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1. Feds accused of cover up
2. Visa program aims at investors
3. Immigrants adjust to regulations
4. Mexican ambassador pessimistic
5. Experts warn against lists

1.
Officials Hid Truth of Immigrant Deaths in Jail
By Nina Bernstein
The New York Times, January 9, 2010

Silence has long shrouded the men and women who die in the nation’s immigration jails. For years, they went uncounted and unnamed in the public record. Even in 2008, when The New York Times obtained and published a federal government list of such deaths, few facts were available about who these people were and how they died.

But behind the scenes, it is now clear, the deaths had already generated thousands of pages of government documents, including scathing investigative reports that were kept under wraps, and a trail of confidential memos and BlackBerry messages that show officials working to stymie outside inquiry.

The documents, obtained over recent months by The Times and the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act, concern most of the 107 deaths in detention counted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement since October 2003, after the agency was created within the Department of Homeland Security.

The Obama administration has vowed to overhaul immigration detention, a haphazard network of privately run jails, federal centers and county cells where the government holds noncitizens while it tries to deport them.

But as the administration moves to increase oversight within the agency, the documents show how officials — some still in key positions — used their role as overseers to cover up evidence of mistreatment, deflect scrutiny by the news media or prepare exculpatory public statements after gathering facts that pointed to substandard care or abuse.

As one man lay dying of head injuries suffered in a New Jersey immigration jail in 2007, for example, a spokesman for the federal agency told The Times that he could learn nothing about the case from government authorities. In fact, the records show, the spokesman had alerted those officials to the reporter’s inquiry, and they conferred at length about sending the man back to Africa to avoid embarrassing publicity.

In another case that year, investigators from the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that unbearable, untreated pain had been a significant factor in the suicide of a 22-year-old detainee at the Bergen County Jail in New Jersey, and that the medical unit was so poorly run that other detainees were at risk.

The investigation found that jail medical personnel had falsified a medication log to show that the detainee, a Salvadoran named Nery Romero, had been given Motrin. The fake entry was easy to detect: When the drug was supposedly administered, Mr. Romero was already dead.

Yet those findings were never disclosed to the public or to Mr. Romero’s relatives on Long Island, who had accused the jail of abruptly depriving him of his prescription painkiller for a broken leg. And an agency supervisor wrote that because other jails were “finicky” about accepting detainees with known medical problems like Mr. Romero’s, such people would continue to be placed at the Bergen jail as “a last resort.”

In a recent interview, Benjamin Feldman, a spokesman for the jail, which housed 1,503 immigration detainees last year, would not say whether any changes had been made since the death.

In February 2007, in the case of the dying African man, the immigration agency’s spokesman for the Northeast, Michael Gilhooly, rebuffed a Times reporter’s questions about the detainee, who had suffered a skull fracture at the privately run Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey. Mr. Gilhooly said that without a full name and alien registration number for the man, he could not check on the case.

But, records show, he had already filed a report warning top managers at the federal agency about the reporter’s interest and sharing information about the injured man, a Guinean tailor named Boubacar Bah. Mr. Bah, 52, had been left in an isolation cell without treatment for more than 13 hours before an ambulance was called.

While he lay in the hospital in a coma after emergency brain surgery, 10 agency managers in Washington and Newark conferred by telephone and e-mail about how to avoid the cost of his care and the likelihood of “increased scrutiny and/or media exposure,” according to a memo summarizing the discussion.

One option they explored was sending the dying man to Guinea, despite an e-mail message from the supervising deportation officer, who wrote, “I don’t condone removal in his present state as he has a catheter” and was unconscious. Another idea was renewing Mr. Bah’s canceled work permit in hopes of tapping into Medicaid or disability benefits.

Eventually, faced with paying $10,000 a month for nursing home care, officials settled on a third course: “humanitarian release” to cousins in New York who had protested that they had no way to care for him. But days before the planned release, Mr. Bah died.

Among the participants in the conferences was Nina Dozoretz, a longtime manager in the agency’s Division of Immigration Health Services who had won an award for cutting detainee health care costs. Later she was vice president of the Nakamoto Group, a company hired by the Bush administration to monitor detention. The Obama administration recently rehired her to lead its overhaul of detainee health care.

Asked about the conference call on Mr. Bah, Ms. Dozoretz said: “How many years ago was that? I don’t recall all the specifics if indeed there was a call.” She added, “I advise you to contact our public affairs office.” Mr. Gilhooly, the spokesman who had said he had no information on the case, would not comment.

On the day after Mr. Bah’s death in May 2007, Scott Weber, director of the Newark field office of the immigration enforcement agency, recommended in a memo that the agency take the unusual step of paying to send the body to Guinea for burial, to prevent his widow from showing up in the United States for a funeral and drawing news coverage.

Mr. Weber wrote that he believed the agency had handled Mr. Bah’s case appropriately. “However,” he added, “I also don’t want to stir up any media interest where none is warranted.” Helping to bury Mr. Bah overseas, he wrote, “will go a long way to putting this matter to rest.”

In the agency’s confidential files was a jail video showing Mr. Bah face down in the medical unit, hands cuffed behind his back, just before medical personnel sent him to a disciplinary cell. The tape shows him crying out repeatedly in his native Fulani, “Help, they are killing me!”

Almost a year after his death, the agency quietly closed the case without action. But Mr. Bah’s name had shown up on the first list of detention fatalities, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and on May 5, 2008, his death was the subject of a front-page article in The Times.

Brian P. Hale, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in an interview that the newly disclosed records represented the past, and that the agency’s new leaders were committed to transparency and greater oversight, including prompt public disclosure and investigation of every death, and more attention to detainee care in a better-managed system.

But the most recent documents show that the culture of secrecy has endured. And the past cover-ups underscore what some of the agency’s own employees say is a central flaw in the proposed overhaul: a reliance on the agency to oversee itself.

“Because ICE investigates itself there is no transparency and there is no reform or improvement,” Chris Crane, a vice president in the union that represents employees of the agency’s detention and removal operations, told a Congressional subcommittee on Dec. 10.

The agency has kept a database of detention fatalities at least since December 2005, when a National Public Radio investigation spurred a Congressional inquiry. In 2006, the agency issued standard procedures for all such deaths to be reported in detail to headquarters.

But internal documents suggest that officials were intensely concerned with controlling public information. In April 2007, Marc Raimondi, then an agency spokesman, warned top managers that a Washington Post reporter had asked about a list of 19 deaths that the civil liberties union had compiled, and about a dying man whose penile cancer had spread after going undiagnosed in detention, despite numerous medical requests for a biopsy.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/us/10detain.html

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2.
Immigrants invest in U.S. businesses in exchange for visas
By N.C. Aizenman
The Washington Post, January 10, 2010; A06

The number of foreigners willing to invest $500,000 to $1 million in a U.S. business in exchange for a visa roughly tripled in the past fiscal year, as dozens of cash-strapped enterprises and local governments scrambled to attract wealthy foreign backers through a previously obscure provision of immigration law.

Under the EB-5 visa program, immigrants who can demonstrate that their investment created or preserved at least 10 U.S. jobs after two years are granted legal permanent residency along with their spouses and children.

Although immigrants are allowed to establish businesses under the program, most prefer to invest in "regional centers" -- public or private enterprises that are certified by the government to receive funds from EB-5 investors and that can count jobs indirectly created by the investment toward the 10 required.

The minimum outlay mandated is $1 million, but immigrants can reduce that to $500,000 by investing in a regional center or establishing businesses in areas designated as economically disadvantaged.

The program was established in 1990, but potential investors and businesses were often dissuaded by the U.S. government's slow and inconsistent administration of the complex rules. In the past year, however, a gradual streamlining of procedures coincided with the recession and credit crunch to dramatically boost interest in the program.

In a matter of months, more than 50 private and public enterprises were certified as regional centers, increasing the total from 23 to 74. Three are in the Washington area.

With so many more investment opportunities to choose from, the number of immigrants (including investors and their immediate family members) who obtained EB-5 visas jumped from 1,443 in fiscal 2008 to 4,218 in the 2009 fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, according to the State Department.

Most were granted to people from Asia, particularly China and South Korea. Several scholars said they expect the number to double again this year.

"What happens with programs like this is that sometimes, all of a sudden they get discovered, and then intermediaries begin to really promote them both here and internationally," said Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank that recently released a report about the trend.

Statistics on the total invested through the EB-5 program are not available, but the capital infusion has been a boon to Washington area businesses. The Capitol Area Regional Center, a real estate investment fund based in the District, has been working to raise a projected $250 million from immigrant investors for use in Washington area construction projects.

Perhaps the greatest potential beneficiaries are nonprofit agencies such as the District's Anacostia Economic Development Corp., which was approved as a regional center in June. Over the next three years, the group hopes to raise $50 million from immigrant investors to develop real estate projects and small businesses in wards 7 and 8 -- a princely sum compared with the $2 million in private capital it raised for its last major building project in Anacostia.

"Normally, to get equity capital to these areas is almost impossible," said Michael Wallach, chief operating officer of the corporation. "These two wards have the highest unemployment rate in the city and the lowest incomes."

But because the primary motivation of the immigrant investors whom Wallach is wooing is to create enough jobs to meet the visa requirement rather than to maximize the return on their investment, they might prove less skittish.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/09/AR201001...

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3.
For Immigrants, New Travel Concerns
By Anne Barnard
The New York Times, January 9, 2010

Eating spiced lamb at a bustling Yemeni restaurant in Downtown Brooklyn, Mahib Alkrizy said that since Sept. 11, 2001, his wife, a religious Muslim who covers her hair, has come to expect being patted down and stared at when she travels by plane.

Around the corner at Abu Yasser Travel Agency, employees waved a reporter away — they were tired of even talking about the Obama administration’s recent decision to impose tougher airline screening measures for people flying from 14 countries, including Yemen.

“People who travel a lot, they’re getting used to it,” said Abdul Alzundani, a clerk at the office of Yemenia, the national airline, nearby.

It was a different story at Odyssey African Market in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Evident there, along with the smoked fish and kola nuts that loaded the narrow aisles, was much of the anguish that radiated from Arab-Americans in the days after 9/11.

For Nigerian immigrants, the news that their country was on the list, after a Nigerian citizen was charged with trying to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day, was a new experience, bringing insult and a creeping fear that they were entering a new era of stigma and scrutiny.

“There is nothing like that in our record!” exclaimed Raymond Owolewa, 73, a retired Metropolitan Transportation Authority worker who brought his children to the United States from Nigeria more than three decades ago and was incensed that Nigeria was lumped in with nations the United States lists as state sponsors of terrorism, like Syria and Iran.

“Every country has radical people,” he added. “But we are not specializing in that.”

Five days after President Obama announced the new rules, it is too early to tell how they will ultimately affect people from Nigeria and the other listed countries, or New York’s Nigerian diaspora, which numbers more than 15,000, according to the Census Bureau. The immediate impact, Nigerians and Yemenis said, is simply inconvenience and fear of stigmatization; travel agents said no one was canceling trips.

But these immigrant communities are uncertain whether there could be, over time, a chilling effect on family visits or business travel. And Nigerians, for whom the problem is freshest, wonder if it is a precursor to more serious challenges like the ones Middle Easterners face, such as increased difficulty getting visas to study and work in America.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/09/nyregion/09screen.html

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4.
Ambassador Doubts Reform in 2010
The Frontera NorteSur News (New Mexico State Universit), January 10, 2010

Mexico's ambassador to the United States has conveyed pessimism about the prosepcts for a comprehensive reform of US immigration laws in 2010. In comments made at a January 8 meeting of his country's diplomatic corps, Ambassador Arturo Sarukhan said US politicians would be unlikely to address the hot-button immigration issue if no legislation is passed before US Congressional races heat up later this summer.

Sarukhan's remarks came at a time when some pro-immigrant forces in the US are heartened by the introduction of immigration reform legislation in the US House by Representative by Luis Gutierrez (D-Illinois), and when activists are redoubling efforts to get a bill approved this year that includes a path to legalization for undocumented residents. For instance, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops is mounting a campaign to send 1.5 million postcards in support of immigration reform to members of Congress.

On the other hand, opponents of reform are gearing up for anti-legalization "tea parties."

Despite a potentially unfavorable political climate for reform in the US, Sarukhan said the status of Mexican migrants in the US remains a top priority for his nation.

"Regardless of the color of the party that holds power in the country, no issue is more important for the future economic well-being of our two countries and North America in general than a comprehensive immigration reform, " Sarukhan said.
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http://www.nmsu.edu/~frontera/

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5.
Experts: world watch lists are flawed terror tool
By Jill Lawless
The Associated Press, January 8, 2010; 4:31 PM

London (AP) -- Around the world, watch lists are a key tool against terrorism - but highly imperfect.

Experts say simple issues like fickle spelling and incomplete data, as well as deliberate deception and uncooperative countries, all make it possible for a determined terrorist like bomb suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to slip across borders.

British officials are proud of their list, which contains more than 1 million names, including that of Abdulmutallab. That didn't stop the young Nigerian boarding a flight from Amsterdam to the United States with explosives in his underwear - a stark reminder of the perils of flawed information-sharing and the limits of watch lists.

"Lists are valuable in making sure governments around the world are able to track individuals," said John Harrison, an aviation security specialist at Singapore's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. "But you don't want to put too much emphasis on these lists. It's an overstatement to say: 'OK, now we are safe.'"

Analysts say human intelligence, information-sharing and data analysis are also vital to stopping terrorists, and Britain has announced an urgent review of its watch list system in the wake of the Christmas Day attack over Detroit.

The British list holds the names of everyone from suspected terrorists and radical clerics to wanted criminals and rejected visa applicants - like Abdulmutallab, who was added after being denied a student visa in May 2009 for listing the name of a bogus college on the application.

The list is the centerpiece of a program called E-borders, which will eventually check all passengers traveling to or through Britain against the master list. Information comes from police, intelligence services and other sources and is held by the U.K. Border Agency.

Home Secretary Alan Johnson said this week that the list had led to almost 5,000 arrests since 2005 - mostly for crimes such as murder, rape and assault rather than terrorism - and prevented 65,000 people entering Britain in 2009.

"In some countries, there are separate watch lists for security, for policing and crime, for people who have lost their passports and for immigration issues, but an integrated watch list serves us well," Johnson told lawmakers in the House of Commons.

Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert at the Swedish National Defense College, said the British system was an effective deterrent. In the U.K., he said, every passenger coming into the country is scrutinized.

"Even if you are in transit, and never meet a border guard, it's a hostile environment if you're flying through the U.K," he said.

The list has its limits, though. Names on it are not automatically shared with other countries, although those on a smaller terrorism-related watch list are.

U.S. authorities have said Abdulmutallab was in a database of 500,000 people suspected of terrorist ties, but not on a no-fly watch list. Britain has said it had no indication the Nigerian was planning an attack, and did not flag him to U.S. officials as a particular threat.

On Thursday, Obama announced about a dozen changes designed to fix the system that let Abdulmutallab slip through, including an overhaul of the nation's terrorist watch lists.

Alain Chouet, former chief of the security intelligence service at France's counterintelligence agency, estimated that lists he saw when working in intelligence were only about "10 percent viable."

"The identity of people outside the European tradition is vague. People can change their names, and there is the problem of transcription into European alphabets," he said.

He used the example of the name Mohamed, which can have different spellings in English, French or Polish.

Even passport numbers are only partially viable since passports can be tampered with, or people can get passports from other countries.

And some countries are more cooperative than others. European Union nations and close allies like the U.S. routinely share information.

"It is outside Europe that we have the problem," Britain's Johnson noted this week.

The Home Office declined to name any uncooperative nations, but said biometric data such as fingerprints, which are being introduced on passports and required from all visa holders, would help tighten up the system.

Experts agree that biometrics, which includes physical traits like face recognition, are key to ensuring names on a watch list can be matched to a real individual.

"It's very difficult to fake, and the governments have begun collecting that information massively," said Ranstorp.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/08/AR201001...