ATD: what you need to know to help end indiscriminate detention of asylum seekers!

Under the Same Stars, Julie's March Viewpoint for Monadnock Ledger  Transcript

ATD: what you need to know to help end indiscriminate detention of asylum seekers!

       The current system of indiscriminate universal detention of asylum seekers in our country and state is inhumane, irrelevant to public safety and a wasteful, expensive use of government resources.

         Evidence-based studies consistently prove community-based programs (ATD or Alternatives to Detention) to be safer, vastly less expensive, and far more effective at ensuring compliance, including dependable attendance at court dates. Most importantly, community-based alternatives offer a framework for refugee and migrant processing that is welcoming and allows families remain together, whether they are ultimately entitled to stay or deported. 

Indiscriminate detention does nothing to make the public safer.

         Seeking asylum is legal. Long term, indefinite and indiscriminate detention serves no purpose. In fact, reducing numbers in detention would focus Homeland Security and ICE on the small percent, including criminals, who really do pose a risk. 

“Indiscriminate immigration enforcement undermines public safety as residents fear interacting with local law enforcement, and policing resources are deployed away from more effective crime prevention and enforcement,” according to the Justice Policy Institute. 

More than 75% of detainees could safely be in ATD instead of lock-up, according to the ACLU.

Detention is a huge and unnecessary burden on taxpayers.

ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is responsible for 1,478 ICE-run facilities, lucrative private prisons and local government jails, sucking up more than $8 million a day in federal taxpayer dollars. 

ATD costs run less than 7% of the cost of detention, according to the GAO (Government Accountability Office, 2014). The average ATD contract costs between $5-6 per day. Compare that to $208, the average per-day cost of detention nationwide. Stafford County Jail in Dover NH houses only adult immigrants, costing federal taxpayers $89 per person per day.

Community-based ATD programs have a great track record.

Statistics show that the vast majority of asylum seekers in alternative programs with local, individualized case management appear at hearings dependably, without detention. The common thread is they are largely community-initiated and coordinated. See the sidebar on this page for real-life examples. Note that the privatized-for-profit model was the least cost efficient. 

ATD stabilizes families and empowers breadwinners.

Incarceration isolates immigrants from their families, faith groups,  community support systems, legal representation, employment and often native language.  

There are different forms of ATD. 

Alternative Accompaniment Programs similar to the long-running federal Refugee Resettlement Program) allow immigrants to work (with permit granted after 180 days) living with family, volunteers, or in group homes, while the courts process their immigration cases.

Post Release Accompaniment Programs assist immigrants in obtainingrelease from detention, enhancing their ability to build their case from the outside, offering housing, legal assistance and transportation to immigration court. 

Revolving Immigration Detention Bond Funds are evidence that immigrants do not need to wear electronic monitors, produce their own  inflated cash bond ($7,000 - $20,000) or stay in prison to ensure compliance with legal proceedings. 

What can we do to help?

Call/write your U.S. Representatives and Senators to reinstate and expand Alternatives to Detention and end indiscriminate detention of asylum seekers and immigrants. 

Check out Keene-based projecthomenh.org . Consider donating towards the NH immigrant bond fund https://www.nhcucc, joining a Project Home accompaniment support team and/or opening your home to an asylum seeker. 

Ask candidates for office at every level what they will do to end ICE detainers in our state, reduce the numbers in detention nationwide by 75%, and re-institute ATD for asylum seekers. 

For more examples of community-based alternatives and legal analysis on viability, read Freedom for Immigrants' report, Rebuilding Trust: A Case Study for Closing and Repurposing Immigration Detention Facilities.

Julie Zimmer of Peterborough is a retired educator and grandmother to two dual citizens.

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[Separate Sidebar]

Examples of Successful ATD programs

shuttered under the current administration.

-     Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service pilot program: including housing, compliance orientations, access to legal representation and case management,$50/day for entire family compared to estimated detention cost of $798/day. 

97% compliance at hearings. 

-     US Council of Catholic Bishops: 90 days of case management to reunited families in 2018, $16/day/family. compared to detention at $318. 

-     1997 - 2000 INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) program: saved taxpayers $4,000 per participant; 91% overall appearance rate at hearings, 93% appearance rate for asylum seekers. 

-     ICE’s own short-lived Family Case Management Program (FCMP), discontinued 7/17: families received tailored caseworker support. Compliance rates over 99% with court hearings and ICE appointments, high rate of compliance with removals and departures. “At a cost below detention,” the final price tag included paying a private prison contractor an average $18,000 per person, for (unknown) # days. 

~ from “The Real Alternatives to Detention” by Justice for Immigrants.

Under the Same Stars - Frying Pan into the Fire - by Marjorie Margolis

The Frying Pan, Into the Fire: Asylum Seekers Blocked at the Border

 by Marjorie Margolis, published in  Monadnock area newspapers Nov. 2019

An endless stream of very bad dreams has turned into a violent nightmare for thousands awaiting on our southern border as our government implements its“Remain in Mexico” policy. This is happening in our name and on our watch. 

Last week I went to El Paso with a group from Upstate New York and New Hampshire (which included Rosemary Weidner from Dublin and Bill Whyte and Katie Schwerin from Gilsum) to participate in a fact-finding trip, Annunciation House’s Border Awareness Experience (BAE). This was my second trip to El Paso, having volunteered there with one of Annunciation House’s temporary shelters last January, serving migrants brought there by ICE once they were released from detention centers, known as heleras (ice boxes).  

During the Border Awareness Experience, we crossed the border into Juarez where we visited a shelter and spoke with Mexicans encamped there, as well as immigration attorneys, advocates, public defenders, community organizers and Annunciation House Director Ruben Garcia. As hard as it is to imagine, things are far worse than they were last year. 

The inhumane conditions of detention centers remain, but Annunciation House is almost empty. Detention is no longer the lowest level of hell; its horror has been surpassed by the borderland of Mexico due to the White House policy euphemistically called Migrant Protection Protocol (MPP) or Remain in Mexico. Under this policy, asylum seekers must remain on the Mexican side of the border while waiting for their applications to be processed, which can take years. 

Another new policy called Safe Third Country forces asylum seekers to apply for asylum in the first country they enter. Guatemala is not a safe place, and the Mexican National Guard is now stationed along that border. The conditions from which they are fleeing have not changed, but we don’t know their current situation. 

The Remain in Mexico policy impacts all Spanish speakers except Mexicans because they are seeking asylum from Mexico, the country administering this program. While it is illegal for the US to prevent asylum seekers from entering, it is not illegal to say, "No room, take a number" and block crossing. This practice is known as metering. Asylum seekers under MPP are blocked from entry and instead are put on a waiting list; Mexicans are on a separate list.  

Because they are not given a date by US Customs and Border Patrol, all asylum seekers must wait by the bridges in order to be present when their number is called, and there they remain for months in cities considered by the US State Department as some of the world’s most dangerous.  

Juarez, El Paso’s sister city, is a horror show. Murders are daily occurrences and the city is littered with burnt out vehicles.  The Cartel controls everything; though they have allowed no other immigrant group to live under the bridge, the Mexicans to have tent cities there. 

Most alarming to me this week is that the Central Americans have seemed to have disappeared. 

Kidnapping has become so common that lawyers and advocates we met say Central Americans are not even safe staying in shelters in Juarez. One attorney, Taylor Levy, told us of an incident on the Bridge of the Americas itself.  While consulting with a Honduran couple on opposite sides of the border gate, a Mexican approached the migrants and forced the couple to come away with him.  Taylor told us that the going extortion rate for kidnapped Central Americans is $10,000, negotiable.  

Once forcefully detained, the Cartel video chats with their victims’ families back in Honduras, inflicting whatever level of violence necessary to compel the families to pay up. As the word gets out through apps like What’s App the migrants from the Central America’s Northern Triangle are nowhere to be seen at the border. We wonder where they have gone.

Equally distressing, all of the advocates and lawyers we meet during the BAE — even Ruben Garcia, Annunciation House Director — believe it is safest for parents to send their children over the border unaccompanied. Can you imagine? 

They believe the child detention centers are safer than the Mexican borderlands. Unlike detention centers, children centers are run by Health and Human Services, under the Office of Refugee and Resettlement. They are licensed by each state and must meet the standards of that state. Still, the militaristic protocol with prohibitions against human contact of any kind can only add to the trauma of these children. 

The single adults and families permitted in through metering must go through detention; however, because of the deaths of six children in detention, CPB is releasing anyone who looks sick or obviously pregnant. Families are usually released within 72 hours. We were told that there are single adults who have been kept there for over three years. 

The most recent guests at Annunciation House are mostly Brazilians, not under the auspices of MPP because they don’t speak Spanish, and Mexicans from the three most dangerous states controlled by the Cartel: Guerrero, Zacatecas, and Michoacan. Each day we were there, an ICE bus would drop off around 80 people just released from the heleras.  That left Annunciation House with 420 vacant beds due to this administration’s heartless policies of metering and remain in Mexico. 

So here is my first-hand update from my two weeks at the border:

*the lucky few are families allowed to cross and endure 72 hours of being caged in an helera

* desperate trapped parents are choosing to send their children across the border unaccompanied to the   uncertain cruelty of detention camps rather than risk kidnapping, death and disease in Mexico

*thousands and thousands of Central Americans have disappeared

Marjorie Margolis is a retired Conant High School teacher living in Sharon. After volunteering at Annunciation House last winter, she organized a group to join an 11/9 – 11/22 trip to the border, including a fact-finding Border Awareness Experience facilitated by Annunciation House. To learn more: tune in Nov. 17 National Public Radio interviews with Immigration agents and migrants on This American Life,  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/this-american-life/id201671138?i=1000457072763

Under the Same Stars: Messaging the Great Beyond
Monadnock Ledger Transcript  Nov 5, 2019 page 9

Messaging the Great Beyond

Here’s what I learned traveling in Guatemala while our son and daughter-in-law lived and worked there: Central Americans prize nothing higher than their tight-knit families, rich history, colorful cultures and beautiful natural settings. It would take extraordinary pressure to choose an arduous, uncertain migration and leave all that behind. This story takes us closer to that truth.

On November 1, Dia de los Muertos (AKA Day of the Dead, Dia de Todos los Santos or All Saints Day, you can choose), Guatemalans of Mayan descent fly vibrant paper kites to honor and communicate with their dead. 

Over the five years our “kids” lived in Antigua our (husband and friends) visits twice coincided with the colorful “barilletas gigantes” festivals in nearby Sacatepéquez villages of Santiago and Sumpango. These celebrations have been around for 3,000 years and are recognized by various religious sects.  The giant kites are a blend of art, tradition and color, sending messages of unity, love, respect and faith to dead ancestors and to Mother Earth. 

 

Our son drove us to Santiago where we parked for a small fee in someone's yard, a little like we used to for Big Ten football games in Iowa City. Later we paid to use the family's toilet, a simple no-flush cement throne in an out-building near our car.  

                   
                                        

First we wound through streets crowded with local families, 

past fair vendors offering street food,

 

roasted pork right off the hog on a spit,

exotic (to us, anyway) flowers and souvenirs. 

Think county fair with princess pageants and kite competitions,

 

combined with Memorial-Day-times-ten; 

families in their Sunday best picnicking,

 flying and displaying kites some 40 to more than 70 feet across as they maintain family tombs 

and decorate the cleaned graves of loved ones with flowers.

Traditionally it takes 40 days to build the kites, the first day marked by the village's unmarried men heading out to the coast at 4:00 am to laboriously collect bamboo for the frames.                                      

Community and family groups work for weeks cutting and pasting. The glue is a mixture of yucca flower, lemon peel, and water, ropes are made of the maguey plant (the plant that also brings us tequila), and the tails are made from woven cloth.

The kites have portraits of deceased loved ones and messages ("there is no other love on earth as great as that of a mother"), 



religious or folklore themes, tributes to the environment and occasional political messages eschewing government corruption. 



                    
My favorite symbol is the dazzling quetzal,

 Guatemala’s stunning national bird. The Quetzal’s iridescent green tail feathers were esteemed as symbols of spring plant growth by ancient Aztecs and Maya and as a symbol of goodness, light and liberty: the quetzal is said to die of sadness if it is caged.

Families and children run between graves with smaller kites all day. 




Bigger kites fly in the late afternoon, but the largest kites assembled in the morning are propped and strung on poles, too heavy to fly at all.

We watched one crash down on the builders. Luckily no one was badly injured. 








Locals compete to see who has the most beautiful kite and which flies the longest, but at the end of the day there is a feeling of peace and unity as the fabled “wind against the paper takes away bad spirits to restore harmony and calm.” Far from a sad remembrance, Dia de los Muers is a joyful connection with those who have gone before. 

Julie Zimmer, a retired educator and journalist, is grandma to two dual U.S./Guatemalan citizens also living in Peterborough.