CIR: All New Content
CIR and two dozen other nonprofit news orgs gathered at Pocantico to collaborate.
A review of "The Price of Sex," Mimi Chakarova's project on sex trafficking.
Many removal proceedings must go before an immigration judge.
This chart shows trends in the number of people that were removed
from the U.S. from 2003 to 2008, broken down by ICE Field Office.
Click on image to view chart. Produced by Hugo CabreraWhile the nation’s understaffed immigration courts strain under a backlog that has grown to more than 200,000 cases, thousands of new border agents have been hired and the number of government attorneys who argue for deportation has increased by 35 percent, pushing more cases onto an already overburdened system.
As a result, cases often take months if not years to complete, leading to more immigrants being locked up in a growing network of detention facilities and jails. On any given day there are more than 30,000 people in immigration lock-up.
Since 2004, 184 trial attorneys have been added by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), bringing the number of lawyers to about 709 as of Feb. 18, according to records recently obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting through a Freedom of Information Act request. ICE, a bureau of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), arrests and detains undocumented immigrants and deports those ordered removed from the country by an immigration judge.
The hiring of more border agents also contrasts sharply to that of immigration judges who have struggled to keep up with the case backlog. While nearly five thousand border agents were hired from 2006 to 2008—the number of Border Patrol agents is expected to reach 20,000 this year—there has been a net increase of three judges from 2006 to June 26, 2009. The number of judges has fluctuated, mostly stemming from retirement, and now stands at 233 jurists, according the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the Justice Department agency that oversees the nation’s 57 immigration courts.
The shortfall of judges has contributed to a backlog of cases that reached 201,212 as of April 30, a 19 percent increase since 2006, according to a recent report by Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a nonpartisan data-analysis group at Syracuse University. The backlog has jumped 64 percent since a decade ago.
Of the 233 current judges, all but a handful regularly hear cases, which TRAC projects to exceed 384,000 this year, up from about 354,000 cases last year. Looking at one week last year, TRAC found that each judge normally handled about 69 cases per week.
"For some people, these are the equivalent of death penalty cases, and we are conducting these cases in a traffic court setting," Judge Dana Leigh Marks, the president of the National Association of Immigration Judges recently told NPR.
The Justice Department has been slow to hire much needed immigration judges, the TRAC report states, despite calls by then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to add jurists as far back as 2006.
In the Justice Department’s 2009 Congressional budget submission, officials underscored that because the immigration courts get almost of their cases from the Department of Homeland Security, "The importance of effectively planning and coordinating with DHS, as their enforcement increases, cannot be overstated."
The Justice Department anticipates "that the current and planned expansion of DHS enforcement efforts, e.g., detention bedspaces, criminal alien programs and border enforcement, will increase immigration court case receipts well into the future," according to the justification report.
Despite appointing more than a dozen judges in the past six months, including 10 in April, EOIR still has 20 open judge positions, as of June 26. The 2009 Omnibus bill signed earlier this year by President Obama included $5 million for the hiring of new judges, and EOIR requested funding for 28 more for fiscal year 2010, according to the Justice Department.
Meanwhile, ICE documents show that the bureau has been approved this year to employ 916 attorneys, of which 735 will argue in courts, and a support staff of 630. As of Feb. 18, there were 26 unfilled attorney jobs. In 2007 the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported that ICE had budgetary approval to employ about 700 attorneys in fiscal year 2006.
Will the new hiring be enough to meet caseload demands as ICE marches more immigrants into court? EOIR thinks so: it checked off as completed necessary budget increases on its 22-point reform to-do list.
On average, roughly four judges now share one law clerk, TRAC found. Along with their usual tasks of hearing deportation, asylum and other related cases, judges also handle administrative duties normally done by clerks or bailiffs—duties such as operating digital recording devices (when they’re not struggling with decades-old cassette recorders) and handling exhibits.
As the number of cases put before immigration judges has increased, so too has the pressure on them to get through cases quickly. A survey of 96 judges, included in a recent Georgetown Immigration Law Journal article, highlights the effects of having an inadequate number of judges presiding over asylum cases in which decisions can have life-or-death consequences.
When surveyed about the challenges of immigration court, one judge responded by saying, “We are told to keep producing—to get the cases done, without regard for the fact that we have insufficient support staff, insufficient time to deliberate and to complete cases, and outdated equipment.”
The nature of cases heard by immigration judges, combined with case overload and long hours, makes the work of judges especially stressful and puts them at particular risk of burnout, the report states. Such burnout can lead to emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, loss of compassion and cynicism.
Judge Denise Slavin, vice president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, told CIR that the problem could be mostly addressed if there were more judges with better resources.
When asked about the courts’ workload, Elaine Komis, a spokeswoman for EOIR, acknowledged that immigration judges continue to face challenging caseloads, but added that they handle them “admirably well.”
“It is important to note that only a relatively low percentage of cases decided by the immigration judges and BIA (Board of Immigration Appeals) members are ever appealed, and of that small number, almost 90 percent are affirmed at the appellate court level nationwide,” she said. “We think this speaks well for the performance of our agency.”
Burnout and Secondary Post Traumatic Stress, however, don’t only have adverse effects on judges. Decisions in sensitive asylum cases have lacked uniformity and have even drawn criticism from appellate courts. The lack of uniformity is not surprising, given the beleaguered immigration courts and judges, although there have been recent signs of improvement, according to TRAC.
A Department of Justice spokesman recently told the New York Times that the growing backlog of cases highlighted by TRAC "doesn’t mean that courts are overwhelmed or inefficient," but rather that backlogs are the result of cases becoming more legally complex or unusual.
One immigration judge told surveyors that, while the law has gotten exponentially more complex and time pressures have made work much more grueling, resources such as clerks have all but disappeared.
And the Justice Department’s 2009 Congressional budget submission points out that immigration courts failed to meet two of three time-oriented performance goals for 2007, narrowly missing targets "due to a large number of immigration judge vacancies and an increase in the detained caseload."
The report continues: "EOIR’s adjudication functions are part of the government’s larger immigration and border control programs. As such, EOIR’s ability to adjudicate cases in a timely fashion allows the larger system to operate more efficiently, including the efficient utilization of DHS detention bed spaces."
As courts become increasingly saddled with work, the need for them to maintain adequate transparency is, more than ever, critical.
In a recent article in The Nation on the lack of transparency of some immigration courts, Jacqueline Stevens points out that although the court’s policy is for hearings to be open, except in certain situations, that’s not always the case. Stevens, a law and society professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, describes how she was refused entry to immigration court inside two detention facilities in Arizona. The reasons why she was kept out, she argues, had nothing to do with the certain exceptions.
Indeed, immigration courts have some quirky ways. Members of the public and reporters who want to attend hearings are allowed to observe, but, as the Immigration Courts Practice Manual emphasizes, news media are "strongly encouraged" to give the court administrator a heads-up before sitting in on court, whether the hearing is held at a detention center or not.
This article also appeared on Truthdig. Andrew Becker is a staff reporter at the Center for Investigative Reporting. Hugo Cabrera is a CIR researcher.
While the nation’s understaffed immigration courts strain under a backlog that has grown to more than 200,000 cases, thousands of new border agents and hundreds of government attorneys have been hired, pushing more cases onto an already overburdened system. As a result, cases often take months if not years to complete. On any given day there are more than 30,000 people in immigration lock-up.
Can General Motors really be revitalized? It's a question that fills TV producer Stephen Talbot with an eerie sense of déjà vu. In 1993, he posed the very same question in "The Heartbeat of America," a CIR/FRONTLINE co-production that explored how the mighty GM had fallen on such hard times, and asked how the company intended to right itself.
Video Excerpt edited by Carrie ChingWhen General Motors declared bankruptcy this month, it already felt inevitable. This had been a long time coming.
Now the question for the Obama administration and American taxpayers is whether an infusion of $30 billion can resuscitate the company that was once an unassailable symbol of U.S. economic dominance. Can General Motors really be revitalized?
It's a question that fills me with an eerie sense of déjà vu.
Sixteen years ago, in October 1993, the Center for Investigative Reporting and I posed the very same question in "The Heartbeat of America," a documentary we produced for the PBS series, Frontline.
Back then, the country was also struggling through a recession, and the U.S. auto industry was reeling, battered by intense competition from Japanese imports. GM, the largest of the U.S. carmakers, had just suffered the biggest yearly corporate loss in U.S. history, a staggering $23.5 billion.
Despite the near-collapse of GM in the early 90s, it seemed almost sacrilegious to question the company's future. But we decided to do just that, investigating how the mighty GM had fallen on such hard times, and asking how the company intended to right itself.
It turned out that GM executives were in no mood to discuss their company's woes, or to reassess publicly the decisions they had made that led to GM's downward spiral. They refused to cooperate from the very beginning—politely at first—but their replies to our continued queries took on a belligerent tone. CIR reporter Eve Pell and I began to feel like crash test dummies smashing into one impenetrable GM barrier after another. By the end, they were denouncing our documentary as "yellow journalism" and threatening to cutoff their financial support for public broadcasting in retaliation.
Now that Americans are being asked to bailout a company experiencing its second near-death experience in the last twenty years, I couldn't resist going back to our film to search for any signs of the bankruptcy to come. Unfortunately—for GM and the Obama administration—they were not hard to find. Are these guys ever going to get it right?
To set the stage: We began to work on the GM documentary late in 1992, after covering the presidential election for Frontline. Bill Clinton had won that race in large part because the country was mired in recession and voters blamed the incumbent Bush (senior) administration. "It's the economy, stupid!" was the Democrat's now famous battle cry. GM had become the poster boy for a troubled corporate America—a once proud and prosperous company that had controlled 50 percent of the U.S. car market but had lost the knack of making a popular, well-engineered, midsize, affordable car. (It's only gotten worse: GM's domestic market share is now down to 20 percent.)
In what became known as the "Christmas massacre," GM chairman Bob Stempel closed out the year 1991 by announcing the layoff of 74,000 workers and the closing of 21 GM plants. By 1992 the corporation was in real danger of flat-lining.
Enter Jack Smith, a relatively modest, low-key, plain-spoken GM chairman, who had enjoyed some success running GM's Opel European division. This new Smith promised a new era in which corporate openness and flexibility would replace GM's reputation for arrogance and stubborn resistance to change.
"Terrific," we thought, "there's our story." CIR's Eve Pell, correspondent Robert Krulwich and I would follow Jack Smith as he tried to re-invent this floundering corporate giant.
No such luck. Despite our appeals and Eve's impeccable East Coast manners, GM stonewalled. The closest we ever got to Jack Smith was when we tailed him to the New York Auto Show and he graciously autographed the cast on Eve's broken wrist.
We spent ten months pursuing GM, but they refused all interview requests and denied us entry to any GM office or factory. It became part of the story—GM's phobia about the media, Frontline in particular.
Nevertheless, we opened our documentary on a hopeful note with a celebration in Washington on the Capitol Mall. This was spring 1993, and the new Clinton-Gore administration was eager to show that the recession was beginning to recede and that the U.S. auto industry, even GM, was showing signs of life. They called it "Drive American Quality," put up circus tents on the Mall, and brought in the chairmen of Ford, Chrysler and GM to show off their new cars to members of Congress and the press.
"I grew up in the back of a Buick dealership," Clinton told the crowd in that charming southern drawl, adding that he'd do anything to help the Big Three regain their former glory. We spotted a very short Secretary of Labor Robert Reich conferring with a very tall United Auto Workers president Owen Bieber, and with our camera rolling, the suave Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown climbed in to a shiny red muscle car to take a test drive. Everyone appeared upbeat.
Only later that day, when we went for a ride with a mid-level UAW official, did we hear a discouraging word. He told us on camera that as GM stumbled and downsized he feared he and his fellow auto workers were "a dying breed"—the last generation of well-paid unionized factory workers with full medical benefits and pensions.
GM did manage to stave off collapse then, thanks largely to the general economic recovery and to the marketing of an invention that now seems like absurdly anachronistic—the SUV. Ironically, that's the same vehicle that helped bring them down did in the long run. Relying on these gas-guzzling, outsized vehicles—the Hummer being the most outrageous—stalled development of fuel-efficient, stylish, affordable cars, including the forward-looking hybrids.
All the Detroit automakers are still searching for the answer to the Honda Accord and Toyota Camry. Another thing to keep in mind as President Obama tries to revive GM and steer it toward developing a "green car": They've already tried: Clinton and Gore tried to do the same thing and failed.
Toward the end of our doc, we went to the White House to cover a ceremony in which the Clinton administration announced it would give $1 billion to the Big Three to develop a revolutionary "clean car." Vice-president Al Gore vowed that this new generation of cars would get 60 to 90 miles per gallon. Jack Smith and his counterparts at Ford and Chrysler solemnly nodded their heads. It would be a 10-year plan, an industry-government partnership, like putting the first man on the moon. Needless to say, it never happened.
Screening "Heartbeat of America" now, a lot of it does seem strangely prophetic. A few snapshots …
* We included a section on GM's thwarting of the electric vehicle from the days of dismantling the trolley lines in Los Angeles (the sub-plot, you may recall, of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?") to its pulling the plug on its own creation of an electric car, the oddly named "Impact." Some of our interviews and footage were later included in the theatrical release documentary, "Who Killed the Electric Car?"
* There's a hilarious interview segment withTom and Ray Magliozzi, the Car Talk guys (we were the first to put them on TV) in which they critique a series of GM cars, particularly the Chevy Lumina whose main selling point appeared to be its 14 cupholders. GM went on to re-design the much-maligned mini-van.
* There's a lot in our report that is disturbingly familiar about the battle between the California Air Resources Board and GM, with the automakers resisting clean air standards set by the state. This may be of interest to the Obama administration, as they try, once more, to establish firm goals for production of low-emission vehicles.
Despite GM's efforts to thwart us, we managed to get inside a GM factory in Oklahoma and we were able to get interviews with dissident GM board members such as Ross Perot and Chicago attorney Elmer Johnson, whose scathing assessments of the company then seem like they could have been said yesterday.
GM's top spokesman condemned "The Heartbeat of America" as "yellow journalism" and issued a press release saying: "We will be re-evaluating our corporate involvement and financial underwriting of Public Broadcasting shows, if programs such as 'Frontline' reflect a value shift on the part of PBS." But no one at GM ever pointed to a single error in fact.
We sparred with GM after the broadcast and discovered that the only PBS programming GM was underwriting at the time was Ken Burns' forthcoming series on baseball. When we pointed this out publicly, GM backed off its threat to curtail its PBS funding. The company continued to be Ken Burns' patron right up until this year when they finally announced that they could no longer afford to underwrite Burns' work—another sign that the end was near.
The New York Times called "The Heartbeat of America" a "scathing account of the breakdown of General Motors," the Newark Star-Ledger said it was "devastating," and the Atlanta Constitution described it as "a sober, more credible version of Michael Moore's documentary, 'Roger & Me'."
As a Newsday reviewer put it: "Do yourself a favor tonight. See how far wrong things can go with insular, isolated leaders unwilling either to listen to good ideas or to grasp the truths in what they consider bad news."
Sound familiar? What we warned about then has come to pass. GM is bankrupt. But the question we asked back in 1993 is still strangely the same: can GM be revitalized?
It will take more than a presidential laying on of hands to truly salvage GM. This is a company and a corporate culture that has to utterly transform itself to survive and prosper. Otherwise, the heartbeat that was jolted back to life by federal intervention doesn't stand a chance. If GM can't re-invent itself, it's code blue.
Stephen Talbot is now president of a San Francisco-based media company, The Talbot Players, where he is developing "Sound Tracks," a new series for PBS about music and musicians around the world. His last Frontline documentary was a 90-minute critique of the state of the news media, "News War: What's Happening to the News" (2007) with reporter Lowell Bergman.
Can General Motors be revitalized? It's a question that fills TV producer Stephen Talbot with an eerie sense of déjà vu. In 1993, he posed the very same question in "The Heartbeat of America," a CIR/FRONTLINE co-production that explored how the mighty GM had fallen on such hard times, and asked how the company intended to right itself.
U.S. immigration courts granted 71 out of 3,000 asylum cases.
Lawlessness and sectarian violence quickly engulfed Iraq after the fall of Saddam, leaving women especially vulnerable. Correspondent Anna Badkhen and photojournalist Mimi Chakarova visited a secret women's shelter in Baghdad to meet with rape victims and war widows and document their stories. CIR spoke to the reporters in their hotel room in Baghdad via Skype for this episode of The Investigators.
The Investigators is CIR's web-video series highlighting investigative reporting—as it happens—by journalists around the world.
Anna Badkhen has covered wars in Afghanistan, Somalia, Israel and the Palestinian territories, Chechnya and Kashmir. She has reported extensively from Iraq since 2003. Her reporting has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, The National, FRONTLINE/World, Truthdig, and Salon. Her book, "A War Reporter's Pantry," will be published in January 2011 by Free Press/Simon&Schuster. Read her reporter's blog for CIR.
Mimi Chakarova is a photojournalist and photography instructor at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. Her solo exhibitions include documentary projects on South Africa, Jamaica, Cuba, Kashmir and Eastern Europe. She is currently working on two long-term projects that examine the conflict in Kashmir and sex trafficking of women in Eastern Europe. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, CBS News 60 Minutes, and FRONTLINE/World.Learn more about this story on FRONTLINE/World: "Iraq: Living in Hiding"
Support for this project was provided in part by CIR's Dick Goldensohn Fund.
PRODUCED AND EDITED BY CARRIE CHING
PHOTOGRAPHY AND VIDEO BY MIMI CHAKAROVALawlessness and sectarian violence quickly engulfed Iraq after the fall of Saddam, leaving women vulnerable. Anna Badkhen and Mimi Chakarova visited a secret women's shelter in Baghdad to document the stories of rape victims and war widows. CIR spoke to the reporters via Skype for this episode of The Investigators.
Advocacy groups rally around embattled Kosovo journalist Jeta Xharra.
PRI features Montgomery's radio doc and CIR video about Kosovo's missing.
Julio Ledezma had been chief of police in La Junta, a town of 8,700 in northern Mexico, for barely three months when a pair of strangers paid him a visit.
They said an aide to the mayor had sent them, and they bore gifts: a briefcase stuffed with cash and a truck for Ledezma's personal use.
In return, the new chief was to distract federal police at security checkpoints with fake calls for assistance. The diversion would allow drug traffickers to drive through the area without inspection.
Ledezma could refuse -- and be killed.
He could take the bribe -- and be owned by the Juarez cartel.
He chose to stall. He told the men he had to talk to his boss first. He approached civic leaders, trying to rally support. Word got back to the traffickers, and on Ledezma's 45th birthday, six men with military rifles surrounded his home while he was out buying steaks and jalapeños for his birthday dinner.
The gunmen told his wife that they would find him and kill him, no matter where he went in Mexico. They waited about 20 minutes, then left.
When Ledezma returned, he realized that resistance was not an option. He drove to Juarez with his wife and their 15-year-old daughter and crossed the Bridge of the Americas into El Paso. There, they asked for political asylum.
Their request will probably be rejected, because asylum is reserved for people fleeing political oppression or ethnic discrimination. Police officers who stood up to drug cartels don't necessarily qualify.
Indeed, the U.S. government is aggressively fighting Ledezma's petition on the grounds that the threat that caused him to flee is inherent to police work, according to his lawyer, Eduardo Beckett. U.S. immigration officials said they could not comment because asylum cases are confidential.
As drug violence has worsened in Mexico, businesspeople, journalists and other professionals have been seeking refuge in the U.S. But few have as much at stake as law enforcement figures who defy the cartels.
No statistics are available on how many police officers have sought asylum in this country, but government sources and immigration attorneys suggest the number is increasing.
That is no surprise, because Mexican police have been "left out in the cold by the very institution they sought to protect," said Bruce J. Einhorn, a retired immigration judge in Los Angeles who directs an asylum clinic at Pepperdine University School of Law.
Police officers seeking refuge in this country face an uncertain future. If their asylum applications are rejected, they can be deported to Mexico, to face near-certain retaliation from the cartels. To avoid such a fate, they can try to strike a deal with U.S. authorities to provide information about drug trafficking in Mexico. Or they can try to remain in this country illegally.
Their plight poses a quandary for U.S. officials, who are seeking to bolster honest Mexican police to curb the influence of the cartels.
"These cases are problematic," said Kathleen Walker, an El Paso lawyer and past president of the American Immigration Lawyers Assn. "It's like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole."
In recent months, judges have granted refuge to a few Mexicans fleeing drug-related violence, according to immigration lawyers. But none were police officers.
George Grayson, a professor of government at the College of William and Mary in Virginia and an expert on U.S.-Mexico relations, said that if immigration judges began to grant asylum liberally to people fleeing the cartels, "We'd have literally tens of thousands of police officers coming to the United States, not to mention some mayors, too."
Cartels' long reach
In some cases, disillusioned or terrified officers simply head for a border post and ask for asylum. They are held in detention facilities while waiting for their applications to be reviewed by asylum officers and a federal immigration court, a process that can take years. More often, Mexican police enter the country on visitor visas; they then have up to a year to apply for asylum. Such applicants typically remain free while awaiting a ruling.
Through immigration lawyers, interviews were arranged with Ledezma and two other Mexican police officers now in this country. Their accounts provide a glimpse of the drug cartels' reach and brazenness.
One of the officers, a detective in Baja California, received a call seeking inside information about two jailed murder suspects linked to the cartels.
The 39-year-old detective, interviewed on condition that he would be identified only as Alvarez, said he suspected that a fellow officer had set him up for the bribery attempt.
Alvarez said he had been brash enough to ask how some of his colleagues could afford fancy clothes, new cars and expensive weapons on their $1,000-a-month salaries.
The anonymous caller wanted to know about interrogations of the two suspects. Alvarez had had the men moved from a jail cell to police headquarters so he could question them about a pair of killings he was investigating.
"He said, 'You transferred some of my guys who work for me. And I want you to let me know every time you go to see them,' " Alvarez recalled.
No money was offered, but Alvarez knew how the traffickers worked. They paid $3,000 upfront, he said, and $2,000 more each time a cop tipped them to a raid or gave other information.
"I told him, 'You should call someone else. I'm not that kind of person,' " Alvarez said. "He said, 'You're not going to listen to me? You're not going to do it?' "
Two weeks later, Alvarez got another call. It was his daughter, reporting that armed men had been seen outside their home. Alvarez asked a supervisor for protection. The supervisor shrugged and said there was nothing he could do.
Alvarez fled with his family, entering the U.S. at San Ysidro on visitor visas. He is living in Southern California, working at a supermarket.
He said Mexican police need more support and better pay to resist the cartels. Otherwise, Alvarez said, "There won't be any honest cops left."
Officers targeted
An officer in the border city of Juarez, who asked to be identified only as Jesus, was on vacation last spring when his supervisor and a fellow officer were shot to death in the same truck Jesus drove when on duty.
A cartel had targeted members of the city's police force because many of them worked with the rival Juarez drug organization. The traffickers broadcast death threats over a stolen police radio.
In the weeks leading up to the killings, Jesus and fellow officers patrolled only in groups. He switched personal cars and never drove an official car home.
After the slayings, he reluctantly concluded that he had no future in Mexico law enforcement.
He is now living in Colorado, where he has applied for asylum.
"The reality is that I can't trust anybody in Mexico," Jesus said.
A case of do or die
Police work was in Julio Ledezma's blood. His father was a police officer, and Ledezma was a mounted officer in Juarez before turning in his badge for something different: He moved 320 miles south and became a mariachi singer and vocal instructor in La Junta.
Nearly 15 years later, in 2007, reform fervor swept the area after President Felipe Calderon's PAN party won regional elections. Ledezma said he was impressed with talk of reorganizing La Junta's "deplorable" police department. A civic leader encouraged him to apply, and he became chief in November 2007.
His predecessor, he recalled, offered some advice: "Some people are going to visit you. My suggestion is you cooperate with them."
Undeterred, Ledezma recruited and trained new officers and outfitted them with weapons and bulletproof vests. Then the two cartel representatives confronted him with their offer: Join us or die.
Playing for time, Ledezma told the men that he couldn't accept without talking to the mayor's chief of staff. One of the traffickers pulled out a cellphone and dialed the man's number. He was connected on speakerphone.
The point was made: Ledezma could expect no help.
Ledezma regrets leaving behind friends, family and the life he had built in Mexico. He is living in the U.S. interior but asked that the location not be revealed, for safety reasons.
"It hurts to be here" he said. But crossing the border was his only option.
"They never forget," he said of the men who threatened him. "Sooner or later they'll catch you."
Read the article in the Los Angeles Times.
In Mexico's escalating battle against drug traffickers, honest cops fear a harrowing proposal: work for the cartel or die. CIR's Andrew Becker reports for the Los Angeles Times on three police officers faced with the choice. PHOTO BY RODOLFO ANGULO
Knight Foundation initiative seeks new models for investigative reporting.
Morris was interviewed in CIR's first webisode of "The Investigators."
Award-winning editor Mark Katches will be joining CIR from Milwaukee.
Two U.S. journalists were given 12 years in N. Korea's labor camps. An expert explains what that might entail.
Elizabeth Rubin documents the digital lives of American soldiers in Afghanistan.
Correspondent Elizabeth Rubin spent the fall of 2007 with Battle Company of the U.S. 173rd Airborne Brigade in northeastern Afghanistan. The Americans and the Taliban have been locked in a dead heat in the Korengal Valley for more than three years. In 2007, Rubin went on a six-day mission with a platoon into the insurgents' mountain hideouts that resulted in the death of three soldiers. Rubin returned to Battle Company and the Korengal in the summer of 2008. Both times, she took a video camera.+ Watch the videos on FRONTLINE's website.
Elizabeth Rubin's reporting was supported in part by CIR's Dick Goldensohn Fund for International Investigative Reporting.
Elizabeth Rubin spent much of the fall of 2007 with Battle Company of the U.S. 173rd Airborne Brigade in northeastern Afghanistan. The Americans and the Taliban have been locked in a dead heat in the Korengal Valley for over three years. In 2007, Rubin went on a six-day mission with a platoon into the mountain hideouts that resulted in the death of three soldiers. Rubin returned to Korengal in the summer of 2008. Both times, she took a video camera.
Soldier Jon Millantz struggled to come to terms with prisoner abuse by his unit in Iraq.
Photo by Shane Bauer The light is fading from the dusty Baghdad sky as Hassan Mahsan re-enacts what happened to his family last summer. We're standing in the courtyard of his concrete-block house, his children are watching us quietly and his wife is twirling large circles of dough and slapping them against the inside walls of a roaring oven. He walks over to his three-foot-tall daughter and grabs her head like a melon. As she stands there, he gestures wildly behind her, pretending to tie up her hands, then pretending to point a rifle at her head. "They took the blindfold off me, pointed the gun at her head and cocked it, saying, 'Either you tell us where al-Zaydawi is, or we kill your daughter.'"
"They just marched into our house and took whatever they wanted," Hassan's mother says, peeking out the kitchen door. "I've never seen anyone act like this."
As Hassan tells it, it was a quiet night on June 10, 2008, in Sadr City, Baghdad's poor Shiite district of more than 2 million people, when the helicopter appeared over his house and the front door exploded, nearly burning his sleeping youngest son. Before Hassan knew it, he was on the ground, hands bound and a bag over his head, with eight men pointing rifles at him, locked and loaded.
At first he couldn't tell whether the men were Iraqis or Americans. He says he identified himself as a police sergeant, offering his ID before they took his pistol and knocked him to the ground. The men didn't move like any Iraqi forces he'd ever seen. They looked and spoke like his countrymen, but they were wearing American-style uniforms and carrying American weapons with night-vision scopes. They accused him of being a commander in the local militia, the Mahdi Army, before they dragged him off, telling his wife he was "finished." But before they left, they identified themselves. "We are the Special Forces. The dirty brigade," Hassan recalls them saying.
The Iraq Special Operations Forces (ISOF) is probably the largest special forces outfit ever built by the United States, and it is free of many of the controls that most governments employ to rein in such lethal forces. The project started in the deserts of Jordan just after the Americans took Baghdad in April 2003. There, the US Army's Special Forces, or Green Berets, trained mostly 18-year-old Iraqis with no prior military experience. The resulting brigade was a Green Beret's dream come true: a deadly, elite, covert unit, fully fitted with American equipment, that would operate for years under US command and be unaccountable to Iraqi ministries and the normal political process.
+ Read the complete article on The Nation's website.
The Center for Investigative Reporting provided partial support for this story through the Dick Goldensohn Fund for International Investigative Reporting.
Just after the U.S. took Baghdad in 2003, the Green Berets began training young Iraqis with no prior military experience in the desert of Jordan. The resulting brigade—the Iraq Special Operations Forces—was a deadly, elite, covert unit, fully fitted with American equipment, that would operate for years under U.S. command and be unaccountable to Iraqi ministries and the normal political process. Shane Bauer reports for The Nation. Support was provided in part by CIR's Dick Goldensohn Fund.
A multimedia story by Human Rights Watch examines how much China has changed.
Truthdig interviews Sasha Abramsky and editors of The Beat Within.
Lawlessness and sectarian violence quickly engulfed Iraq after the fall of Saddam, leaving women vulnerable. Human rights groups say incidents of rape have increased, and by Iraqi tradition the victims are shunned and sometimes murdered by family members in "honor killings." Correspondent Anna Badkhen and photojournalist Mimi Chakarova visit a secret women's shelter in Baghdad to speak with rape victims and war widows and document their stories.
+ Watch the slideshow on FRONTLINE/World and read the story by Anna Badkhen.
Support for this project was provided in part by CIR's Dick Goldensohn Fund.
Lawlessness and sectarian violence quickly engulfed Iraq after the fall of Saddam, leaving women vulnerable. Incidents of rape have increased, and by Iraqi tradition the victims are shunned and sometimes murdered by family members in "honor killings." Correspondent Anna Badkhen and photojournalist Mimi Chakarova visit a secret women's shelter in Baghdad to speak with rape victims and war widows and document their stories.
After the collapse of communism in 1989, millions of former Soviet bloc residents migrated abroad, breathing life into one of the oldest criminal enterprises—the trafficking of humans into sexual slavery. Since then, thousands of Eastern European women have been sold into prostitution. Photojournalist Mimi Chakarova investigates this rarely documented journey.
+ View project at www.priceofsex.org.
+ Watch video profiles of the women.
Produced by Mimi Chakarova and Carrie Ching
After the collapse of communism in 1989, millions of former Soviet bloc residents migrated abroad, breathing life into one of the oldest criminal enterprises—the trafficking of humans into sexual slavery. Since then, thousands of Eastern European women have been sold into prostitution. Photojournalist Mimi Chakarova investigates this rarely documented journey.
Reporters compare stimulus spending to disarray of homeland security grants after 9/11.
The Chad-Cameroon pipeline runs more than
660 miles to the coast. Exxonmobil.comBerkeley, CA — The Center for Investigative Reporting is pleased to announce that documentary filmmaker Christiane Badgley will receive the second Henry Demarest Lloyd Investigative Fund grant.
Badgley will receive $5,000 in seed money to develop a film project investigating the effects of the oil pipeline constructed by Exxon/Mobil and other oil companies, with assistance from the World Bank, through the West African nations of Chad and Cameroon. She plans to follow the route of the pipeline and document its effect on the environment, on workers, local communities, and on local and national governments.
While in pre-production for the film, Badgley will produce a running video-blog of her travels, which commence this fall. The video-blog will be produced in collaboration with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which also is supporting this project. In conjunction with the film, Badgley will launch a series of interactive multimedia dialogues with African citizens along the pipeline’s route.
Badgley’s films have been broadcast on PBS and Link TV in the United States, and on French and other European television stations. She produced an early episode of Exposé, the television series on investigative reporting, which CIR developed in cooperation with the New York PBS station WNET.
The mission of the Lloyd Investigative Fund, named in honor of Henry Demarest Lloyd (1847-1903), the pioneer muckraker of late 19th century Chicago, is to support the work of investigative journalists who probe behind the walls of secrecy erected by government and powerful corporations, to inform the public of unreported news and events at home and around the globe.
* * * * * Founded in 1977, the Center for Investigative Reporting is the nation's oldest nonprofit investigative reporting organization. The Lloyd Investigative Fund is one way that CIR is working to ensure that high-quality, credible journalism does not die, but flourishes.
Documentary filmmaker Christiane Badgley will receive the second Henry Demarest Lloyd Investigative Fund grant—$5,000 in seed money to develop a film project investigating the effects of the oil pipeline constructed by Exxon/Mobil and other oil companies, with assistance from the World Bank, through the West African nations of Chad and Cameroon.
The Center for Investigative Reporting Launches California-Focused Initiative
Innovative New Project Features Collaboration and Public EngagementBerkeley, CA—The Center for Investigative Reporting is launching a new statewide reporting initiative to produce in-depth multimedia journalism specific to California and to engage the public on issues of critical importance to the state.
It will launch with a grant of $1.2 million over three years from The James Irvine Foundation. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation also has awarded a grant of $1.2 million for the same time period, primarily for reporting on education, which is in part a challenge grant to encourage other funders to support this new initiative.
The project, a new department within CIR, will combine the experience and resources of CIR, the oldest nonprofit investigative reporting organization in the country, and the skills and resources of the California Media Collaborative, established to devise new strategies to improve coverage of key statewide issues.
Targeting regional and statewide journalism offers a solution to the crisis in journalism. The project will serve as a watchdog for government and powerful institutions, fulfilling the core mandate of CIR. It will partner with existing news organizations, journalism schools and other institutions to develop innovative ways to inform and engage Californians on issues that affect them in their communities and in their daily lives.
“The turmoil in the news industry has had the greatest impact on local and regional news organizations. Their ability to produce investigative and in-depth reporting is becoming more difficult every day. We will monitor government, track private interests and reveal abuses that threaten our democracy,” said Robert J. Rosenthal, CIR’s executive director, and former managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and executive editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Rosenthal, who will have overall responsibility for the project, added, “We will hire top journalistic talent to tell stories in new and creative ways and to distribute them throughout the state, to reach a wide and varied audience across multiple platforms.”
CIR is pleased to announce that Louis Freedberg will direct the project. Freedberg is founder and director of the California Media Collaborative, which was based at the Commonwealth Club of California, and a veteran journalist who was most recently on the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle.
”How the media cover California matters, arguably more than in any other state,” said Freedberg. “As newsrooms shrink in size, the media have less and less capacity to cover the innovations, institutions and ideas that have made California such a force in the nation and the world, as well as the multiple challenges clouding the state’s future. The need for a vibrant, watchdog press is as acute as ever. “
The project will cover key California issues, including education, the environment, immigration, state governance and public safety. A major focus will be on making statewide data accessible to journalists and the public, connecting the dots on particular issues between communities throughout the state. It also will emphasize “solutions-based” reporting, identifying ways that ordinary Californians, as well as policy makers, can address the issues covered. Social networking tools will encourage audience interaction and help communities solve problems and identify potential issues to be investigated.
“This effort holds considerable promise to develop a new model for coverage of state-level issues here and in other parts of the country,” said Kristi Kimball, program officer at the Hewlett Foundation. “We hope other funders will join us to ensure its success and maximize its impact on the state.”
CIR is also in discussion with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation about supporting the project because of Knight’s interest in experimental new investigative reporting models.
CIR will hire an editorial director and additional reporting staff and will make further announcements about collaborations with media outlets and other partners in the near future. Visit www.centerforinvestigativereporting.org for information, including job descriptions.
The Center for Investigative Reporting is launching a new statewide reporting initiative to produce in-depth multimedia journalism specific to California and to engage the public on issues of critical importance to the state.
In response to the downsizing of California newsrooms, as well as the economic crises facing the state, the Center for Investigative Reporting is launching a new reporting initiative on issues of crucial importance to California and its future.
The initiative will be supported by a range of sources, including major grants from The James Irvine Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. With a team of experienced journalists at its core, it will produce in-depth, high-impact investigative reporting in multimedia formats on issues ranging from education to the economic crisis, to immigration, public safety and the environment. We will place a major emphasis on solution-oriented reporting intended to have an impact on the quality of life for Californians and the communities where they live.
This new venture will combine the experience and resources of CIR, the oldest nonprofit investigative reporting organization in the country, and the talents and resources of the California Media Collaborative, based at the Commonwealth Club of California, established in 2007 to devise strategies to improve coverage of key statewide issues. It will embrace four central principles:
- We will work collaboratively with news organizations, journalism schools and research and public policy institutions to expand and deepen our reporting. We will engage citizens interactively to generate story ideas and inform our understanding of concerns facing Californians in their own communities.
- We will deliver our reporting on multiple media platforms through existing and new media outlets to maximize the impact of our work. Outlets will range from major newspapers and broadcast outlets to smaller ethnic media and local on-line news sites. We also will test new technologies, delivering our content in innovative ways through our own website and via mobile platforms.
- We will develop new revenue streams in order to sustain the initiative, in partnership with technology companies, digital outlets, and other media innovators.
- We will use state and federal data in creative ways to localize our reporting and show Californians how state-level issues have an impact on their daily lives and on local government and other institutions.
>> For more information, read the press release.
>> Apply for jobs with the California reporting project.
>> To discuss partnerships, please contact Robert Rosenthal at rrosenthal@cironline.org or Louis Freedberg at lfreedberg@californiamedia.org.
In response to the downsizing of California newsrooms, as well as the economic crises facing the state, the Center for Investigative Reporting is launching a new reporting initiative on issues of crucial importance to California and its future.
- We will work collaboratively with news organizations, journalism schools and research and public policy institutions to expand and deepen our reporting. We will engage citizens interactively to generate story ideas and inform our understanding of concerns facing Californians in their own communities.
About 1000 items from massacre site destroyed because they "smelled bad."
Documents from the Srebrenica killing fields may have been burned in The Hague.
The lanky 19-year-old from South Korea has lived in the Southland since he was 9 years old. He is as comfortable speaking English as his native Korean. And he desperately wants to join the Army.
Late last week, the teenager walked into a recruiting office in an Eagle Rock mall wearing a pendant shaped like a dog tag around his neck. Until recently, local recruiters would have had to turn him away. His student visa would not have qualified him to enlist. Only citizens or permanent residents who carry green cards were eligible to serve.
But starting today, 10 Los Angeles-area Army recruiting offices will begin taking applications from some foreigners who are here on temporary visas or who have been granted asylum.
In all, the pilot program, which was launched in New York in February, seeks to enlist 1,000 military recruits with special language and medical skills, most of whom will join the Army. Response to the program has exceeded expectations, drawing applications from more than 7,000 people around the country, many of them highly educated, defense officials said.
Those who are accepted will get an expedited path to citizenship in return for their service. "Ever since I entered high school, I was waiting for this opportunity," Jason, the 19-year-old aspiring soldier, told recruiters as they helped him prepare documents to submit today. "As soon as it came, I just jumped."
The Army requested that applicants' full names not be used because, in some cases, it could put them or family members at risk in their home countries.
Although the Army has been meeting or exceeding its recruiting goals, defense officials say there is a shortage of soldiers with medical, foreign language and cultural abilities needed in the war on terror and peacekeeping efforts around the world.
"What we're looking for are critical, vital skills," said Naomi Verdugo, assistant deputy for recruiting in the office of the assistant secretary of the Army.
The Army hopes to enlist 333 healthcare professionals, including doctors, dentists, nurses and others. It is also looking for 557 people with any of 35 languages, including Arabic and Yoruba, spoken in West Africa. Spanish is not on the list. An additional 110 slots are earmarked for other services, which have not yet started taking applications for the program.
Although the effort is limited in scope, it has raised concerns among some veterans groups and advocates for tighter immigration controls. They question whether the policy shift could pave the way for large numbers of foreigners, including ones who might have entered the U.S. illegally, to join the armed services.
"By aggressively recruiting foreigners abroad, or illegal immigrants who could use such a program to get legalized, we could easily create a situation where the Pentagon comes to rely on cheap foreign labor," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington D.C.-based think tank.
"That's not where we are now. . . . But we always need to be careful that we don't start going down a steep, slippery slope."
Defense officials emphasize that the program is only open to foreigners who have lived legally in the U.S. for at least two years, including students, some professionals and refugees.
Those who enlist are required to meet the same physical and conduct standards as other recruits and exceed the educational standards. They are also vetted by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, and they will not be granted waivers for any criminal offenses.
Foreign-born residents have a long history in the U.S. armed forces.
Under a wartime statute invoked in 2002, those who serve can apply for citizenship on the first day of active duty. Naturalization fees are waived. About 29,000 people with green cards are in the military and about 8,000 enlist each year, according to Pentagon figures.
Recruiters have already signed up 105 people with targeted languages and two medical professionals under the new program.
More than 60% of those enlisting under the pilot program have at least a bachelor's degree, compared with roughly 7% of those joining the Army through regular channels.
Their average score on a required math and verbal aptitude test is 79 out of a possible 99 points. That's compared with 62 for the average citizen or permanent resident who enlisted in the Army in the 12 months ending in September.
As word of the New York pilot program spread, many people traveled across the country to apply.
The 107 enlisted so far include 13 California residents, officials said. Less than half came from the New York area, including New Jersey.
Jason was among those who traveled to New York. But he arrived so tired after an overnight flight that he failed to score the minimum 50 points on a sample aptitude test.
By extending the program to Los Angeles, Army officials hope to make it easier for applicants on the West Coast to be considered and to ease the pressure on New York recruiters.
They also want to reach a broader range of language experts. So far, most of the recruits have been Korean, Indian and Chinese language speakers. The Army needs more people with languages used in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, among others. Only four of the recruits enlisted as Arabic speakers, one speaks Urdu and one speaks Punjabi.
Staff Sgt. Joshua Cannon, who commands the recruiting station where Jason is applying, is pleased to be able to sign up more aspiring Americans. The policy restricting applications to people with green cards has been a source of frustration to local recruiters, who have struggled for years to find qualified applicants in a city with many immigrants, especially when the country is at war.
Cannon said his office had been getting calls about the new program for months. For most of the callers, the biggest draw is the chance to become citizens in as little as six months, he said. The normal naturalization process can take five to 15 years.
To retain their citizenship, participants must honorably complete at least five years of service.
When Jason heard he could apply closer to home, he headed straight over. This time he scored a respectable 67 on the sample aptitude test.
After 10 years of living with the uncertainty of temporary visas, he too is hoping to finally become an American.
His mother, who raised two children alone, never bothered to apply for green cards for the family, so now he faces the possibility of being summoned back to South Korea for mandatory military service.
Jason is also looking for a way to complete his studies at Pasadena City College.
His mother's grocery store is struggling, so he had to defer for two semesters after his first year to help keep the business going. Although his mother worries that Jason could be sent to Iraq or Afghanistan, he will not be dissuaded.
"I would have to go to the army in Korea anyway, so let's make it count for something," he said. "A new life. A new beginning."
Read the story in the Los Angeles Times. Andrew Becker is a CIR staff reporter. Alexandra Zavis is a Times staff writer.
A pilot program seeks to boost the ranks of language and healthcare specialists by offering citizenship. CIR's Andrew Becker reports for the Los Angeles Times.
Antoine Mackey, Yusuf Bey IV, and Devaughndre Broussard. OAKLAND – A grand jury today voted to indict Yusuf Ali Bey IV, the scion of the defunct Your Black Muslim Bakery, for ordering the killings of journalist Chauncey Bailey and two other men in 2007, authorities familiar with the situation said.
Prosecutors are likely to bring the case with special circumstances – allowing them to seek the death penalty against Bey IV, 23. He allegedly told two of his followers that in exchange for killing Bailey, he would teach them how to file fraudulent loan applications that could reap hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Another man, Antoine Arelus Mackey, 23, is also to be charged.
The indictments are based largely on the testimony of Devaughndre Broussard, 21, Bailey’s admitted killer. The existing charges against him will be amended to include charges for the killing of another man, Odell Roberson, Broussard’s lawyer, LeRue Grim said.
Broussard will then plead guilty to two counts of voluntary manslaughter, one for each slaying, probably next week, Grim said. He will receive a set sentence of about 25 years in exchange for his admissions and testimony.
It was unclear when Bey IV and Mackey will appear in court. Bey IV is in Alameda County’s Santa Rita Jail on unrelated charges, but Mackey is in San Quentin State Prison on a burglary sentence and will have to be brought back to Oakland for arraignment.
The charges against Bey IV and Mackey come after a lengthy re-investigation of Bailey’s killing by the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office.
The Oakland Police homicide investigator first assigned to the Bailey case, Sgt. Derwin Longmire, is suspended and the department is moving to fire him after he was found to have compromised the investigation and had undocumented contact with Bey IV against orders.
Longmire was friendly with Bey IV and used him to solicit Broussard’s original confession a day after the killing. The Chauncey Bailey Project reported last year that Longmire didn’t document evidence in his case notes that pointed to Bey IV’s alleged involvement in a conspiracy to kill Bailey.
That evidence included a report from a tracking device that showed Bey IV’s car parked outside Bailey’s apartment less than seven hours before the Aug. 2, 2007 killing and a secret jailhouse video, recorded as part of a separate case, on which Bey IV mocked and laughed about Bailey’s death, said he put the shotgun used in the attack in his bedroom closet afterwards, said he played “hella dumb” when questioned, and bragged that Longmire was protecting him from charges.
The charges against Bey IV mark the first time in the nearly 40-year history of the former bakery started by his father, Yusuf Bey, that a person associated with it, other than Broussard, faces murder accusations. Authorities, though, have long investigated the organization on suspicion that members killed for retribution and power, dating back decades ago to a forerunner of the organization in Southern California.
Members are suspected in the unsolved slayings of at least five other people — husband and wife Wendell and Birdie Mae Scott in 1968; Ronald Alan in 1982; Peter Kaufman in 1986; and Waajid Bey in 2004.
Bailey’s sister, Lorelei Waqia, said she grudgingly approves of the plea agreement with Broussard because it strengthens the chances of convicting Bey IV and Mackey in her brother’s slaying.
Bey IV “and Mackey are more dangerous than Broussard. In the perfect world he (Broussard) would get life but that’s how a plea bargain is: You have to give a little to get a lot. It’s worth it to get the other guys,” Waqia said.
Still, Waqia said, the charges will bring little solace.
“Anything that happened from the day he passed until now is not going to bring him back. So, for me, there’ll never be closure because I’ve lost a brother, my father has lost his namesake; his son, my nephew has lost a father who was a mentor to him,” she said.
Grim, Broussard’s lawyer, describes his client as “a human being seeking redemption” and who regrets his actions.
The crime for which he is to plead guilty, voluntary manslaughter, seems not to fit the cold-blooded nature of the killings to which he has admitted.
California law defines voluntary manslaughter as “the unlawful killing of a human being … upon a sudden quarrel or heat of passion.”
Broussard said he shot Roberson with an assault rifle as the man stood before him with his hands in the air. An autopsy showed Roberson was hit with about 14 bullets that caused “extensive destruction” to his head, left arm and torso.
According to Broussard’s statement to prosecutors that is the basis of the plea, he and Mackey hunted for Bailey and Broussard shot him three times at point black range with a load of buckshot. The third shot, which eviscerated much of Bailey’s face, was fired as the victim lay on the ground dying.
Thomas Peele is an investigative reporter for the Bay Area News Group. Reach him at Tpeele@bayareanewsgroup.com. Bob Butler and Mary Fricker are independent journalists who can be reached at bobbutler7@comcast.net and Maryfricker@hughes.net. To learn more about the Chauncey Bailey Project, visit chaunceybaileyproject.org.
A grand jury voted to indict Yusuf Ali Bey IV, the scion of the defunct Your Black Muslim Bakery, for ordering the killings of journalist Chauncey Bailey and two other men in 2007. Prosecutors are likely to bring the case with special circumstances—allowing them to seek the death penalty against Bey IV, 23. Another man, Antoine Mackey, 23, will also be charged.
CIR reporter talks about the impact of drug violence along the border with Mexico.
CIR's Andrew Becker talks about his reporting on immigration with Truthdig.
Salvador Rivera was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1979. At age 18, as he faced several arrest warrants, he adopted an alias and obtained a Mexican birth certificate. The ruse worked: When he was arrested by a Border Patrol agent in January 1998, Rivera assumed his false identity and was voluntarily deported to Mexico. Within days, he returned to the United States, reentering the country legally as a citizen.
A couple of years later, Rivera was convicted of drug possession and served a short jail sentence. Shortly after his release, the Immigration and Naturalization Service arrested him at a meeting with his parole officer. This time, Rivera asserted his American citizenship. Even after reviewing his original birth certificate and other documentation, an immigration judge denied his claim. The Immigration and Naturalization Service deported Rivera to Mexico in February 2001.
For the next few years, Rivera lived in Juarez, just across the border from El Paso. Back in the states, his family found an attorney to represent him and his case eventually made it to the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals. After a couple more years of legal wrangling, the federal government conceded that Rivera was in fact a citizen. In 2006, he was repatriated to the United States and the government agreed to pay $115,000 to cover his legal expenses. Writing for the majority, circuit court Judge Warren J. Ferguson acknowledged that Rivera "is no model citizen." However, he wrote, Rivera's criminal record and earlier attempt to conceal his citizenship could not alter the fact that as a United States citizen, he could not be deported.
As unusual as Rivera's odyssey may be, his case is also striking proof of what can go wrong when an American citizen gets caught up in the bureaucracy of the federal immigration system. And Rivera is not alone. As efforts to find, detain, and deport undocumented immigrants have ramped up (a record 350,000 people were deported last year), hundreds of American citizens have been at risk of joining the ranks of the deported. The immigration service insists it does not expel American citizens from the country. Yet tales like Rivera’s suggest that has done so more than it acknowledges.
Last year, the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonpartisan research group, found 278 people in 13 immigration detention centers around the country who said they would claim US citizenship to fight deportation. The study was conducted on behalf of the Justice Department's Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees the nation's 57 immigration courts, where removal, or deportation, proceedings are heard. Previously, the institute found 322 detainees with citizenship claims in 2007, and another 129 at six detention sites in 2006.
It is not uncommon for immigration detainees to make false claims of citizenship, and the Vera Institute and Department of Justice have not verified whether any of these 700 potential citizenship claims were valid. But Jacqueline Stevens, a political scientist at the University of California-Santa Barbara, says she has documented more than 160 cases of American citizens who have been detained or deported in recent years. "I've been stunned that the detentions and deportations have not caused more public outrage," she says. Few people care about the issue beyond civil rights advocates, she notes. She also speculates that "immigrant rights folks for good reasons don't want to pit citizens against noncitizens. They don't want to claim that US citizens have more rights than [noncitizens]."
In a recent Los Angeles Times story coreported and written by the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), ICE maintained it does not detain or deport US citizens. (The INS became ICE in 2003 with the formation of the Department of Homeland Security.) Agency spokesman Richard Rocha said that immigration detainees face removal only if no evidence is presented to prove that they cannot be deported. At a 2008 congressional hearing on the issue of citizen deportations, another ICE official testified that the bureau "immediately releases individuals who are US citizens or who may have legitimate claims to derivative US citizenship." Jim Hayes, ICE's director of detention and removal, recently told the Associated Press that he was aware of only 10 cases of Americans detained on suspicion of being in the country illegally over the past five years. Citing privacy concerns, Hayes declined to elaborate on individual cases.
In internal memos obtained by CIR, Hayes wrote last year that immigration officers may make warrantless arrests of people who claim to be citizens or are unsure of their citizenship status only if the officers have reason to believe that they are in the country illegally. In her research, Stevens says, she has found that ICE screens jail and prison inmates by ethnic or racial background, singling out people of Hispanic descent for interviews or detention. The agency strongly denies that it targets suspected noncitizens based on their names or ethnicity. "Racial profiling is absolutely not tolerated, and we investigate any allegations of racial profiling aggressively and thoroughly," says Rocha. Officially, immigration officers initially assess whether someone may be a legal resident based on their personal documents, or lack of them.
As most Americans don't carry around passports or birth certificates, citizens who are caught up in immigration sweeps or imprisoned for other reasons may find it difficult to confirm their status. Verifying citizenship can be surprisingly difficult for immigration officials as well. The federal government does not have a database of citizens for officials to reference. Additionally, immigration lawyers note that some immigration officers who handle citizenship cases lack training or adequate knowledge of the law. Margaret Stock, an immigration attorney who teaches at West Point, says that confirming someone's citizenship can be so complicated that asking deportation officers and other immigration officials to make such determinations is like "appointing someone to be a tax judge who has never filed a tax return."
ICE is not required to track when it arrests, detains, or deports citizens. Regardless, Americans should never be detained and deported, says Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), who chaired last year's hearing before the House Judiciary Committee's immigration and citizenship subcommittee. "There's no jurisdiction for the government to arrest or detain, or let alone deport, citizens. That's otherwise known as kidnapping," she says. Lofgren is still awaiting a detailed response from ICE on why or how the detention or deportation of citizens happens, but she says she believes the issue is on the Obama administration's radar. (Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano has signaled that ICE will shift its focus toward targeting employers who hire workers who are in the country illegally.)
The number of detained or deported citizens is relatively small compared to the number of immigrants deported in the past few years, but some of the cases have been particularly egregious. In March 2006, Ricardo Martinez, a resident of Mercedes, Texas, visited his dying grandmother in Mexico. When he tried to come back into the US in Laredo, Texas, a Customs and Border Protection officer suspected his passport was fraudulent, detained him, and handcuffed him to a chair, according to Martinez's attorney, Lisa Brodyaga. The officer also threatened him with eight months in prison if he would not admit he was Mexican. Afraid of the threat, Martinez, who was born in Texas, but spent most of his youth in Mexico and doesn't speak or read English, signed a paper claiming Mexican citizenship. He was sent back to Mexico, where he stayed for nearly two years. Martinez filed a civil lawsuit in 2008 seeking damages and a federal district judge to reaffirm his citizenship. He is back in the United States, but his case is pending.
Rennison Vern Castillo spent more than seven months in a Seattle-area immigration lockup in 2005 and 2006 after serving an eight-month jail term for harassing an ex-girlfriend. Though Castillo insisted that he was a citizen, an immigration judge ordered his deportation. He was released after an appeals board noted his military service and it was discovered that his name had been misspelled on immigration records.
Matt Adams, legal director for the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project in Seattle, which is representing Castillo in a civil suit against ICE, says that last year his office found about a dozen people in immigration lockups whose citizenship claims proved to be valid. He suspects that there may be additional citizens who get deported because they don't have legal assistance, don't fight their cases, or don't realize that they actually are citizens. Immigration detainees have no right to an attorney, which Adams sees as a fundamental flaw that was compounded by the Bush administration's push to step up the rate of deportations. As a result, he says, ICE has locked up whomever it can get its hands on, infringing on the rights of citizens. "This is a classic example of where the government doesn't take seriously the almost sacred responsibility they have in not depriving people of their liberty," says Adams.
Read the story on motherjones.com.
Despite the government's stance that it does not detain or deport Americans, U.S. citizens have been caught up in immigration sweeps in recent years. Attorneys report finding more than 700 people who intended to make citizenship claims to fight deportation. CIR's Andrew Becker reports for MotherJones.com.
Handyman who confessed, then recanted, told details about three murders.
CIR's Rosenthal talks to PBS NewsHour about cuts in investigative reporting.
OAKLAND — On the order of Yusuf Bey IV, Devaughndre Broussard and Antoine Mackey in July 2007 lured a homeless man to a dark corner where he was shot dead after raising his hands over his head, according to a statement Broussard gave prosecutors last month.
Broussard also said Mackey admitted to killing another man with an assault rifle and joking about it, describing himself as “Elmer Fudd” on a hunting trip.
Broussard, who admitted in the document to killing journalist Chauncey Bailey, is scheduled to describe all three killings to an Alameda County grand jury next week as part of a plea agreement. Prosecutors then expect to charge Bey IV and Mackey with multiple murders.
For weeks, Broussard said, Bey IV, then the leader of Your Black Muslim Bakery, told him to follow the man, Odell Roberson, in preparation for killing him. The reason, he said, was revenge for the 2005 killing of Bey IV’s brother, Antar Bey, by Roberson’s nephew, Alonza Phillips.
On the night of July 8, 2007, Broussard, Mackey and Bey IV were “talking and chopping it up” when Bey IV suddenly gave the order: Roberson’s time was up. Broussard told investigators from the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office that he took Roberson to a dark spot on Herzog Street, where Mackey passed him an assault rifle, according to a transcript of the interview.
“I took the safety off and pointed it at him,” Broussard said. “He tried to break. I’m like, stop, then he turned around and put his hands up and I (shot) him. … Then he probably turned and I know I just kept hitting him. … His body hopped off the ground and moved a couple of inches.”
Broussard is scheduled to tell a grand jury next week that he killed Roberson and Bailey at Bey IV’s order. He also is to testify that Mackey killed another man, Michael Wills, on July 12, 2007.
Bey IV and Mackey are then expected to each be charged with multiple counts of murder. Broussard has agreed to plead guilty to two counts of voluntary manslaughter. In exchange for his testimony, he would receive a prison sentence of about 25 years with a guaranteed release date.
Both Broussard’s attorney, LeRue Grim, and deputy district attorney Christopher Lamiero have declined to comment on the testimony or plea agreement, which Broussard signed this week.
His testimony comes more than 20 months after police say he shot and killed Bailey near downtown Oakland. He told Lamiero during questioning in preparation for grand jury testimony that Bey IV ordered Bailey killed because the reporter was working on a story about the bakery’s financial problems and internal strife.
Bey IV remains uncharged in Bailey’s killing. He is charged with a host of other crimes, including kidnapping and torture, and is jailed without bail and has denied involvement in Bailey’s killing.
In addition to detailing the slayings of Bailey and Roberson, Broussard said in the interview that Bey IV kept a “hit list” of people he wanted killed for “revenge, retribution.” Broussard said that Bey IV also told him to be ready to kill others in Phillips’ family in retribution for the slaying of Antar Bey — plans that were still being developed when police raided the bakery Aug. 3, 2007, the day after Bailey was killed.
Broussard also told investigators that Mackey told him he shot and killed Wills.
Broussard said he was at the bakery and heard shots. Moments later, Mackey and Bey IV rushed in. Broussard said he followed Mackey to his room where Mackey described the killing.
“He said the dude tried to run and then he shot him,” Broussard said, adding that Mackey was laughing and described himself as the cartoon character Elmer Fudd out hunting.
“I ran over there and I went to look” at where the killing happened a few blocks from the bakery. “Yusuf was like, ‘Go look for yourself.’” Broussard said he dressed in jogging clothes so he could claim he was exercising if police stopped him. As he neared Wills’ body, he said he heard a woman yell, “Somebody killed that boy! Somebody killed that boy!” Wills apparently was a random target chosen because he was white, according to the Broussard’s account.
Broussard said Mackey told him he and Bey IV were discussing the 1970 Zebra Killings in San Francisco, in which African-Americans had killed whites, when they saw Wills, a chef who lived nearby, who was walking home from a convenience store after finishing work.
A few days later, Broussard said Bey IV “said we got a devil. … He was cocky like.” Both Bey IV and his late father, bakery founder Yusuf Bey, have often referred to whites as “devils” while preaching.
In telephone calls recorded from the Santa Rita Jail in Dublin and obtained by the Chauncey Bailey Project, Bey IV often makes similar statements, referring to “white and Jew devils” and “media devils” he claims are trying to destroy him.
On the order of Yusuf Bey IV, Devaughndre Broussard and Antoine Mackey in July 2007 lured a homeless man to a dark corner where he was shot dead after raising his hands over his head, according to a statement Broussard gave prosecutors last month. Broussard also said Mackey admitted to killing another man with an assault rifle and joking about it, describing himself as “Elmer Fudd” on a hunting trip.
OAKLAND—Murder charges are imminent against former Your Black Muslim Bakery leader Yusuf Bey IV and another man in the August 2007 killing of journalist Chauncey Bailey under a plea deal reached with the only person arrested in the case, law enforcement and other sources said Wednesday night.
Devaughndre Broussard, who confessed to killing Bailey and later recanted, has signed an agreement to testify that Bey IV ordered the hit to silence the journalist and that Antoine Mackey, another of Bey IV followers, helped carry it out. Bey IV and Mackey would face murder charges if indicted by a grand jury.
Charges in two other killings in July 2007 that police long have suspected bakery members committed also are likely. Broussard will admit to killing Odell Roberson and testify that Mackey shot and killed another man, Michael Wills. Both Roberson and Wills were slain in July of 2007 near San Pablo Avenue in North Oakland.
Grand jury testimony is scheduled for next week, followed by indictments of Bey and Mackey.
In exchange for testimony, Broussard would plead guilty to two counts of voluntary manslaughter and receive a set sentence of between 20 and 30 years, officials said.
Broussard would also admit to killing Roberson at Bey IV’s order. Roberson was the uncle of Alonza Phillips, who was convicted of killing Bey IV’s older brother, Antar Bey, in 2005.
Bey IV is jailed without bail on a host of unrelated charges, including kidnapping and torture. Mackey, who San Francisco police suspect was involved in multiple unsolved gang killings, is serving an unrelated burglary charge in state prison and could be released within a year.
Deputy District Attorney Christopher Lamiero said he could not confirm any details Wednesday night.
“We are very close to a point where we are going to be able to hold accountable all of those responsible for Bailey’s murder,” he said. He declined to say anything further.
LaRue J. Grim, Broussard’s lawyer, only would say he expected significant developments in the case to happen quickly. “It’s hard, very hard” to potentially not take the case to trial, he said, adding that Broussard has “expressed remorse” over his actions, and that makes a deal more palatable.
Legal experts said it makes sense for District Attorney Thomas Orloff to approve a deal that would result in additional charges in Bailey’s death as well as clear other killings. “Nailing this thing shut is worth dealing with Broussard,” said Peter Keane, Golden Gate University Law School dean emeritus, recently, speaking of a possible agreement. “It would be a righteous deal.”
Former Superior Court Judge LaDoris Cordell called it “a hell of a deal. The (district attorney) got everything that he could possibly get and maybe more. He solves three murders, he gets Mackey, and he gets the alleged mastermind, Bey IV.”
Bailey’s sister, Lorelei Waqia, said she was thankful additional charges could be filed soon.
“At least we’re getting to the truth, and I think that’s important that everybody that’s involved has to pay the piper,” she said late Wednesday.
Lamiero has been leading an aggressive investigation of Bailey’s killing in the wake of a bungled Oakland police investigation of the slaying. The lead detective in case, Sgt. Derwin Longmire, is close to being fired after an investigation found he compromised the handling of the Bailey inquiry.
Longmire was put on paid administrative leave Monday. Bey IV has been recorded bragging Longmire was protecting him from charges. A confidential informant told investigators Bey IV was overheard in jail describing Longmire as bakery sympathizer.
Longmire and Bey IV spoke at least twice on the phone last year while Bey was being held at Santa Rita Jail in Dublin on kidnapping and torture charges.
The Chauncey Bailey Project reported last year Longmire failed to document in his case notes evidence of a conspiracy involving Bey to kill Bailey, editor of the Oakland Post.
A masked man shot Bailey three times with a sawed-off shotgun at 7:24 a.m. Aug. 2, 2007. Broussard confessed the next day, saying he killed the journalist “because he was going to write bad things about the bakery” and Bey IV.
From the beginning, it was clear Broussard didn’t act alone. He, Bey IV and Mackey stalked Bailey less than seven hours before the killing, parking near his Lake Merritt apartment. The next morning witnesses told police that they saw another man driving the white van in which Broussard fled the killing scene. Mackey has long been suspected of being the driver.
Broussard was arrested during an Aug. 3, 2007, raid of the bakery. He at first denied involvement. Longmire then left Broussard and Bey IV alone for seven minutes and did not record the conversation. Broussard then confessed.
A few days later, police secretly video taped Bey IV and two co-defendants in an unrelated kidnapping and torture case. Bey mocked Bailey’s killing, laughing and throwing his head back and saying, “That fool said pow, pow, poof!” to imitate the fatal shots.
Murder charges are imminent against former Your Black Muslim Bakery leader Yusuf Bey IV and another man in the August 2007 killing of journalist Chauncey Bailey under a plea deal reached with the only person arrested in the case, law enforcement and other sources said Wednesday night.
CIR reporter Andrew Becker speaks to the BBC World Service's World Update.
Federal authorities have repeatedly said their priority is to find and remove illegal immigrants with violent criminal histories, but the U.S. government's stepped up enforcement in recent years has led to the deportation of hundreds of thousands of immigrants convicted of nonviolent crimes, according to a new study.
Nearly three-quarters of the roughly 897,000 immigrants deported from 1997 to 2007 after serving criminal sentences were convicted of nonviolent offenses and one-fifth were legal permanent residents, according to the study released today by Human Rights Watch.
"This explodes the myth that immigrants deported for crimes are invariably people here illegally who committed serious, violent crimes," said David Fathi, director of the New York-based advocacy group's U.S. program. "We know now the large majority are being deported for nonviolent, often quite minor crimes."
The report comes at a time when President Obama has said he will push for immigration reforms and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has begun reviewing enforcement policies.
The deportations cited in the report occurred after the passage of a 1996 law that mandated the detention and deportation of all immigrants, even those who are longtime lawful residents, if they committed a crime punishable by at least one year behind bars.
The law is retroactive, so immigrants are often deported because of crimes they committed before the law was written.
The top reasons for deportation during the 10-year period were entering the U.S. illegally, driving while under the influence of alcohol, assault and immigration crimes, such as selling false citizenship papers, the report said.
The study is based on data obtained from the U.S. government through the Freedom of Information Act.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Lori Haley said the agency was responsible for enforcing the laws enacted by Congress and carrying out court-ordered deportation orders. The majority of criminal immigrants targeted were identified while in the nation's jails or prisons, she said.
"Promoting public safety is part of ICE's core mission," Haley said. "Removing these individuals from our communities and from our country reduces a significant safety vulnerability."
The report said 28% of those deported on criminal grounds were convicted of violent or potentially violent offenses, such as robbery and kidnapping.
Roy Beck, executive director of NumbersUSA, which favors stricter controls on immigration, said illegal immigrants had no right to be here and should be removed regardless of their criminal records.
"They don't need to have committed a crime at all," he said. "They still should be deported."
The Human Rights Watch report estimates the deportations have caused the separation of more than 1 million family members.
Yakara Hernandez of Tampa, Fla., said she and her husband understood that he came to the U.S. illegally and were willing to pay the penalty. Hernandez said they owned a business and a home, paid taxes and were raising three daughters.
But she said the family's life had been on hold since immigration officials deported her husband to Honduras in December 2006.
Hector Hernandez had a drunken driving conviction and had been deported once before. He was arrested at the Port of Tampa and flown to his native country after spending two months in immigration jail.
"My life has been thrown into pause since 2006," she said. "I can't plan for the future."
Leticia Benitez, who lives in Azusa, said her family had also been divided by deportation. Benitez's husband, a legal permanent resident, was arrested in 2007 and deported to Mexico based on an old misdemeanor conviction for statutory rape.
"That was a mistake he did when he was a teenager," said Benitez, a U.S. citizen. "He shouldn't be punished for that."
His lawyer, Mario Acosta Jr., said Tuesday that the U.S. government had agreed that the crime should not have resulted in a deportation and that the case would return to appellate court. Benitez said she and the couple's two U.S.-born daughters were praying for his return.
The biggest problem with the 1996 law is that it didn't give judges enough discretion to consider family and community ties, said Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles. Immigrants are punished twice for their crimes, she said.
"Not only are they dealing with whatever the mistake was in the criminal justice system, then they have to deal with the immigration consequences," she said.
Human Rights Watch recommended that Obama and Congress amend the law to allow legal permanent residents facing deportation to ask a judge for permission to stay in the country if their crimes were minor and their family connections strong.
The report also calls on immigration authorities to focus their deportation efforts on undocumented immigrants convicted of violent crimes.
But Rachel E. Rosenbloom, supervising attorney with Boston College's Post-Deportation Human Rights Project, said she expected the deportation of criminal offenders would be the last piece of any reform legislation.
"There are a lot of issues that need to be fixed in our immigration laws," Rosenbloom said. "This is one of them, but it's not in the limelight."
Andrew Becker is a CIR staff reporter. Anna Gorman is a Los Angeles Times staff writer.
CIR and the Los Angeles Times report that according to a new Human Rights Watch study nearly three-quarters of immigrants deported after serving a criminal sentence in a 10-year period were nonviolent offenders, with one in five having been legal residents.
Pulitzer Prize-winner describes 'hurdles' faced in securing funding and editorial support.
Sgt. Derwin Longmire was taken off duty Monday for mishandling the murder case.
"A Day Late in Oakland" and "Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country" screen 4/23–5/7.
Editors talk about the decline of newspapers and the rise of nonprofit journalism.
SF Chronicle editor-at-large says CIR's nonprofit model could be a solution.
Frank Ponce de Leon, a native of Mexico who lives in La Puente, Calif., spent almost three months in immigration custody — all the while insisting he was a U.S. citizen. Photo: Anne Cusack / Los Angeles TimesRennison Vern Castillo thought his legal troubles were nearly over at the end of a jail stay for harassing his ex-girlfriend. But then a U.S. immigration hold order blocked his release.
"They think you're here illegally," a jailhouse guard said to him.
Castillo, mystified, insisted it was all a mistake. Though born in Belize, he had come of age in South Los Angeles, spoke fluent English, served a stint in the Army and had become an American citizen about seven years earlier.
He had some legal problems, but being in the country unlawfully was not one of them. Castillo said he wasn't worried -- not until he was shackled and transferred to a federal detention center. He spent months in custody before an appeals panel blocked his deportation and an immigration judge finally ordered Castillo set free.
Although his case is an extreme example, mistaken detentions are drawing increased attention as immigration officials mount workplace roundups and jailhouse sweeps in search of undocumented immigrants.
Immigration raids of factories and other work sites often result in at least a short-term detention of lawful residents and even citizens, as agents seal targeted businesses and grill workers about their status.
Officials in Washington said last month that the Obama administration was expected to rein in the controversial workplace raids -- shifting enforcement emphasis to target employers rather than workers. Immigrant advocates have long pushed for such a change, while others say easing workplace enforcement will encourage illegal immigration.
Castillo is one of many citizens and legal residents held for suspected immigration violations -- some for a few hours, some for much longer. No agency tracks such incidents, so statistical totals are not available.
Officials at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement downplay the problem.
"ICE does not detain United States citizens," said spokesman Richard Rocha, adding that agents thoroughly investigated people's claims of citizenship. "ICE only processes an individual for removal when all available facts indicate that the person is an alien."
He declined to comment on Castillo's case or others, citing privacy concerns or pending lawsuits.
The surge in ICE workplace actions during the Bush administration spawned fierce complaints from employees caught up in dragnets at factories, slaughterhouses and poultry farms.
Mike Graves, a two-decade veteran of the Swift & Co. meatpacking plant in Marshalltown, Iowa, said he was handcuffed and held for eight hours in December 2006 when ICE agents raided Swift plants throughout the heartland.
"My government treated me like a criminal, and I didn't do anything wrong," said Graves, a native of Iowa.
An ICE raid last year at a Van Nuys printer cartridge manufacturer, Micro Solutions Enterprises, generated wrongful-arrest claims from more than 100 citizens, said Peter Schey, chief lawyer at the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law in Los Angeles. All were held for two to three hours before being released, Schey said.
Americans seldom carry proof of their legal status, which can be a factor in the confusion about detainees' citizenship. There is no comprehensive database or list of all citizens for agents to check.
Official investigations may miss crucial documents such as birth certificates and naturalization papers. In some cases, names have been jumbled or misfiled and records lost. Confused detainees have signed their own removal orders. Some in custody may even be unaware of their citizenship or unable to prove it without a lawyer's help.
Unlike suspects in criminal matters, however, immigration detainees have no right to government-appointed counsel -- and, in some cases, have no access to paid lawyers. Fast-track deportation procedures enacted by Congress in recent years also limit court review once the expulsion process is underway.
In border regions like Southern California, residents on both sides of the international boundary have for generations moved back and forth without regard for passports, status or birth certificates. Many U.S. citizens by birth or parentage have no proof of their status.
Frank Ponce de Leon, a native of Mexico who lives in La Puente, got out of ICE custody Dec. 31 after spending almost three months locked up -- all the while insisting he was a citizen. The longtime California resident had never sought citizenship because he was the son of an American-born parent. His father was a New Mexico native and U.S. serviceman during World War II.
"I knew they couldn't hold me forever, and sooner or later they would see it my way because I had every right," said Ponce de Leon, 47, whose five California-born children include a daughter, Deanne, 22, who served in Iraq as an Army nurse.
On occasion, the uncertainty can lead to mistaken deportation, as was the case with Pedro Guzman, a mentally disabled U.S. citizen living in Lancaster.
U.S. immigration officials shipped Guzman to Tijuana in May 2007 from the Men's Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles, where he was being held on a misdemeanor trespassing charge. The Los Angeles native, then 29, spent three months rummaging for food in dumps and sleeping in the Mexican borderlands as his desperate mother, a fast-food cook, searched for him in hospitals, shelters, jails and morgues, his family said.
Eventually Guzman, a cement finisher with limited Spanish and a second-grade reading ability, was reunited with his family in the border town of Calexico.
The Guzman case sparked Washington hearings at which immigration authorities were chastised by Congress members and accused of "stunning incompetence." ICE officials called the case an aberration and vowed to review all citizenship claims before anyone was detained or deported.
Out of more than 1 million detentions, ICE officials say, Guzman was the only citizen known to have been shipped out of the country. But others dispute that claim.
Rachel E. Rosenbloom, supervising attorney at Boston College's Post-Deportation Human Rights Project, cited at least eight cases of wrongly deported citizens and said she expected the number was substantially higher.
One such case, detailed in an upcoming report by Rosenbloom's group, is the curious saga of Duarnis Perez. He is a native of the Dominican Republic who became a U.S. citizen at 15 when his mother was naturalized. But he didn't know citizenship had been conferred on him as well. He assumed he was illegal, and so did everyone else.
Perez was deported and subsequently arrested trying to sneak back into the United States from Canada. He spent almost five years in prison for unlawful reentry. It was only upon his release in 2004 that an ICE official reviewed his file and informed Perez that he had been a citizen all along.
In Castillo's case, he was an infant when his mother left Belize and sought work in Los Angeles. She later became a nurse and sent for her son. Castillo attended elementary school in South L.A. and graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in 1996. He became a naturalized citizen in 1998. He joined the Army and served in Korea, then was posted to Ft. Lewis, Wash. He was honorably discharged in 2003.
After domestic disputes with a girlfriend, he was convicted in 2005 of felony harassment and violating a no-contact order, and was sent to Pierce County Jail in Washington state for eight months. He was in a holding area with inmates about to be released when a corrections officer held him back.
Castillo was handcuffed and whisked off in a van to the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma. A federal officer said records showed he was an illegal immigrant.
"Your records are wrong," Castillo said he replied. He said he told the officer that he was a citizen but that his naturalization certificate had never arrived. It was sent to the wrong address, he later learned.
Castillo went before an immigration judge, who appeared via video conference, a common procedure in the crowded immigration court system. Again, he claimed citizenship. The judge didn't believe him. He was ordered deported on Jan. 24, 2006.
The nonprofit Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, a legal advocacy center based in Seattle, provided a lawyer to handle Castillo's appeal. The lawyer searched for Castillo's naturalization documents and records of his military service.
The Board of Immigration Appeals blocked Castillo's deportation, noting proof of his military service. A month later, he was released without further explanation. It turned out Castillo was the victim of a paperwork mix-up: His name was spelled wrong in immigration records. And he had been assigned more than one "alien number," causing further confusion.
Castillo, now 31, is still incredulous.
"If it had taken 30 days to figure it out, I wouldn't be upset. But seven months?" he said in an interview.
He, like Guzman and others with similar experiences, has filed suit against the ICE.
"I want them to recognize they made a mistake," Castillo said. "Something needs to change. If it can happen to me, it's going to happen to someone else."
Andrew Becker is a CIR staff reporter. Patrick J. McDonnell is a Times staff writer. Read the story in the Los Angeles Times.
Mistaken detentions are drawing increased attention as immigration officials mount workplace roundups and jailhouse sweeps in search of undocumented immigrants. CIR's Andrew Becker reports for the Los Angeles Times. Photo: Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times
Ten years after the Kosovo War, Michael Montgomery returns to the Balkans for the BBC to investigate "the other side of the war"—Serbs allegedly kidnapped and killed by ethnic Albanians. In a series of video journals for CIR, Montgomery takes viewers behind the story.
The Mystery HouseSources pinpoint a house in central Albania where Serb captives were allegedly tortured and killed. Rumor has it their organs were stolen, as well.The Severed HeadsStories about a KLA fighter who beheaded two Serb prisoners lead Montgomery to the lawless town of Tropoje, Albania.The KLA BaseA source leads Montgomery to an abandoned KLA base in Albania where he says many prisoners were tortured and killed.Additional reporting by field producer Jovo Martinovic
Can't view the videos? Watch them on Blip.tv
+ Listen to Michael Montgomery's BBC radio documentary.+ More reporting on Kosovo from BBC: "Horrors of KLA prison camps revealed"
+ Read a report by Altin Raxhimi, Montgomery's reporting partner from the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network: "Kosovo Liberation Army Ran Torture Camps in Albania"
Ten years after the Kosovo War, Michael Montgomery returns for the BBC to investigate "the other side of the war"—Serbs allegedly kidnapped and killed by ethnic Albanians.
Documents missing to justify homeland security purchases in California.
Mac Aviation Group charged with sending helicopter engines and other parts to Iran.
As a drug war rages throughout Mexico and along its northern border, an increasing number of Mexicans are crossing into the United States to flee the killings, extortion and kidnappings that have plagued places like Juárez and Tijuana.
Unlike the traditional job-seeking migrants, whose numbers have dropped in part due to the slumping US economy and increased border enforcement, this new migrant class comprises business owners, executives and other professionals who choose safety in the United States--even if it means detention--over freedom in their own country.
The drug war, which has claimed nearly 10,000 lives in a little more than two years-- more than 1,600 in Juárez in the last year alone--is a central component. But where most of those gruesome killings--including beheadings and mutilated bodies dumped in mass graves--involve criminals killing other criminals, rivals' family members or police, a dark, secondary shadow of lawlessness is enveloping innocent men, women and children who are fleeing for their lives.Officials on both sides of the border acknowledge these new immigrants but decline to make estimates of how many have fled. The tally could be in the thousands. The number of asylum-seekers has grown steadily in the past few years, according to the Department of Homeland Security, and is anticipated to increase. About 200 Mexicans applied for asylum at border posts last year and seventy just in the first quarter of this year. In addition, not all Mexicans fleeing the violence turn themselves in and ask for asylum.
Howard Campbell, an anthropology professor at the University of Texas, El Paso, who tracks the drug trade and its effects on society in Mexico and along the border, doesn't believe that Mexico is a failed state or even moving in that direction. Mexicans, however, are deeply frustrated by the lawlessness and police corruption that have some citizens rejecting the country.
"It's the worst violence since the (Mexican) Revolution and the worst period of instability since the Revolution," Campbell said, referring to the war against the Mexican government led by Pancho Villa and others that broke out nearly a hundred years ago. "People are giving up on the country, thinking it's totally hopeless."
On the night of January 10, Adolfo Guerrero, a 43-year-old father of one, who works in San Diego County but lives in a middle-class neighborhood on the edge of Tijuana, was driving home from downtown Tijuana. Guerrero, who was born in the United States but has always lived in Mexico, saw a white Ford pickup pull up behind him, its headlights flashing. Thinking the driver wanted to pass, Guerrero switched lanes as he descended a long hill. The driver of the Ford chased him, eventually pulling alongside. Guerrero saw the front passenger hold up a long-barrel rifle and gesture at him to pull off the road.
Guerrero fled, lost control and rammed his truck into a fence surrounding a housing development, the impact causing the bed of his truck to jackknife. One of the men in the Ford tried to open the truck's door, but Guerrero resisted and other cars approached. The man ran off. Moments later, a police car and tow truck appeared.
Rather than take a statement from Guerrero or pursue the Ford, the cop demanded $300 on the spot to cover the damage to the fence, Guerrero said. When Guerrero said he didn't have the money, the officer, who said he was with the anti-kidnapping unit, hauled him to jail. Afraid of police collusion, Guerrero paid $150 at the station. As he was about to leave, an officer said, "Think about it, Güero" (an insult insinuating that Guerrero was just a dumb American). "At least you're alive."
For about a year, Guerrero had contemplated moving away from Tijuana, where his family had lived for generations. The incident spurred him to buy a home in San Diego County.
"What is happening in Tijuana is happening to everyone. Social status doesn't matter," he said. "You can't go to anyone (in the police). They ignore you or laugh."
There is concern, voiced by intelligence officials, politicians and military leaders, of possible cross-border kidnappings or other violence, or a refugee crisis if the war and hostilities escalate. The situation has prompted local, state and federal officials to make plans to handle the issue of spillover.
Before he left his post as Homeland Security secretary in late January, Michael Chertoff told the New York Times that last summer he'd ordered the drafting of a contingency plan in the event there was "significant" border violence spillover. He said the department could muster a surge of its force to confront the issue and even work with the US military if necessary.
Coast Guard Vice Adm. Roger Rufe (retired), director of DHS office of operations coordination, recently testified to Congress that the department has a four-phase response to increasing levels of border violence. He said the department is developing plans to respond to a mass rush of Mexicans fleeing across the border, including housing arrangements and caring for displaced people.
Fred Burton, a former State Department counterterrorism official, and others have questioned the effectiveness of the federal plan to deal with a refugee crisis, in the unlikely event such a response is necessary. Zapata County (Texas) Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez, chair of the Southwestern Border Sheriffs' Coalition, says that no sheriff along the border has seen the federal contingency plan and that none of them know of a comprehensive strategy to deal with cross-border violence and Mexicans fleeing the war. DHS spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said that the plan will be sent to local law enforcement agencies soon. She declined to elaborate on the details of the strategy.
Congress last year passed a $1.4 billion aid package, dubbed the Mérida Initiative, to fight the drug trade in Mexico and Central America, with the first few hundred million released since December, but there hasn't been a straightforward discussion between the two countries about collateral damage.
While there is a loud chorus of US support for the efforts of President Felipe Calderón, who has sent 8,500 troops to Juárez in an attempt to restore order, few have publicly weighed the human cost, including what to do about Mexicans fleeing the war. It's a delicate issue, as neighboring Mexico remains the United States' third-largest trading partner and a major oil supplier.
For now, the US focus is on the drug cartels, as well as a redoubled concentration on curbing small-arms trafficking and the flow of drug money to Mexico. That focus raises the question: what responsibility does the US government have to Mexicans fleeing a war that is fueled by US drug consumption, fought with firearms largely purchased in the United States and funded in part by the United States' giving money to a government that is not able to reliably protect its people?
The issue is being taken up in Washington. The Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan immigration think tank, last month organized a round-table discussion sponsored by the Army War College Strategic Studies Institute that gathered about forty scholars, policy analysts and US officials from the State, Justice and Homeland Security departments for the opening round of talks to recommend how to address Mexico's security problems and help manage the migration wrought by the war while dealing with this country's own border issues, including corruption and firearms trafficking.
Susan Ginsburg, who directs the think tank's mobility and security program, said there are unanswered questions about the nature of the violence, where it's coming from and what the motivations are.
"Some of these tactics are things we've seen in Middle Eastern terrorist organizations," she said. "Why are innocent people being caught up in it? It's something we've been unable to answer, but it's considered an important question."
José Miguel Vivanco, the Americas division director for Human Rights Watch, said the Mérida Initiative could help Mexico strengthen its democratic and judicial institutions and ensure that law enforcement agencies and the army do not engage in massive and gross violations of human rights. Mexican police officers, targets for corruption by drug lords, typically earn less than $1,000 a month, and crime goes widely unsolved in Mexico.
The battle in Mexico has primarily been between the powerful drug cartels vying for control of the lucrative smuggling routes into the United States. Shortly after taking office in late 2006, President Calderón launched an offensive against traffickers and police corruption, and has since sent some 45,000 Mexican troops across the country.
Since then, however, a wave of lawlessness has risen as some crime syndicates, such as the once-potent Tijuana cartel, have faltered due to arrests or killings of its leaders, and a crackdown on police corruption has weeded out some crooked cops. As a result, gangs have turned to kidnapping or extortion as other means to make money, and low-level criminals have jumped at the opportunity to prey upon victims in cities that lack a police presence.
Burton, the former counterterrorism official at State and an analyst with the Austin, Texas-based security company Stratfor, describes this as a third war waged "by criminals who may or may not be involved with the cartels" that target innocent citizens.
In a recent report published by Stratfor, Burton and Scott Stewart wrote that "Unlike the other battles, where cartel members or government forces are the primary targets and civilians are only killed as collateral damage, on this battlefront, civilians are squarely in the crosshairs."
Jodi Goodwin, an immigration attorney in Harlingen, Texas, less than twenty miles from the Mexico border, says she gets calls or sees people at least twice a week where they express a fear of living in Mexico because of the rise in drug-related violence.
"I never heard people say they were afraid to live in Matamoros or Reynosa until the last year and a half," she said. "It's hard to feel you have any protection when the people supposed to be protecting you are in bed with the enemy," she said, referring to Mexican police.
In El Paso, which shares the border with Ciudad Juárez, a city of more than a million people, Mayor John Cook said some Mexicans come over on weekends to get away from the violence or have moved because they find it safer in the United States. He noted that the 1,600-member Juárez police department has fired hundreds of cops who have failed drug or lie-detector tests.
"Some of the little gangsters in town have used that as an opportunity to kidnap and extort," he said. "Many people we have fleeing are not fleeing drug violence but the secondary level of violence."
Apartment managers in recent months have noticed more Mexican businessmen moving themselves or their families to El Paso, which for years has touted itself as one of the safest big cities in the United States. Suzy Shewmaker Hicks, board president of the Greater El Paso Association of Realtors, said that in the past year she's seen more Juárez residents inquiring about living in El Paso.
A woman who had recently returned to her Juárez home after fleeing to El Paso for a few months starting last summer recently talked at an El Paso coffee shop about her experience. Dressed elegantly and sipping a coffee drink at a Starbucks, the woman, who asked that her identity be withheld for safety reasons, said her family decided to leave after her husband felt threatened at his business. They had since returned to Juárez because they believe it's their duty to stand up for their city. (The family maintains a home in El Paso.)
Her husband has not returned to his business since he noticed a pickup truck packed with five suspicious men lurking outside late at night last summer, she said. Instead, he operates his business using a web camera and by phone.
While her family again lives in Juárez, many of her acquaintances and friends remain in the United States, where they've sought safety, the woman said. Meanwhile, she said she knows at least six people who have been kidnapped for ransom in the past five months.
"We don't want a failed state," the woman, who has dual American and Mexican citizenship, said. "We want families to come back."
To protect themselves against kidnappings and other attacks, people have taken to wearing disguises or changing cars, she said. The month-old coat of dust and dirt on her car gave a thin psychological layer of protection against would-be kidnappers. Even the mayor of Juárez, Jose Reyes Ferriz, who has owned a home on the US side for about fifteen years, relocated his family after receiving threats, according to press reports.
"It's worse than any movie," the woman said. "If you had told me ten months ago we'd be where we are now, I wouldn't have believed you."
Since returning to Juárez, the woman said, community efforts to create safe public places have begun through neighborhood, church and business associations.
Republican Congressman Michael McCaul of Texas said he saw evidence of the insecurity migration when a Mexican newspaper publisher moved into a nearby neighborhood.
"In my lifetime living in Texas, we have seen the increase of violence and lawlessness. It used to be you'd visit a (Mexican) border town--go shopping with your family, eat at a restaurant and then go home. You don't do that anymore," said McCaul, a member of the House Homeland Security and Foreign Affairs committees.
He acknowledged that Mexico is becoming more of a narco-state along the border but not a failed one. The United States must shoulder the burden by curbing drug demand and cutting off the flow of guns and cash into Mexico. US military involvement is on the table.
"It's a ticking time bomb about ready to explode, and I'm just very concerned what the next step is going to be," he said.
Still, Texas is better off than other states, Sheriff Gonzalez said, as the governor's office has developed a state contingency plan and the Texas Legislature has committed millions to bolster the state's border-area law enforcement. He said Texas sheriffs feel sorry for their counterparts in other states who don't have the money. But Gonzalez said he does have some reason for hope, as new Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano met with local law enforcement officials in late February and indicated to them that she wants to talk by telephone at least once a month.
"We've finally been invited to the table instead of having to lick crumbs off the floor like we used to, and not very successfully," Gonzalez said.
The escalating war near America's southern border is driving embattled Mexicans to seek safety in the United States. What if the tide of violence follows them? CIR's Andrew Becker reports from San Diego and El Paso for The Nation.
Second Amendment freedoms equal more blood in Mexico.
CIR's Andy Becker talks about a new wave of immigrants trying to escape the violence.
A Rolls-Royce helicopter engine, similar to those Khoshnevisrad allegedly
attempted to smuggle into Iran. Photo © Rolls-Royce plc 2009SOURCE DOCUMENTS:
• Download the affidavit filed by a Department of Commerce special agent and the resulting criminal complaint.
A Tehran businessman who allegedly helped run a major weapons-smuggling ring for Iran was charged yesterday with multiple export-related crimes, two days after he was arrested in San Francisco after stepping off a flight from Europe.Hossein Ali Khoshnevisrad, 55, was described by U.S. officials as a key figure in Iran's vast network of businesses and front companies seeking Western technology for weapons ranging from ballistic missiles to improvised explosive devices. Documents and officials from the Justice and Commerce departments linked Khoshnevisrad's firm to a scheme to acquire millions of dollars worth of parts for military helicopters and jet fighters, using Malaysian and European companies as middlemen.
At least some of the parts were intended for an Iranian company that the State Department has linked to Iran's nuclear and ballistic missiles program, according to documents first obtained by the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting. The case was the latest in a series of attempts by the U.S. government to crack down on illicit procurement networks that feed Tehran's pursuit of high-tech weapons systems.
The arrest of Khoshnevisrad was an unexpected bonus in those efforts, U.S. officials said. After tracking the businessman and his import company, Ariasa, for months, investigators with U.S. Customs and Border Protection discovered that the entrepreneur was traveling from Iran to the United States for what was believed to be his first visit to this country.
A party of federal officers was waiting for him early Saturday as he arrived at San Francisco International Airport with his wife and teenage son after a stopover flight from Europe. Khoshnevisrad was confronted in the airport's customs area and detained without incident.
"It is rare that a guy of his stature in the procurement business comes to the United States," said a law enforcement official familiar with the case. The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing probe, said the case "demonstrates the scope and reach of these procurement networks, and their global efforts to insulate themselves using trading companies around the world."
Ariasa, the official said, relied chiefly on Malaysian trading partners—including a phony "book trader"—to circumvent bans on direct exports of technology to Iran. The link is notable, he said, because Iran appears in recent months to have shifted the routing of many of its purchases through Asia, following a crackdown on several front companies in the United Arab Emirates.
A balding man with a thick mustache Khoshnevisrad wore a blue dress shirt and slacks for his first court appearance yesterday at an arraignment before a U.S. magistrate in San Francisco. Before the magistrate arrived Khoshnevisrad sat outside the courtroom handcuffed at the wrists.
"Do you know if my family is coming?" he asked the federal agents escorting him to court. He spoke fluent English.
Khoshnevisrad told the agents he was worried about whether his family would show up. He asked if he could make a phone call.
The law enforcement agents, some in plainclothes with badges dangling from their necks, others in suits, huddled. One asked Khoshnevisrad what number to call. Khoshnevisrad gave him a number, but before dialing the agent was reminded by one of his colleagues to dial *67 beforehand to block the recipient's caller ID. The agent handed his phone to the alleged weapons smuggler.
He stood and, still cuffed, held the phone, and listened. He never spoke; no one answered.
A few minutes later his family arrived.
Khoshnevisrad shared a long embrace with his wife and spoke with his family in Farsi, sharing an occasional laugh. His sister told him she was happy to hear him laughing, considering he had just spent two nights in a local county jail. Interrupted by federal agents when the courtroom doors opened, his handcuffs were taken off, and they were all led inside.
With his family members in the courtroom, he was formally charged with four counts of export-related charges, tied to a series of alleged deals to ship helicopter engines and military-grade surveillance cameras to Iran. A lawyer for the businessman declined to comment on the charges.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Candace Kelly requested that Khoshnevisrad be held without bail, saying he posed a "very serious national security risk." The magistrate agreed with that request.
The aircraft parts, valued at more than $4 million, were purchased from U.S. firms and routed through a network of front companies, according to documents obtained by the Berkeley, Calif.-based CIR.
Among the purchases were 17 Rolls-Royce helicopter engines, manufactured at a factory in Indiana and allegedly destined for Iran Aircraft Manufacturing Industrial Co., and 11 aerial-surveillance cameras sold by a Pennsylvania distributor and allegedly intended for mounting on Iran's F-4 fighter jets, according to an affidavit by investigators for Commerce's Office of Export Enforcement. The U.S. firms apparently were unaware that the parts were intended for Iran, federal officials said.
The documents, including an affidavit from the Commerce Department filed with the magistrate, indicate that Khoshnevisrad's network also allegedly involved trading companies in Ireland and the Netherlands and American freight carriers, one of which was described in court records as "the Irish trading company's designated freight forwarder from New York."
The investigation of Khoshnevisrad relied in part on intercepted emails between him and his business partners. Excerpts from the email exchanges appear to show Khoshnevisrad, while negotiating deals with Irish and Dutch trading partners, often acknowledging that the companies would have to circumvent U.S. export laws.
"We have your 'three engines' ready to ship/deliver in Kuala Lumpur," a representative of the Irish trading company wrote in a Jan. 15, 2007, email, one of several cited in the Commerce affidavit. "We are giving you ... top-quality service ... under extreme[ly] difficult conditions (embargo[es] ... export controls)."
In another email to Khoshnevisrad about three weeks later, the Irish trading company wrote, "Aviation/Equip[ment] ... embargo ... very, very 'strong' right now on 'Iran.' Extreme vigilance 'worldwide' in place."
In another case involving alleged front companies, the Justice Department indicted a number of Iranian businessmen and firms for illegally purchasing electronics used to make IEDs of the type used to kill U.S. and coalition troops in Iraq.
Khoshnevisrad's firm, Ariasa, describes itself on its website as a trading and engineering firm. The firm's website includes a section detailing its procurement network, which includes sources in Europe, Asia and the U.S. Its products from its "Europe-America" sources include "any kind of optical component, equipment"; "raw materials, alloys"; "electro motors, transformers, any kind of connector, relay"; "radio equipment and systems"; and "aviation equipment."
Calls to the Tehran telephone numbers listed on the site were not answered.
Joby Warrick is a reporter for the Washington Post. Shahien Nasiripour is a reporter at the Center for Investigative Reporting. Read the full story on Washingtonpost.com.
A Tehran businessman at the center of an alleged international weapons-trafficking scheme was charged today in federal court with violating U.S. export-control laws, two days after he was quietly seized by lawmen in San Francisco upon arriving from overseas.
Photo © Rolls-Royce plc 2009
Brothers extradited from Mexico accused of smuggling Brazilians and Mexicans into the country for as much as $12,000 a person.
The city of Skagway has 823 people.
Will fusion centers expand under the new president?
Interview by Mark Schapiro
Produced by Carrie Ching, Joe Rubin, and Andres CedielABOUT THE SERIES
Welcome to The Investigators, an ongoing web-video series highlighting investigative reporting—as it happens—by journalists around the world. The series features interviews with journalists, who share the stories behind their groundbreaking international investigations into human rights abuses, financial corruption, political malfeasance, environmental destruction and other abuses of power. Often these journalists work in dangerous circumstances, risking their lives to reveal stories that have far-reaching impact and are relevant to us all.ABOUT CONTRAVIA
Our first segment features Colombian journalists Hollman Morris and Juan Pablo Morris, who created a series on Colombian television that is unearthing the largely hidden history of the country’s long-running guerilla wars. The series, called Contravía, airs on Colombia’s third public channel and online www.contravia.tv.While the violent tactics of the left-wing guerilla movement, the FARC, have generated considerable press attention—most recently after the release of kidnapped former congresswoman Ingrid Betancourt and other hostages in July 2008—a major component of that violence, by right-wing paramilitary groups, has gone largely unreported. Founded some twenty years ago by landowners to combat the guerillas, the paramilitary groups have transformed into violent criminal enterprises financed through cocaine exports and kidnappings—much like the FARC itself. Over more than two decades, the paramilitary squads have been responsible for the deaths and disappearance of as many as 20,000 people, according to the National Movement of Victims of State Crimes, a human rights group established to protest paramilitary abuses.
The Morris brothers take their cameras deep into the Colombian countryside to probe into the disappearance of thousands of individuals kidnapped over the past decade, and track efforts to unearth their graves far from the cosmopolitan capital city of Bogotá or the eyes of the international or global press. “Our aim,” Juan Pablo told us, “is to reconstruct the memory of those atrocities…. Many of the people who followed the paramilitaries in the 1980s and 90s are running the country today.”
Contravia has uncovered links between paramilitary leaders and high officials in Colombian politics and finance. Thirty senators and representatives in the Colombian Congress have been imprisoned because of their ties to the paramilitary death squads; another sixty have been investigated. That’s a third of Colombia’s 268 member Congress, giving rise to a new term—‘para-politica’—to describe the ongoing crisis as one top politician after another is accused of complicity with the para-military squads. Most of those accused represent political parties that are part of the governing coalition led by President Alvaro Uribe.
Hollman Morris was given the Human Rights Defender Award by Human Rights Watch in 2007. He’s been forced to leave Colombia several times for extended periods after the airing of Contravía revelations. The show does not receive commercial backing; subsidies come from the Open Society Institute, the European Union and other international sources.
In February 2009, Contravía’s reporting prompted a denunciation by the government: Colombia’s Minister of Defense, Juan Manuel Santos, accused Hollman Morris on national radio of being “close to the guerillas,” after he conducted several interviews with FARC hostages who were later released. Uribe himself denounced Morris to the national press, and implied he was a member of the “intellectual bloc” of the FARC.
Such accusations in Colombia can have fatal consequences. Death threats followed. Shortly thereafter, Morris defended himself from the government’s charges on one of Colombia’s most popular morning talk shows; Contravía filmed Morris’ part of the conversation with the host Julio Sanchez and produced an English translation of the interview.
The government's accusations prompted a protest by the Committee to Protect Journalists and Human Rights Watch, which claimed in a letter to President Uribe that there was no evidence for such a statement, which could lead to “serious threats” of violence, and “undermines … freedom of expression” in Colombia.
The Inter-American Human Rights Commission (IAHRC) of the Organization of American States issued a statement criticizing the Colombian government’s effort to vilify the journalists and link them to the guerillas. On March 23, attorneys for the Committee for Free Expression in Colombia and other free press advocates publicly challenged the Colombian government’s version of events, and described the potentially corrosive effects the personal attacks were having on the willingness of Colombian journalists to pursue controversial human rights stories.
Two days after that presentation, Juan Pablo Morris commented by phone from Bogotá that Contravía will continue to defy efforts by Uribe to “link journalists who question the government to ‘terrorists’.”
CIR Editorial Director Mark Schapiro interviewed Hollman and Juan Pablo Morris via web-cam at their studio in Bogotá.
Colombian journalists Hollman Morris and Juan Pablo Morris are risking their lives to unearth the largely hidden history of the country’s long-running guerilla wars. CIR's Mark Schapiro interviews the Morris brothers via web-cam about their TV news program, Contravía.
While reporting on a fighter jet, we met a marine vocally opposed to the war.
Journal prints controversial GMO story to stir up debate; scientific claims were a hoax.
Former Your Black Muslim Bakery leader Yusuf Bey IV bragged in jail about ordering the killing of journalist Chauncey Bailey in 2007 because Bailey had financial information that Bey IV "didn't want to get out," according to a statement taken by investigators late last year.Bey IV said he had to "sacrifice a soldier" to "take out" the Oakland Post editor to protect the bakery, according to the statement taken by the Alameda County District Attorney's office from a confidential informant. Bey IV remains uncharged in the Aug. 2, 2007 killing of Bailey; he is jailed awaiting trial on unrelated kidnapping and torture charges.
This and other documents obtained Wednesday by The Chauncey Bailey Project add these new details to the case:
– Bey IV bragged that Oakland homicide Detective Sgt. Derwin Longmire, the lead detective in the Bailey case, was a "sympathizer" of the bakery who was not pursuing charges against him and was receiving sexual favors set up by Bey IV, according to the confidential informant.
Reached Wednesday night, Longmire said that police department policy banned him from commenting. He referred questions to his attorney, Michael Rains, who did not return a phone call Wednesday night.
– Bailey told a co-worker at the Oakland Post shortly before his death that "the Muslims" had been making "threats on his life" in phone calls. This statement came from Nisiyah Yahudah, who was once married to bakery founder Yusuf Bey.
– Devaughndre Broussard confessed to killing Bailey to stop him from "writing bad things" about the bakery. He then recanted and pleaded not guilty. In the statement from the informant about Bey IV, Bey IV is said to have claimed that he ordered Broussard to recant "so the confession would 'lose credibility at trial.'"
Longmire left Bey IV and Broussard alone in a police interrogation room for about six minutes — without recording their conversation — immediately after which Broussard confessed. Before the time with Bey IV, he had denied the killing.
– District attorney investigators interviewed a former district director of Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, who told them Bey IV and his entourage were showing up so often at Lee's Oakland office in 2007 that she had to tell him to not come without an appointment.
Leslie Littleton, the former director who now works for Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums, said that Sandra Andrews, another staff member, knew Bey IV, describing him as "like a son to her" and urged Littleton to write a letter of support for Bey IV in the bakery's bankruptcy proceeding.
– Ali Saleem Bey, a former member of the bakery, also was asking Lee's office to intervene against Bey IV in the bankruptcy case. Littleton told investigators that she cut off contact with both parties.
Julie Nickson, Lee's chief of staff, said that Lee could not comment because of the ongoing investigation of Bailey killing.
How much weight the district attorney's office is giving these statements is unclear.
Nancy O'Malley in the District Attorney's Office declined to comment Wednesday night. Christopher Lamiero, the prosecutor trying the only person charged in the case, could not be reached.
Bey IV has made other incriminating statements about the Bailey killing, as documented by the Chauncey Bailey Project. A bakery worker also told police in 2007 that Bey IV watched a television news report on the killing and boasted that the slaying would "teach them to (expletive) with us."
After a brief court appearance by Broussard last month, where his trial was set to begin May 19, Lamiero said the investigation of Bailey's killing remained ongoing. The state justice department and police internal affairs division are investigating Longmire's handling of the case and the oversight of his then-supervisors, Lt. Ersie Joyner and former Capt. Jeffrey Loman. Longmire and Joyner were transferred to patrol this year, a move that police said was routine. Loman is suspended with pay pending the outcome of an unrelated sexual harassment investigation.
Oakland Tribune reporters Kelly Rayburn and Paul Rosynsky and independent journalist Bob Butler contributed to this story.
Former Your Black Muslim Bakery leader Yusuf Bey IV bragged in jail about ordering the killing of journalist Chauncey Bailey in 2007 because Bailey had financial information that Bey IV “didn’t want to get out,” according to a statement taken by investigators late last year and just obtained by The Chauncey Bailey Project along with other new evidence in the case.
Colin Powell visits Colombia in support of Plan Colombia. Immigration fueled by drug-related violence and lawlessness is not unprecedented.
Over the past decade, thousands of Colombians have sought asylum in the United States as the U.S. government sent billions of dollars to South America to attack coca production. The aid package, known as Plan Colombia, has been widely compared to the more recent Merida Initiative, another U.S.-funded plan approved last year by Congress and directed to fight drug smuggling in Mexico and Central American countries. The first round of funding — $297 million — was released late last year, and another $99 million was released last month. A total of $1.4 billion has been pledged by the U.S. government.
Refugee groups have pushed hard for temporary protected status to Colombians, said Mark Hetfield of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and the director of a 2005 study on asylum seekers for the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. Temporary protected status allows immigrants to reside in the U.S., but not permanently. The Bush administration refused such requests.
Safe haven has been granted to people from Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador living in the U.S. who don't qualify as refugees but are fleeing natural disasters or other catastrophes, as long as it's in U.S. national interest. Colombians had little success in gaining refugee status at first, too, Hetfield said. The possibility of persecution "didn't fit the drug war when our understanding was not as sophisticated," Hetfield said. "But as immigration judges became more familiar with what was happening in Colombia, they realized these are political opinion cases." For much of the last decade Colombia has had the second highest number of asylees, after China.
While Hetfield said the situation between the two countries—a stable Mexican government versus a once shaky Colombian democracy battling revolutionary forces funded by the drug trade—is definitely different, the comparison between the two countries is more lemons to oranges than apples to oranges.
"In Mexico, it's police involvement in the drug trade that creates fear of retaliation of police. It's also an imputed political opinion. It's not the FARC (the left-wing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) versus the government," Hetfield said, adding said it is debatable whether the United States has a responsibility to accept Mexican refugees because of its involvement in the war on drugs. The problem in Mexico is "renegade government forces that can't be controlled by the federal government."
A State Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity disputed any comparison between Mexico and Colombia in terms of country conditions. He said, however, the reason for the spike in Colombian asylum cases over the past decade could be similar to what's happening in Mexico today.
"When the central government in both cases tries to address the root problems—lawlessness and corruption in Mexico and no state control at all in Colombia—it kicks up a backlash by the parties used to operating almost in a vacuum … Then things get messy until the state prevails," the official said, adding that Colombia is much more in control today than it was a decade ago. "Our hope is that Mexico feels the same way in two or three years' time."
Andrew Becker's article "Mexico's Drug War Creates New Class of Refugees" ran in the Los Angeles Times. See the complete Times investigation: "Mexico Under Siege."
Starting nearly a decade ago, a spike in the number of asylum seekers from Colombia coincided with a U.S.-backed plan to eradicate drug production in the region. Could the nation see a similar wave of Mexicans seeking safe haven?
EL PASO—The Juarez police lieutenant was recovering from three gunshot wounds, the result of an assault by hit men for a drug cartel. His name was on a death list brazenly posted at a monument for fallen peace officers. Lt. Salvador Hernandez Arvizu didn't like his odds of surviving in Mexico. So he fled his hospital bed, hoping to take refuge in the U.S.At a border post in El Paso, he filled out immigration paperwork, made a formal request for political asylum—and was taken directly to jail.
The Juarez policeman is part of a new breed of would-be refugees—business owners, law enforcement officers, journalists and other professionals—on the run from Mexico's vicious drug wars. Increasingly, they are seeking safe haven in the U.S. by filing for asylum.
The number of asylum requests filed at U.S. border entries by Mexican nationals nearly doubled to almost 200 in the last fiscal year, and the pace has increased this year. Seventy Mexican asylum-seekers filed petitions in the first quarter, most of them in El Paso and San Diego. The figures are small compared with the vast scale of illegal immigration, but many fear explosive growth if the bloodshed worsens.
Mexico Torture Claim
In late December 2008, the nation's highest administrative body for immigration law, the Board of Immigration Appeals, remanded a case to a lower immigration court in Harlingen, Texas, finding that a Mexican man initially denied safe haven in the United States had in fact made a valid case that he likely faced torture, or even death, if he returned to his native country. According to court records, the man, who lived in Matamoros, Mexico, across the border from Brownsville, Texas, fled to the United States after being abducted by local police, repeatedly beaten and threatened for refusing a neighbor's request to store drugs and weapons in his home. He asked to be allowed to stay in the United States not as an asylee, but under a United Nations treaty, known as the Convention Against Torture, or CAT. An immigration judge denied his request, which he appealed.
Henry Cruz, a Seattle-based attorney who represented the Matamoros man's appeal to the immigration board, said the unpublished decision, which doesn't set legal precedent, could nonetheless open more claims for people in similar situations.
"This represents a new area in asylum, and CAT-related relief when it comes to drug violence," Cruz said. "It's significant that the board was pointing out the increase in violence along the border." The man's case is still pending.
Download the Board of Immigration Appeals decisionDrug violence in Mexico has claimed at least 7,000 lives in little more than a year, most of those deaths along the border and many of them carried out to maximize their gruesome impact. Mass killings and beheadings have had a terrorizing effect on border towns from Texas to Tijuana.It is unclear whether any asylum requests have been granted in cases based on fear of drug violence. Most of the recent cases are still working their way through the system. Some refugees from the narco-wars are hiding on the U.S. side of the border, uncertain whether to apply for asylum—and risk being deported if their petitions are denied.
"We're at the beginning of the problem," said Bruce J. Einhorn, a retired immigration judge. "It's indicative of a new and emerging class of persecuted people from Mexico."
The surge in applications has heightened debate about how broadly to interpret asylum rules and whether to detain applicants while they wait for their cases to be decided.
Asylum-seekers are among the most desperate people confronting immigration officials. Deporting them to their homeland can be a death sentence. But under U.S. law, fear of criminal violence is not recognized as grounds for asylum.
Applicants must show that they are members of a social, political or other group targeted for persecution—a difficult standard to meet. Asylum requests are usually associated with people fleeing civil wars or dictatorships.
Mexican applicants generally do not claim to be victims of government persecution. Rather, many argue that Mexican authorities have failed to protect them from the drug cartels—a hard-to-prove variation on the established criteria for asylum.
The applicants are not immigrants in search of economic opportunities. They are typically middle-class, employed and frightened.
"It's very hard to accept that I can never return to Mexico, but that is the lamentable reality," said Emilio Gutierrez Soto, a regional newspaper reporter for El Diario in northern Chihuahua state who has an asylum request pending.
Gutierrez said his troubles began with a series of articles he wrote that were critical of the Mexican military, which is leading the country's anti-drug efforts. After a death threat, Gutierrez said, he headed for the border with his 15-year-old son. He left behind a home and career.
Like the wounded police lieutenant, the Mexican journalist was jailed immediately in El Paso by U.S. authorities. All asylum-seekers arriving at border posts face detention. Gutierrez's son was sent to a juvenile detention facility but later was released to relatives.
The case has prompted advocates for immigrant rights to approach the Obama administration with renewed appeals to allow such asylum-seekers to remain free while they await rulings on their applications. Journalism groups also rallied to his defense, and Gutierrez was released unexpectedly in January after seven months in custody.
"I was prepared to stay in jail as long as it took, since I know I'm a dead man in Mexico," Gutierrez said in an interview. He and his son have been reunited and are living with family members in the U.S.
Juarez police Lt. Hernandez, however, abandoned his asylum bid and returned to Mexico, according to El Paso attorney Carlos Spector, who represented him.
"People, especially policemen, just get tired of being in jail," Spector said.
Hernandez could not be reached for comment. His former lawyer believes he is in hiding in Mexico.
The increase in applications has prompted heightened federal scrutiny of asylum petitions.
"The agency has been paying closer attention to the issue of Mexico's drug-related violence," said Jedidah Hussey, deputy chief of the asylum division for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Einhorn predicts that asylum requests have yet to peak. The retired immigration judge, now a law professor at Pepperdine University, said the boom in applications "will probably get more intense and busy before it lessens."
He also said he expected evidence of drug-related violence against Mexican citizens eventually to be persuasive to officers and judges.
"A credible argument can be made that these individuals are unable to obtain protection from . . . the government of their country," Einhorn said. That could make them arguably eligible for asylum, he said.
Some experts caution against expanding the grounds for asylum to accommodate those fleeing the drug violence.
"Clearly, if we start granting asylum to Mexicans, it could start a real flood of applicants, even from people with no plausible case," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, which seeks tighter enforcement of immigration laws.
Already, Mexico's drug havoc has generated warnings of a looming humanitarian crisis.
In December, Barry R. McCaffrey, former U.S. drug czar and a retired general, raised the prospect of "millions of refugees" if Mexico failed to curb lawlessness. The previous month, the U.S. military's Joint Forces Command cited the potential threat to U.S. security of a debilitated Mexican state. Some suggested that the U.S. might need to build detention camps and post troops to contain a potential flood of refugees.
However, a State Department official said such scenarios were overblown.
"What is happening is people along the border who have visas, who are middle-class, who are scared of the violence—you may see a larger number of those folks going to live on the U.S. side," said the official, who under State Department guidelines could not be named. "This is a subset that is different from economic migrants coming into the U.S."
Among the recent asylum petitioners is a Juarez mother of four whose husband, a drug operative, was gunned down gangland-style along with two other relatives. Her lawyer argued that she and her children were uninvolved in drugs yet remained potential targets of retribution killings, and were entitled to protection.
"We're sending these people back to their deaths," said the lawyer, Craig Shagin, who declined to identify his client to protect her and her family.
Last month, an immigration judge ordered the widow deported. In denying her asylum claim, the judge ruled that Mexico's violence was widespread and didn't specifically target her. She also had the option of relocating her family within Mexico, ruled Judge Andrew Arthur in York, Pa.
The woman is appealing the ruling. In the meantime, she is being held in a Pennsylvania immigration lockup with her two youngest children, ages 9 and 14.
In El Paso, officials say they are keeping an eye on self-declared drug-war refugees—for their protection.
"The El Paso Police Department knows who has taken asylum over here," said Mayor John Cook. "We don't publicize this or make a big deal of it, but we know who might become targets."
Among the Juarez professionals who have fled is Jorge Luis Aguirre, a veteran journalist who founded the widely read website lapolaka.com.
The site's amalgam of news tidbits and pointed musings is a must-read for Juarez politicos, business leaders and journalists. Last year, several postings questioned the drug-fighting resolve of Patricia Gonzalez, Juarez's top state prosecutor.
According to Aguirre, threats filtered back to him, but he became especially alarmed after fellow reporter Armando Rodriguez of El Diario de Juarez was gunned down last November. Aguirre said that while he was en route to his fellow reporter's wake, his cellphone rang.
"You're next," the caller said.
Aguirre, his wife and his three children packed their bags and entered the United States on temporary visas. Today, Aguirre publishes his site from hiding in El Paso.
He is mulling a bid for asylum once his temporary visa expires, but Aguirre worries that he could end up jailed, or worse, deported—a fate that, he is sure, would mean death.
"I was happy in Mexico; I never intended to leave, until they vowed to kill me," Aguirre said in an interview at an El Paso cafe. "When they tell you that in Juarez, you better believe it."
Read more from the Los Angeles Times special project: "Mexico Under Siege."
As a drug war rages in Mexico between gangs and the country’s military, a new group has begun to appear at the nation’s borders: asylum seekers fleeing the violence. CIR and the Los Angeles Times report from El Paso, where last year more Mexicans arrived at crossing points to ask for protection than anywhere else along the Southwest border.
Baghdad | Los Angeles, a four-month collaboration between the Annenberg School for Communication at USC and the Center for Investigative Reporting in Berkeley, explores the impact of the Iraq war in Southern California. Stories include: a profile of the Junior ROTC program at Hollywood High School; the tale of an undocumented Mexican, in the U.S. since the age of three, who wants nothing more than to serve in the U.S. military, but can’t; stories of Iraqi exiles with roots in Southern California who’ve returned to help rebuild their country; a “biography of a fighter jet,” from Southern California assembly line to payload delivery in Iraq; an analysis of the U.S. Army’s advertising strategy in light of an unpopular war; and a first person essay by a reporter whose father’s secret defense-industry work has its own ties to Iraq.The project began as part of Sandy Tolan’s “Reporting in Los Angeles” class at the Annenberg School. The class’s goal was to examine how the war in Iraq, in direct and indirect ways, has played a role in the lives of a diverse group of Californians. The challenge was to find untold stories and to tell them in new ways in a digital format. Student reporters explored ideas during regular class sessions and with extensive consultation with colleagues from CIR. The reporters were encouraged to come up with their own ideas and interpretations of the connections between Iraq and Southern California.
Student reporters are Janna Brancolini, Lara Coger, Daniela Gerson, Alex Herbach, Michelle Lanz, Catherine Lyons, Chris Nelson, and Jean Yung. Special thanks to CIR’s director, Robert Rosenthal, and editorial director, Mark Schapiro. Thanks also to CIR’s web producer, Carrie Ching, to Wendy Chapman, Director of Web Technologies at Annenberg, and to Chris Nelson, who designed and set up the project website.
The editors would also like to thank Dan Birman, executive producer for USC Annenberg’s student-produced newsmagazine series, Impact, and to Impact’s Lee Warner, for their generosity in facilitating access to Jean Yung’s story, “A Helping Hand for the Cadets of Hollywood High.”
>> Visit the Baghdad | Los Angeles website
>> Download press releaseBaghdad | Los Angeles, a four-month collaboration between the Annenberg School for Communication at USC and the Center for Investigative Reporting in Berkeley, explores the impact of the Iraq war in Southern California through original multimedia reporting.
The U.S. Coast Guard may be overemphasizing homeland security.
"We're in a crisis," said CIR's director, former managing editor of the paper.
Highway corruption in Philippines; press freedom in Gaza; democracy in Kosovo?
The project "has had a deep impact on the city’s public life."
Border fence costs taxpayers up to $16 million per mile.
"Each person, one after the other, refuses to speak to us on the street."
"I end up on a road thick with U.S. military vehicles ... I'm lost in the Green Zone."
Judge said attorneys have provided "a significant benefit to the public."
Finding asylum in the United States is no simple task.
The Doha Centre for Media Freedom provides legal, medical and daily assistance.
An Iraqi fishes for dinner in the Tigris across from the largest U.S. embassy in the world.
"When I get to the polling station at 10 am there are more journalists than voters."
Iraqis talk about their hopes and fears as they prepare to vote.
Shane Bauer is a freelance journalist reporting from Baghdad for The Muckraker.