http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0306-11.htm
Published on Thursday, March 6, 2003 by TomPaine.com Not Welcome Here Feds Now Arbitrarily Turning Away Foreigners At Airports by Laura Flanders In the last few days, I've received news of an Irish activist, an Australian professor and a Toronto mom -- all barred at the border from entering the United States. It's beginning to seem a whole lot like the Wild West at U.S. airports and pretty soon no one is going to dare come visit us at all. On Saturday, I got a call from Deirdre McAliskey. Deirdre is the daughter of the legendary Irish civil rights activist, Bernadette Devlin McAliskey. McAliskey, who's been traveling to this country regularly since 1969, was the youngest woman ever elected to the British Parliament; she's been a tireless crusader for civil rights in her own country and this one. Bernadette's against the war in Iraq, and I've never heard her say a good word about George W., but that's not why she was stopped by Immigration and Naturalization Service officers in Chicago on Feb. 21. By all accounts, it seems that she was stopped because immigration officers are out of control. Mother and daughter were coming to New York for a holiday. They'd snagged a cheap flight that took them through O'Hare. Coming from Dublin, passengers go through U.S. immigration before getting on the plane. The two had been cleared for travel. But hours later, when they arrived stateside, they were surrounded by INS officials who told them they had received orders to send Bernadette straight home. Deirdre was permitted to carry on to New York where she related the following story: After they'd grabbed our passports out of my hands, one of the officers told Mommy, "'We've a fax from our agents in Dublin. It says you're a potential or real threat to the United States.'" During the dispute that followed, Deirdre says one INS officer used what she called "very thinly veiled threats" against her mother, including threats to arrest and jail her. One officer, she says "pulled his chair right up to mommy and I heard him say 'Don't make my boss angry. I saw him fire a shot at a guy last week and he has authority to shoot.'" A few hours later, this "55-year old granny with a gammy leg," as she describes herself, was finger-printed, photographed and forced back on a plane against her will. Officials at the Justice Department, the INS and the State Department refuse to confirm whether or not McAliskey's name appears on some "unwanted alien" list, or even if such an "undesireables" list exists. But an INS official who spoke anonymously to Newsday that week said McAliskey was "returned based on an expired visa waiver" and alleged that in 1983, she'd been banned from the United States. This explanation makes no sense. A so-called "visa waiver" (which substitutes for a visa for people visiting from certain privileged countries) doesn't expire -- you sign it at the airport -- and Bernadette was never denied entry into the United States. In 1983, she inquired about a visa to speak at a rally for an Irish prisoner, and when she was told she wouldn't get one, she didn't apply. She says she has a letter from the State Department to that effect. So why is that same State Department telling reporters that she was ever "banned" when it's not true? And who sent a fax to Chicago, just hours after U.S. authorities in Dublin let her through? The McAliskeys think the officials in Chicago had no idea who they were, but that doesn't make the situation better, it makes it worse. "If this can happen to us," says Deirdre, "who else is it happening to?" As it turns out, since I first reported this story, I've heard about two others, in just the last few days. An aboriginal activist and University of Melbourne professor, Marcia Langton from Australia, was barred from the United States, supposedly for failing to reveal on entry papers that she had once been arrested in New York. But Langton, 51, who was visiting the University of California to deliver a lecture, has travelled to the United States without trouble on many occasions since her arrest in 1970. There's a statute of limitations on having to reveal past arrest records on visa applications, and that long ago expired in her case. Also at O'Hare, a Toronto woman on her way home from visiting her parents in India was denied access to a lawyer, threatened with jail by INS officers and then deported -- not to Toronto where she lives, has two children and a job as a loan officer, but to India, the country of her birth. And that was after INS destroyed her passport -- which they insisted was fake -- and humiliated her in the airport. INS has yet to explain why Berna Cruz's passport, which she says is in order, was perfectly acceptable to immigration offiicials in Toronto, India, and on recent trips to Boston, New York and Spain. These three stories have been written up in their home-country papers. The news is harder to find right here. So it remains unclear. Just who does the United States government consider a threat today? And what private information is making it into INS databanks? Do authorities in airports operate under procedures that permit threats and intimidation? If the INS is giving trouble to people with public followings, who knows what they're doing to the ones whose names we do not recognize. Laura Flanders is the host of Working Assets Radio, heard on KALW-FM in San Francisco, and author of Real Majority, Media Minority: The Cost of Sidelining Women in Reporting. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
