The roots of a hostage crisis

The angry Cuban detainees in Louisiana are just some of the illegal immigrants trapped in the INS's permanent limbo.

By Robert Bryce and Lisa Tozzi

Dec 20, 1999 | Frustrated prisoners, tough immigration policies and money-hungry local officials combined to create the powder keg that erupted last week in St. Martinville, La.

The drama began last Monday when five Cuban-born prisoners armed with homemade weapons seized control of part of the parish jail. They threatened to kill their hostages -- including the warden and three prison guards -- if they were not set free. The siege ended Saturday when the hostage-takers freed their prisoners and surrendered, in exchange for the promise of safe passage to Cuba.

It is an unusual ending to the six-day standoff that shined a spotlight on thousands of otherwise forgotten prisoners -- the roughly 2,400 Cubans caught in a prison twilight zone. In Immigration and Naturalization Service lingo, they are "non-removables" -- inmates who cannot be deported because the U.S. doesn't have diplomatic relations with their countries. Nor can the prisoners be released. In 1996, Congress passed a law requiring the INS to incarcerate criminal aliens until they can be deported.

But for the Cubans in St. Martinville, and more than 3,600 other non-removable inmates from countries like Iraq, Libya, Vietnam, Iran, Syria, Cambodia and Laos, deportation is not an option. Even if they have already served their criminal sentences, non-deportable inmates are forced to serve a second indeterminate sentence -- sometimes for life. One Cuban involved in the St. Martin Parish takeover says he has been in jail 13 years awaiting deportation to Cuba. INS and prison officials have not been able to confirm his story.

INS detainees have become the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. prison population. In 1995, the agency had 6,600 inmates in custody. Today, the agency has more than 17,000. The non-deportable segment of the population is also soaring. A year ago, the INS had 2,800 non-removables. Today it has 3,600.

While the INS says non-deportables make up only a small segment of its detainees, officials admit that their detention creates an important revenue stream for local communities.

The crackdown on detainees has so overwhelmed INS's own detention centers, that the agency is paying local facilities -- like the St. Martin Parish Correctional Center -- millions of dollars each year to board its prisoners. But the local jails are often ill-equipped to deal with the inmates, and that lack of preparedness likely contributed to the current standoff, say human rights watchdogs and immigration advocates.

"You see in letter after letter from prisoners the level of frustration, the level of depression that comes from years of indefinite detention," says Allyson Collins, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. The Washington, D.C.-based international human rights organization issued a lengthy report in September 1998 titled "Locked Away: Immigration Detainees in Local Jails in the United States," which chastised the INS for warehousing its prisoners in local jails for indefinite periods of time. The organization contends that along with substantial sums of money, the INS is surrendering the welfare of indefinite detainees to officials of small-town jails which in most cases, are not subject to a uniform set of guidelines and are not regularly monitored.

Next Page: Detainees check in, but they don't check out

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