Author: mopress

Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez reference this article in their report on the boy they helped to free. Will Suzi be Next? Below, Isenberg says he’s working on it.–gm

Texas Samaritan for Canadian boy says he’ll help more kids detained in U.S.

BETH GORHAM

Canadian Press

WASHINGTON — Ralph Isenberg never met the nine-year-old Canadian boy he helped spring from a Texas immigration jail.

But the fate of Kevin Yourdkhani, who finally headed to Toronto on Wednesday with his Iranian parents, is still very personal for Isenberg, a wealthy Dallas property manager.

“I’m so happy. I pray to God that Canadians welcome that family home. Now it’s on to the next family.”
Mr. Isenberg, 55, who says he had his own immigration nightmare over the status of his Chinese wife, is determined to get all the kids out of the T. Don Hutto detention facility near Austin, Texas. He wants to force officials to shut it down.

“The conditions are atrocious,” Mr. Isenberg said from Dallas. “When I see an injustice where I can do something, I step right in. I’m not afraid of these bastards. To hell with ’em.”

A colourful, blunt-speaking businessman, Mr. Isenberg tears up when discussing how detainees have been treated by authorities.

He says the U.S. Immigration Control Enforcement is out of control. “They need to be put out of business.”

“You can’t allow a law-enforcement agency to have such power over all these foreign nationals. ICE in itself is creating terrorists of the future by jailing kids nine or 10 or 15 years old,” he said.

“I’ve seen the faces of the children who’ve been in there. Those kids are damaged goods.”

Kevin Yourdkhani was born in Canada. His parents lived in Toronto for 10 years before they were deported to Iran in 2005.

They were caught with fake passports by U.S. authorities in early February when they made an unscheduled stop in Puerto Rico while en route to Canada to seek asylum for the second time.

They spent weeks in detention. Kevin, who was threatened with foster care, wrote to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and pleaded to be allowed to go home.

Last week, Ottawa granted the three a temporary residence permit.

Mr. Isenberg read about the boy’s case early on and stepped in, covering US$1,000 for travel permits and offering to pay the legal fees of the family’s Canadian lawyers.

While others are working on a lawsuit designed to close the facility, Isenberg works with individual families like Kevin’s.

“Somebody’s got to do it. You don’t need any more reason than it’s not right,” he says.

“It’s plain, pure and simple – not right. His was the most egregious case. He was literally kidnapped.”

“I don’t think our government understands what they did to that family.”

There is, though, a compelling reason for Mr. Isenberg’s activism and the money he devotes to it – his own battle over the status of his second wife, Nicole.

She had come to the United States in 1999 seeking political asylum. In 2003, by then Mr. Isenberg’s fiancee, she spent 52 days in the Rolling Plains Detention Center in Haskell after authorities nabbed her for failing to attend a hearing.

The prison, a mix of hardened criminals and immigration cases, was “a hell hole out in the middle of nowhere,” said Mr. Isenberg, with scant services or medical attention for detainees.

“All you have to do is experience the screams of your fiancee with an abscessed tooth, no one to help her.”

Nicole was eventually force to leave the United States. The couple and their baby had just returned in January from 14 months in China while they sorted out her case. She is now a legal permanent resident of the United States.

“I was in exile,” said Mr. Isenberg. “It was a terrible ordeal.”

It was after his return that he found out about the Hutto facility, opened last May by the Homeland Security Department.

“I went crazy when I heard about it,” he said.

“I may not have been in prison but I certainly know what this government is capable of doing to anyone and everyone.”

“If we do this to foreign nationals, it’s going to be us next.”

About half of some 400 people at Hutto are children. None of the detained have criminal records.

U.S. officials say the facility, and one like it in Pennsylvania, provide a humane way to keep families together while immigration laws are being enforced. Officials say this is what Congress directed them to do. But activists say legislators actually wanted the families held in home-like environments, not jails where they sleep in cells, wear prison garb and face major restrictions.

Mr. Isenberg helped secure the release last month of the Ibrahims, a Palestinian family held at Hutto since November on immigration violations.

When they got out, he sent a limousine to pick up Hanan and four of her five children. Their father was imprisoned hundreds of kilometres away while the family’s youngest, a three-year-old, stayed with an uncle.

Next, Mr. Isenberg is taking up the cause of three or four families who are Iraqi and Syrian.

And he’s hoping for the imminent release of Suzi Hazahza, 20, and her sister Mirvat from the same prison where his wife was once locked up.

Mr. Isenberg said it’s terrible to think about what U.S. officials did to Canadian engineer Maher Arar, who was sent to Syria where he was imprisoned and tortured.

“I think of that poor person at least once a week,” he said. “I’m kind of blessed. At least I haven’t been tortured.”

What would you consider a good reason to send a dozen armed police into a family home, arrest everyone age 11 to 60 and throw them in prison?

According to our source at the Dallas Federal Courthouse today, the reason turns out to be that the federal government claims it sent a letter to the father of the family asking him for a meeting to discuss his immigration status.
The federal magistrate judge presiding over the hearing asked if the feds sent the letter to everyone in the family? No, the letter was sent to the father only. Could the feds prove that they actually sent the letter to Radi Hazahza? No they could not.

“So this is why 15 people came with assault weapons into the Hazahza home, sticking gun barrels to their heads, arresting them and sending them to prison?” asks Jay Johnson-Castro, who stood vigil outside the Dallas federal courthouse Thursday morning.

He says courtroom observers described the magistrate as very distraught about the government’s case. The magistrate assured the US Attorney that if the Hazahzas lingered in prison past the six-month mark, the US Attorney would find himself ordered back to court to explain.

With about five weeks left until the six-month limit expires, some of the courthouse observers were hoping for an earlier release of the four Hazahzas who remain in the Rolling Plains prison of Haskell, Texas. Two of the Hazahzas were released from the T. Don Hutto prison earlier this year.

“If they keep the Hazahzas another month, that’s another seven-thousand-dollars per person that the prison camp gets to collect,” said Johnson-Castro in response to the day’s legal event.

“Everybody’s in agreement that what the US is doing is not legal,” he says. “The US Attorneys don’t want to defend the legality of these actions. But if what they are doing is not legal, then it’s illegal.”

Apparently one legal consequence of keeping this case at the level of “distraught magistrate” on Thursday is to evade an outright ruling by a federal judge, which would not be kind to this recent exercise of federal power. So why not free the Hazahzas on Friday?–gm

By Greg Moses

CounterPunch / ElectronicIntifada / OpEdNews / IndyBay /
UrukNet

One by one, all the helium-inflated excuses for arresting and imprisoning Suzi Hazahza have been popped and now lie on the ground. And the single memory humanizing the government that still holds her unlawfully behind bars is the look on one Federal Magistrate’s face Thursday in Dallas when he was told by a US Attorney that Congress has stripped the federal bench of any right to order Suzi Hazahza freed until a full six months of illegal detention have passed.
Anguish is the word that some observers have used to describe the look on the judge’s face as he wrestled with the impotence of his authority before the power of Homeland Security to arrest and detain innocent immigrants.

“Believe it or not, immigration law is replete with that language,” explains New York immigration attorney Joshua Bardavid from his New York office on Friday evening, as sounds of the street honk outside his window. “Congress has told the courts that many discretionary decisions by immigration authorities are unreviewable.” In this case, the unreviewable decision involves the unlawful six-month imprisonment of an innocent immigrant in the hellish privatized Rolling Plains prison of Haskell, Texas.

Over the weekend, Bardavid will work up his motion pleading with the Federal Magistrate to exercise his unimpeachable power to enforce the Constitution, with its protections against unlawful seizure and guarantees of due process. But the argument will be a a tough sell politically, because in order to take legal responsibility for Suzi Hazahza, the federal courts will have to state plainly that Homeland Security is using its discretionary authority to break the Constitution on American soil. For an aspiring federal magistrate under the administration of George the Bush II, such a ruling could mean the end of a career and almost certain reversal by the Fifth Circuit judges who gave us the racist Hopwood ruling not too many years ago (the ruling that abolished affirmative action in Texas for several years).

“It is extraordinarily upsetting and frustrating that we can live in a system where it is possible that a judge concludes that detention is unlawful but that he himself has no authority to release the prisoner,” says Bardavid. But that could be the best hand-wringing effort that the federal courts will make in this case. And it would be a nauseating retreat from the principle of habeas corpus at home.

For Suzi Hazahza, the reality of a powerless judiciary branch, disabled by a weak Congress, will leave her to the hands of a muscular executive power without checks or balances. She will be living in a virtual police state until May 3, when the six-month deadline for her unlawful detention expires. For the rest of us, that leaves a question. If we allow Suzi Hazahza and other innocent immigrants to live in a police state for six months at a time, what are we allowing Homeland Security to make of America?

On the first Friday in November, 2006 Suzi Hazahza was arrested at gunpoint inside her father’s home and transported with the rest of her family to an immigration jail in Dallas. By the first Sunday in November, the administration had scored its Dalls-area headlines about the arrest and detention of “criminal aliens” such as the seven Hazahas and other immigrant families.

In order to make the case that the pre-election roundup was a hit for Homeland Security, immigration authorities posted a press release on the internet that included a mug shot of Suzi’s 17-year-old brother Ahmed, deliberately misidentifying his age as an 18-year-old adult, and maliciously publicizing his juvenile delinquency as a burglar. There are international laws against the use of children for propaganda purposes. But with the administration facing a grim election challenge, no trick seemed too dirty to pull. On that first Sunday in November, Ahmed was placed into solitary confinement, because he was a juvenile in an adult facility at the Rolling Plains prison of Haskell, Texas.

Not only did Homeland Security know exactly how old Ahmed was, but they knew that his birthday was coming soon. So he was not sent with his mother and younger brother to the T. Don Hutto prison in Taylor, Texas, where all the other immigrant juveniles of the pre-election roundup were sent. By the first Sunday in November, the Hazahza family had been split between two Texas prisons, with mother Juma and 11-year-old Mohammad sent to Hutto, while father Radi was sent to Rolling Plains with his two adult daughters and his two oldest sons.

What Homeland Security will not put into a press release is that the Hazahza family never tried to hide from anybody. They entered the USA legally with visas and applied for asylum to protect themselves from politics back home. Although they have been ordered deported to Jordan or Palestine, visas have been denied by authorities at both places. All the adult members of the family were law abiding citizens. Radi worked as a vehicle inspector. His oldest son Hisham worked as a cell phone salesman. His oldest daughter Mirvat managed the office of an insurance agent and is married to an American citizen. His youngest daughter Suzi had devoted herself to the care of her mother Juma and was engaged to be married to an American citizen in December.

At the federal magistrate hearing on Thursday, the US Attorney admitted that immigration authorities could not prove they had sent a letter to Radi Hazahza ordering him to report for a meeting. They had not sent the letter with return-receipt requested. They had no affidavit from immigration personnel stating that the letter had been mailed. They had no service documents.

“I even asked them if they had a photocopy of the envelope,” recalls Bardavid. But no, they didn’t even have that.

Furthermore, the letter they showed the judge misstated the facts of the Hazahza immigration case in such a way that it didn’t seem to arise from within a knowledgeable process. The letter stated that the Hazahzas of Palestine and Jordan had been ordered deported to Israel, which is a lie. In any case, it was the wrong form.

“That letter was so fundamentally flawed that it can’t be given legal effect,” argued Bardavid in Dallas. “Therefore the detention based on that letter is unlawful. Even the US Attorney seemed surprised by the errors in the document and promised to look into the matter further.”

“I have difficulty grasping in my head this is occurring,” says Bardavid from his New York office. “The government did not refute any allegations that we made about the prison conditions, or the fact that the Hazahzas were allegedly sent the wrong form, or lack of proof of service for that letter, or that the facts were flawed. The premise of their entire case was that this federal court does not have jurisdiction in these matters.”

Despite the horrible implications for Suzi Hazahza, America should send her a thank you note. Thanks to Suzi’s unjust treatment we now have proof that our Homeland Security machine has pulled loose from its Constitutional moorings. Homeland Security has become a pirate operation unto itself. Each passing day of Suzi’s imprisonment gives us one more reason to demand the resignation of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and immediate action by Congress to strip the agency of its power to evade federal court review.