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OFF PAGE ONE
East Oregonian
Saturday, July 21, 2018
Asylum seekers endure horrible conditions in prison
By ANDREW SELSKY
Associated Press
SALEM
—
Strip
searches.
Overcrowded
cells with open toilets. Scant
meals that violate religious
restrictions.
Federal public defenders
say 120 asylum seekers are
enduring those conditions at
a federal prison in Oregon
where some have considered
suicide and at least one has
attempted it.
“We are dying day by day
inside here,” one detainee
said, William Teesdale, chief
investigator for the federal
public defender’s office in
Oregon, wrote in a filing in
federal court in Portland.
The immigrant was
unwilling to be identified in
the filing due to fear of per-
secution or retaliation, Tees-
dale said in the documents.
Most of the asylum seek-
ers held at the prison in rural
Sheridan say they faced
risks in their home countries,
including India, Nepal, Gua-
temala, Mexico and China.
Instead of being wel-
comed to the U.S., they ran
into the “zero-tolerance”
policy of the Trump admin-
istration that calls for the
detention of people who try
to enter the country illegally.
“Here we have come to
save our lives but I think
we will die here in jail,” one
detainee said, according to
Teesdale’s affidavit.
Several detainees have
untreated medical condi-
tions, including a heart prob-
lem, gunshot wound and
broken leg.
He said they are tri-
ple-bunked and confined for
long hours in cells with open
toilets. They must eat in the
cells and have no indoor
or outdoor recreational
opportunities.
They are strip-searched
in front of other detainees,
and Hindus were given beef
and pork to eat, even though
it’s against their religion,
and tried to survive on just
the vegetables accompany-
ing the meals, Teesdale said.
Immigration and Cus-
toms Enforcement recently
transferred four detainees to
a center in Tacoma, Wash-
ington, for specialized med-
ical care, ICE spokeswoman
Clarissa Cutrell said.
The agency has no com-
ment on the conditions in
Sheridan due to pending liti-
gation, Cutrell said.
Leland Baxter-Neal, an
attorney with the Ameri-
can Civil Liberties Union
of Oregon, called the con-
ditions
inhumane
and
unconstitutional.
The Trump administra-
tion’s decision to put the
immigrants in the prison,
where they mixed for
three weeks with the gen-
eral prison population, has
caused “chaos, confusion
and massive human suffer-
ing,” he said.
Federal Public Defender
Doug Brown/ACLU via AP
In this June 25 photo provided by the ACLU, Leland Baxter-Neal of the American
Civil Liberties Union of Oregon poses in his office in Portland. Baxter-Neal said
Friday that massive human suffering has resulted from the Trump administration’s
decision to lock up asylum seekers at the prison in Sheridan.
Lisa Hay said in a letter to
Warden Josaias Salazar and
Acting ICE Field Office
Director Elizabeth Godfrey
that her office learned of an
apparent suicide attempt by
a detainee.
“Both those who wit-
nessed the incident and
those who heard of it have
expressed great distress,”
Hay said.
Other detainees also con-
sidered killing themselves,
court documents state.
Petitions were filed
Wednesday by Hay’s office
seeking court hearings for
five detainees, whose names
were redacted because of
their security concerns.
“I have to cry in my pil-
low,” an immigrant iden-
tified as ICE detainee No.
1 said in his habeas cor-
pus brief. “I have suicidal
thoughts but then I remem-
ber my family. My family is
all that keeps me going.”
The public affairs office
of the Federal Bureau of
Prisons did not immediately
respond to a request for
comment.
A statement filed in
court shows the prison had
to scramble to take in the
immigrants, who were sent
there because other holding
facilities used by ICE were
overloaded.
The prison received only
one day of notice — on
May 30 — that about 130
detainees would be arriv-
ing, Amberly Newman, an
adviser to the prison war-
den, said in a declaration in
federal court.
She said they had to
be mixed with the general
prison population for the
first three weeks before they
could be separated into dif-
ferent units.
One of the detainees
described guards making
him and his two cellmates
strip to their underwear.
“In the night, it gets so
cold in the cell and when l
was in boxers and T-shirt, I
was terribly cold,” he said,
according to his habeas cor-
pus filing.
Victoria Bejarano Muir-
head of Innovation Law
Lab said her Portland-based
group has engaged over 80
volunteers to provide legal
services to the detainees.
Those seeking asylum
must show authorities they
have credible fear in their
homelands. Twenty of those
immigrants at the prison
have provided statements
that lead to hearings before
a judge, Muirhead said
in a conference call with
journalists.
Hay wrote on July 9
to Salazar and Godfrey
that some conditions have
improved, “but continue
to fall below the minimum
standards set by our govern-
ment for immigration deten-
tion and, in my view, violate
the Constitution by impos-
ing punitive detention on
civil detainees.”
Follow Andrew Selsky
on Twitter at https://twitter.
com/andrewselsky
TAKEN: Alvaro was led away in handcuffs, no goodbyes allowed
Continued from 1A
“Never in my life have
I seen fear like I saw in his
eyes that night,” Torres-Me-
drano said.
She waited helplessly as
police sorted through the
fact that Alvaro was undoc-
umented, driving without
a license and had a juve-
nile record from years ear-
lier when, she said, he tried
to escape the neglect at home
by looking for acceptance in
the wrong crowd. She said
she must have smoked a
whole pack of cigarettes, one
right after another, to try to
calm herself down.
“It was the most intense
feelings I have ever felt,” she
said, breaking into sobs.
“I’m sorry, I don’t ever
talk about this,” she said after
a moment, her voice crack-
ing as she wiped away tears
with the back of her hand.
“It was harder because they
showed no sympathy. It was
just another traffic stop for
them.”
Alvaro was taken away
in handcuffs without being
given the chance to hug his
girlfriend, his mother or
his infant son goodbye. He
spent Christmas in a hold-
ing facility in Tacoma, then
was sent to Mexico, a coun-
try he had only vague mem-
ories of. They left him
with an ill-fitting pair of
shorts, a T-shirt, cheap san-
dals and enough money to
make a single phone call to
Torres-Medrano.
“He said, ‘I don’t even
have socks. I don’t know
what to do,’” she said.
He spent the night on the
street, and was able to even-
tually make contact with his
grandparents, who lived in a
different city, and make his
way there.
Meanwhile, Torres-Me-
drano — who had just turned
18 and wasn’t on speaking
terms with her family — fell
into depression.
“I didn’t want to be alive,”
she said.
She survived those first
confusing, terrifying months
as she tried to figure out what
the rest of her life would
look like, and pulled her-
self together for her son.
After two years she was able
to scrape together enough
money to visit Mexico.
Alvaro seemed to have
lost the will to live, she said.
When she headed back to the
United States for work a cou-
ple of weeks later, he begged
her to leave their son in Mex-
ico and she relented, worried
what it would do to him if she
said no. She knew other peo-
ple who had died after getting
deported and deciding they
didn’t care — a fatal attitude
in a place where walking
down the wrong gang’s street
can get you killed.
“That was the hardest
thing for me,” she said.
She sent money as often
as she could, and picked the
boy up a year later. They
have not returned since.
A complicated process
Torres-Medrano is now
living with her sister Selene
Torres-Medrano, a Umatilla
city councilor.
Selene recently made
a passionate plea during a
council meeting for commu-
nity members to show com-
passion to their immigrant
neighbors. She was born in
the United States, but she has
been touched by her sister’s
story, by growing up in the
care of her undocumented
mother, and by friends who
are undocumented “Dream-
ers,” not allowed to become
citizens of the country they
grew up in.
She remembers waiting
each night with Thalia for
their mother to come home
from working in the fields,
sometimes for less than min-
imum wage. They stayed
inside and hid when there
were rumors of immigration
officials — “la migra” — in
town. And they knew if mom
didn’t come home they were
supposed to call their aunt
and tell her she had been
taken away.
In the end it was their aunt
who was deported and their
cousins who made that call
to them.
“I do remember it was a
pretty sad time in our fam-
ily,” Selene said. “The kids
were left behind and we
didn’t know what would hap-
pen. Our cousins missed their
mom.”
The cousins — U.S. cit-
izens — went to Mexico
for a while, but the region
where they lived didn’t have
a school that went past ele-
mentary level and so even-
doesn’t understand why
Americans think that peo-
ple who walked thousands
of miles across the desert,
risking death and rape and
enslavement, then suddenly
decided they were too lazy
to fill out some paperwork
that would solve all their
problems.
“It’s not like the DMV,
where you go and get in line
for a couple of hours and you
get your paperwork settled
and they call and say you’re
going to take your test in a
couple of weeks,” she said.
“Is that how people think it
works?”
Selene worries about Ini-
tiative Petition 22, which
will allow voters this fall to
vote on Oregon’s “sanctu-
ary” status, which bars local
law enforcement from using
their resources to apprehend
people whose only crime
is being in the country ille-
gally. She said even citi-
zens such as herself could be
affected by racial profiling —
being pulled over and asked
to prove their citizenship
because of the way they look.
Thalia said it has been
hard seeing so much about
immigration on the news,
from debates about DACA
to children being separated
from their parents at the
border. She cried when she
talked about seeing a news
report about a man in his 60s
who was deported from his
wife and family — and real-
ized she was jealous of him.
“I think, you guys had all
those years together and I
didn’t even make it to adult-
hood,” she said. “We didn’t
end it, they ended it for us. He
just got taken away ... It hurts
me because I get reminded
that I’m part of that.”
———
Contact Jade McDow-
ell at jmcdowell@eastorego-
nian.com or 541-564-4536.
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tually their mother sent them
back to the United States to
get an education and start
their families where there is
more opportunity, less pov-
erty and less violence.
“My aunt can’t be part of
her kids’ life,” Selene said.
“She can’t be a grandma.
She misses those milestones,
those birthdays. It’s hard on
my cousins.”
Immigrating legally from
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many are able to afford and
it takes years, even decades.
That’s not counting the 10
years that those who have
been deported from the U.S.
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