What’s in a visit?
by Julie A. Wortman

In early November fellow Witness staffer Ethan Flad and I were in Garden City, Long Island, taking the pulse of that particular corner of the church. Asked what justice issues had been capturing his attention, Orris Walker, Long Island’s Episcopal bishop, spoke of an eye-opening visit he had made the previous spring to a Queens immigration detention center run by Wackenhut Corrections Corporation under contract with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Walker had been part of a 22-person delegation, most of them religious leaders, investigating the treatment of people seeking political asylum in the U.S. under the unwelcoming provisions of the 1996 Immigration Reform Act.

The Wackenhut facility, tucked away in a dismal warehouse district near JFK Airport, made Walker think of a "concentration camp." The 200 asylum seekers held here arrive in shackles. Locked in 12- to 40-bed dormitories and segregation cells with open-stall toilets and showers for 22-23 hours a day – and under the constant scrutiny of armed guards – their unenviable uphill task is to convince authorities that they have a "credible fear of persecution" back home. Depending on their access to legal and other forms of help – and on their ability to overcome language barriers – this can take many months.

One teenage woman Walker saw was from the Congo, detained at JFK Airport in transit to Canada, where she was to rejoin her mother. Four months later, there seemed to be no prospect of her release any time soon.

"It seemed crazy that she was being held here – her intent was to not to enter this country, but to go to her own people in Canada," Walker said. "We asked a lot of questions about her case, but didn’t get many satisfactory answers." He paused, smiling wryly. "A couple of days later I got word that she had been allowed to continue her journey to Canada – a miracle!"

Richard Parkins, the director of the Episcopal Church’s Migration Ministries office, says the situation for asylum seekers and refugees coming to this country will only get worse as our leaders pursue their vengeful war on global terrorism. At this writing, our president has issued an emergency order that gives him the power to dismiss "the principles of law and the rules of evidence" that form the basis of this country’s judicial system, all in the cause of protecting us from aliens who might wish us harm. Even conservative columnist William Safire is outraged by the move. "Not content with his previous decision to permit police to eavesdrop on a suspect’s conversations with an attorney, Bush now strips the alien accused of even the limited rights afforded by a court martial," Safire wrote in the New York Times on November 15. "His kangaroo court can conceal evidence by citing national security, make up its own rules, find a defendant guilty even if a third of the officers disagree, and execute the alien with no review by any civilian court. No longer does the judicial branch and an independent jury stand between the government and the accused. In lieu of those checks and balances central to our legal system, non-citizens face an executive that is now investigator, prosecutor, judge, jury and jailer or exectioner. In an Orwellian twist, Bush’s order calls this Soviet-style abomination ‘a full and fair trial.’"

Criminal justice activists have long maintained that this sort of xenophobic, punitive mindset – aimed, they argue, at securing the privilege, power and profit of the establishment – permeates this nation’s understanding of law and order. In this issue we probe that claim in light of evidence that there are a growing number of people on death row who are being proven innocent, signs that "three-strikes" laws are filling our prisons with lifers whose crimes are disproportionately minor and reports of police violence that are difficult to understand except in the context of entrenched racial prejudice.

For people of faith, the call is to become personally involved. We’re asked to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, welcome the stranger, visit the imprisoned. In the process, we are told, we will encounter God. In the process, as Orris Walker discovered last year, we might become catalysts for justice.

Julie A. Wortman is editor/publisher of The Witness.