, and Cold War-era bars to entry based on ideology. Until the most recent upsurge in nativism, these experiences were regarded with shame.
Has America's new fear of terrorism been manipulated into a wider xenophobia that conceals an intent to keep out those who don't fit the orthodox American profile? The arbitrary nature of the plan—Tom Ridge said it would apply to citizens of some nations but not others—only highlights its discriminatory and unfair nature. What form of racial or ethnic profiling will Border Patrol agents use in exercising their discretion?
Resurgent discrimination also ignores the fact that actual terrorists do not fit any particular racial or national origin stereotype and come from all ethnic backgrounds—including native-born whites.
In playing on fear and prejudice, the architects of this new policy ignore our nation's own origins as a place of refuge from political and religious persecution. Seeking illusory strength from closing our borders, they neglect the mighty wellspring of freedom and openness that has been our actual strength.
The strength that will help us defeat terrorists derives not from fear, but from the courage to offer refuge to those in need. Not from insistence on unbridled discretionary power, but from decisions tested by checks and balances from judges and other decision-makers. Not from removing hope from the world—but from adding to it what hope we can.
