GAIUTRA BAHADUR

After 3.5 Years in Jail, Takky Zubeda Can Begin the Life She Sought in America
By Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

Takky Zubeda stepped off a prison van to freedom in the United States of America on Friday afternoon.

She emerged with two other detainees at the Greyhound station in this faded manufacturing town in the middle of Pennsylvania. This is how, every day, the York County Prison releases its inmates to lives in the outside world.

For Zubeda, an asylum seeker from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, that outside world is also a country she barely knows – except for the 1,245 days she spent in one of its county jails.

Zubeda has been locked up longer than any other asylum seeker at the York facility.

Her husband, Ndume Ibochwa, a U.S. citizen who lives in Minneapolis, was at the Greyhound station to receive her. Five hours earlier, he had taken a bus from a budget motel where he spent Thursday night. It was one last leg of their journey toward a life together in the United States.

Zubeda’s release, ordered by an immigration judge at a hearing Thursday, marked the end of a 31/2-year odyssey through a system that critics say treats asylum seekers like criminal defendants. But unlike those charged with a crime, foreigners who flee to U.S. shores without a valid passport or visa don’t have the right to have their detentions here reviewed by a judge. Nor do they have a right to a public defender.

Immigration officers can grant parole to those who can prove their identities, don’t pose a danger, have ties here, and are not flight risks. However, a recent report by the lawyers group Human Rights First concluded that, especially since Sept. 11, many asylum seekers who meet the guidelines are denied parole.

“Ultimately, Takky Zubeda’s case shows us that our immigration policy can work,” said Jonathan Feinberg, a civil-rights lawyer who worked with pro-bono lawyers from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, known as HIAS, and Council Migration Service of Philadelphia to free Zubeda.

“But the case ought to make us think very seriously about a policy of mandatory detention,” he said. “Does it really represent the best of American values to detain someone like Takky Zubeda for 31/2 years, especially after what she went through to get here?”

Zubeda was detained after arriving at Newark’s airport with someone else’s passport in December 2000. She told an immigration agent she had come to visit her brother and attend Bible school – a lie that would hurt her case for asylum. She later told a harrowing tale that, according to State Department and human rights groups, is common in her region of the Congo.

Zubeda, 29, said she was gang-raped by rebel soldiers who then beheaded her father and brothers. They set fire to her family house while her mother and sister were still inside and took Zubeda to a military camp in the jungle, where she and other women were forced to cook and clean and have sex with their captors. She escaped to neighboring Tanzania after a week and, with the help of a church worker, made her way to the United States, where her husband was resettled as a refugee 13 years ago.

Yesterday, the couple saw each other outside the walls of a prison for the first time since their wedding in Tanzania five years ago.

“Hi, baby, how are you?” Ibochwa, 43, asked Zubeda.

A silver cross hung down from her neck, and she carried a duffel bag with some clothes and two boxes with books from Bible and high school equivalency classes she took in the jail.

Ibochwa put an arm around his wife. Shy around him, she smiled and lowered her eyes. They brought her baggage into the Greyhound waiting room and, as Ibochwa bought two tickets on the 7:15 p.m. bus to Philadelphia, Zubeda bolted up to make a call on a pay telephone.

She dialed Tania Tchitembo, another asylum seeker. The women met in a minimum-security dorm in the jail. Tchitembo, now living at a shelter for refugees in York, was released Tuesday after five months in detention.

“Ndungu yangu nimetoka nje leo,” Zubeda rattled away in Swahili: “Sister, I just get out today.”

Five minutes later, Tchitembo was at the station, and the two embraced, chattering.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” Zubeda said. “I feel like it is a dream.”

The couple will spend part of the weekend at the home of yet another freed asylum seeker in Northeast Philadelphia. Irina Bougaeva, who fled Uzbekistan, spent three months at the York jail. She befriended Zubeda before being released in September.

“She gave me faith,” Bougaeva said. “She gave me hope.”

Zubeda celebrated in Germantown yesterday at a backyard barbecue with the lawyers who stuck with her, for no money, for many months and even years as her case moved slowly through the immigration and court systems.

She looked a little disoriented over her plate of barbecued chicken, Caesar salad and plantains. “She’s not really here yet,” Ibochwa said. “Used to the same people in the same place for so long.”

A guest airlifted out of Liberia years ago, in the midst of a bloody civil war, told Zubeda that she would be fine. The mind, she said, snaps back from trauma when you least expect it.

Zubeda simply smiled.

The judge who ordered Zubeda freed said she would likely be detained at the airport and physically abused, even raped, if sent back to the Congo. He ruled the same way more than two years ago, but immigration authorities appealed. Then, a year ago, the Third Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals sent the case back to the judge, Walt Durling.

The Department of Homeland Security dropped its fight to deport her to the Congo on Thursday, and Durling apologized to Zubeda for her lengthy detention.

Last night, the couple planned to take the bus to Minneapolis, where Ibochwa lives in a two-bedroom apartment with his cousin and mans presses that print USA Today.

Money is tight, and it is unclear whether Zubeda will be able to work because she does not yet have legal status. But none of that matters to them now..

“I’m there for her,” Ibochwa said. “I don’t worry if she can work or not. For now, I want her to relax, for us to be enjoying each other’s faces for a long time.”

Zubeda, who learned English in prison and is close to earning her high school diploma, wants to go to college and become a nurse.

But, even as her own journey to freedom finally ended, she does not forget that, five miles away, at the York County Prison, a friend has inherited her title as the asylum seeker held the longest at the jail.

Linda Botchway, a Ghanaian who is among thousands of asylum seekers jailed nationwide, has been locked up for at least three years.

By Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

For more than three years, a pay phone at the York County Prison has been Takky Zubeda’s lifeline, connecting her to her husband and to her peace of mind. She is here – prisoner No. 62025 in a bleached-out jail in rural Pennsylvania – not because she committed a crime. Rather, she says she fled one, a gang rape by soldiers who also decapitated her father.

Zubeda has been locked up for 1,242 days – longer than any other immigration detainee at the prison – as her request for asylum in the United States has snaked its way through the system. She has been denied parole three times, despite the home awaiting her with her husband, a U.S. citizen, in Minneapolis. A judge could release her Thursday by granting asylum.

The story of the 29-year-old from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire) is one piece of the larger narrative of how the United States, after Sept. 11, has become a tougher place for foreigners.

A January report by the lawyers’ group Human Rights First concluded that, especially since the terror attacks, asylum-seekers held by immigration authorities are often denied parole without a close look at the details of their cases.

A spokesman for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the federal agency had no room or money to lock up more than 20,000 people a day – at a nationwide average of $90 a day, that amounts to more than $650 million a year – and denied parole only to protect the public from criminals, terrorists or threats to health.

“It’s just like your house,” spokesman Garrison Courtney said. “If somebody knocks on your door and you don’t know who that person is, you don’t leave them unsupervised alone in your house. Unless you can determine who that person is, you’re leaving yourself vulnerable.”

Detention often automatic

The federal government automatically detains people who ask for asylum at airports or border crossings and lack a valid passport or visa. Many who flee turmoil at home do not have proper travel documents and end up in county jails or immigration detention centers in the United States.

According to guidelines overseen by the Department of Homeland Security, most asylum-seekers should be paroled after showing they are who they say they are, do not pose a danger, have community ties in the United States, and are not a flight risk.

But according to the report “In Liberty’s Shadow,” asylum-seekers who meet the guidelines are not being released until they are ordered deported or granted asylum – and sometimes not even then. That has meant months or even years behind locked doors for some who turned to the United States as a haven. In one case, a Tibetan nun whom a judge granted asylum last fall spent months more in a Virginia prison because immigration authorities appealed the decision.

It is unclear how many asylum-seekers are detained nationwide or for how long. Congress requires the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to provide statistics on detained asylum-seekers to lawmakers every year and to the public when requested. The bureau, however, said it could not respond to a request made by The Inquirer on March 11 because of logistical problems. Congress is also awaiting that data.

Last month, York held about 47 asylum-seekers, 27 of them detained for more than six months, said Joseph Sallemi, head of deportations. York receives $4 million yearly from the federal government to house 800 detainees at $49 a day. Zubeda’s stay has cost U.S. taxpayers at least $60,000. The toll, for her, has been emotional.

Sitting near a pay phone in the women’s wing of the prison, Zubeda lowered her eyes and smiled shyly when asked about her husband, Ndume Ibohwa.

Thirteen years ago, Ibohwa, a political prisoner, escaped from jail and fled the regime of Mobutu Sese Seko, called by some “The Zairean Caligula.”

“At the time, the government was not playing,” said Ibohwa, 43, a refugee who was resettled in Minneapolis by the U.S. government and became a citizen this year. “They don’t play with people… . They can kill you at any time.”

Ibohwa returned to Africa in 1999 to marry the girl his family had chosen. He remembered Zubeda only as a pretty teenager from a nearby village. They had a small ceremony in neighboring Tanzania. Ibohwa could not risk returning home.

Then he had to surrender his new bride to the uncertainties of a civil war in Congo that has driven 300,000 to neighboring countries. Back in the United States, Ibohwa tried to bring Zubeda to him, but he could not give immigration officials her address; the chaos of the war kept the couple from corresponding, and he knew only that she was with his family. The next time Ibohwa heard his wife’s voice, nearly two years later, she was calling from a prison in the United States.

Shame and a damaging lie

The day Zubeda had to tell an immigration judge the events that drove her to board a plane to Newark, N.J., 10 months earlier with someone else’s passport, she begged her lawyer to keep Ibohwa out of the hearing.

“I was feeling so shamed,” she said. “He’s going to accept me? What’s going to happen?”

But Ibohwa was in the courtroom. For the first time, he heard his wife say her mother had been raped by soldiers. And he heard her say that, while there to care for the victim, she became one herself.

On Nov. 15, 2000, 10 soldiers barged into Zubeda’s family home in a rebel-controlled region. In the four months before, women’s rights groups counted 115 rapes there. Rape is a common weapon in Congo’s civil war, according to the State Department. The soldiers confronted Zubeda’s father about his plan to report his wife’s rape.

They made him watch as they raped Zubeda. When done, they decapitated her father and her two brothers with machetes and set fire to the house. Her mother and sister were still inside, Zubeda told the judge, when soldiers took her and several other women to a military camp in the jungle to cook, clean, and have sex with them.

A week later, she and other captives escaped by asking to use the toilet, which was outside the camp. They fled by foot and canoe to Tanzania, where a church worker gave Zubeda $100 and a passport and put her on a plane to the United States. On landing, she told an immigration agent that she had come to visit her brother and go to Bible school.

“If I see somebody wear uniform, it’s the same people as back home,” she explained. “I was really afraid.”

The lie – though so common in airport statements by asylum-seekers that the courts have warned against emphasizing them – hurt her case.

Contradictory testimony

The immigration judge at York, Walt Durling, denied Zubeda asylum. He said details of her testimony contradicted her written statement. She told him, for example, that her mother and sister had burned to death in their house. In her written statement, she said she did not know their fate. In an interview, Zubeda said she assumed the pair had perished in the fire – and learned only last year that her mother had escaped the fire and later died.

“The government of the Congo is a miserable excuse of a sovereign government,” Durling said in his ruling. “However, the Congo does not hold a monopoly on abusive treatment of its citizens, and I cannot grant [asylum]… on the mere fact of hailing from such a country.”

But Durling ruled that Zubeda should not be deported to Congo because she would likely be detained by the government and perhaps raped. He rebuked immigration authorities for taking six weeks to decide whether Zubeda had a credible fear of persecution.

Still, Zubeda remained in the minimum-security unit at York as the government appealed the judge’s order not to deport her.

“I live like I don’t have a home,” she said. “You don’t know what is going on in your life, and you don’t know when it’s going to be finished. I’m just asking for protection… . They say the U.S. is to protect people.”

An official with the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Zubeda had been denied parole because officials feared she would not show up for her hearing. There are about 250,000 asylum cases pending in the United States. Bureau officials say a significant number of those who are released skip their hearings. On Thursday, Zubeda will be escorted by prison guards to her hearing before Durling, who has been directed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit to reconsider her claims.

Meanwhile, another day will unfold for Zubeda in jail. The tether to her calm will be a telephone cord in the York common room. She calls Ibohwa once, twice, sometimes three times a day.

“Sometimes, I feel so sad, I just call him… and I feel better. I feel like to call again. To call again,” she said. “I tell him, ‘Don’t worry. I’m coming soon.’ ”

Follow-Up Story: Freed asylum seeker: ‘I feel like it is a dream’

© The Philadelphia Inquirer. All rights reserved.

By Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

The Takatu River is so slender a border between Guyana and Brazil that speedboat taxis skim across it in a minute. In the dry season, villagers ford it by jeep or even on foot. At Lethem, the official gateway into Guyana’s southwest, there is no checkpoint. Only a medicated sponge on the riverbank, which visitors from Brazil must step on to ward against foot-and-mouth disease, marks it as an international crossing.

For decades, garden-variety contraband has flowed across Guyana’s largely unpatrolled borders. Now, with crackdowns elsewhere, the remote regions of this South American nation of 700,000 have become part of the hidden highway for Latin American drug smuggling.

Cocaine destined for the United States is increasingly passing through this swatch of rain forest and sugarcane fields _ a mostly untouched paradise conjured as the mythical “El Dorado” by European explorers _ on its way from Colombia.

This deadly black market threatens finally to ruin a place independent only 38 years and already broken by poverty, racial tension, rigged elections, and soul-sapping emigration.

“There is believed to be significant drug trafficking through Guyana,” said Daniel Daley, a U.S. Embassy official in the capital, Georgetown. “As interdiction in Venezuela and Colombia have effect, the traffic in Guyana is likely to increase unless steps are taken to prevent that.”

A U.S. government report on the global drug trade in 2003 described Guyana as “a prime target for narcotics traffickers.” Several recent cases have shown how the country _ with its slack border controls, rampant corruption, and far-flung diaspora _ has become a transit area for drug smuggling.

In November, U.S. law-enforcement arrested cargo and baggage handlers at New York and Miami airports who had, over a year, unloaded tens of millions of dollars of drugs outside the eye of surveillance cameras.

More than 400 kilos (880 pounds) of cocaine had arrived on flights from Guyana and Jamaica in luggage and cargo boxes and under ice in a plane’s galley.

In May, a former Miss Guyana was arrested at a Toronto airport with $1 million of cocaine in bottles of lotion and in the false sides of her suitcase. And Guyanese ships bearing logs also carried $13 million of cocaine to England in May.

Cocaine seizures at Guyana’s main airport grew six times to 230 kilos (500 pounds) last year. About 200 couriers, some with U.S. passports, have been arrested there since 2002. Security workers now shake bottles of the country’s prized El Dorado rum because passengers have dissolved cocaine in it. Others have tried to smuggle tacolike “rotis” stuffed with the drug.

“We feel they’re not the real players,” said Leon Trim, the country’s anticrime chief. “We feel they’re just fetching the drugs. Most of the big guys, we haven’t really touched on them.”

The only case ever brought against a suspected drug lord was dismissed by Guyana’s highest court in 1996. Trim said prosecutors had presented only part of incriminating wiretaps from Canadian authorities. The evidence against the alleged kingpin, the owner of a department-store chain, has since disappeared.

In its journey through Guyana, cocaine has corrupted government officials and bankrolled a paramilitary squad responsible for vigilante killings. It has also introduced Uzi submachine guns _ and a climate of fear _ into a country where a sugarcane cutter’s scythe was once the most common weapon.

“We’re seeing more and more drug defendants walking away, because witnesses are not turning up,” said Steve Crossman, deputy British high commissioner. “You have to ask why.”

An Allentown, Pa., woman, among six U.S. citizens in prison on drug charges in Guyana, recently backed down from testifying against a Guyanese man.

“I don’t want any further trouble, here or at home,” Karen Chobot, face flushed, chin trembling, said in court last month. “I’m afraid of what he is capable of doing in the future.”

She told the judge she would not testify against the snackette owner who gave her the cocaine-laced food seized as she tried to leave Guyana in November. Still, Chobot, serving three years in prison, stood by her statement implicating him.

She said a Guyanese man she met in Allentown last year bought her a ticket to visit him and told her he would marry her. That promise fell apart, and on her way home, she carried a package for his supposed cousin, the snackette owner.

“I just want to go home,” she told her attorney, while holding a card with a Bible verse from her parents. “Please help me.”

The intimidation seems to extend beyond witnesses.

“You don’t know who to trust,” a police sergeant who asked that his name not be used said. “One day you make a report to your boss. The next day you might turn up dead.”

Guyana’s Stabroek News won’t investigate the alleged nexus of drugs, militias and government corruption. “No way,” said publisher David de Caires. “It’s too dangerous.”

The deputy director of the antidrug unit was riddled with bullets as he stopped to buy a newspaper on his way to work in 2002. Last year, 200 people, including drug agents, police and couriers, were slain.

“The number of killings is alarming,” said human-rights activist Mike McCormack. “The failure to arrest anyone is a little beyond belief.”

Race divides in almost every way in this former British colony, where sugar was king and slaves from Africa and bonded laborers from India were imported to grow it. Since then, these two main ethnic groups have been locked in a seesaw battle for power. Today, Indians run the ruling party; Africans control the army and the police.

Traffickers seem to have exploited that rift. Guyanese whisper that a “phantom army” outfitted by drug lords is responsible for many of the killings. They also say the squad serves the government, killing criminals the police and army won’t.

“If you start to use criminals to fight criminals, you become hopelessly compromised,” de Caires said. “After a while, you start to lose control. You then open a Pandora’s box of horror.”

Along the coast, machine guns signal the drug trade with their sporadic pop. The signs in the “Interior,” the hinterlands that make up most of Guyana, come under the cover of night. Villagers say that’s when planes pass overhead.

“You hear noise at night,” said Regina Simon, who lives miles outside Lethem. “In that direction, there’s no airport.”

Trim said cartels smuggled drugs into Guyana through secret airstrips or airdrops in the Interior and smuggle it out through Georgetown’s airports and seaports. He said the country simply did not have the personnel, surveillance or money to patrol its borders effectively.

“Given the resources we have, I think we’re doing a reasonable job,” he said.

President Bharrat Jagdeo asked President Bush for aid to fight drugs in October. But the United States has criticized the country’s record on drug control. Indeed, there are many in Guyana who murmur about whether their government can’t crack down on drugs _ or won’t.

“If not cooperation, there’s an understanding between major drug dealers and the government,” McCormack said. Some have called for Ronald Gajraj, the domestic affairs minister, to step down because he has failed to prosecute criminals. He did not return repeated calls for comment.

He “kept saying there was no crisis,” said Rhyaan Shah, head of a citizens group. “It’s like the Wild West. There’s no order, no discipline, no justice.”

By one estimate, the drug trade is a $175 million industry _ in a country where major exports such as sugar sell too cheaply and all goods and services garner only $700 million.

“Yes, people do make money from the drug industry,” said Col. Fairbairn Liverpool, antidrug coordinator for the Caribbean Community. “And they spread the money around. They have a ‘Robin Hood’ mentality.”

Drug lords also spread the money around to the government and police, he said. Bribed officials “talk about it. They don’t make money by being public servants.”

Ethnic struggle and socialist policies that led to food shortages have almost emptied Guyana. About one-third of the country’s natives live abroad. That has helped the drug trade _ with its reliance on networks across borders _ flourish.

Ronald Gajraj, the domestic affairs minister, has said some 600 deportees, criminals with U.S. street smarts and contacts, have remade the country into a portal for cocaine and a playground for its traffickers.

That, meanwhile, is likely to chase out more Guyanese. Lines outside the U.S. Embassy spill across the street, and many complain the country soon will be home to only the very young and the very old.

“Guyana did not become woebegone yesterday,” publisher de Caires said. “The drug trafficking is just a further complication. (Still,) I’d rather live under Lenin than Al Capone.”

© The Philadelphia Inquirer. All rights reserved.