In-Credible Fear: US Immigration Security Theater (Letter 2)
Prayer beads\rosaries made from bread and scrap metals by prisoners in ICE detention.
In October 2023, TFS contributor Tumen Tushinov and his wife crossed the US-Mexico border in order to claim asylum. Their journey took them from Russian-occupied Buryatia to Mongolia, to Georgia, to Turkey, and then to Mexico. After spending well over $10,000 on lawyers to apply for a “talent visa”, Tumen was rejected and was almost out of time to remain abroad. A return to Russia would mean certain danger - Tumen has marked himself as a political subversive and is involved with organizations that openly oppose the Russian government. If that wasn’t enough, the Russian government does not take kindly to its citizens running off, especially young men of fighting age who could be “better” used as cannon fodder for the war in Ukraine. Tumen’s decision to finally flee Russia had much to do with the ritual forced conscription happening in villages just like his, in Ulan-Ude.
Despite Tumen’s best efforts to follow proper procedures for a border crossing in October, he and his wife were separated and Tumen was detained in Fort Isabel, Texas. You can read the initial details here. Tumen was then transferred to the ICE detention center in Aurora, Colorado, where he has remained for the past seven months. He worked tirelessly on his appeal for asylum, and when the day finally came for a hearing before an immigration judge and a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) attorney, we felt confident we were going to fulfill every criteria for permanent residence and refugee status. What we didn’t account for - a racist, incompetent judge who had already made up her mind before hearing a single word any of us had to say. After almost eight hours across two separate hearings, Tumen’s request was denied and the judge ordered his removal from the country - deportation. Ed Gallo goes into more detail about the hearing here.
This brings us to the present, where Tumen has to make one final stand. He is able to appeal the decision and stand before the Board of Immigration Appeals, but this time we are taking no chances. Read here about the way Tumen found a reputable lawyer who validated our frustrations and freely talked about the malicious incompetence of the judge.
All that’s left is for us to wait patiently for the lawyer to work his magic, but there’s the matter of paying him. Below you will read the first of Tumen’s letters to the public, hand-written from the Aurora ICE Processing Center. PLEASE NOTE: The Fight Site is not directly profiting from these fundraisers or providing any of the funds afforded to the site to Tumen, who is obviously not a current active contributor to the site. We are simply using the platform to bring attention to Tumen’s personal fundraiser, which is located separately on Ko-Fi. The following is a transcription of Tumen’s second hand-written letter, edited by Ed Gallo.
READ TUMEN’S INTRODUCTORY LETTER HERE
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In the past, detention periods usually never lasted more than 3 months, especially for first-time entrants seeking asylum. We’ve gone over some of the reasons why getting out is tricky and the game of jurisdiction hot potato the DHS, ICE and EOIR play with each other. But where is all this confusion actually coming from? Nobody can say for sure yet, and for those reasons we must once again come back to how it all should work, and why it actually didn’t, before we examine how the recent asylum law changes have messed it all up.
In-Credible Fear
Normally all entrants to the US applying for asylum will have gone through the so-called “credible fear” process which is part of the overall Expedited Removal program. That program is meant, on the surface, to separate credible fear asylum claims from the bogus ones. In practice, it’s more of a roadblock meant to prevent the asylum claims from flooding the EOIR schedule. Let me explain how it all works. Once you enter the US via, let’s say, crossing the river running along the US-Mexico border, you’re likely to get detained. First by CBP, who screen you, take your biometrics (photo and fingerprints), then they conduct and initial interview. Sometimes they let you go and sometimes they pass you on to ICE. Let’s deal with that second scenario.
In ICE custody, you have to wait for your credible fear interview date, which is when a USCIS (not ICE!) asylum officer from the Houston asylum office will listen to your story. Based on the findings of that interview, it will be determined if you have qualified for “credible fear” of returning to your home country or not. Then, normally, should your interview prove positive, you’re supposed to be paroled to your sponsor’s address with an ankle monitor. If your result comes back negative, you can appeal the result before an immigration judge. As with everything else, you get 30 days to appeal. Getting a negative credible fear interview result means you’re ordered to be removed from the country. Hence, “Expedited Removal.” Overall, the entire process almost never took more than three months.
I recommend checking out the Florence Project guide to asylum to learn more about how the system “should” work, before proceeding with the rest of the article, because now I’m going to tear it all down.
In practice, credible fear is more of a roadblock for asylum seekers these days after all the changes to procedure DHS had begun implementing near the end of summer 2023. What credible fear really determines is if you can go on to see an immigration judge. What makes this a crapshoot is that there’s always a shortage of both asylum officers at USCIS and a shortage of quality translators who are able to tackle the sensitive task of accurately translating peoples’ asylum claims. As a result, across many detention centers, when the influx of detainees get too large, the wait times for your interview increase accordingly - up to 100 or 120 days in the most egregious cases, like the poor schmucks that got stuck down in Mississippi, or we happy few of Denver Contract.
Now, normally, if you’ve got your shit together, getting a credible fear interview date should be a relatively happy occasion. That’s supposed to be your ticket out of detention. In reality, it’s a nerve-wracking experience until you get your result. Asylum officers at USCIS are generally more concerned about past harm rather than future persecution (which is more up the Immigration Court’s alley) which incentivizes people to exaggerate or falsify claims of past torture or beatings just to get through the interview. This seriously harms the asylee’s credibility should the cross examination get too tough at the later asylum hearing in court. However, not sticking to the USCIS’ strict criteria may result in being ordered to be removed, so people are basically incentivized to lie through their teeth up until the very final hearing from the very start. This means that although asylum law is rather broad and flexible in what fits the legal definition of persecution and credible fear, those who went through the interview and went on to win in court may have lied at some point or another. That is not to say those people are undeserving of asylum - rather the inconsistency between the systems essentially forces people to lie in court because the alternative is getting deported. If your country is like mine, they don’t take too kindly to people leaving the place to seek asylum abroad, this system actually causes people to suffer persecution and mistreatment and torture back home.
I also mentioned a lack of good translators. With the sheer amount of languages out there in the world, when you think about it, certain detainees going through Expedited Removal would be stuck waiting years for their interviews. Hence why certain people from certain countries either never get detained full stop, or they just get released after an arbitrary period. This ultimately makes detention and deportation a question of convenience and optics more than anything. However, the most immediate concern detainees have is poor translation, causing negative interview outcomes. I’ve personally seen so many examples of this after a certain point it became funny rather than sad. One situation that continues to stick out in my mind is the case of a Russian national from my batch of entrants. State Security had used him as the patsy for a case concerning a theft of some 1.2 million rubles (around $12,000) and the interpreter somehow turned it into, “I stole 1.2 million.” He got an insta-negative and was labeled a criminal and was deported within the next couple of months after an immigration judge in Texas chose to trust a certified, sworn-in interpreter because he simply must be competent, over the word of a person determined to be a con-man by the USCIS. It’s not like the government can make mistakes sometimes or anything.
The asylum officers themselves are not exactly the sharpest tools in the US government’s shed, either. While CBP and ICE officers failing middle school geography is something of a running gag among immigrants at this point, asylum officers from the USCIS are just as bad. Not only credible fear interviews are exhausting and terrifying because detainees among other things cannot have their attorneys present during them, they are also infuriating at times.
“What languages other than Russian do you speak?”
Azerbaijani.
“I’m not talking about your tribe’s language.”
It’s a country.
[Confused silence.]
“Where on the world map is it located, if it really exists?”
- Actual quote! These words have been said by a US government employee tasked with talking to people from all over the world.
Another issue caused by the screwed up incentives of the credible fear process is the way the USCIS asylum officers are drilled. They’re trained to look for “inconsistencies” within peoples’ stories and be on the lookout for stories that are “suspiciously similar” or structured in a way that fits a “common mold”. The issue here is twofold, 1: realistically, persecution in general trends towards developing along similar lines to begin with; 2: it incentivizes asylum workers to use a cheat-sheet as opposed to analyzing what is actually being said.
After receiving numerous interview transcripts and listening to interviewees, I came to the conclusion that asylum officers really just look for key phrases and frequently guide the interviewees toward saying what they wish to hear. Now, what they want can be a real crapshoot here. If the asylum worker doesn’t feel like giving you positive, they can easily bury you under a line of questioning that is really only tangentially related to your actual case but supposedly shows “inconsistencies” in your story. For example, the USCIS loves handing out negatives if the interviewee has at some point naturalized in the country they’re fleeing as opposed to being born in it, even if they had spent their entire life in it. Really, whether or not your interview ends up being positive or negative is just as much up to luck as anything else in this headass system. Some people got negatives because the USCIS asylum officer interviewing them failed their geography classes and thinks that all countries that end in “stan” are under Taliban rule, so the officer just went and ticked off the “security threat” box without really giving it much thought. Seeing “Kazakhstan” get turned variously into “Kurdistan” or “Pakistan” was my favorite USCIS error, right after “Backstroke of the West”-tier mistranslations like, “the police beat me off for 24-plus hours.”
In the end, far from being the “sieve” the EOIR does admittedly need with the ever-increasing number of asylum seekers, the credible fear system seems to actually ruin the lives of those who really need asylum and lets through those whose interview hit the most tags. It’s glorified Search Engine Optimization (SEO), except instead of making google unnavigable, it kills people.
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NOTES FROM THE AUTHOR
Originally I wanted to continue ripping into ICE and their flimsy justifications for holding people for so long, but I realized it’d be better to provide an overview of the Asylum system, starting with credible fear. Part 3 will also focus on poking holes in the system based on fire-hand experience, and I intend on explaining and detailing more CBP One ridiculousness. Obviously this topic is expansive and complex, so expect these articles to sometimes go back-and-forth between topics, or zoom in and out when it comes to certain issues. My beta-readers are my fellow inmates and they keep remembering the craziest shit from their own experience dealing with ICE, CBP, & EOIR, so keeping concise and to the point is very tricky. There’s just too much stupid. I wish I could just transplant what I know magically on paper but I have to do with a pen for now.
I intend on dropping back down on the ground and describing the actual detention conditions eventually. There’s a lot of plain old nasty as opposed to institutional dumbassery so expect to be variously grossed out and outraged. Unless you get off on gay rape stories, in which case sort yourself out, you 14 year-old fujoshit (look it up if you don’t know).
Speaking of detention centers, Talton, the detention telephone contractor, recently took our 13 free calls a week. Ostensibly it’s because it was a charitable COVID-19 measure and now that COVID’s “done” they’re back to normal again, which is charging people from bumfuck nowhere 35 cents per minute for calling mom and 13 cents for calling a girlfriend in the states. How very nice of them. Again, DHS expects us to prepare for court like this.
See you in the next one.
Peace out,
Iggy
