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INS Coverage
be interviewed. (Permission is required,
but can be granted either by parents or
the director of a detention center. In
this case, it never was.)
Children Are Wary of
Journalists
Children in detention are also often
not trustful of reporters, so establishing
trust was a delicate undertaking.
Often the minors had fled dangerous
circumstances and oppression only to
be traumatized further in this country.
The jails that many were kept in were
not the safe haven that they had imagined,
so they became suspicious of
everyone, including reporters.
In other cases they were afraid of
retribution. Juan Carlos, a 17-year-old
Salvadoran who fled his country last
year, was one of those. When I first
interviewed him after he was released
from a juvenile jail in Arizona, he was
still hesitant to divulge even his last
name, where he was from, and some of
the specific details of his life. He was
scared that after speaking with a reporter
he would be discovered by forces
that had driven him from his country.
Any talk of having his picture taken was
immediately dismissed. Like many of
the children I interviewed, he was
placed in a detention center filled with
American criminals and was held without
access to an attorney for months.
Carlos was hesitant to discuss those
details until we’d had many conversations,
which happened after he was
released and awaiting his asylum hearings.
That I was able to have this series
of conversations allowed him eventually
to open up and talk honestly about
his experience. We first started with a
phone interview, and then we had two
successive face to face meetings in
which he grew progressively more comfortable
with me. It was this human
contact that gave us the ability to get to
the heart of his story.
Despite the difficulty in gaining access
to the youths—and in some cases
in getting them to open up—the resulting
stories complimented congressional
lawmakers’ efforts at addressing
the issue of INS treatment of minors.
During special senate hearings and
private interviews with congressional
members, children not only told of
hardships in their home countries but
also about their INS isolation here in
the United States. By February 2002,
enough momentum had been gained
on Capitol Hill that reforms were made
in INS policies and procedures regarding
undocumented minors.
Reader feedback about such stories
lets journalists know that their relentless
digging through what seemed at
first—in the case of the Tanzanian Boy
Scouts—to be a straightforward news
story constituted a public service. By
doing what journalists are trained to
do—asking good questions of public
officials, finding examples of where a
public institution is broken, and remaining
skeptical until all the evidence
is gathered—reporters gave voice to
neglected people who, in some cases,
were afraid to speak about how they
were being treated. ■
Chris L. Jenkins is a metro staff
writer for The Washington Post.
jenkinsc@washpost.com
The Press Paid Little Attention When the
Immigration Act Was Passed
By personalizing cases of injustice, a columnist connects readers to its consequences.
By Anthony Lewis
Mary Anne Gehris was brought
to this country from Germany
when she was a year old. She
grew up in the South and sounds it.
But she never did anything about becoming
an American citizen until she
was 33, in 1999. She filled out the
forms, and in October she got an envelope
from the Immigration and Naturalization
Service (INS) in the mail.
She expected that it was a notice
telling her when and where she would
be sworn in. Instead, the letter told her
that she was targeted for deportation.
Why? In 1988, she pulled a woman’s
hair in a quarrel over a man. Georgia
prosecutors charged her with battery,
a misdemeanor. On the advice of a
public defender, she pleaded guilty.
She received a one-year sentence, suspended
for a year’s probation.
Such sa guilty plea was not a ground
for deportation at the time. But eight
years later, in the Immigration Act of
1996, Congress defined such trivial misdemeanors,
with a one-year sentence,
as “aggravated felonies” requiring deportation
of the offender. And the statute
was applied retroactively.
I wrote a column for The New York
Times about the case of Mary Anne
Gehris. It embarrassed the INS, whose
top officials really understood that such
outrageous deportation cases should
not be brought. But in the end the
Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles
saved Gehris. It pardoned her for her
hair-pulling crime, commenting that it
wished Washington would find ways to
“bring some measure of justice” to such
cases and use “the nation’s resources
more appropriately.”
Nieman Reports / Winter 2002 25