March 11, 2008 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Security
Frequent flying by Russian strategic bombers near American airspace — drawing U.S. fighter jets — has military officials at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs on guard and angling for greater openness and cooperation. While odds are low that these increasing Russian forays will cause a catastrophe, “there’s more of a risk of something accidental happening,” Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen said Monday after meeting here with homeland defense commanders.
“We will clearly watch this evolution,” Mullen said of the Russian flights — not detected in such numbers since the Cold War. “We’ve got good military-to-military relations with the Russians. My sense is there’s no strategic intent to threaten the United States.”
To prevent problems, the Colorado-based North American Aerospace Defense and Northern commands initiated joint exercises with Russian counterparts here and in Alaska — a return to Cold War-era efforts to manage tensions.
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March 7, 2008 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
China Olympics
Soldier trains for his shot to compete in Beijing Games
By any measure, Army Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Downs would appear a long shot to join the U.S. Olympic Boxing team at the Summer Games in Beijing. He’s 33, the oldest on record for the team, a father of two and, until the Iraq war began, he had never entered a boxing ring. On top of all that, he first had to survive 13 months in combat to get where he is now. Saturday, Downs leaves for a fight in Trinidad and Tobago that could qualify him for China. Regardless of whether he makes it, Downs will resume his Army infantry duties when he’s finished with his Olympic effort.
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February 22, 2008 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
China Olympics
Some 625 China-bound U.S. athletes are targeted in a growing campaign by activist group Team Darfur to persuade athletes worldwide to use their voices in China to make a political point. U.S. Olympic Committee officials this year instituted mandatory “ambassador” seminars that teach about China and encourage athletes to think carefully about how best to represent their country. Yet USOC officials say they’ll let athletes decide for themselves whether to speak out on sensitive issues — as long as they stay mum at official Olympics sites, in accordance with International Olympic Committee rules.
The USOC stayed firm as government and Olympics officials in Europe, Britain and New Zealand recently moved toward silencing China-bound athletes. Freedom of speech and expression are “values of our country,” USOC spokesman Darryl Seibel said. “As an Olympic committee, we would not restrict values that are consistent with what we stand for as a country. . . . It’s up to the athletes to make individual choices.”
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February 19, 2008 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Globalization, International Adoption
When 11-year-old Ana Dodson returned to her native Peru, she watched barefoot children scavenging through garbage for food. She stepped off a bus nearby. Orphans mobbed her. She gave them teddy bears — and saw herself in their faces.
A well-to-do Colorado family adopted Ana as an infant in 1992, and she moved from a mud-and-tin mountainside shantytown near Cusco to a radically different world: a two-story home in a foothills suburb west of Denver with private school, synagogue, horse-riding and sparkling shopping malls.
Today, four years after meeting those children in Cusco, Ana, now 16, is leading an effort to help them. She began a “Peruvian Hearts” campaign — part of an emerging trend in which U.S. teenagers launch aid projects. Going back to Peru also prompted Ana to track down her biological siblings and father — an unusual accomplishment in international adoptions. U.S. adults adopt about 20,000 children a year from low-income countries, a figure that has tripled since the early 1990s, records show. Children increasingly are visiting their birth countries to explore their roots. But adoption agency officials say few have found and forged relations with biological parents abroad.
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February 7, 2008 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Globalization, Immigrants, Migration
Familiar sport comforts growing community of African immigrants
Angolan immigrant Zacarias Paulo perched at the edge of the booth at Le Baobab restaurant, eyes fixed on a big-screen Hitachi as he watched Angola’s Black Antelopes pound Egypt’s Pharaohs in African Cup of Nations soccer.
The Africans come from nations across the continent and, though fewer in number than their counterparts from Mexico, are multiplying rapidly and sinking roots. Census data obtained last week indicated about 16,585 African immigrants reside in the area, which is double the number in 2000.
Their latest oasis opened off a once-blighted bit of East Colfax Avenue is the crimson-walled Le Baobab restaurant in Aurora, run by Congolese refugees Clarisse and Sylvin Mberry.
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January 16, 2008 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Globalization, Pakistan-Afghanistan Borderlands
Greg Mortenson “careful” with creation of schools along Pakistan-Afghanistan border
Mountain climber turned social entrepreneur who once raised government suspicions is now attracting positive attention from the U.S. military for his school-building drive in the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands. This creates a problem.
“I have to be very careful,” said Greg Mortenson, who appreciates the recognition but fears that if he becomes aligned with the U.S. government he’ll no longer be trusted by the people he helps.
Sales of Mortenson’s book “Three Cups of Tea” just topped 1 million, and Pentagon officials bought several thousand copies as reading for soldiers training to fight terrorism.
Pentagon strategists three times have invited Mortenson to speak with them about his softer approach. He has established 64 schools that give a balanced education to 25,000 girls and boys otherwise targeted by recruiters for anti-U.S. groups.
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January 13, 2008 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Immigrants, Migration, Security
Officials want to cut the long wait caused by a surge in immigrants’ applications.
Mushrooming numbers of immigrants in Denver and other cities are pushing to become U.S. citizens, and their deluge of applications is forcing the government to fix its overloaded processing system.
Undaunted by a $200 application- fee hike and encouraged by political activists, more than 1.4 million immigrants applied for citizenship last year, nearly double the number in 2006 and among the highest totals on record, federal officials said Friday. At least 10,892 in Denver sought citizenship — apparently a local record, the latest federal data show.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials who process applications estimated their turnaround time has nearly tripled in recent years to 16 to 18 months. Nearly 1 million applications are pending, almost twice the number pending a year ago, data show. The government has promised to recruit and hire 1,500 new adjudicators to handle the massive backlog — using money from the fee hike from $475 to $675 that kicked in last July. Officials acknowledged that, despite receiving 1.4 million applications last year, the number of new citizens approved decreased — by 6 percent to 659,237 compared with 702,663 in fiscal year 2006.
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January 7, 2008 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Globalization
Zimbabwean stone carvers find respite in Denver from their homeland’s unrest.
Zimbabwean sculptor Brian Nyanhongo winces inside the Denver Botanic Gardens amid 57 towering stone creations weighing up to 3 tons.
For Denver, these massive sculptures carved by Zimbabwean masters became a popular diversion — eliciting emotional responses from Americans passing among plants.
But for Nyanhongo, 39, and other visiting Zimbabwean sculptors — who have been chipping away at imported raw rocks in tents around the gardens — the exhibit is a matter of survival.
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November 23, 2007 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Immigrants, Latin America, Migration
Youngsters by the thousands are entering the U.S. illegally – without their parents.
When he turned 14, Santos Herrera set out from his Guatemalan mountain village for the United States — on his own.
His relatives borrowed $8,000 for smugglers, counting on him to send home at least $400 a month to make payments.
Joined along the way by other young Guatemalans of Mayan descent, Herrera said, he rode buses through Mexico. Then, during a four-day desert trek across the U.S.-Mexico border, U.S. border agents nearly caught him, he said, and for two days he hid alone, lost and terrified.
But he made it to Colorado, where he earned $5.50 an hour picking onions and up to $7 at other jobs — until June, when a Wyoming sheriff’s deputy caught him driving with no license.
“I’m here to fight for my mother, to get money so she can have an operation for her eyes. And I need to get money for my siblings so they can eat and go to school,” Herrera said.
He’s part of a growing, ragged parade of thousands of children who enter the United States illegally without their parents.
Department of Homeland Security border agents apprehend more than 113,000 children a year, data show, and find scores who are on their own. Under a 2002 law, unaccompanied children must be sent to facilities run by the Department of Health and Human Services. Some 8,212 unaccompanied children were held at these juvenile facilities this past year, up from 5,000 in 2003, according to federal officials and records.
Nobody knows how many more, like Herrera, enter without getting caught. Child-advocacy groups estimate as many as 50,000 a year slip through. Several lawyers in Denver are handling cases of unaccompanied children.
Most come from Central America, federal records show. All pose a dilemma for U.S. communities that increasingly want immigration laws enforced yet also want children treated humanely.
Because the federal government has limited space for juveniles at detention facilities — about 1,710 beds nationwide — a majority of children are released with notices to appear in court.
Last year, about 7,000 children — 88 percent of those initially detained — eventually were released, Health and Human Services spokesman Ken Wolfe said. Of those released, 2,299 were sent back to their birth countries, while about 4,927 were released into the United States to sponsoring relatives, foster homes or friends.
“We have challenges with bed capacity and services, but we work as hard as we can to make sure those in our care get good care…,” Wolfe said. “Once a child is released,” Health and Human Services “does not have oversight,” he said.
Homeland Security officials “get a lot of criticism for incarcerating unaccompanied children,” Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Pat Reilly said. “So there’s a special custody arrangement for these children, and that agency (Health and Human Services) has to answer for what happens to them.”
No data are kept on whether released children make it to court, officials said. Many immigration courts are swamped, and many teens become adults before their cases are resolved.
For Herrera, now 16, getting caught brought new twists in an odyssey rooted in poverty.
After the deputy nabbed him, he bounced from one adult jail in Laramie for 13 days to another, a federal immigration detention center, in Colorado for a month. Then, under pressure from a lawyer, federal authorities bused Herrera to a juvenile hall in Texas, where he was held for two more months, court records show.
Now, pending review of his case, he’s been released to the custody of a family friend in Fort Morgan, northeast of Denver. He’s living with relatives and planning to attend school.
“I pray to God I can stay, to help my family, so we don’t have to suffer in poverty anymore,” he said in a recent interview.
U.S. border agents say most unaccompanied children come to join relatives already in the country illegally.
Homeland Security “understands the sensitive nature of handling cases involving the smuggling of a child. The agency recognizes that the child is the victim and takes actions to safely return the child to his or her home country as quickly as possible,” Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman Maggie Myers said.
Yet just identifying children is proving difficult because smugglers use false documents, Myers said. “Children grow and change rapidly, especially very young children. Very young children cannot speak on their own behalf so interview techniques cannot uncover inconsistencies that may reveal their true identity.”
Child advocates oppose deportations.
Children entering illegally without parents “are usually fleeing something,” often don’t have relatives here and, in many cases, have endured trauma such as rape and being held for ransom, said Tricia Swartz, director of the National Center for Refugee and Immigrant Children in Washington, D.C.
Across-the-board deportations “would be literally sacrificing children’s lives,” she said. “Some of them are facing potential execution by gangs.”
A privately funded $600,000 project has begun to line up pro-bono lawyers, medical and mental care, and foster families for about 1,000 children a year. Children are told to attend school and forbidden from working until their cases are decided, Swartz said.
“That gets to be difficult because they want to work.”
All sides agree the best solution would be better living conditions abroad.
The global economy “is crashing on the poor, starving them out,” said Denver-based attorney Jim Salvator, who represents Herrera and several other teens who entered illegally without their parents.
Salvator is planning to seek asylum for Herrera, claiming that if the boy were sent home, he would face gang recruiters and an economic system that confines Mayans to servitude.
Today, about 15.3 percent of migrants seeking asylum protection in the United States are under 18, up from 14.8 percent in 2004, federal records show.
Federal immigration courts, run by the Department of Justice, are adapting. In Denver’s court, a box of toys sits in the lobby. A recent memo encouraged judges to use booster chairs and child-friendly questioning at hearings.
Bruce Finley: 303-954-1700 or bfinley@denverpost.com
October 8, 2007 · The Denver Post
By Bruce Finley, Denver Post Staff Writer
Counter-Terrorism, Human Rights, Immigrants, Refugees, Security, U.S. Role in the World
Tough rules delay cases Anti-terrorism efforts require stricter proof of persecution, including documents that can “reasonably” be obtained.
Jailed and tortured in Ethiopia, Samuel Tafesa made it to Mexico,
then waded across the Rio Grande into the United States.
Now in Denver, he’s begging for asylum protection, claiming that
Ethiopian police beat him with sticks on the bottoms of his feet
and held his head under water, trying to coerce information about
fellow members of an opposition political party.
“I’m afraid to go back to Ethiopia,” he said. “If I go back,
I’ll be killed.”
For Tafesa and tens of thousands of other asylum-seekers, sanctuary
in America has become harder to attain. U.S. officials are
subjecting them to increasingly rigorous scrutiny, government
officials and legal experts say.
New anti-terrorism measures require stricter proof of persecution,
including documents that can “reasonably” be obtained.
Tafesa, 22, called back to Ethiopia repeatedly, asking his mother
to get what she can for his lawyer, Michael Litman.
Today’s higher standard of proof makes cases more complex and
prolongs them, with government attorneys sending documents to a
Homeland Security forensics lab for testing.
“We have a tradition, but we want to make sure people seeking
(asylum) have a rightful entitlement,” said Mike Everitt, a unit
chief in the lab near Washington, D.C.
The new measures are contributing to a record immigration-court
backlog – 3,370 cases pending in Denver, a third involving asylum,
federal statistics show. That’s double Denver’s pending caseload
six years ago.
Department of Justice officials said 166,200 cases are pending in
immigration courts nationwide, including 33,194 in Los Angeles,
8,546 in Chicago and 9,455 in Orlando, Fla. In 2000, 125,764 cases
were pending.
“Overburdened” system
Dana Marks, a sitting judge in California and president of the
National Association of Immigration Judges, said dozens more judges
are needed.
The system is “unbelievably overburdened,” squeezing judges’
ability to make life-or-death decisions, Marks said.
“Why are we treating the asylum system this way? If we pride
ourselves in America for treating refugees right, why aren’t we
providing resources to ensure they get prompt and fair treatment?”
Marks said.
Now, fewer people are applying for asylum, though the reasons for
the drop aren’t clear.
Some 54,452 applications were received last year in immigration
courts, down from 74,627 in 2002 and 84,904 in 1997, records show.
Adjudicators for the U.S. Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration
Services, who often see asylum-seekers first, received 36,502
applications last year, down from 65,201 in 2002 and 149,000 in
1995, according to a senior USCIS official who spoke on condition
of anonymity, in accordance with agency policy.
In Denver, about one in three cases handled is approved. Asylum
experts say it’s too early to gauge whether the new standards for
proof will change that percentage.
USCIS adjudicators approved 27 percent of cases they handled this
year, down from 43 percent in 2001, according to the senior
official. In immigration courts, stats show 23 percent of
applications processed last year were approved, up from 20 percent
in 2002.
Previously, asylum-seekers often were accepted solely on the basis
of government “country condition” reports and testimony that
judges found to be credible and persuasive.
Today’s higher standards requiring documentation that could
“reasonably” be obtained “change the burden of proof,” the
official said. But “there’s still the allowance” that an
applicant who can’t obtain documents can win asylum if deemed
credible, he said.
“Out of reach for many”
One problem caused by the more frequent demand for documents is
that hiring document and medical experts raises legal costs, said
Regina Germain, legal director at the Rocky Mountain Survivors
Center and author of a legal text on asylum law.
“I fear recent changes … could put asylum out of reach for many
people who flee with little more than the clothes on their backs,”
Germain said.
In Tafesa’s case, an Addis Ababa police document his mother sent
says he was imprisoned for 17 days in 2005 for being a member of
the Coalition for Unity and Democracy Party. The document accuses
him of involvement in “illegal demonstrations” and “promoting
unhealthy propaganda and causing conflict of people against
people.”
It says he was released from prison on the condition he cease all
political activity and check in weekly, which he failed to do. It
warns: “The police department will track you and your family
down.”
The government is vetting those documents. His case is scheduled
for a hearing in May.
Meantime, he works under a temporary permit, washing rental cars at
Denver International Airport for $8.85 an hour that he uses mostly
for legal fees.
His father and brother in Ethiopia have gone missing, and his
6-year-old son, Mathais, is bewildered, Tafesa said before work
Friday.
“He asks me: ‘Where are you?’ I tell him I’ll be there one day,”
Tafesa said. “What can I do?”
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A journalist and lawyer, Bruce Finley has investigated local, national and international issues with on-site reporting in more than 40 countries. In his position as a staff writer for the Denver Post, he is focusing on environment-related news including water challenges, the oil and gas boom and wildfire.
