Torture Victim, Expecting a U.S. Handshake, Was Given Handcuffs Instead...NYTimes
Molly Molloy
Torture Victim, Expecting a U.S. Handshake, Was Given Handcuffs Instead
Marco Coello, then a skinny 18-year-old high school student, was grabbed by plainclothes agents of the Venezuelan security services as he joined a 2014 demonstration against the government in Caracas.
They put a gun to his head. They attacked him with their feet, a golf club, a fire extinguisher. They tortured him with electric shocks. Then Mr. Coello was jailed for several months, and shortly after his release, he fled to the United States.
Human Rights Watch extensively documented his case in a report that year. The State Department included him in its own human rights report on Venezuela in 2015. With such an extensive paper trail of mistreatment in his home country, his lawyer, Elizabeth Blandon, expected a straightforward asylum interview when Mr. Coello appeared at an immigration office this April in Miami.
“I had this very naïve idea that we were going to walk in there and the officer was going to say, ‘It’s an honor to meet you,’” said Ms. Blandon, an immigration law expert in Weston, Fla.
Instead, he was arrested and taken to a detention facility on the edge of the Everglades. He was now a candidate for deportation. “Every time they would move me around, I would fear that they were going to take me to deport me,” said Mr. Coello, now 22.
Mr. Coello’s case drew extensive media coverage in both Miami and Caracas and, eventually, the intervention of Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. The senator helped secure Mr. Coello’s release, though he could still be deported.
The case may have been a sign of just how far the government is willing to go to carry out President Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
“It’s very unusual — almost unprecedented — that ICE would arrest an asylum applicant who is at a U.S.C.I.S. office waiting for their asylum interview,” said Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration law professor at Cornell Law School.
He was referring to two agencies that are part of the Department of Homeland Security but, as Mr. Coello discovered, have very different missions: United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, which handles citizenship and asylum cases, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which arrests people believed to be in the country without permission.
In the first three months of the Trump administration, ICE agents arrested some 41,000 people, an increase of nearly 40 percent over the same period last year. At the same time, the administration has expressed a desire to be stricter about allowing people into the country with asylum claims, as most such claims are ultimately rejected.
When Mr. Coello was taken to the Krome detention center, another asylum seeker was already there.
Denis Davydov, who fled Russia as an H.I.V.-positive gay man, had been on his way back to San Jose, Calif., from a vacation in the United States Virgin Islands. Though it is an American territory, travelers heading to the mainland must pass through Customs and Border Protection — also part of Homeland Security — and when Mr. Davydov did so, he was arrested. Agents flew him to Miami and sent him to Krome, shackled and chained at the wrists and ankles.
Despite his pending asylum case, Mr. Davydov still appeared in the system as having overstayed his original visa. “They would not let him go because he would still be found inadmissible to the United States,” said Jaime I. Ruiz, a spokesman for Customs and Border Protection. Mr. Davydov, like Mr. Coello, has been released but still faces potential deportation.
“My fear is that going forward this is business as usual,” said Aaron C. Morris, executive director at Immigration Equality, a nonprofit group that provides free legal representation to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. The group is handling more than 650 open asylum cases. “We’re doing our best to advise the community about this new danger without scaring them all.”
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Mr. Coello’s case is all the more striking given that Mr. Trump has attacked Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, who has used antiterrorism laws and military tribunals to prosecute political rivals. Mr. Trump has even called for the release of the opposition leader Leopoldo López from prison. Mr. Coello said that his Venezuelan interrogators tried to coerce him into implicating Mr. López but that he refused.
Mr. Coello’s problems in the United States most likely began when he became drowsy working as a driver for the ride-hailing service Lyft and pulled over to sleep in a parking lot. A police officer rapped on his window, telling him it was private property and writing him a ticket. He was convicted of misdemeanor trespassing and paid a fine of $100 and $92 in court costs, according to court records in Fairfax, Va.
That conviction brought him to the attention of ICE. “Marco Coello has one misdemeanor criminal conviction and did not depart the country in accordance with his visa,” said Nestor Yglesias, an ICE spokesman, referring to the tourist visa he had arrived on. “As a result, he violated the terms of his nonimmigrant status in the United States.”
Paul Wickham Schmidt, a retired immigration judge who is now an adjunct law professor at Georgetown University, said that ICE agents could legally arrest individuals in asylum proceedings. “Otherwise everyone could absolutely immunize themselves from removal just by filing with the asylum office,” he said.
But arresting Mr. Coello was also indicative of the Trump administration’s new priorities, he said. “As Jeff Sessions keeps pointing out, anyone here illegally shouldn’t feel safe,” Mr. Schmidt said, referring to the attorney general under Mr. Trump.
Mr. Coello was a high school student in El Hatillo in southeastern Caracas when he joined marches and demonstrations across Venezuela on Feb. 12, 2014, to protest Mr. Maduro, a close ally of Hugo Chávez who took office after Mr. Chávez’s death in 2013.
The protests that day turned ugly, with violence between government forces and civilian protesters, who in some cases threw Molotov cocktails. Mr. Coello, who said he was not involved in the disturbance, was struck on the leg by a tear-gas canister and fell to the ground. Security personnel in plainclothes began to beat him and took him into custody.
According to a report by Human Rights Watch, based on interviews with Mr. Coello and five others arrested, the security forces put a gun to his head and doused him in gasoline. “They wrapped a thin mat around his body, tied it with tape, and approximately 10 officers kicked him and beat him with sticks, a golf club, and a fire extinguisher on his ribs and upper body,” the report said. He was tortured with shocks and told to confess to burning the vehicles. He refused.
Mr. Coello was accused of arson, among other charges related to an alleged attack on the Venezuelan attorney general’s office. After months in detention, he was released pending trial and fled to the United States with his father. His mother later joined them.
Following his time in Virginia, where he was studying English, Mr. Coello moved to Miami and found a job as an assistant cameraman at a local studio associated with the Spanish-language station Telemundo.
When he and his lawyer, Ms. Blandon, arrived at his asylum appointment in April, they were passed off to ICE. “We walk in, she didn’t even introduce herself,” Ms. Blandon said of the Citizenship and Immigration Services official who met them. “‘We can’t entertain your claim for asylum. These two gentlemen from ICE can explain.’”
After articles appeared in the local and Spanish-language news media — “Joven torturado en Venezuela es arrestado en Miami por inmigración” was the headline of one article in El Nuevo Herald — Mr. Rubio, a Republican from the Miami area, contacted Reince Priebus, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff.
The next day, Mr. Coello was released.
Mr. Coello will still have the opportunity to plead for asylum in immigration court. His arrest was legal, but some experts question whether it was the best use of limited resources in an overburdened system.
“In years of doing these, I’ve had probably only a few dozen cases where somebody can point to their name in a State Department human rights report and say, ‘That’s me,’” Mr. Schmidt, the former immigration judge, said of Mr. Coello.
With a backlog of nearly 600,000 cases in the system, he asked, “Why clog an already clogged court docket with a case that looks like a slam dunk?”
ICE chief tells lawmakers agency needs much more money for immigration arrests
The acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Thomas D. Homan, shown after a news conference in May, testified Tuesday on Capitol Hill about his agency’s budget request. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
Federal immigration arrests — already up sharply since President Trump took office — could rise dramatically next year if Congress approves the administration’s multibillion-dollar budget proposal, the nation’s top enforcement official said Tuesday.
Thomas D. Homan, the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told lawmakers at a hearing on Capitol Hill that the agency is churning out detainer requests, adding thousands of cases to its docket and deputizing an increasing number of local law enforcement agencies to help enforce federal immigration law.
“If you’re in this country illegally, and you committed a crime by entering this country, you should be uncomfortable,” Homan said. “You should look over your shoulder.”
House Democrats questioned the Trump administration’s plans to spend millions of dollars to lock up students and others who are in the country illegally but have not committed any crimes, including Diego Puma, a 19-year-old New York high school student who was detained last week hours before his senior prom.
Rep. Nita M. Lowey (D-N.Y.) called the policy “un-American,” and Rep. David E. Price (D-N.C.) wondered whether ICE was focused on threats to public safety, given the recent uptick in arrests of noncriminals.
Homan said ICE still targets criminals, but he said Trump’s Jan. 25 executive order broadened the pool of immigrants who could be targeted for deportation to include 345,000 fugitives with final deportation orders and 600,000 visa overstayers — individuals who Homan said had been essentially off-limits under President Barack Obama. He said Puma and his mother had their day in immigration court and were ordered deported.
Homan’s testimony before the homeland security subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee included details of how ICE carries out enforcement. Besides searching for immigrants on its own, the agency uses a fingerprint-sharing program called Secure Communities that helps alert agents when an undocumented immigrant has been arrested in connection with a state or local crime.
ICE files detainer requests with local law enforcement officials and jails, asking that they help federal agents transfer the immigrants into federal custody. Many “sanctuary cities” refuse to cooperate with such requests, in some cases because they say cooperation would make immigrants less willing to act as witnesses or report crimes.
But Homan said ICE is still trying: The number of detainers this year is up 75 percent over last year, he told lawmakers, without providing hard numbers. ICE arrests are up 38 percent.
Homan used the numbers to show that ICE can “clearly” justify the need to fund 51,000 beds in immigrant detention centers in next year’s budget, up from 34,000 beds now.
The agency is requesting a budget of $7.6 billion, a $1.2 billion increase, with total spending authority of $7.9 billion.
More than 40 local law enforcement agencies have been deputized to help ICE enforce immigration law, Homan said, and more countries are cooperating with deportations of their citizens.
Under Obama, 23 countries routinely refused to issue the travel documents that U.S. officials need to put people on airplanes and deport them to their countries of citizenship. Now, 12 are considered recalcitrant.
ICE is the Homeland Security agency that handles detentions and deportations. The Justice Department runs the immigration courts, and under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, it has led the offensive against jurisdictions that refuse to detain immigrants so that ICE can take them into federal custody.
On Tuesday, Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein testified before a Senate committee that slashing the immigration court’s “extraordinary” backlog of 600,000 cases is one of his top priorities.
He said the agency is seeking funding for 75 new judges and hundreds of support staffers.
Rosenstein said the agency will hold jurisdictions accountable if they fail to communicate with federal immigration agents. The administration sent letters to several jurisdictions this year asking them to certify by June 30 that they are in compliance with federal law. So far, New Orleans; Clark County, Nev., and Connecticut have done so.
Robert Mosher
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