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By Richard Read
INS Coverage
WATCHDOG
The Oregonian Investigates Mistreatment of Foreigners
Reporters uncover ‘a world of racism, sexism and questionable conduct.’
The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service sealed its distinction
as a clueless bureaucracy
last March when its contractor
mailed visa confirmations for two dead
September 11 hijackers. President Bush
called the action an inexcusable blunder.
Outrage over the incident contributed
to an overwhelming House vote
to abolish the INS and split its functions
between two bureaus.
But the agency’s slipshod, abusive
nature wasn’t so glaring two years before,
when reporter Julie Sullivan and
I examined mistreatment of foreigners
by INS officers in Portland, Oregon.
Were these isolated incidents, we wondered,
or did vindictive enforcement
and bureaucratic bungling typify the
agency’s work?
Working with two other reporters,
we answered that question in a six-part
series that exposed INS abuses of
power. The Oregonian is a regional
newspaper, but we parlayed the local
story into a national investigation.
Amanda Bennett, our editor, set demanding
standards of evidence for our
reporting. But the frustrations we had
as reporters in dealing with the INS
paled in comparison to the agonies
inflicted by the agency on foreigners
who lacked constitutional protection.
U.S. Representative Janice
Schakowsky, a Democrat from Illinois,
told us that people complained more
about the agency than anything else.
“The INS is like an onion,” she said.
“The more you peel it away, the more
you cry.”
Finding INS Mistreatment
men and technicians—arriving at Portland
International Airport. It turned
out that inspectors routinely made a
rejected foreigner take the next flight
back to Japan or South Korea. But if the
return flight had already departed by
the time the paperwork was completed,
the INS sent horrified foreigners in
handcuffs to the local county jail.
Earlier, Julie Sullivan had exposed
the plight of a Chinese girl held by the
INS in a county jail for weeks after
gaining political asylum. Jailers referred
to the 15 year old, held with five other
Chinese teenagers, as “the girl who
cries.”
Fear of the INS ran so deep among
victims of its harsh enforcement that
we often had trouble finding people
who would talk on the record. Acting
on a reader’s tip, I asked a moonlighting
South Korean journalist to track
down a Korean man who had been
rejected at the airport. Kong Hee-joon,
26, had flown to Portland to train computer
technicians. He found himself
handcuffed, jailed for two nights, unable
to contact his company or a lawyer,
and then sent home. “Just because
one document was missing,” Kong said,
“they treated me as a serious criminal.”
The stories got worse. INS inspectors
intercepted a Chinese businesswoman
at the airport, strip-searched
her, and jailed her for two nights before
deciding her passport was legitimate.
INS officers arrested the German
wife of an American citizen after her
visa expired: She was jailed, stripsearched,
and deported to Germany
without her breastfeeding daughter.
For every abusive INS officer we
found we met others who labored conscientiously
in an intractable system.
Overworked agency employees, constrained
by a harsh Immigration Act
passed by Congress in 1996, were
swamped by the sheer crush of people
trying to get into the United States.
In a previous era, The Oregonian
would have been content to focus its
resources on news coverage of these
My first tip about INS mistreatment
came in April 2000 from a local exporter
who said immigration inspectors
were citing visa technicalities to
reject foreigners—often Asian business-
Lee Fjelstad, vice president of Verbal Judo, trains Portland INS inspectors. Photo by
Motoya Nakamura/The Oregonian.
Nieman Reports / Winter 2002 27