Human Rights Reporting

Spring 2001 Student Work

When confronted by the customs officer at JFK Airport, "I confessed I was Saikou Amadou Baldé, that I was from Guinea, and that I had fled because of persecution, and begged him not to send me back," the would-be refugee said.

By Katherine Cheng

As Saikou Amadou Baldé's plane touched down on the runway of John F. Kennedy airport, he was holding in his hands a passport that didn't belong to him. It was his first time traveling outside of Guinea, and all he could hope for was a sympathetic ear at the customs gate. When it came his turn to present his passport, he waited tensely. The customs officer asked him if he was the man pictured in the passport. Exhausted and terrified, Baldé broke down in tears. "I confessed I was Saikou Amadou Baldé, that I was from Guinea, and that I had fled because of persecution, and begged him not to send me back," Baldé said.

Thus began Baldé's five-month fight to stay in the United States, a long and difficult struggle to obtain asylum. Baldé is one of thousands of immigrants who come to the U.S. every year fleeing political and ethnic persecution in their homeland, only to wind up in prison-like detention facilities.

In 1999, the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights issued a report on the Immigration and Naturalization Service's (INS) process of detaining asylum seekers. The Committee found that detainees are often held for excessive lengths of time, from several months to years, even after they demonstrate credible fear.

"Many have fled to this country because they believed that it is the land of liberty and the protector of the persecuted," said Eleanor Acer, the senior coordinator of the Committee's asylum program. "Some are survivors of torture. Instead, they have found themselves behind bars in the land that they believed would protect them."

Before 1997, the INS presumed many undocumented asylum seekers to be well intentioned. That was until the agency got flooded with cases, as more economic opportunity seekers began calling themselves refugees in order to obtain green cards. Many of these people missed their asylum hearings and just disappeared, prompting legislators to reexamine immigration laws. In 1996, Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Responsibility Act. The law states that when immigrants arrive at airports without documents, they are required to be held under detention until they're granted political asylum, deported, or released to family or friends while awaiting a decision. Since 1996, the annual number of asylum seekers dropped from 155, 868 to 124, 777 in 1998.

Baldé was one of those thousands who decided to take a chance by entering the United States illegally, then claiming political asylum. His story is not uncommon among today's asylum seekers — of an ordinary man swept away by the political tides of his country. He was born about 300 miles from Conakry, the capital of Guinea, in 1965. He was a member of the Fulani ethnic group, which accounts for about 30 percent of Guinea's population. The other principal ethnic groups were the Malinké and the Sousou. At the age of 12, Baldé left school to work in Conakry as an apprentice for his older brother, who owned a booth on the Madina, the main market. When Baldé turned 19, he purchased his own booth to sell office equipment and school supplies.

He first became politically active in 1991, when he joined the Reassemblement du Peuple de Guinée (RPG), a group which opposed the government of General Lansan Conté. Conté seized power in a military coup in 1984. Since then, the leader has disregarded political freedoms and human rights to preserve his regime, under which torture and persecution of political opponents have become common practices. Baldé became an activist in the RPG because of his experience in the Madina market. "There were a lot of people from different backgrounds, and I was able to talk to a lot of people," he said. "That's how I got the idea — that there's a third way." The RPG is made up mostly of Fulani and Malinké — the minority groups of Guinea.

As a member of the RPG, Baldé campaigned under Alpha Condé, the group's leader and a major opposition figure in Guinea. Baldé's ability to speak Fulani, Malinké, and some French proved essential to reaching across ethnic lines and rallying support in the remote villages of Middle Guinea.

Baldé was proud of his membership in the RPG despite its ill consequences. As a result of his political membership and his Fulani background, he was harassed and persecuted by the police, detained without trial, and severely tortured. General Conté is Sousou and has openly advocated preferential treatment of Sousous. Thus, the majority of police, military, and government are comprised of Sousou people. According to Baldé, the police would regularly harass him at his booth on the Madina, threatening to arrest him if he did not pay them bribes. In 1985, he was held in jail for two days before he finally paid the police to release him. "After RPG demonstrations, the Sousous would often raid and ransack Fulani booths on the Madina to threaten us and teach us a lesson," he said.

Baldé returned to jail eight years later, when in November 1993, two weeks before Guinea's presidential elections, he was seized and arrested in an attack on RPG demonstrators. He was incarcerated for a month and beaten severely while tied to a chair. He still has scars on his forehead and right leg from the beatings.

On September 11, 2000, RPG leader Alpha Condé was sentenced to five years in prison for trying to overthrow the government. On that day, Baldé joined a spontaneous protest in front of the courthouse. Incensed by the protest, the government began making widespread arrests of Condé supporters. It was this crackdown that finally prompted Baldé to flee.

On September 21, the Sousou police came to Baldé's house looking for him. As he hid in a back room, he planned his escape. "Before recently I wasn't afraid. I thought things would change," said Baldé reflecting on his decision to leave. "But since our leader, a man of fame and prestige, was arrested and convicted, a lot of people were arrested and disappeared in prison. That's when I realized, if I was caught I'd be killed." With the help of a friend, Baldé fled the country on September 23rd, stopping briefly in Abidjan, in the Ivory Coast, before making his way to the United States.

He arrived at JFK on September 30, 2000. He knew little about the immigration process before he came. "I was told that if I made it through customs, I should go back and explain because once you explained what your problem was, people would be there to listen and would help you out and let you get a fair chance, and basically would find a cure for your illness," he said. But Baldé did not make it through customs that easily. Once his passport was discovered as false, he was taken to an interrogation room and interviewed by an INS officer.

He was then taken to the 300-bed detention center in Elizabeth, New Jersey, beginning an ordeal of sleepless nights and days filled with sickness and confusion. He slept in warehouse-type spaces, packed with rows of beds, about 40 to each room. "I didn't sleep much because I was always thinking about my family," he said. "My main concern was if I got asylum, whether I'd be able to bring them here, and if I didn't get it, then what would happen, and if I could survive without having them here in the meantime." When Baldé fled, he could not tell his wife and four children where he was heading. Nor could he contact his family from the detention center. Like many detainees, he arrived at the center with no money, unable to even pay for a phone call.

His days in the detention center were tedious. "The hardest part was first being locked up and having to wait around all the time. People deal with this differently. And that was very hard to get used to," he said. "Nothing would happen during the day unless you had visitors. We had one hour of outdoor time a day in a covered courtyard. And you could spend another hour doing weightlifting." To communicate with the guards, who only spoke English, Baldé had to enlist the help of friends in the center who could translate for him.

Eleanore Dailley signed on to represent Baldé after finding his case on a Lawyer's Committee posting. The attorney described the detention center as worse than a jail. "There was no library. They used to have English class but they canceled that. So people are just idle and have nothing to do," she said. "I don't think it's a crime to come here and hope for asylum. And I don't think the ways that people are treated is right at all. The laws have gotten a lot stricter in the last couple of years. And I really think the way the system is managed is unacceptable."

One of the biggest problems for Baldé in the detention center was getting medical treatment. "If you felt really sick you'd have to give a note and you'd only be looked at the next day. Even if you said it was urgent, sometimes the officer there wouldn't believe you and wouldn't do anything," he said. While detained, Baldé fell ill with an ear infection. He was treated once, then got sick again. Dailley believes the sickness came about from the conditions of the center. " Their courtyard is closed, you don't see open sky — it's air conditioning all the time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week," she said.

The second time Baldé was infected, the center refused to treat him. He called Dailley, who then spent three days trying to reach an INS officer for help. According to Dailley, the deportation officer responded to her request by saying, "You believe everything your client says? I'm sure he's not sick, you know, you're not getting medical parole — forget about it." The officer eventually told Dailley to send Baldé back to the medical center, where he was finally treated. The infection continued to plague Baldé throughout his entire stay at the center, but disappeared the day he walked out.

The process of getting him out began in December, when Dailley signed on to the case and submitted an asylum application. The application was due within two weeks of Baldé's first court hearing, requiring Dailley to work overtime and pray for sheer luck. "The horrible thing is all those traumatic events have to be told in such detail and pretty quickly and it's really tough," she said.

Baldé based his claim on both political and ethnic persecution. "The ethnic persecution was our weakest argument because although it's well-documented, people are so used to it, and it's hard for them to equate day-to-day harassment with ethnic persecution," said Dailley. Baldé had actually said he hadn't been persecuted for ethnic reasons when he was initially interviewed at the airport.

Where Baldé did have luck was in gathering corroborative evidence. He was able to get his national identity card sent over, proving his true identity, along with a letter from the RPG asserting his membership, all in time for his hearing. Still, Baldé never knew what outcome to expect. "Everyday, some people were sent back, others were released," he said. "I knew that if I was sent back, I would rather die here than go back. I knew they would mistreat me, they would ask me, 'Why did you go and tell on us?' and then they would kill me. And I'd rather die here."

On March 15, 2001, Baldé got his wish, and was granted asylum. He was released from the detention center the next evening. For his attorney, who took on the case as her first expulsion proceeding, the trial presented a disturbing look at the INS. "I think it shouldn't necessarily be an adversary proceeding," said Dailley. "Right now it's totally misbalanced — the burden is really on the applicant to show that he has the right to be here. These are people without means, without documentation usually, who often come from terrible situations, and haven't come ready to fight this whole system."

Baldé is currently living in New York with friends. He wants to learn English, and is willing to take up any work. Once he gets more acquainted with the city, he'd like to work as a cab driver or just doing odd jobs. Most importantly, he wants to bring his family over, and has already begun proceedings to apply for their asylum. Since his release, he has learned that his wife and children have been hiding out in northern Guinea. His brother and many of his close friends have been arrested and he has not been heard from.

He does not plan to ever go back to Guinea. "There's just so much trauma associated with it that it would be very hard for me," he said. Today he sits in his lawyer's office in a midtown Manhattan skyscraper, wearing a yellow T-shirt, blue jeans, and newly purchased sunglasses. He smiles easily as he talks of his adoptive homeland." I think it's good because it's a country where people's rights are respected. I'm really happy for the way things worked out for me. I told my story, they believed me, and they gave me a chance," he said.

But for all the detainees that did make it through, Baldé remembers those who didn't. "All the people that were released, they knew it was because they had a lawyer. They had someone who was going to take care of their case, otherwise it wouldn't have happened," he said.

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