aria
Former Moderator
- Joined
- Dec 4, 1977
- Posts
- 39,546
Of course, "The Terminal" was based off the the real life misadventures of an Iranian man who was stuck in Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport for 10 years -Steven Speilberg adapted the story (without any citation) to a NY airport. In reality, the US version would either be in jail or on parole 
This story is interesting for how much money, time and a person's life this has wasted.
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June 4, 2005
Refugees in Limbo: Ordered Out of U.S., but With Nowhere to Go
By JODI WILGOREN - NYT
STILLWATER, Minn., May 31 - Back in 1999, Keyse G. Jama, a Somali refugee, made what he calls his big mistake: engaging in a drunken knife fight that led to a one-year jail sentence. Nearly six years later, he is still behind bars.
Ordered deported in May 2001 because of his crime, Mr. Jama fought all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in January that he could indeed be returned to the violent and chaotic land of his birth despite its lack of a functioning government. So the immigration service chartered a plane and paid a private security company to repatriate him in April. But when he arrived at a Somali airstrip, local officials rejected his papers and turned him away.
Now, after a pricey journey of 18,000 miles, Mr. Jama, 26, is back in this Minneapolis suburb, at the county jail where he began, a man without a country, longing to go home - whether to relatives in Minnesota or to strangers in Somalia.
"It doesn't matter where I go," he said in a jailhouse interview punctuated by sarcasm and a few sobs. "I don't have land. I don't have nothing. I just want to get out of jail. You could let me out in Iraq right now. I want to be free."
Mr. Jama's struggle against the system, while extraordinary, reflects one of the stickiest political and moral quandaries facing the immigration service: what to do with people who have no legal right to stay, yet no practical route out. Though he is among only a handful of Somalis who are jailed while awaiting expulsion, about 4,000 of his countrymen also face imminent deportation - most because of failure of their asylum applications - if the government can get them back home.
And the issue is hardly limited to Somalis. The Catholic Legal Immigration Network, using data from the Department of Homeland Security, counted 1,225 immigrants from more than 100 countries in long-term detention, like Mr. Jama, as of March. Thousands more ordered deported live under parolelike supervision and could be expelled at any time.
"We call them lifers," said David Leopold, a Cleveland lawyer who is on the board of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. "It's a serious problem, because there's nowhere to send them, and if there's nowhere to send them, they go into this strange limbo."
While some are from war zones like Somalia or Sudan, where there are no authorities to issue passports, most are from nations like Cuba, Iran, Libya and North Korea that lack full diplomatic relations with the United States. Others are citizens of Vietnam, Laos or China whose return has been rejected for unknown reasons. There are problems that are most particular - a stateless European born in a displaced-persons camp, an Ethiopian from territory now belonging to Eritrea - and there are Palestinians without a homeland.
"It can be very challenging removing people to these countries," said Manny Van Pelt, a spokesman for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "The American public thinks it's just putting a person on a plane and letting him go."
Laura Lichter, a lawyer in Denver who represents Somalis, Cambodians and others in similar straits, said the government's failure to remove Mr. Jama only bolstered the argument that he and others like him should not be sent home until the situation is more stable.
"This is kind of like they're sending you C.O.D. someplace: someone needs to sign off on you on the other side," Ms. Lichter said. "It's one thing for the government to say, 'Look, you don't belong here, you've been a rude guest, go home.' But the point is, you don't just throw people out on the street. And I don't think anybody's really come up with a solution for it."
Outraged at the botching of Mr. Jama's removal, a federal judge in Minneapolis, John R. Tunheim, ordered last month that he be released by May 23. Judge Tunheim urged the government to "slow down its rush to act, and take time to carefully and thoroughly plan a lawful and safe deportation for all Somali nationals subject to deportation."
But an appeals court halted Mr. Jama's release after the government argued in court papers that he was a flight risk, "as he has nothing to lose," and said the authorities were "on the brink" of removing him.
Mr. Jama's lawyers question how a second deportation effort would differ from the first, and argue that holding him this long, or sending him to Somalia without ensuring his security, both amount to trampling on his human rights. Their client, meanwhile, struggles to sleep in his cell, unsure whether dawn will bring the first day of the rest of his life, or another 24 hours locked up at a taxpayer cost of $81.11.
"This game, when is it going to be over?" he said. "Looked like it was over, but no."
Born in Mogadishu, Mr. Jama spent several years in refugee camps in Kenya before coming to the United States, legally, in 1996, part of a wave that has swelled this country's Somali population to 90,000, nearly half living here in Minnesota.
His problems began immediately, he says, in a beer bottle. He grew estranged from his strict Muslim family. He quit school, where he did not understand English instruction anyway. He got, and lost, an airport job stocking planes. And he was arrested several times for theft or disorderly conduct.
In the early hours of June 15, 1999, a quarrel with a roommate turned violent outside a bar in Waseca, Minn., about 75 miles south of the Twin Cities, and Mr. Jama stabbed three people, according to police reports. He pleaded guilty to one count of assault and was released from jail, but quickly violated his parole and was back in custody on Oct. 21. He has been there ever since.
"I should not be here at all," he said, now nearly fluent in English. "I come to this country refugee. I should have my citizenship today. The mistake I made is alcohol."
The conviction brought deportation proceedings, but Mr. Jama resisted, filing a legal challenge on his own before getting help from Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights and from Briggs & Morgan, a law firm that has donated more than 5,000 hours to his case. Then, five months ago, the Supreme Court ruled, 5 to 4, that deportation law did not require prior consent of the receiving country.
Thus began the second battle: to get Mr. Jama home.
There was a struggle over where in Somalia to send him, with the immigration service eventually accepting his choice: Puntland, a region in the northeast controlled by his clan, Darood.
There was the question of a passport. Mr. Jama never had one, and Somalia has no central government to issue one. Daallo Airlines, the only commercial option, requires one, so the lawyers argued over whether they could (or should) obtain one from a quasi-governmental group, eventually opting against doing so.
At 9 a.m. on April 20, immigration officers came to the jail here "and told me to collect my belongings," Mr. Jama said in a sworn statement.
Interviews and other court records show that he was flown, ankles or wrists cuffed, in a private jet from Minneapolis to Nairobi, with fuel stops in Reykjavik and Rome. American officials do not travel to Somalia - or negotiate with the local Puntland authorities - so they handed him over in Nairobi to RMI Security, a Kenyan concern that, under United States government contract, was supposed to arrange his acceptance.
He and his guards flew as planned to an airstrip in Puntland, but soon reboarded the plane with a handwritten document from an unidentified official that said, "Not having needed lawful documents we have rejected to except" him. It was signed "Thanks."
Now the legal tug of war is over separate Supreme Court precedent that forbids detention beyond six months unless deportation is imminent or there is a specific danger in release. The immigration service, in asking the appeals court to block Mr. Jama's release, argued that the start of the six-month period should be Jan. 12, the date of the Supreme Court's decision on his suit.
"This case involves an alien who has blocked his removal at every turn," the government lawyers wrote, attributing the length of Mr. Jama's detention to his original challenge to deportation, his choice of destination and his refusal to pursue a passport.
In court documents, the government has said that it now plans to expel Mr. Jama by June 8. Tim Counts, a spokesman for the immigration service's office in Bloomington, Minn., said in an interview that "it's very clear that we have the authority to hold him," but refused to discuss the next deportation effort. "We simply don't talk about the details of any removal - the hows, the whens, any of that," he said.
So Mr. Jama sits in jail, where he has a certificate for winning a basketball shooting championship and another for completing chemical dependency treatment. He used to play dominoes and card games but has recently spent more time reading, about Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.
"When my case went to the Supreme Court, I started reading a lot of history books," he said. "About how people suffered. It's not just me."
[con't in next post]
This story is interesting for how much money, time and a person's life this has wasted.
--------
June 4, 2005
Refugees in Limbo: Ordered Out of U.S., but With Nowhere to Go
By JODI WILGOREN - NYT
STILLWATER, Minn., May 31 - Back in 1999, Keyse G. Jama, a Somali refugee, made what he calls his big mistake: engaging in a drunken knife fight that led to a one-year jail sentence. Nearly six years later, he is still behind bars.
Ordered deported in May 2001 because of his crime, Mr. Jama fought all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in January that he could indeed be returned to the violent and chaotic land of his birth despite its lack of a functioning government. So the immigration service chartered a plane and paid a private security company to repatriate him in April. But when he arrived at a Somali airstrip, local officials rejected his papers and turned him away.
Now, after a pricey journey of 18,000 miles, Mr. Jama, 26, is back in this Minneapolis suburb, at the county jail where he began, a man without a country, longing to go home - whether to relatives in Minnesota or to strangers in Somalia.
"It doesn't matter where I go," he said in a jailhouse interview punctuated by sarcasm and a few sobs. "I don't have land. I don't have nothing. I just want to get out of jail. You could let me out in Iraq right now. I want to be free."
Mr. Jama's struggle against the system, while extraordinary, reflects one of the stickiest political and moral quandaries facing the immigration service: what to do with people who have no legal right to stay, yet no practical route out. Though he is among only a handful of Somalis who are jailed while awaiting expulsion, about 4,000 of his countrymen also face imminent deportation - most because of failure of their asylum applications - if the government can get them back home.
And the issue is hardly limited to Somalis. The Catholic Legal Immigration Network, using data from the Department of Homeland Security, counted 1,225 immigrants from more than 100 countries in long-term detention, like Mr. Jama, as of March. Thousands more ordered deported live under parolelike supervision and could be expelled at any time.
"We call them lifers," said David Leopold, a Cleveland lawyer who is on the board of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. "It's a serious problem, because there's nowhere to send them, and if there's nowhere to send them, they go into this strange limbo."
While some are from war zones like Somalia or Sudan, where there are no authorities to issue passports, most are from nations like Cuba, Iran, Libya and North Korea that lack full diplomatic relations with the United States. Others are citizens of Vietnam, Laos or China whose return has been rejected for unknown reasons. There are problems that are most particular - a stateless European born in a displaced-persons camp, an Ethiopian from territory now belonging to Eritrea - and there are Palestinians without a homeland.
"It can be very challenging removing people to these countries," said Manny Van Pelt, a spokesman for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "The American public thinks it's just putting a person on a plane and letting him go."
Laura Lichter, a lawyer in Denver who represents Somalis, Cambodians and others in similar straits, said the government's failure to remove Mr. Jama only bolstered the argument that he and others like him should not be sent home until the situation is more stable.
"This is kind of like they're sending you C.O.D. someplace: someone needs to sign off on you on the other side," Ms. Lichter said. "It's one thing for the government to say, 'Look, you don't belong here, you've been a rude guest, go home.' But the point is, you don't just throw people out on the street. And I don't think anybody's really come up with a solution for it."
Outraged at the botching of Mr. Jama's removal, a federal judge in Minneapolis, John R. Tunheim, ordered last month that he be released by May 23. Judge Tunheim urged the government to "slow down its rush to act, and take time to carefully and thoroughly plan a lawful and safe deportation for all Somali nationals subject to deportation."
But an appeals court halted Mr. Jama's release after the government argued in court papers that he was a flight risk, "as he has nothing to lose," and said the authorities were "on the brink" of removing him.
Mr. Jama's lawyers question how a second deportation effort would differ from the first, and argue that holding him this long, or sending him to Somalia without ensuring his security, both amount to trampling on his human rights. Their client, meanwhile, struggles to sleep in his cell, unsure whether dawn will bring the first day of the rest of his life, or another 24 hours locked up at a taxpayer cost of $81.11.
"This game, when is it going to be over?" he said. "Looked like it was over, but no."
Born in Mogadishu, Mr. Jama spent several years in refugee camps in Kenya before coming to the United States, legally, in 1996, part of a wave that has swelled this country's Somali population to 90,000, nearly half living here in Minnesota.
His problems began immediately, he says, in a beer bottle. He grew estranged from his strict Muslim family. He quit school, where he did not understand English instruction anyway. He got, and lost, an airport job stocking planes. And he was arrested several times for theft or disorderly conduct.
In the early hours of June 15, 1999, a quarrel with a roommate turned violent outside a bar in Waseca, Minn., about 75 miles south of the Twin Cities, and Mr. Jama stabbed three people, according to police reports. He pleaded guilty to one count of assault and was released from jail, but quickly violated his parole and was back in custody on Oct. 21. He has been there ever since.
"I should not be here at all," he said, now nearly fluent in English. "I come to this country refugee. I should have my citizenship today. The mistake I made is alcohol."
The conviction brought deportation proceedings, but Mr. Jama resisted, filing a legal challenge on his own before getting help from Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights and from Briggs & Morgan, a law firm that has donated more than 5,000 hours to his case. Then, five months ago, the Supreme Court ruled, 5 to 4, that deportation law did not require prior consent of the receiving country.
Thus began the second battle: to get Mr. Jama home.
There was a struggle over where in Somalia to send him, with the immigration service eventually accepting his choice: Puntland, a region in the northeast controlled by his clan, Darood.
There was the question of a passport. Mr. Jama never had one, and Somalia has no central government to issue one. Daallo Airlines, the only commercial option, requires one, so the lawyers argued over whether they could (or should) obtain one from a quasi-governmental group, eventually opting against doing so.
At 9 a.m. on April 20, immigration officers came to the jail here "and told me to collect my belongings," Mr. Jama said in a sworn statement.
Interviews and other court records show that he was flown, ankles or wrists cuffed, in a private jet from Minneapolis to Nairobi, with fuel stops in Reykjavik and Rome. American officials do not travel to Somalia - or negotiate with the local Puntland authorities - so they handed him over in Nairobi to RMI Security, a Kenyan concern that, under United States government contract, was supposed to arrange his acceptance.
He and his guards flew as planned to an airstrip in Puntland, but soon reboarded the plane with a handwritten document from an unidentified official that said, "Not having needed lawful documents we have rejected to except" him. It was signed "Thanks."
Now the legal tug of war is over separate Supreme Court precedent that forbids detention beyond six months unless deportation is imminent or there is a specific danger in release. The immigration service, in asking the appeals court to block Mr. Jama's release, argued that the start of the six-month period should be Jan. 12, the date of the Supreme Court's decision on his suit.
"This case involves an alien who has blocked his removal at every turn," the government lawyers wrote, attributing the length of Mr. Jama's detention to his original challenge to deportation, his choice of destination and his refusal to pursue a passport.
In court documents, the government has said that it now plans to expel Mr. Jama by June 8. Tim Counts, a spokesman for the immigration service's office in Bloomington, Minn., said in an interview that "it's very clear that we have the authority to hold him," but refused to discuss the next deportation effort. "We simply don't talk about the details of any removal - the hows, the whens, any of that," he said.
So Mr. Jama sits in jail, where he has a certificate for winning a basketball shooting championship and another for completing chemical dependency treatment. He used to play dominoes and card games but has recently spent more time reading, about Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.
"When my case went to the Supreme Court, I started reading a lot of history books," he said. "About how people suffered. It's not just me."
[con't in next post]