Suit alleges abuse of asylum seekers

Group wants Border Patrol to release records on treatment of immigrants

When Border Patrol agents stop people who are trying to enter the United States without legal documents, they’re supposed to find out whether the person is afraid of returning home and refer all such migrants to officers who will consider their eligibility for political asylum.

But in a lawsuit filed Monday in San Francisco federal court, an advocacy group says it has seen evidence that the Border Patrol has abused asylum seekers and misrepresented their statements, but the government is refusing to disclose records of its actions.

“The Trump administration, and the Obama administration before it, have repeatedly run roughshod over asylum seekers’ rights at the border,” said Clara Long, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, which filed the suit. “The public deserves to know when its own federal agencies are failing to follow the law.”

The suit, under the Freedom of Information Act, says U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has provided only a small fraction of the documents in holds from 2012 onward on the Border Patrol’s treatment of immigrants who may have been eligible for asylum. Asylum requires proof that an immigrant would face persecution if deported.

Long said the group’s initial demand for records, filed in 2015, focused on actions under President Barack Obama’s administration. The suit also seeks documents from the Trump administration.

Most of the pages the govern-

ment released had much or all of their contents blacked out, the suit said. But Long said there were some documents alleging abuse:

In May 2015, a woman told an asylum officer that a Border Patrol “officer with green eyes” hit her in the head, kicked her breasts, pulled her hair and threw her on the floor.

In July 2014, a man who had told the Border Patrol he was not afraid of returning to his native Ecuador testified that he had made that statement out of fear, because of what he had seen when he was first stopped and questioned: Two men were standing in line ahead of him when an officer “put some kind of electricity on them and they started shaking all over.”

In several cases, asylum seekers said the Border Patrol falsely reported that they had expressed no fear of returning to their homeland. When they managed to get a hearing before an asylum officer, Long said, government lawyers used their purported statements to discredit them.

“This is about people being turned away in situations of serious risk,” Long said.

She said other records showed asylum officers sending emails to one another, or filing complaints to a government civil rights office, expressing “serious concerns about the way asylum seekers were treated at the border.”

Long also cited a report by another organization, the American Immigration Council, which used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain government records of 809 complaints against Border Patrol agents in the Southwest from January 2009 to January 2012.

Forty percent of those complaints alleged physical abuse, the report said, and only a handful resulted in disciplinary action.

The Department of Homeland Security, lead defendant in the lawsuit, declined to comment.