The President announced his “Strategy to Enhance America’s Homeland Security Through Comprehensive Immigration Reform” yesterday. This strategy includes the expansion of a controversial summary deportation process known as expedited removal. Under the process, individual immigration or border patrol officers are given the authority to order deportations, a power previously entrusted to immigration judges.
Human Rights First is concerned that this flawed strategy puts asylum seekers at risk of mistaken deportation and lengthy detentions in inappropriate prison-like conditions. Human Rights First has issued several reports on the detention of asylum seekers and the expedited removal process, including In Liberty’s Shadow; US Detention of Asylum Seekers in the Era of Homeland Security and Is This America? The Denial of Due Process to Asylum Seekers in the U.S.
“The expedited removal process is deeply flawed,” said Eleanor Acer, the director of Human Rights First’s refugee protection program, “The expansion of this defective process will put more refugees at risk of being deported back into the hands of their persecutors or jailed in prison-like conditions in the very country they turned to for protection.”
According to a White House statement, the expedited process will now be used across the entire Southwest border. President Bush erroneously called expedited removal “[o]ne of the most effective tools we have in this effort” and a “straightforward idea.”
Yet, just earlier this year, the bipartisan U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom concluded that there are serious problems with expedited removal that put asylum seekers at risk of improper return. The Commission’s experts found significant variations in compliance with procedures designed to protect asylum seekers and that immigration officers disregard some of these procedures more than half the time. The Commission further concluded that asylum seekers are jailed in conditions of confinement that are virtually identical to those in prisons and create a serious risk of psychological harm.
The President also asserted that “every single illegal entrant” would be returned “with no exceptions.” This categorical statement ignores the U.S.’s commitment to refrain from deporting, back into the hands of their persecutors, those who have fled from repression.
Ms. Acer stressed that “We urge the U.S. government to live up to its commitment to protect those who flee persecution and seek refuge here.”
