Public News Service (New York)
By Mike Clifford
August 10, 2015
Fundamentally
unsafe, that's how New York immigrant advocates describe daily life for
people in detention who identify as gay, lesbian or transgender.
Detention staff
attorney Clement Lee with the group Immigration Equality says people
who flee to the U.S. border because they fear persecution based on
sexual identity almost always end up being placed in detention by
Homeland Security. The cruel irony is, these asylum-seekers
end up in unsafe detention conditions because of their sexual identity.
Lee says transgender people are 13 times more likely to be sexually
assaulted in immigration detention. "Gay men are 10 times more likely to
face sexual assault," says Lee. "If the Department
of Homeland Security can't detain lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender
people safely, it should not detain them at all. " Lee says the system
is so overloaded that asylum cases that begin this year likely will not
be resolved until 2018 at the earliest, putting
LGBT detainees at significant risk. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE) is on record saying it is committed to developing new standards
to protect vulnerable detainees. Jamila Hammami, executive director with
the Queer Detainee Empowerment Project, says
the Department of Homeland Security has a strict quota to fill more
than 400 beds in New York every night. She says that provides a perverse
incentive for law enforcement to detain immigrants for very minor
offenses. "There are so many stories of queer youth
jumping turnstiles to get on the train, and then ending up in
immigration detention and then in deportation - which is absurd," says
Hammami. Vanessa "B" is a transgender New Yorker who says she fled
Mexico in fear of her life, and was able to win her case
for asylum in 2014. "If I stay in my country, probably somebody kill
me; maybe I never get a good job," she says. "This country is better, I
love this country and the police help you, the organizations help you."
Lee says queer youth locked up for minor offenses
in such suburban areas as Long Island are more likely to end up being
transferred to immigration detention. While the U.S. does not guarantee
legal counsel for asylum-seekers, he says those with a lawyer are six
times more likely to be granted asylum.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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