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INS Coverage
rant this type of coverage…. Obviously
there has to be a reason to disrupt the
routine at the Krome facility.”
A flurry of letters going up to the INS
commissioner followed. Amnesty International
wrote to the district director:
“If access to Krome has been denied
to reporters and others, we
question why this has occurred at a
time when concerns about conditions
there have been expressed publicly by
detainees, by advocates, and in the
media.” The agency finally relented.
And while INS media access policy gives
wide latitude to the district director in
structuring press pools, the INS’s concession
simply confirmed that its original
decision had been intended to obstruct
any independent investigations.
Not one of the original 11 requesters
was part of the group allowed in, and
only one of the original media organizations
was included.
The pattern has been repeated
around the country. When the ACLU
was investigating the Varick Street detention
facility in New York, the INS
refused access to the housing areas. A
corrections expert and former warden
who was assisting the group said that
he had “never experienced [that] in
over 39 years of professional work in
facilities including Alcatraz and Marian,”
the ACLU later reported.
All this may seem like ancient history
to those who first became aware of
the INS and its detention system after
September 11. The agency’s culture of
lawlessness and disinformation was in
place long before John Ashcroft became
Attorney General, though it is no
secret that under Ashcroft the Justice
Department has taken full advantage
of our national trauma to codify the
excessive powers it has been working
toward for many years. At least the
INS’s secrecy is less of a secret now.
The agency is more shameless now,
too. Recently the Newark District INS
decided that I was asking the wrong
questions of the wrong people. Back in
April, I had requested and was granted
permission to interview a Pakistani
detainee who was a victim of the post-
September 11 dragnet. Anser
Mehmoud was picked up from his home
by the INS in October. Agents told his
wife that he would probably be home
the next day since the FBI had already
questioned and cleared him. He then
spent more than four months in solitary
confinement at MDC, the federal
prison in Brooklyn, though he was
never charged with anything other than
immigration violations. He was later
moved to the Passaic County Jail in
Paterson, New Jersey, where I met him,
before he was sent back to Karachi.
The day after I interviewed
Mehmoud, I got a call from Newark INS
Public Affairs officer Kerry Gill. He asked
me whether it was true that when I
visited the jail, I had asked the on-site
INS official how many special interest
detainees were being held there. When
I said yes (I hadn’t gotten any answer,
of course), Gill went on at length to tell
me that my question was “inappropriate,”
since the Attorney General had
ordered the district director not to
disclose these numbers. He added that
I knew this, having been on a media
tour of the Hudson County jail when
the district director herself said so.
Although I was more than a little
shocked by Gill’s reaction, I tried to
have a reasonable conversation with
him and explain to him that the Attorney
General’s orders to his subordinates
did not apply to journalists. We
actually had a conversation about
whether journalists are obligated to
stop asking questions when government
officials say that they won’t answer
them.
Gill also alleged that I had violated
INS detention standards concerning
media visitation. When I asked which
standard he was referring to, he decided
that our conversation was over.
From now on, he said, my requests for
visits with detainees in the Newark
district, by order of the district director,
would only be permitted when an
INS public affairs official was available
to accompany me to the jail (though
the official would not be present during
the actual interviews). I wrote to
District Director Andrea Quarantillo,
asking her to remove this restriction.
She has refused, directing me, as Gill
had, to the INS Web site where I could
find INS detention standards on media
visits. Like Gill, she failed to cite any
specific standard that I had supposedly
violated. In refusing to lift the restrictions
placed on me, Quarantillo wrote:
“I have found no evidence or indication
on your part that you plan to
observe the agency’s procedures for
the release of official information.”
The arrogance at work here affects
all of us. Interference with journalists
does not compare to the harm the
agency can do to the prisoners it is
hiding, but these two forms of repression
are connected. The New Jersey
INS banned Jesuit Refugee Service Bible
classes in its Elizabeth Detention Center
after teachers and their detained
students discussed a taboo topic: detention.
More recently, District Director
Quarantillo pulled out of a public
meeting set up by immigrant advocacy
groups when the organizers refused to
comply with the INS condition that
journalists be forbidden from participating.
It should be clear that the Department
of Justice cannot decide which
questions reporters can ask or of whom
we can ask them. I believe that we
should challenge this lawlessness head
on, and a number of fine reporters
have been doing so. But others are not
willing to lose the limited access they
now have by advocating for more. Back
in Miami years ago, I contacted The
Associated Press reporter whom the
INS had asked to direct the pool tour of
Krome. He was glad to hear how the
tour had come about, saying he knew
that the INS must have been up to
something to offer a tour when he had
not requested one. Then he got nervous
and asked me not to use his name.
He said he still needed the INS to
return his calls. ■
Mark Dow is a poet and freelance
writer. He won a Project Censored
Award for his reporting on INS
detention and is working on “American
Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration
Prisons” for the University of California
Press (2003). He would be grateful
to reporters willing to speak with
him (anonymously or otherwise)
about their experiences with the INS.
mdow@igc.org
12 Nieman Reports / Winter 2002