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Immigration

Immigration Program Stirs Clash Of Views
Frederick, Montgomery Chiefs Testify to Congress

By N.C. Aizenman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 5, 2009; B04

Two suburban Maryland law enforcement chiefs testifying before Congress yesterday gave dramatically different assessments of a controversial federal program that deputizes local officers to enforce immigration law.

Montgomery County Police Chief J. Thomas Manger warned members of the House Committee on Homeland Security that the program could severely undermine trust between police and immigrant communities.

"Public safety increases when people have trust and confidence in local police forces," Manger said. "The bottom line is local law enforcement needs to work closely with our immigration authorities, but we cannot do their job for them."

But Sheriff Chuck Jenkins of Frederick County characterized his force's participation in the program as "an overwhelming success."

Known as 287(g) for the section of immigration law that authorizes it, the program has garnered more than $114 million in funds since its launch four years ago and has trained 951 officers in 67 state and local agencies on how to determine a person's immigration status.

Jenkins said the four weeks of training provided to 52 of his county's sheriff employees and corrections officers last year had enabled them to identify 337 illegal immigrants -- 309 of whom were put into removal proceedings by immigration authorities.

Jenkins told the panel that nine of those arrested were members of the "notoriously violent gangs MS-13 and 18th Street" and that others were picked up for such crimes as attempted second-degree murder, second-degree rape, armed robbery, first-degree assault, child abuse and burglary.

"I would urge every law enforcement executive . . . to request participation" in the program, Jenkins said. He added that doing so was essential to combating "the enormous increase in crime throughout the United States . . . which can be tied directly to the unchecked flow of illegal immigrants through our southern border with Mexico." Later, he added, "We are dying on American soil, and there is a role for enforcement of immigration laws by local law enforcement."

Although some lawmakers on the panel praised Jenkins, others noted that a Government Accountability Office report released yesterday found that the government had failed to provide sufficient oversight to ensure its state and local partners were focusing on the dangerous criminals the program was intended to target rather than those guilty of minor violations.

Advocates for CASA of Maryland, an immigrant rights group that recently obtained information on 85 percent of the illegal immigrants identified by Frederick officials, contend that more than half were stopped for driving without a license and that only 20 were charged with felonies.

Lawmakers did not ask Jenkins for a breakdown of the severity of offenses in his most recent arrest figures. However, they did press him about the profit the county makes on room and board fees while holding illegal immigrants awaiting pickup by immigration authorities. Jenkins answered that though the actual cost to the county is only $7 per day, the county charges the federal government $83 per day to house illegal immigrants arrested for offenses that would otherwise warrant their release.

 

Immigration Report

From Stand in Long Island Slavery Case, a Snapshot of a Hidden U.S. Problem

By PAUL VITELLO

CENTRAL ISLIP, N.Y., Nov. 30 — The two tiny Indonesian women know just a handful of English words. They know Windex. Fantastik (the cleanser, not the adjective). They know the words Master and Missus, which they were taught to use in addressing the Long Island couple they served as live-in help for five years in the sylvan North Shore hamlet of Muttontown.

Their employers, Varsha Sabhnani, 35, and her husband, Mahender, 51, naturalized citizens from India, have been on trial in U.S. District Court here for the past month. They are charged with what the federal criminal statutes refer to as involuntary servitude and peonage, or, in the common national parlance since 1865, the crime of keeping slaves.

The two women, the government charged in its indictment, were victims of “modern-day slavery.”

It is a rarely prosecuted crime. But since passage of the 2000 federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act, prosecutions have increased from less than a handful nationwide per year to about a dozen. The law is probably best known for its focus on prostitution and child-sex traffickers; yet in the last few years, in a few highly publicized cases like the Sabhnanis’, federal and state task forces set up to deal with sex trafficking have also begun to focus on the exploitation of domestic workers.

Last year, the wife of a Saudi prince was convicted in Boston for keeping two house servants for three years in virtual slavery. In 2005, two doctors in Wisconsin were convicted of holding a Philippine woman as an indentured servant for 20 years. Federal prosecutors won convictions in 2003 against a Maryland couple who kept a Brazilian woman in their home as a servant for 15 years, paying her nothing.

In the Long Island case, prosecutors say the two Indonesian women were made to sleep in closets of the sprawling, multimillion-dollar home of their employers. They were forced to work day and night, threatened, tortured, beaten with rolling pins and brooms, deprived of adequate food and never allowed out of the house except to take out the garbage.

The defense lawyers, who are scheduled to begin their case on Monday, have characterized the two women as liars, practitioners of witchcraft, and inventors of a false claim designed to win them fast-track advantages that federal immigration law grants certain victims of torture and abuse. Whatever injuries the women may have suffered, the lawyers said, were self-inflicted in the practice of a traditional Indonesian folk cure known as kerokan.

Advocacy groups, prosecutors and researchers who study labor trafficking say domestic workers are as vulnerable to exploitation as sex workers, and in some ways even harder to reach.

“The domestic servant cases are often the most brutal because of the total isolation in which these women are kept for years and years,” said Cathleen Caron, executive director of Global Workers Justice Alliance, a New York-based advocacy group that provides legal help to exploited migrant workers. She has been watching the Sabhnani case with interest, she said.

The Indonesian women in the Long Island case are identified by the government only by their first names, Samirah and Enung. They are 51 and 47 years old, respectively. Each stands less than five feet tall. In their many hours of translated testimony and cross-examination so far, halted occasionally by fits of sobbing, they have told a grim tale at odds with every notion of modern life in the United States.

The Sabhnanis, who are perfume manufacturers with relatives and business contacts in Indonesia, lured them from their jobs and families in Jakarta in 2002 with false promises, they say, and then subjected them to relentless abuse until Samirah ran away in May.

Regardless of the jury’s verdict, the case has raised the profile of a population, mostly of women, hidden in the folds of some very affluent American households, according to advocates for exploited workers.

Claudia Flores, a staff lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who recently represented three Indian women kept in involuntary servitude by foreign diplomats in Washington, said foreign workers unfamiliar with American culture and language, already vulnerable, are pushed beyond the pale by isolation.

“Many times, they are forbidden to talk to people who come into the house,” Ms. Flores said. “If there are two of them, they are often forbidden to talk to each other. Their phone calls are monitored. They are not allowed to go anywhere unaccompanied. We are only seeing the women who are lucky enough and capable enough to find assistance. What we see is really only the tip of the iceberg.”

A report released in July by the federal State Department, “Pursuing a Dream and Finding a Nightmare,” said the exploitation of women as domestic workers in the United States and abroad was a crime that has “largely gone unpunished for too long.”

The report, written by research staff in the department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, underlined the government’s concern for “unskilled women from developing countries, particularly women working as domestics,” who it said often “fall victim to conditions of servitude in developed destination countries, including the United States.”

Jodi Bobb, a U.S. Justice Department spokeswoman, said the Long Island slavery case was one of about 100 prosecutions for involuntary servitude or labor trafficking since passage of the 2000 anti-trafficking law. Not all of them involved domestic workers, she said, but that number represents a two-fold increase in such prosecutions compared with the seven years before 2000.

The number of migrant domestic servants living in involuntary servitude in the United States is a matter for guessing, but there are some well-informed guesses. The State Department report estimated that the total number of people trafficked to the United States annually was 15,000 to 20,000.

The figures do not distinguish between people trafficked for prostitution or factory, farm or domestic work. But advocates including Ms. Flores and Ms. Caron, based on hundreds of cases that filter through their agencies, estimated that domestic workers accounted for about one-third of the total.

In other words, 5,000 to 7,000 migrant domestic servants take jobs each year in homes where they are highly vulnerable to abuse by their employers, they say.

Whether or not they live in conditions as violent as Samirah and Enung claim to have suffered, almost all are uneducated women from the world’s poorest countries, according to the State Department report. Some are children.

They may sign employment contracts promising wages that seem princely in their home countries — Samirah and Enung agreed to $100 a month, for instance — but which severely limit their options here. The temporary visas they obtain with their new employers’ help usually expire after three to six months, giving employers ammunition to threaten the servants with certain arrest if they leave the house.

“Who would do this to another human being?” said Suzanne Tomatore, director of the Immigrant Women and Children Project of the New York City Bar Association, which has assisted dozens of migrant domestic servants. “All kinds of people. Doctors, lawyers, professionals, business people, diplomats — the only thing the employers have in common as a group is they all have the resources to pay someone a fair wage, but they choose not to.”

Ms. Tomatore said prosecutions were difficult for obvious reasons: language and cultural barriers. Fear. In many cases, depression. One of her clients, a 24-year-old woman, had been a domestic servant in one household since she was 6. “She had never been to school,” said Ms. Tomatore, who would not identify the woman or the employers except to say they were diplomats from an African nation who have since left. The woman was given permanent legal immigration status. She works in an office.

During the Long Island trial, sobbing sometimes overtook Samirah as she described the tortures she was subjected to — being forced to run up and down stairs until exhausted, to eat whole hot chili peppers, to stand still while “the Missus” scalded her with boiling hot water. Sometimes the sobbing overtook Enung, who described being forced to help perform some of those tortures on Samirah.

The case is unusual, advocates say, because there were other witnesses to corroborate some of the women’s claims. Among them was a woman who worked for Mr. Sabhnani’s perfume company, which is based in an office attached to the Muttontown house. She said she was shocked one day to see Samirah crawling up the basement stairs, bleeding from the forehead. The woman testified that Samirah and Enung told her that Mrs. Sabhnani had beaten her.

A landscape contractor testified that Enung approached him furtively one morning, raggedly dressed, pointing to her stomach and uttering one of her few English words: “Doughnut,” he recalled her saying. “Doughnut.” He gave her the half-dozen doughnuts he had in his truck.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she cried as she ran back toward the big house, he said.

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