Al Jazeera America
By Aviva Stahl
September 30, 2015
In
March 2013, Patrice Talbot was taken out of York County Prison in
southern Pennsylvania and told he was being deported. Officials with the
U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement agency, or ICE, later showed Talbot the temporary one-way
passport, known as a laissez-passer, they said they had secured for him
from Cameroonian officials. ICE was required to produce a travel
document in order to send him back to his native
country of Cameroon, which he said he’d fled in 2002 after enduring
arrests and brutal beatings by police. Talbot had been living without
papers in Philadelphia after being denied political asylum in the United
States almost nine years earlier. He says he
was afraid to return home.
Yet
nothing about the Cameroonian passport seemed right. The photograph was
so dark and grainy he hardly recognized himself. The single sheet was
not printed on embassy
letterhead. And instead of bearing the signature of the ambassador, the
passport was signed by someone he had never heard of — Charles Greene,
of Houston, Texas. Talbot expressed his concerns to the ICE officer
assigned to his case, Mistyann Schram. When Talbot
was charged in August 2013 with resisting deportation, a federal judge
stated in a ruling that she also doubted the document’s validity. By
then, others had raised questions about the role of Greene, a Methodist
minister who served in a voluntary capacity
with the Cameroonian ministry, in deportations. According to documents
reviewed by Al Jazeera America, Greene had issued a Cameroonian passport
in the spring of 2013 to someone who was not even a citizen of that
country.
Talbot
spent almost two years fighting his deportation from the York detention
center. But despite the red flags surrounding the passport, he was sent
back to Cameroon
in January 2015 on a charter flight with the document in hand.
Talbot’s
story is not the only one of its kind. In a report released today,
“Smuggled into Exile,” the New York-based advocacy group Families for
Freedom raises concerns
about other cases in which ICE officials deported people based on
falsified identity documents. The group identified at least four
individuals who were removed from the United States from 2012 to 2015
with travel papers of dubious validity or without any papers
at all. It says the actual number may be much higher.
Abraham
Paulos, executive director of Families for Freedom and the report’s
editor, says this practice is not the only example of the Department of
Homeland Security,
which oversees ICE, bending international norms and its own rules in
order to expedite deportations. Meanwhile, the consequences for people
who are removed without valid laissez-passers or other paperwork can be
significant. People who arrive in their country
of origin without proper identity documents may have difficulty working
or accessing local services and can even be subject to arrest.
“To
us, the travel document is much more than a piece of paper,” Paulos
said. “It is the weight that hangs in the balance of our freedom or
imprisonment.”
In
an email, Sarah Maxwell, ICE’s Philadelphia-based spokeswoman, denied
that the agency knowingly deports people without valid papers.
“Consistent with every removal
effected by the agency, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
does its due diligence in working with the receiving country’s
designated representative, who is responsible for verifying the
citizenship of the deportee and issuing the requisite travel
documents,” she wrote. Greene has also defended the accuracy of the
passports he issued.
Formed
after the Sept. 11 attacks, ICE is responsible for enforcing
immigration laws and deporting people deemed to be removable — those who
lack legal status and have
exhausted all immigration proceedings available to them. To ensure that
individuals are deported to countries where they have recognized
status, and that they have proof of citizenship upon arrival,
deportation officers must obtain travel documents from the
receiving country before removing anyone. Typically, the officers
provide officials at the consulate or embassy of the destination country
with information that attests to the deportee’s identity. The consular
official uses that information to corroborate
the deportee’s citizenship status, for example by checking against a
national identity database. One form of temporary travel document issued
for deportees to West Africa who lack passports is the laissez-passer
like the one produced for Talbot.
According
to investigations by The Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times,
acquiring travel documents for deportees is a challenge. Governments
with poorly functioning
or underfunded consular services are often unable to respond to ICE
requests. A 2007 report by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office
of Inspector General, or OIG, found that due to problems securing travel
documents, nearly half of African deportees
remained in detention for more than 90 days after being issued a final
order of removal, the highest of any region. People who have been issued
a final order of removal, but have no travel documents, are generally
supposed to be released from detention after
180 days.
Schram,
who handled deportations to Cameroon, often had trouble getting travel
documents for the country, according to testimony she gave in 2014 when
Talbot was charged
with resisting deportation. In the 2.5 years she had been working for
ICE, Schram said, she had requested about 150 travel documents and
received about 20. When Talbot’s case file came across her desk, she
testified, she did not mail the usual package of documents
to the embassy. Instead, she sent the papers to the ICE field office in
Houston, whose employees then approached an honorary consul for
Cameroon who lived in the area. This person was Greene.
Honorary
consuls are citizens or legal residents of the host country who have
personal or professional contacts with the country they are serving. In
2013 there were about
20,000 honorary consuls worldwide, according to The Economist, and by
one count about 1,200 in the U.S. Most are residents of cities that lack
formal consulates, and they often work without pay; while they may
provide limited consular services, they can be
appointed to nurture the foreign country’s business interests.
Greene,
who was born in Liberty, Texas, had never been to Cameroon before his
appointment, in April 1986, as honorary consul. Nor did he have any
experience working in
immigration or foreign affairs. His only direct link to the country was
through his family’s oil wells in Texas, which had been purchased by
Shell many years ago. At the time, the company also had holdings in
Cameroon.
It
was rare for ICE to approach Greene, but it had happened before. Greene
testified at Talbot’s trial that from 2010 to 2014 he had produced 14
travel documents for the
agency. (The ICE press office responded to requests for comment
directed to Schram.)
In
at least one of the cases preceding Talbot’s, Greene had made an error.
According to documents reviewed by Al Jazeera America, in May 2013
Greene issued a passport
for another individual on Schram’s caseload, Noah. (Noah’s name has
been changed since he and his family are still working to gain legal
status and documentation.) Noah was born in the Ivory Coast and said he
had never been to Cameroon, although he is of Cameroonian
descent. After Noah’s lawyer provided Greene with Noah’s Ivorian birth
certificate and a copy of Cameroonian citizenship statutes — which
strictly prohibit dual citizenship — Greene issued a retraction of the
original document. But nonetheless, in 2014, Noah
was deported to Cameroon.
According
to Bardis Vakili, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of San Diego,
people deported to their home countries without valid documentation may
face a greater risk
of arbitrary arrest or be unable to work or receive medical care.
A
number of people have raised questions about whether Greene, as an
honorary consul, has the authority to issue passports, particularly to
deportees. The particular bylaws
of each embassy determine whether honorary consuls can issue such
documents. A form on the Cameroonian Embassy website, dated March 2013,
appears to specify that travel documents can only be secured through the
Washington, D.C., office. The Cameroonian Embassy
in Washington did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Cameroon’s Ministry of External Affairs could not be reached for
comment.
Talbot
said that when he called the Cameroonian Embassy from detention around
April 2013, embassy officials told him the passports produced by Greene
were invalid. In
court, Paulos, the Families for Freedom advocate who was assisting with
Talbot’s case, and Talbot’s lawyer, Harrisburg public defender Lori
Ulrich, told the judge that Greene had told them he was only permitted
to issue travel documents for people within Texas.
In his testimony, Greene denied making those statements. Greene also
testified that ICE agents failed to inform him that Talbot was being
held in Pennsylvania when they approached him to produce the travel
document.
In
a phone interview, Greene struggled to recall the details of specific
cases and denied that there had ever been questions about the legitimacy
of the documents he produced.
When pressed on the issue, he suggested that Noah had claimed different
countries of origin at different times in order to complicate ICE’s
efforts to deport him. “Every time you try to nail them down to a
country, they jump over to another country,” Greene
said.
He
also insisted he had the legal power to produce identity documents on
behalf of ICE. “There’s nothing false about [these papers],” he said. “I
worked through Homeland
Security. They brought it to me and I responded.”
Greene’s
practices do not appear to be common. None of the immigration attorneys
or immigrant advocates contacted by Al Jazeera America were familiar
with cases in which
ICE had approached an honorary consul in order to secure travel
documents.
According
to the 2007 OIG report, however, it is common for deportation officers
to take shortcuts when attempting to acquire travel documents for
deportees. OIG investigators
found that four of seven field offices “routinely” failed to submit the
specific travel document applications required by receiving countries.
Instead they simply sent passport photographs and a standard DHS form.
And
Talbot’s experience may fit into a broader pattern of overreach by U.S.
immigration authorities, say civil rights advocates. In a report last
year, the American Civil
Liberties Union said that officers with DHS appear to have provided
false and misleading information to many deportees in order to secure
their signatures on voluntary departure forms and formal deportation
orders. According to Sarah Mehta, the ACLU researcher
who authored the report, DHS officers have pressured individuals into
signing voluntary departure forms and deportation orders. In some cases,
people were told they would be released to go home if they signed the
papers or that they would lose their children
if they refused, Mehta said. Even people with legal status in the U.S.
have sometimes been coerced into signing removal orders.
Maxwell,
the ICE spokeswoman, wrote that neither Noah nor Talbot had a legal
basis on which to remain in the United States. She declined to answer
specific questions on
whether they had been deported on the basis of false or fraudulently
procured papers.
People
deported with invalid papers can face major hurdles upon their return.
The Families for Freedom report describes the case of Carlos, an
immigrant from Ecuador who
faced deportation after pleading guilty to criminal charges. In August
2013, the Ecuadorian consulate in Atlanta sent a letter to Carlos’
deportation officer stating that it could not locate documentation
confirming his Ecuadorian nationality. By that point,
Carlos had been in the United States for decades and did not have the
identification the consulate required to corroborate his citizenship status. According to Families for Freedom, in October 2014 Carlos was
sent back to Ecuador anyway, with a sheet of paper
that resembled a photocopy of the ID page of a passport. When Carlos
arrived in Guayaquil, Ecuador, government officials confiscated the
document, telling him it was invalid, according to the report.
Carlos
told Families for Freedom that he lived in fear of arrest since police
frequently stop people and ask for identification. It took Carlos five
months to obtain Ecuadoran
identification. In that time, he was unable to work and struggled to
feed, clothe and house himself, according to Families for Freedom.
According
to Bardis Vakili, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of San Diego,
people deported to their home countries without valid documentation may
face a greater risk
of arbitrary arrest or be unable to work or receive medical care. “Even
for those who are somehow able to navigate the process well enough to
eventually get ID documents, the process can take months if not years,
during which time they have to struggle just
to survive.”
'The
Court believes that the evidence presented by Defendant raises serious
questions as to the validity of the travel document such that this Court
is unable to conclude
beyond a reasonable doubt that the travel document is valid.'
After
his asylum claims failed in 2005, Talbot was granted a voluntary
removal, meaning he was allowed to arrange his own travel back to
Cameroon, according to the Families
for Freedom report. He decided to defy his deportation order and remain
in the country undocumented. Years passed. Talbot settled in
Philadelphia, where he met and moved in with an American woman, Crystal
Cesar. But in 2013, Cesar called police, alleging domestic
violence, and Talbot was arrested. Although Cesar quickly dropped the
charges, Talbot’s name was flagged in an ICE database. He was handed
over to immigration officials in compliance with federal law.
Fearful
of what awaited him in Cameroon, Talbot repeatedly resisted
deportation. In August 2013, after he fought back physically during an
attempt by ICE to put him onto
a commercial flight to Cameroon, Talbot was charged with hindering
removal from the United States, a federal crime. The matter went to a
bench trial in May 2014. In her ruling, Judge Kane found Talbot guilty
of resisting removal. However, she concurred with
his defense that the passport was dubious. “The Court believes that the
evidence presented by Defendant raises serious questions as to the
validity of the travel document such that this Court is unable to
conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that the travel
document is valid,” she stated in her decision.
In
January, after he was taken to a detention center in Miami, Talbot
decided he was tired of fighting. One day that month, he boarded a
charter flight bound for Douala
International Airport with roughly 14 other deportees from the region.
The three other deportees from that country were allowed to disembark
while he waited on the plane, according to Talbot. He was then taken to a
holding cell, where he waited for nearly
five hours, Talbot said. Only after he phoned a relative in the city
and paid an official a bribe was he permitted to leave.
Before
his deportation, Talbot and Grant married in a small ceremony in
Baltimore in July 2013. The couple filed an application for a spousal
visa; that application is
still pending. Although she doesn’t know how she’ll find the money to
hire a good immigration attorney, Grant hopes she will eventually be
reunited with her husband. Talbot feels the same. “I miss my wife,” he
said. “I would do anything to be with her.”
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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