Forgotten Prisoners: The Problem With Our Immigrant Deportation System

Josè Hernan's deportation back to his native Ecuador for violating his tourist visa was supposed to be quick and easy. "Within a few days," Hernan was told the morning after he arrived at the Chippewa County Jail in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan -- as long as he signed a "voluntary departure" form, essentially relinquishing his right to seek legal help.

"A few days," Hernan was promised, and he'd be back home with his family in the Andes Mountains ... "A few days," my family in Empire was told when we returned a phone call to Agent Cheney of the Border Patrol, who had detained our friend after an arts and crafts show in St. Ignace (just above the Mackinac Bridge) on Sept. 3.

Two months later Josè Hernan was still there, languishing in a jail cell and cut off from the world while his deportation file gathered dust at a maze of federal agencies under the guise of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the successor to Immigration and Naturalization Services (I.N.S.) under the post-9/11 Department of Homeland Security.

Meanwhile, this country's taxpayers fork out as much as $80 per day for federal prisoners awaiting the inevitable deportation back to their homeland. Chippewa County Jail's Sheriff Moran claims that Sault Ste. Marie jail receives $56 per day per federal inmate -- under the national average. Still, at that rate Hernan's 65-day incarceration cost us $3,640 -- almost seven times the cost of an actual flight back to Quito, Ecuador. A fellow Ecuadorian inmate waited in Chippewa County Jail for 10 months. Do the math: 300 days, at $56 per day, equals a whopping $16,800 -- the price of our inefficient, and some would claim racist, deportation system.

Why does the deportation process take so long? According to Tara Tidwell-Cullen of the National Immigrant Justice Center in Chicago, a federal judge must first approve the deportation order, and then ICE must obtain travel documents from the detainee's country. Without these documents the detainee can't travel. Previously, I.N.S. (now ICE) couldn't indefinitely detain noncitizens whom it couldn't remove (such as a citizen of the former Yugoslavia whose government no longer officially existed) for more than six months, but the precedent established by the Supreme Court's decision in Zadvydas v. Davis is not always upheld -- such as the case with Hernan's Ecuadorian jail mate.

Deportable aliens are usually taken to their countries on chartered flights called JPATS (Justice Prisoner and Alien Transportation System). In the past, flights to Mexico have gone once a week, on Fridays, but Tidwell-Cullen thinks that may have changed, and neither ICE nor JPATS will comment on their exact deportation procedures. Flights to other countries are not as standard, and detainees flown home on commercial flights, with or without handcuffs, is not unheard of either.

Though the terrorist attacks five years ago were executed by Islamic fundamentalists from the Middle East, many argue that the paranoia and Patriot Act legislation that followed have hurt Latinos from south of our border more than anyone. Josè Hernan was caught in that net before he was finally deported on Nov. 8 -- 65 days after his capture.

Yet Hernan actually had a visa to be in this country legally. He has spent years in the United States and hadn't been arrested before or caused any problems before this fall. He's traveled back and forth between the Midwest and South America with relative ease. That's because he and his family are Otavaleños, Quichua Indian artisans from a market town in northern Ecuador well known on the backpacker and tourist circuit for its beautiful indigenous fabrics and textiles.

Because of their indigenous heritage, Otavaleños are often granted permission to sell their native products or play their Andean flute music -- as Hernan's sister Miriam puts it, "defending their culture" -- and make a little money on the side, despite not having work visas. Artisans from Otavalo show up on the street corners of cities all over Europe, Japan and Canada, and in Hernan's case, at arts and craft shows all over the upper Midwest.