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Investigating What Happens to Refugees in
INS Detention
This is the kind of story that ‘many of us entered journalism to do.’
INS Coverage
By Rick Tulsky
No one really doubted why
Ponnampalam Kailasapillai had
made a desperate effort to flee
his native Sri Lanka in 1996 in search of
a new life in Canada. Like many Tamils,
Kailasapillai and his family found themselves
caught in the midst of the long
and bloody civil war between the ruling
government and militant members
of the Tamil minority. A farmer in the
contested part of the country,
Kailasapillai described encountering
repeated abuses and detentions both
from government troops who mistrusted
his allegiance and from rebels
who demanded support.
And so, that September, the slight
farmer, then 46, set out on the journey
to Toronto, on the other side of the
universe. There, he hoped to settle in
the growing Tamil community where
his brother had made a new life and
then arrange for his wife and daughters
to follow. He made his way to Switzerland
and then to Dulles Airport, outside
Washington, D.C. But as he sought
to transfer planes one more time, alert
inspectors of the Immigration and Naturalization
Service (INS) discovered that
Kailasapillai’s passport was not his own
and took him into custody.
There, he was sent to a jail in Virginia
and forced to navigate the U.S.
asylum system if he wished to avoid
being sent back to Sri Lanka. He remained
locked up as Immigration Judge
Joan Churchill denied him asylum in
1996, ruling that although the Tamil
had a credible fear for his safety, the
violent conditions of Sri Lanka did not
amount to the kind of persecution intended
under asylum law.
Though he wanted only to make his
way to Canada, Kailasapillai remained
locked up, in one Virginia jail after
another, as the weeks turned into
months turned into years. The American
University Law Clinic attempted to
help him navigate his freedom, but
U.S. officials continued to oppose his
release, even as his psychologists
warned that Kailasapillai’s mental condition
was deteriorating because of
posttraumatic stress disorder caused
by his previous detentions in Sri Lanka.
It was not until April 2001 that INS
officials would finally release
Kailasapillai, when Justice Department
officials finally reversed themselves and
ruled that he could go free as long as he
went on to Canada—as he always intended.
In midafternoon on April 3,
after clearing the Canadian border at
Niagara Falls, Kailasapillai finally was
reunited with his brother. He was four
and a half years late.
Covering the INS in a
Systemic Way
The case of Kailasapillai would seem to
be precisely the kind of issue that makes
a free press so valuable: a vulnerable,
harmless person who wanted only freedom
and safety and instead had become
a victim of a harsh and arbitrary
system. Even better, at issue was a
system that went to the very heart of
how well America served as the beacon
of freedom and justice.
In fact, Kailasapillai was one of thousands
of Sri Lankan Tamils who have
been locked up in the United States,
many for extended periods, as they
tried to escape to safety in Canada. And
Sri Lankans were only a small percentage
of the thousands of people who
undertook great risks to flee danger in
their homeland, only to be locked up
with the threat of being sent back to
whatever they may face back home.
For better or worse, I became involved
in asylum issues in 1997, after
having read articles by New York Times
reporter Cecilia Dugger and columns
by Anthony Lewis [see Lewis’s story on
page 25] with some horror stories involving
asylum seekers. I called Lewis
to seek his views about the need for
someone to explore what was happening
on a more systemic basis. He was
totally encouraging.
In early 1998, I undertook such a
project through an Alicia Patterson
Foundation Fellowship. Two years
later, I had found a system that failed to
fully ensure that refugees fleeing desperate
situations could count on protection
in the United States:
• In 56 cases that were reviewed as
part of the project, asylum seekers
won their cases only after spending
more than one year in custody once
they arrived in the United States
seeking help.
• One of the most significant factors in
whether asylum seekers would win
their cases was the luck of which
administrative immigration judge
was assigned to hear the case. An
analysis of more than 175,000 cases
heard by 219 different judges
showed extreme disparities in how
asylum cases were decided: Some
administrative judges granted more
than half the cases they heard, while
others were granting fewer than five
percent of the cases.
• One third of asylum seekers were
left to present their case without an
attorney; many have little or no familiarity
with English or with the
legal standard for asylum. A
Georgetown University study deter-
Nieman Reports / Winter 2002 5