When their military careers were cut short by the collapse of the Soviet system, Oleksiy Galushka and Victor Odnovyun pinned their hopes on promises of democracy in an independent Ukraine.
When their grass-roots activism made them targets of beatings, threats and jail by Ukrainian security forces, they fled west toward freedom.
But in March 1999, after a circuitous route through Argentina and Iceland, the two arrived at Kennedy Airport in New York, asked for asylum, and were promptly locked up. Instead of finding liberty, they joined thousands of other asylum-seekers who spend months to years in detention, including a Tibetan nun sent from Dulles International Airport in Washington to a rural jail in Virginia, and an Armenian activist dispatched from San Francisco airport to the jail in Yuba County, California.
Detention for such asylum-seekers has become increasingly automatic, arbitrary and open-ended since the Department of Homeland Security absorbed the Immigration and Naturalization Service last year, according to a new study made available yesterday by the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.
Even detainees with strong community ties, established identities and initial rulings in their favor are now routinely denied parole while their cases are pending, with no appeal possible, the report said.
"That's the most difficult part of detention -- they can keep us here as long as they want," Galushka, 35, said in an interview Tuesday inside the windowless 200-bed lockup in Queens where he and Odnovyun have spent most of their four-year-long detention.
The center is one of several run by the GEO Group, formerly Wackenhut Corrections Corp, under contract to the government.
But there are signs that such cases are beginning to trouble government officials. Asa Hutchinson, the Homeland Security Department's undersecretary for border security, said in an interview on Tuesday that he was not satisfied with the balance between security concerns and the protection of people seeking asylum.
"I want to make sure that we have the right policies in place," said Hutchinson, who indicated that his remarks were prompted in part by a Court TV movie to be shown next week, which dramatizes the case of an Afghan woman who fled the Taliban only to be jailed at the Queens detention center when she sought asylum.
The Lawyers Committee, which eventually helped the Afghan woman get her release, is discussing its report at screenings of the movie across the US this week. Hutchinson said initial detention was often necessary to establish the identity of refugees traveling with false papers, to make sure they are not a danger. But he said the administration needed to constantly recheck procedures.
"They can be imperfect in an individual case because of individual officers, or because of policy, and we have to constantly look at both," he said.
Hutchinson's response comes a week after the Bush administration began promoting temporary work permits for illegal immigrants, a stance that might seem at odds with its hard-line practices toward refugees from repression. The administration has also begun to release some of what it calls the "enemy combatants" held on Guantanamo Bay, after an international outcry.
Asylum-seekers and advocates said detention centers like the tan brick former warehouse in Queens are a little like local Guantanamos, in the sense that the asylum detainees have no way to know how long they will be locked up.
"We understand they want to protect America," said Odnovyun, 43, who works three hours a day in the jail kitchen for US$7 a week -- the price of a seven-minute telephone call to his teenage son in Ukraine. But, he said, if the US gives visas to terrorists and leaves "people who love America in the prison," the government is "throwing money in the garbage."
In a sense, the Ukrainians were among the lucky detainees, because they were paroled at one point, after three years of detention. But despite support from a score of citizens in York, Pennsylvania, where the two men lived and worked for 10 months, they were unexpectedly returned to detention seven months ago after an immigration hearing.
The reason? The government's lawyer decided to appeal the judge's ruling that the men were entitled to protection from deportation under the international Convention Against Torture. The judge had also ruled that they did not qualify for asylum because they could have stayed in Argentina, a finding the men are now appealing.
Immigration officials will not comment on specific cases. But the Lawyers Committee said that when the government recently denied the two men parole, it referred to them collectively as "she" -- a form-letter mistake that could indicate a blanket practice rather than case-by-case review.
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