WASHINGTON: An Afghan medical student spent three months behind bars in a New York detention centre in 1998. She was strip-searched, shackled, then kept in one room for 23 hours a day. The reason: She had fled the Taliban without any identity documents and sought asylum in the United States.

“Of course, I was not expecting them to let me go right away because I did not have any documents,” she said in an interview last week from her Baltimore home. “I did not expect them to shackle me like a criminal.” She eventually won asylum, but not before encountering a rigorous US immigration system that treats most newcomers harshly.

America’s immigration policies have come under fire in recent months for the treatment of hundreds of foreigners picked up by authorities investigating the Sept 11 terrorist attacks. Advocates and detainees have complained about lengthy detentions, delays, secrecy and lack of legal representation.

But, as the Afghan student’s case illustrates, those problems are not unique to the Sept 11 detainees. They are endemic in a process that gives few legal protections to people who are in the United States illegally, whether they came to seek political asylum or overstayed a visa.

Now advocates for immigrants fear tough conditions will worsen for them, as the government girds itself against future terrorist attacks. “The political environment has changed overnight. It really set us back years,” said Wendy Young, director of government relations for the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children. “Somehow, as a country we have to differentiate between people coming here for the wrong reasons and people who are seeking refuge or to rejoin family.”

Attorney General John Ashcroft has said his office is trying to strike a balance between national security interests and the rights of the detainees. “Our efforts have been carefully crafted to avoid infringing on constitutional rights while saving American lives,” he told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

After the 1993 World Trade Centre bombers abused asylum laws to stay in the United States, Congress tightened asylum laws and began detaining more asylum-seekers. Advocates complain that the laws have been carried out in an arbitrary and often punitive manner since then. Although there is one federal immigration law, Immigration and Naturalization Service districts across the country have their own rules for detention. Depending on where immigrants are caught by the INS, they might be detained for days, months, years - or not at all.

“What’s happened after Sept 11 has exposed flaws in the process of immigration adjudication that the public simply wasn’t aware of,” said Margaret Taylor, an immigration law professor at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.

Nearly all of the Sept 11 detainees being held on immigration violations will end up in immigration court in what are called removal proceedings. Most will likely be ordered out of the country. A study last spring of 1.2 million immigration court cases filed from 1994 to 2000 showed that nine out of 10 cases ended with deportation orders.

The immigrants’ cases are adjudicated in an administrative process that doesn’t carry the full portfolio of rights that defendants would have in criminal court proceedings. They appear before immigration court judges who are employed by the Justice Department, rather than the court system. Because there is no right to a government lawyer, most immigrants go without one. The only record of the hearing is a tape recording kept by the judge. The testimony of witnesses is not usually translated for the benefit of non-English speakers.

The Afghan student, who preferred to remain anonymous, learned the hard way that she had few rights under US immigration laws. When the INS refused to parole her from detention, even though she had a sister in Maryland who was a US citizen, she could not appeal the decision.

The student testified about her ordeal under an assumed name before a congressional subcommittee in May. The student’s saga began in Oct 1998 when she arrived at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York without any identity documents. Her name was so well-known to the Taliban - she had run a school for girls - that she feared carrying her papers would put her life in danger, she said.

She said an INS officer at the airport interviewed her, then ordered her to take off her clothes. She was so scared, she fainted. “From the culture I come from, it’s very hard for me to change my clothes in front of my sisters,” she said.

The study, published last year, found that justice in immigration court was often arbitrary. The chances of staying in the United States often depended as much on who the judge was as the facts of the case. Some judges rarely granted asylum while others granted it liberally.

For example, in the period studied, 53 per cent of the applicants from Afghanistan were granted asylum. But the chances of success were considerably lower for those assigned to the courtroom of New York Immigration Judge Sandy Hom. He heard 20 asylum claims from Afghans, but granted just three. Overall, Hom granted asylum to seven per cent of the applicants in his courtroom; the national average is 14 per cent.

In 1997, he rejected an asylum claim from a mother and three school-age daughters who said they would be persecuted by the Taliban because she was an Afghanistan woman with liberal views.

Before Sept 11, advocates were finding sympathy in Congress to reform immigration laws. Even President Bush had campaigned against the use of secret evidence in such cases. The attacks have changed all that. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times