Burmese seeking U.S. asylum held in custody, limbo in Guam
BY FREDRIC N. TULSKY
San Jose Mercury News
January 23, 2001 GUAM -- In the past several months, more than 700 Burmese people have fled the repressive regime back home and made their way to this small Pacific island, hoping for refuge in the United States. Instead, they have found themselves trapped.
They got in thanks to a visa loophole designed to encourage tourism in the U.S. protectorate. They stayed because what they came for was political asylum in the mainland United States. But with a backlog in the system and no asylum officials in place on the island, the refugees are marooned, waiting months, or years, for the U.S. Justice Department to consider their pleas.
Their treatment reveals yet another way in which the U.S. asylum system fails to protect vulnerable refugees.
The Mercury News previously reported that the asylum system is marred by gross disparities in the outcome of cases depending on which administrative judge hears the case, and whether the asylum seeker is represented by a lawyer.
The Burmese refugees stranded on Guam are living crowded by the dozens in small private houses. Not eligible for work permits or government aid, they survive on handouts from church groups. Most are left to pursue their asylum claims on their own, unable to afford the few local attorneys willing to help.
Thirty-eight others fared even worse: They have spent months locked up in the Guam Detention Center because they answered honestly at the airport when asked if they intended to seek asylum in the U.S. or to stay in Guam for just 15 days and return home.
Under detention, husbands and wives, sisters and brothers, have been separated for months. A pregnant woman was kept in isolation in a cramped, locked cell for four months because officials feared that she might be carrying tuberculosis and were afraid -- because of her pregnancy -- to conduct a chest X-ray. Last week, a delegation of church officials, accompanied by Mercury News staff members and interpreters, arrived to document the conditions.
The Guam governor, after meeting with representatives from Church World Service, the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service,and local church officials, protested the situation to Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)officials in Washington.
The INS had taken the position that the visa-waiver program rules meant they could neither release those in custody nor permit others to travel to the mainland United States.This week, INS officials said the agency has agreed to ease its stance and release the Burmese in custody in Guam, and will consider permitting them to relocate to the mainland United States while their asylum claims are pending. The change in policy brought immediate, if cautious, reaction.
``The detention of this group of people, who were not given a chance to even apply for release, was inappropriate,'' said Matthew Wilch of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service in Baltimore,who was part of the group. ``But we remain concerned about the large number of people who fled persecution and remain stranded on the island.''
Immigrants stranded -- Island has been target of refugees, smugglers A U.S. territory not much larger in area than the city of San Jose, Guam is situated thousands of miles closer to Asia than any other place where U.S. immigration law applies.
That has made it a target not just for Burmese. In recent years, Chinese smugglers trying to transport laborers from Fujian province have used Guam as a route to the United States. Guam officials fear signs of a new effort in several recent incidents in which fishing boats have pulled close to shore and left Chinese passengers to swim to the island. Two such passengers died offshore earlier this month, apparently mauled while trying to swim over the rough coral reef, and then attacked by sharks.
The Burmese first trickled into Guam, but over the past six months, the numbers swelled; hundreds of Burmese came, including doctors and engineers, pastors and teachers. They came seeking political and religious freedom and telling stories of arrest and torture for practicing Christianity or demonstrating for democracy. They arrived with valid passports but nothing more.
Since 1986, Burma, also known as Myanmar, had been among the countries whose residents did not need visas in order to visit Guam. The visa-waiver program was established to attract Asian vacationers to the island, which suffers from a double-digit unemployment rate.
Most of the Burmese got through the airport, but then found nowhere to go. Sa Tin Lai, 32, was a pastor for the largely Christian Chin community of Burma until he fled to Guam last November. Lai said that he became politically active in college, and was involved in the 1988 student uprisings. Lai said that he was arrested and held for 25 days and interrogated day and night about the student movement.
During the questioning, he was slapped, and had a gun held to his head. He described being forced to crawl on his knees over sharp rocks, and being fed rice mixed with sand. After his release,troubles continued for Lai, who received a degree in theology in 1999. He finally fled when the church deacon warned him that his life was in danger because he angered military officials by repairing the water-damaged church. When he arrived in Guam, Lai had no idea where to go. A taxi took him to a local hotel. Staffers there put him in contact with the Chin Christian Fellowship, which arranged for him to stay with four other Chin asylum seekers in a one-bedroom house.
On another part of the island, a group of 41 Chin men crowd into a four-bedroom house. There is little furniture;the front room, barren, is used for prayer and for sleep. The men pass the long waiting hours outside striking a ball across the front lawn with a makeshift wooden putter into a white cup in the ground.
Thomas Mung, 25, is one of the youngest of the group. The son of a political activist, Mung said he was arrested and beaten for his own political activities as a student. He later produced a magazine, angering military officials again, and eventually fled. Like many of the Burmese refugees on Guam, Mung said that he borrowed money in the summer and paid a broker to arrange his transit out of Burma through Thailand to Guam.
``When I arrived, I said to a taxi driver, `Please tell me where the Burmese people are'' Mung said. Asked what comes next, he said simply, ``I cannot return to Burma.'' Mung and his housemates depend on handouts. As they traded stories near their makeshift putting green, Deacon Frank C.
Tenorio of the Catholic archdiocese arrived in a truck, bearing bags of rice. He said he brings food and old furniture when he can to four houses where Burmese live; he has taken eight other Burmese into his own home. ``Men are not supposed to cry,'' said the deacon, as his eyes filled with tears.
``But I am so moved by them; they have been through so much pain. I wish I could do more.''
Struggle for a hearing -- Most have little help facing asylum system There is little doubt that Burma is a country filled with atrocities committed by the ruling military government. The annual U.S. State Department report cites an ``extremely poor human rights record and longstanding severe repression of its citizens.''
The military has ruled since 1962 but the situation has worsened since 1988. Burmese people -- particularly those from the certain ethnic groups -- have been subject to arrest, rape, even death at the hands of military officers, the State Department reports. As a result,Burmese asylum seekers have fared far better than most once reaching U.S. territory.
Nationwide,Justice Department statistics analyzed by the Mercury News show, about 55 percent of Burmese applicants won their asylum cases from 1995 through 1999 -- a success rate more than twice that of applicants from other countries.
The law, in accordance with international convention, offers asylum for people who have a well-founded fear of persecution if sent back home, based on their race, religion, national origin, membership in a social group or because of their political opinion.
Neither asylum officers nor immigration judges are based in Guam, leaving the department struggling to keep up with the growing number of asylum seekers. More than 500 asylum applicants have not yet had hearings, and scores more Burmese have not yet submitted their asylum applications.
One woman, 23, said she fled her homeland after she was threatened with military arrest because of herpolitical activism; she arrived in Guam in 1998, and is still waiting for a hearing before an asylum officer. None of the scores of asylum seekers interviewed outside of custody last week had lawyers.
``Nobody can afford one,'' said Dan Baumwang, an engineer and member of the Christian Kachin ethnic minority, who fled Burma last year.``Many thought when they got here they were finished.'
Baumwang, who was educated in London, lives with 23 other Kachin people in two adjoining two-bedroom apartments. On a nail on his wall are the tales of seven compatriots, written in their own hands, in their own language. He provides them copies of the asylum application, and translates their statements. Baumwang said he had not even suggested to the asylum seekers that they should try to find any documentation to support their testimony; they were afraid to take any political or religious materials with them.
``I don't know how they would get such things,'' he said. Detained for honesty -- Rules for visa waiver left many imprisoned Under the tourism promotion program, most of the Burmese refugees were waived through the airport when they arrived.
The INS officer in charge of Guam, David Johnston, said that he instructed the airport inspectors not to profile arriving foreign citizens based on ethnicity if they had valid passports. But several dozen were stopped because they stood out, such as the 21 Burmese who arrived on the same flight on Oct. 3. Although they did not know each other, a broker had arranged their passage together. The group was sent for detailed questioning by airport inspectors. One after another, they said freely that they were hoping to apply for asylum and stay in the United States. Their honesty was costly. They were sent to jail.
Johnston said the regulations gave him no choice: Burmese who did not intend to return home within the 15-day limit of the visa-waiver program were violating the rule and had to sit in custody until they were granted asylum by an administrative immigration judge. They are held at the Guam Detention Center, where INS detainees make up roughly half the prison population, said the warden, Francisco Cristosomo.
The men live in two large, air-conditioned barracks built in 1999 in response to a flood of Chinese boat people. A third barracks sits empty. It was built to house women, but with just 11 Chinese and six Burmese women in custody, prison officials said it is more efficient to hold them in jail cells.
They live with the local prison inmates, sometimes as many as four to a cell the size of a walk-in closet. One of the women is an ethnic Chin, whose father was a Christian pastor. She said she was arrested in Burma in 1993 after she spoke against the government within earshot of an army officer.
She said the officer then beat and raped her. She fled to India but last year, when she no longer felt safe there, she returned to Burma. She continued her political activity and heard that the military officer was after her once again, so she fled to Guam. When she arrived, she tested positive for tuberculosis in a skin test. Because she was pregnant, officials were afraid to take an X-ray.
Instead, they kept her in isolation. But when the church group toured the prison last week and found the woman, they were alarmed by the effect of months of isolation.
The Rev. Jerry Elmore, pastor of the local University Baptist Church, offered to sponsor the woman himself, so she could be released from custody to his care.
Officials balked. But a day later, she was released and given a chest X-ray. ``I am happier,'' she told a reporter who toured the facility the following day. ``But I still feel weak and afraid in this place.''
Burmese barred -- Change helps those on island gain freedom
In October, Robert A. Underwood, the island's non-voting congressional representative, asked INS officials to drop Burma from the visa-waiver program. He said he feared that the Burmese asylum-seekers could cause the entire program to be curtailed. Citing ``law enforcement and national security interests,'' the Justice Department dropped Burma from the program as of Jan. 10.
That change is what made officials more receptive to releasing the Burmese refugees already on Guam, said Wilch, the Lutheran advocate for asylum seekers. With Burma off the program, he said,the INS could release the asylum-seekers without worrying that Guam would become a magnet.
`It worked out perfectly in terms of timing for the people there,'' said Wilch. But, he added, ``that still leaves one unanswered concern: What about the people who are still in Burma? We have no answer for that.''