The INS of ‘Deportland’
September 28, 2000
Treatment of foreign travelers scrutinized
By Tara Burghart & William McCall/AP
In a letter sent to Attorney General Janet Reno, Gov. John Kitzhaber and other Oregon officials on Aug. 23 accused immigration inspectors of treating foreigners unfairly at Portland International Airport and demanded a federal investigation. In a quick response, Johnny Williams, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service Western regional director, said on Aug. 24 that he will meet with politicians and INS officials this week to discuss the recent problems.
The appeal came after Guo Liming, a Chinese businesswoman, was jailed for two days before her passport was found to be authentic. The incident was the latest in a series of problems with the handling of international visitors at the airport, where inspectors reject a far higher percentage of foreigners than at other West Coast airports.
Travelers rejected by INS inspectors in Portland have sometimes been jailed until a flight to their homeland became available-generating negative press in foreign countries and earning the city the nickname “Deportland” in some Asian countries.
In the past 19 months, Portland has had nine such cases, said John O’Brien, INS port director.
Earlier this year, the INS held several meetings with the Japanese Consul General, State Department officials, the business community and the Port of Portland to discuss the problem. They agreed that foreign travelers denied entry because they did not have the right travel documents would be housed overnight in hotel rooms instead of jails.
Many Asian companies and travel agents have begun to advise travelers to avoid Portland, hurting sales for Delta Air Lines, despite INS promises of reforms. Delta has said it is re-evaluating its flights between Portland and Japan.
INS Commissioner Doris Meissner agreed to meet with members of the Northwest congressional delegation in Washington, D.C., next month to discuss INS Portland management, said Joe Shoemaker, a chief of staff for Congressman Brian Baird, a Democrat who represents Washington.
The Aug. 23 letter sent to Attorney General Janet Reno-and signed by Gov. Kitzhaber, Portland Mayor Vera Katz and Mike Thorne, the executive director of the Port of Portland-said, “Inspectors have often been rude, uncooperative, and insensitive to the different cultural values of the foreign passengers passing through PDX…These enforcement practices at PDX have caused serious personal and professional distress to the individuals unfairly affected by this treatment.”
Besides calling for the investigation, Thorne said the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service should remove its district director.
“They’ve made a commitment things are going to improve,” he said. “This tells me they don’t even care about improving it. I’m tired of being misled. I think it’s time the INS gets different personnel to manage this district.”
Earlier last week on Aug. 22, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service managers defended their actions, saying Guo Liming “fit the profile” of attempted illegal immigrants because she was traveling with another person.
Guo, 36, of Guangzhou, China, arrived at Portland International Airport Saturday on a flight from Japan with Hsieh Tsuhui, 43, her fiancé and business partner. The resumed their business trip to New York on Aug. 22.
Inspectors said her passport appeared suspicious because the original clear plastic laminate had been peeled back, making it appear that a photo could have been substituted and a second laminate applied.
“It had all the outward appearances of the kinds of bogus documentation we’ve seen in the past presented by PRC nationals,” the INS district director in Portland David Beebe said. “China has been a problem to PDX in terms of either photo-substituted passports or fraudulent visas.”
Guo said INS inspectors made her strip to her underwear for a search. They interrogated her under oath through an interpreter. Then they handcuffed her for the two-hour drive to jail in The Dalles.
“They owe me an apology,” she told The Oregonian.
INS officials blamed her for not replacing a passport that looked doctored but turned out to be authentic. Beebe said Guo should have replaced her passport after encountering problems with it earlier in Hong Kong.
“If I had that problem, I sure as hell would have taken care of it,” Beebe said.
Guo said that she was unable to contact a lawyer, the Chinese consulate or anyone outside the jail during the weekend. Hsieh, her fiancé, didn’t know where she was until Aug. 21 when he hired Bao Lin Chen, a Portland immigration lawyer, to find her. “They asked me whether we have any human rights protection,” Chen said. “That’s a kind of question a person asks in China, not this country. It wasn’t her mistake, but she was treated like a criminal.”
Thorne said Guo should have been put up in a hotel instead of jailed. “For them to fall back on their old Gestapo-type actions is just unacceptable,” Thorne said. “Enough of this is enough.”
Beebe said he sent a letter apologizing to Guo for the strip search and for inspectors’ apparent failure to notify anyone of her whereabouts during the two nights she spent in jail. He also said he had “strong suspicions” that there was not enough evidence to warrant a strip search of Guo.
He said inspectors were to conduct a pat-down search of everyone taken into custody. If there are suspicions of a concealed item, then inspectors must ask a supervisor to authorize a strip search by an inspector of the same gender as the traveler. A supervisor of the same gender must be present during the search.
Beebe and other senior INS officials in Portland said they did not know Guo was strip searched until an Oregonian reporter told them of her allegation.
On Friday the INS inspectors were under further scrutiny. James DePreist, the conductor of the Oregon Symphony, complained on Aug. 25 about the way he and his wife were treated by federal immigration authorities. DePreist, who is black, and his wife, Ginette, who is white, arrived for an interview at the Immigration and Naturalization office in Portland on Aug. 23 as part of Ginette DePreist’s application for dual U.S.-Canadian citizenship.
When an INS interviewer called Ginette DePreist’s name, Ginette DePreist stood to greet the interviewer. Nevertheless, the woman still asked the couple, “Which one of you is Ginette?” James DePreist said. “At first we thought it was a joke,” James DePreist said. “…But she was absolutely, deadly serious.”
DePreist said he had the sense the interviewer thought that he-the black man-was applying for citizenship, and not the white woman. The conductor said he thought that bordered on racism.
“Those of us who are of color are somewhat accustomed to this,” DePreist said. “But this was shocking, quite frankly,” he said.
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