On a sweltering afternoon in the heart of bustling downtown Monrovia, Moriba Kamara's bony, chafed hands shake as he talks about his months inside a Liberian maximum-security prison. “I didn't sleep. I was always afraid.” He feared he would not make it out alive and was constantly thinking, “Maybe this is the place [I'll] be taken to be assassinated.”

Kamara's eyes well up as he remembers how “the whole day we [were] locked up, the whole night we [were] locked up. We had no access to go to recreation, nothing.” He and his fellow prisoners were forced to defecate in a bucket inside their cell, which often overflowed. “I got dysentery,” he recalls. “I tried to talk to the prison director to take me to the hospital, but they said no.”

Kamara was one of twenty-two deportees expelled from the United States to Liberia in December 2008 by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Some had served time in US jails for minor offenses. Others, like Kamara, had committed no crime. But for reasons that were unclear to them, all were labeled a security threat upon arriving in Liberia's capital city. Bedraggled and weak after spending months in immigration detention followed by a long flight to Monrovia during which they were shackled, the deportees were forced onto a bus headed for Zwedru National Corrections Palace, an imposing, isolated structure that is home to convicted murderers, rapists and, occasionally, US deportees.

Zwedru is only 184 miles from Monrovia, but the trip can take days on the unpaved and sometimes hazardous roads. Along the way, “we stopped in every city, whether small or big,” remembers deportee Bill Passawe. “People booed at the vehicle. People screamed 'criminals coming from America' and stuff like that.” The public display was meant to show Liberians that their government was taking action to protect them from this group of convicts. But “we really didn't have no clue why we were in jail,” says Sandra Komai, another deportee who had been jailed in the United States on minor drug charges. “When I left Liberia, I was a small child. I had committed no crime in Liberia.”

Kamara, too, left Liberia as a child, fleeing after his father was murdered by rebels during the civil war. He crossed into neighboring Guinea, only to face years of persecution — jailings and beatings — because he came from the Mandingo ethnic group, which had allegedly backed Liberia's dictator, Samuel Doe. In 2007 he decided to seek asylum in the United States. Arriving in New Jersey, he was immediately imprisoned at the Elizabeth Detention Center. “It is better for me to be in detention until my death,” he remembers telling officials there. “I can't be deported to Liberia.”

Kamara is only one of 359,795 people who were deported by the United States in 2008. The number has gone up. For all the rhetoric — particularly on the right — about cracking down on illegal immigration, Americans know relatively little about why people are deported or how. Rarely does anyone question what happens to deportees once they leave.

The numbers tell only part of the story. In 2002, when the Bush administration began to use deportation as a national security tool, 165,168 people were deported. (The Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is a part, was established that year.) In 2009, Obama's first year in office, deportations peaked at 395,165. In 2010, 387,242 people were removed, the equivalent of deporting almost the entire city of Oakland, California. It is anticipated that figures for 2011 will top 400,000, bringing Obama's deportation tally to more than 1 million people during his three years in office.

The number of Liberians the United States deports each year is relatively small. Twenty-six were deported in 2008. In 2009 forty people were sent back, and in 2010 the number went down to sixteen. This pales in comparison with the 21,421 Filipinos, 4,417 Ukrainians or 3,951 Burmese deported in 2010 alone. Yet the smaller number of Liberian deportees virtually guarantees that their harsh treatment will go unnoticed. Although Liberia's mandatory jailing of deportees appears to have ceased after 2008, the experience of Kamara and his fellow prisoners raises troubling questions about a deportation agenda that has been wholly embraced by the Obama White House. Hundreds of thousands of people are labeled criminals and expelled every year; what becomes of them on the other side?

In Liberia, US deportees are still a public target. When President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf spoke at Harvard University, her alma mater, last spring, she described US deportees as one of the “challenges” facing her country. “Our stability is threatened by the thousands of returnees from US prisons,” she said. Although she went on to discuss Liberia's progress since the civil war, it was this remark that made headlines in the Liberian press.

“Ellen [Sirleaf] has said…that deportees from the US are to blame for most of the armed robberies that have taken place in the country and that deportees are responsible for the high crime rate in Monrovia,” says Garmonyou Wilson, a reporter for the Liberian newspaper theInquirer.

This perception has made men like Kamara pariahs in Monrovia. With employment opportunities scarce, no one wants to hire a man the United States deported, let alone one who served time in a Liberian maximum-security prison. “My life now is a living hell,” he says. “I have no family here, no job, no place to live. Everyone thinks I'm a vicious criminal.”

Could Liberia have rejected the planeload of deportees in 2008? It tried.

Under Bush, ICE had first attempted to deport them in September of that year, but it was told by the Sirleaf administration that Liberia would not accept them. Already on board a flight bound for Monrovia, Bill Passawe and the others were taken off the plane, still in shackles, and sent back to jail in Louisiana. It is unclear what negotiations took place — neither ICE nor Liberian officials wished to comment — but on December 2, 2008, the flight took off, with the blessing of the Liberian government.

According to Eric Mullbah, director of prisons in the Ministry of Justice, part of the reluctance likely had to do with the Liberian government being told that “twenty-two hard-core criminals are being returned.” ICE denies using the label “hard-core,” but regardless of the word choice, hearing of the detainees' impending arrival put local officials in a bind. Such news “filters into our community,” says Mullbah, with many Liberians asking, “Hey, are they going to bring ten armed robbers, and gangsters, and just throw them into the community?”

Given such concerns, Mullbah described the decision to imprison Kamara and his fellow deportees as “prudent.” In a press conference, Chris Massaquoi, commissioner of the Liberian Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, called it a “security measure.”

“Understand that Liberia is evolving from war,” Mullbah says, citing challenges that are more pressing than the reintegration of a few dozen citizens expelled from another country.

Liberia is not alone in its harsh treatment of deportees arriving from the United States, nor are its politicians and press alone in scapegoating them. In Haiti, El Salvador, Nigeria and the Dominican Republic, deportees have been routinely jailed. In the Dominican Republic, which received 753 people in 2010, the media report all arrivals, often focusing on the fact that the deportees have previously been imprisoned in the United States. In a 2002 investigation by the Dominican newspaper Listin Diario, authorities responsible for accepting and reintegrating deportees admitted that they were given very little information about each person aside from his or her criminal conviction. Dominican authorities, like the Liberian government, claim their actions toward deportees are simply to protect their population.

In Haiti the only way a deportee can avoid months or even years of incarceration upon arrival is if a family member successfully applies for his or her release. But most Haitian deportees do not have immediate family in Haiti. And if conditions were horrific before the 2010 earthquake, “in post-earthquake Haiti, detention conditions are even more dire,” according to Michelle Karshan, director of Alternative Chance, an NGO that helps Haitian deportees. Although the Obama administration announced that it would suspend deportations to Haiti immediately following the disaster, less than twelve months later, amid sluggish rebuilding and widespread deaths from cholera, deportations resumed. In the first year after the earthquake, more than 300 Haitian deportees were put into putrid police-station holding cells because the Haitian government believed them to be dangerous.

According to Daniel Kanstroom, director of the International Human Rights Program at Boston College Law School, there is a “widespread misperception that deportees are hard-core criminals,” something he says is simply not true. Under the Secure Communities program, instituted by the Bush administration and expanded by Obama, noncitizens serving jail time for “aggravated felony” offenses are being funneled into removal proceedings with little chance of being allowed to stay in the United States after serving their sentences.

“Recent research has shown…the majority [of deportees] are people who have violated drug laws or other nonviolent offenders,” says Kanstroom. “Before the Supreme Court corrected ICE in a series of cases, many thousands were deported for simple drug possession. Many people convicted of misdemeanors were also deported.” Information obtained by the National Day Laborer Organization, Center for Constitutional Rights and the Cardozo School of Law shows clearly that of those deported through Secure Communities, close to 80 percent had no criminal conviction or were guilty only of traffic violations or other low-level offenses.

“Most people just believe that those who are deported are bad, or dangerous criminals, or must have broken laws and so they deserve to be deported,” says Michele McKenzie, advocacy director at The Advocates for Human Rights, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit. “This is so far from the truth.”

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request seeking information on why the twenty-two Liberians in Kamara's group were deported, ICE divulged that five of them were “non-criminal immigration violators” and the rest had been convicted of crimes ranging from drugs to robbery, to sex offenses and fraudulent activities. But it is clear that they were not “hard-core criminals.”

Sandra Komai, for example, who spent her youth in the United States and said she did two stints in prison for drug possession, was arrested years after serving her sentences. She had been renewing her immigration papers when her record popped up in the system. Despite having done her time — for nonviolent crimes — she was detained and deported to a country she barely remembered. At the Zwedru prison, she was terrified of “snakes and lizards” and felt regularly humiliated as a woman alone among male guards and prisoners.

Citing “operational security,” ICE refused to comment on other allegations related to the conditions of the deportation flight, a twenty-four-hour ordeal from Louisiana to Puerto Rico to Cape Verde to Monrovia. Bill Passawe says the deportees were not even unshackled to use the restroom, and were forced to rely on ICE agents to unzip their pants for them. ICE spokesman Temple Black conceded that “ICE regularly uses restraints when transporting detainees.” But an ICE memo available on its website states that “instruments of restraint shall be used only as a precaution against escape during transfer.”

Amy Gottlieb, immigration attorney at the American Friends Service Committee, has heard many stories over the years of ICE's “overuse” of restraints; she concludes that it seems to be “standard practice.”

It's a measure of the extent to which undocumented immigrants have been criminalized. “The notion that any person that is unauthorized in the US is a criminal has taken root,” says Donald Kerwin of the Migration Policy Institute, a DC-based think tank. “You don't just find this on cable TV and talk-radio; you find it in state legislation.” In this climate even asylum seekers like Kamara, who flee persecution and enter the United States without a visa, become criminals.

“There are deep concerns about the human rights issues raised by falsely labeling innocent people as hard-core criminals and then dumping them with this label in another country,” says Kerwin.

ICE maintains that any questions about the treatment of deportees in Liberia can be answered only by the Liberian government. But human rights experts see the United States as partly responsible. Professor Helen Stacy, director of the human rights program at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, points to a 2007 human rights report on Liberia, released by the State Department months before ICE deported the group of twenty-two.

“Prison conditions were harsh and in some cases life threatening,” the report reads. “Women and juveniles were subject to abuse by guards or other inmates.” In Stacy's opinion, the deportation of noncitizens by the United States “into conditions that are known to be squalid, or unfair, or dangerous” is tantamount to “de facto extraordinary rendition.”

In the end, Kamara was released from the Zwedru prison through the efforts of a regional NGO, the Foundation for International Dignity, which fought against the prison's dreadful conditions and petitioned the government to release the deportees. Kamara “was not sent here to be tried, so why detain him?” asks the group's director, John Adolphus Woods.

Two years after his release, Kamara is still struggling to eke out a living in Monrovia, sleeping on the floor of an Internet cafe where he does voluntary work in exchange for a place to sleep at night.

“I've been running after jobs all over,” he says, “but there's nobody to give me a job because if I go in the community people are pointing at me [and saying] 'this is the criminal that was deported from America.' People are afraid of me.”

Kamara says his mistake was to choose the United States as the country to flee to in pursuit of asylum and a safe place to live. “I selected America for its human rights,” he says, slumped on a pile of rubble as traffic in downtown Monrovia whizzes by. “They treated me like I was the worst kind of criminal, and all I did was ask for asylum.”

Research support for this article was provided by The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, now known as Type Investigations and the Puffin Foundation.

The post US Asylum Seekers in Liberian Prisons appeared first on Type Investigations.

Moriba Kamara, a citizen of Liberia, came to the United States in 2007 seeking asylum. It was denied, and he was deported by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, and then jailed by the Liberian government on his arrival in Monrovia. After months in jail with no charges brought against him and no access to a judge or attorney, an NGO helped free him. Now Moriba struggles to eke out a living.

The Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute provided travel support for this radio story.

The post Fate of Deportees in Liberia appeared first on Type Investigations.

“That's President Bush hugging me. See how tightly he's hugging me?” It was the chilly end of 2006 in Baker, Louisiana, when Lena Beard asked me this, proudly waving a newspaper clipping my direction as we talked in her still-temporary home. The fading photo, taken the same day the mother of two took refuge on a mattress in a church after Hurricane Katrina, had served as proof after the levees burst that she was going to be okay. “I'm a veteran who has served my country and put my life on the line. I believed my country would take care of me and my family,” she said.

But three years after natural disaster stripped Beard and her sons of their house in New Orleans, she is still not okay. Unable to find a place she can afford after being evicted this summer from Renaissance Village, the largest FEMA trailer park in the country, the Beard family is contemplating a move next month into a homeless shelter.

I first met Beard a year and a half ago, while she was living in one of the 75,000 toxic trailersissued to Katrina evacuees. Ninety miles from New Orleans, she had grown discouraged and depressed after struggling with a three-hour commute each way trying to find work in her home city. She and her family had occupied the “temporary” shelter since October 2005. The day we met was the first day she had come out of it in a month. “I'm not proud that my children see me staying in bed all day, but I don't know what to do. I just don't,” she told her neighbors in December 2006, at a residents' meeting of Renaissance Village. “I feel you honey, I feel you,” came the sympathetic response. Cold winter winds whipped past the flaps of the big white tent where Beard and the other residents were gathered.

Like others in the room, also evacuees from a poor and heavily African American neighborhood in New Orleans, Lena had received a trailer for herself and her two sons. The trailer was approximately 8 foot by 32 foot, with two sectioned-off ends that served as bedrooms. Even if she was watching TV in her room with the flimsy door shut, everyone in the trailer could hear what the other was doing. “My children used to have their own rooms,” Beard told me of the home she used to own. “And they both had computers.” No one wants to be a homeowner again more than she does.

From February 2007 through the summer months, Beard actively pursued various options to move her family back to New Orleans. She commuted in on weekends to work a bar job on Canal Street, which didn't last long due to health issues that made it hard for her to stand for eight consecutive hours. In July 2007, just one month shy of her two-year displacement anniversary, a final housing option fell through. With no job, and having spent down the last of her savings in the years since the storm, she was unable to come up with the money to cover a security deposit and the first and last months' rent. She was devastated.

But she was not alone. In the years after the storm, moving displaced low-income families back to New Orleans has become less and less realistic. Yes, 92 percent of hotels in New Orleans were open by mid-2007, but by June 2008, 40 percent of public schools remained closed. The number of public buses up and running is still nowhere near pre-Katrina levels.

In the fall of 2007 the number of active trailers still numbered more than 50,000. By February 2008, when CDC tests confirmed high levels of formaldehyde in FEMA trailers across Louisiana and Mississippi, FEMA began an aggressive push to shut down its trailer parks and “relocate families into safer and more permanent housing.” In the first quarter of 2008, FEMA displaced over 10,000 trailer residents. But even after the formaldehyde scandal had broken, the cramped and toxic trailers were the only security most residents had. “This is home, and I ain't going to move into any slum just because FEMA tell me I have to,” Beard lamented to me in early 2008, referring to the apartments FEMA had on its lists of available long-term rentals.

Beard received a knock at her trailer door one June morning and was told she had two days to pack her things. After two days she and her family were moved into a motel and given a month days to find alternative accommodation. “I'm so tired from all this,” Beard told me then, in the motel room that housed the belongings she was able to salvage from her trailer before being locked out of it. “I just want my family to live in a decent home after all we've been through, so we can rebuild our lives. Is that too much to ask?”

This summer, FEMA spokesperson Gina Cortez told Mother Jones, “FEMA has closed 106 of its 111 group sites in Louisiana. Renaissance Village is one of them.”

Beard's was one of the last five families to leave the trailer park.

Cortez claims FEMA has helped “all eligible trailer residents transition into long-term housing,” but ask around the motels where former Renaissance residents have gone after 30 days, and you hear a different story. While some have moved to homes of relatives in other states, others are living in cars, or have joined the rapidly growing New Orleans homeless population.

FEMA reiterates that its mission, beyond meeting emergency needs, is to simply complete infrastructure repairs and return a disaster area to its predisaster state. The agency won't build new housing for displaced residents, even if it could be done for less money than what it costs to temporarily house people, because it's outside their purview. But if FEMA isn't responsible for finding these people housing, who is?

Beard and her family are still scrambling to find out. She had hoped to move into a lovely house with a yard near Renaissance Village—Catholic Charities even paid the landlord a security deposit—and she thought she could afford to move in. But due to what she says is a technical error, FEMA has deemed her ineligible for housing assistance, and as a result the lease fell through. While she searches for housing she can afford, her home state is being rebuilt around her. Her final eviction from the motel will come this week, just shy of the three-year anniversary when she lost her home to Hurricane Katrina.

Deepa Fernandes is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute, whose Investigative Fund provided research support for this article.

The post Three Years After Hurricane Katrina, Homelessness Looms appeared first on Type Investigations.

If you drive around Louisiana these days and scan the AM/FM offerings, you'll hear one recurring radio spot: In the wake of the latest tests showing high levels of formaldehyde emissions in federally issued trailers, FEMA wants to talk to all remaining post-Katrina evacuee trailer residents about how to get their living quarters tested for formaldehyde. What you won't find as easily on the dial, at least not yet, is Texas attorney Anthony Buzbee's allegation that FEMA knew about the formaldehyde problem even before the mass distribution of emergency homes began.

Buzbee is one of several lawyers representing over 10,000 trailer residents in a class action lawsuit against FEMA and more than 60 trailer manufacturers. He told Mother Jones that newly obtained Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA) documents show the Occupational and Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) had been testing formaldehyde exposure around the trailers as early as October 2005—almost a year before tests were made public. Indeed, when OSHA placed monitors on employees at various trailer distribution sites across Mississippi that fall, it discovered alarmingly high levels of formaldehyde emanating from the very same trailers the FEMA workers were distributing to evacuees. OSHA is required to inform employers, in this case FEMA, of excessive levels of formaldehyde; the 2005 test results revealed levels up to 6.7 times higher than what is deemed safe in a workplace. Says Buzbee, “The documents clearly show that FEMA was aware of the formaldehyde problem before it even distributed the trailers to the Katrina victims.”

Disturbed by the brazenness of FEMA in beginning mass distribution of trailers it knew were toxic, Buzbee is pushing for a congressional investigation against the agency. While FEMA has not returned calls for comment on whether they had been informed of the OSHA results, Buzbee says it's standard policy for OSHA to notify employers immediately if they detect levels of formaldehyde that are higher than the permissible limits, and their procedure gives these employers 60 days to remedy the situation.“ Why, then, ”would OSHA have broken this protocol and not told FEMA? After all, it was FEMA employees who were being directly affected by the formaldehyde exposure.“

Formaldehyde is a somewhat complex gas, and different government agencies consider different levels safe. OSHA says that for workers, whose exposure would be periodic and total a maximum of eight hours per day, the allowable limit of formaldehyde is 0.75 parts per million. However, the Department of Health and Safety, through its Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, has a much lower limit of 0.008 parts per million, because its measurement is based on chronic exposure. Accordingly, while formaldehyde levels exceeded the OSHA limit in 12 cases out of the approximately 200 tests the agency conducted in Mississippi between 2005 and 2006, the ATSDR limit, according to Buzbee and borne out by FOIA documents, ”was exceeded by many many times in every single case.“

While the levels of unsafe formaldehyde exposure appear to differ widely, Buzbee asserts that the trailer residents have been exposed to far beyond what is safe by anyone's standards. His assertion holds water with the EPA, which considers any exposure over 0.1ppm—only slightly higher than ATSDR's—likely to cause adverse health effects. Says Michael Walsh, a professor at the NYU School of Medicine's Department of Environmental Medicine, ”The bottom line is that if [formaldehyde] exposure exceeds the safety level, those who were exposed should be concerned.“

And what are the symptoms of such exposure? Per the ATSDR: ”Low-dose acute exposure can result in headache, rhinitis, and dyspnea; higher doses may cause severe mucous membrane irritation, burning, and lacrimation, and lower respiratory effects such as bronchitis, pulmonary edema, or pneumonia. Sensitive individuals may experience asthma and dermatitis, even at very low doses. Formaldehyde vapors are slightly heavier than air and can result in asphyxiation in poorly ventilated, enclosed, or low-lying areas.“

Poor ventilation is perhaps the one characteristic that defines all the travel trailers that Katrina evacuees are occupying. During the hot months, it is impossible to leave the trailer door open for even a second, as precious cool air from the air conditioner escapes. Not only would living in a trailer constitute a constant or chronic exposure because of the number of hours per day that people are exposed, but it would likely also constitute a concentrated exposure due to the poor ventilation of these homes.

Buzbee and the residents who spoke to Mother Jones all believe those late 2005 tests should have raised an immediate alarm—yet no one alerted residents to the potential danger until an entire year later. This spring, residents had a chance to talk to FEMA officials about their concerns, at one of several government-sponsored ”Public Availability Sessions“ across the state.

I went to one such talk earlier this year, held in Louisiana's largest FEMA trailer park, built in the aftermath of Katrina. The park, called Renaissance Village, sits in Baker, Louisiana, just northeast of Baton Rouge. The talk promised residents free food, bottled water, and a chance to be among the first evacuees to have their questions answered by experts from both FEMA and the CDC soon after CDC test results were announced. Yet if residents were upset or distressed when they arrived at this first meeting in Baker, most left the meeting downright angry, like one Renaissance Village trailer resident, Lena, who did not want to give her last name. ”It's all a string-along,“ she said that day. ”It's a bunch of nothingness. Just words to keep you going, and thinking that help is coming, making you think that the government cares.“

At the Renaissance Village meeting, residents and people like attorney Buzbee had a barrage of burning questions for the government officials. How many trailers in Renaissance Village had been tested? Michael McGeehin, representing the CDC, was unable to provide an exact count. Residents protested that they did not know a single person who had had the tests done. McGeehin responded that the trailers were chosen in a scientific manner across the state. When residents then berated him chorus-style, ”that is not good enough; it is not good enough,“ McGeehin bluntly responded, ”YES it is. YES it is.“

While McGeehin was the one before the gathered crowd facing repeated questions about the test results, he was quick to deflect them to FEMA every time residents asked why their trailer wasn't tested in his study. He repeatedly pointed to a row of seated officials at computers who worked for FEMA, saying FEMA has said ”that anyone who wants their trailer tested can have their trailer tested.“

Lena, who has lived with her two sons in Renaissance Village since October 2005, did as instructed and took a seat before a FEMA official, asking if her family's trailer could be tested. The response from Jennifer, who later identified herself as a FEMA ”supervisor“ but refused to give her last name, was mechanical: ”That's a CDC question, Ma'am.“ When I intervened over Lena's shoulder, my press pass flashing and my microphone pointed at the FEMA official, and told her that CDC is directing residents to her FEMA staff because it is FEMA who will now be doing follow up testing, she glanced quickly at me, then at Lena, and then reversed her position, saying, ”We can do that.“ However, when Lena asked how long the process would take, Jennifer responded, ”I don't have any information on that.“

Over the next 20 minutes, I watched while Lena was bounced between officials who treated her with alternating condescension—as when Lena expressed a deep fear of not being able to ”make it“ given the exorbitant prices of rentals in New Orleans, and one responded, ”If you think you're going to fail, what's going to happen? Think positive, you know, I've always told my kids…“—and contempt, as when Lena asked the supervisor to help her because she felt she was getting nowhere and was abruptly told, ”That's what we have case workers for.“

Among the various supervisors, FEMA caseworkers, and FEMA press officials at the Renaissance Village meeting, no one could definitively answer whether or not FEMA was going to test more trailers for formaldehyde. That day, it seemed the best FEMA was offering residents concerned about their health was a motel room. And while a new space may seem like a good first step, many residents fear it's a quick and simple path to homelessness. Fear of losing the only stable homes people have, even if they are potentially toxic, means that many residents won't even start a case with FEMA. Stories abound among residents of neighbors and friends at Renaissance Village who have been moved first out of their trailer, and then, one month later, out of a FEMA-funded motel room, cast starkly on their own.

To Lena, the situation is simple. ”I believe that people who have case workers are scared. They are being made to believe that they have a place, but they really are not stable and they are not going to have stability unless something that is concrete, that's well grounded or well rooted happens. For me, I'm afraid. How do I step out when there are so many lies? The government [is] not giving the employees the answers for us, because I believe there is no answer for us. They just hope that we probably all drop dead like flies.“

The post Toxic Trailers Redux: When Did FEMA Know? appeared first on Type Investigations.