Indian man detained for 10 months (India New England Online)

Indian man detained for 10 months
Is one of 1,200 illegal immigrants held in NE
Issue Date: April 1-15, 2008, Posted On: 4/4/2008
By JULIE MASIS


An illegal immigrant from India handwrote a petition from a Massachusetts medium security prison in January asking the Department of Homeland Security to release him.
Gulbarg Singh is requesting the government release him because he has been detained for longer than six months, considered the maximum time period the government is supposed to detain people who are awaiting deportation. Singh, who could not be reached for this story, has no lawyer and has been in custody for nearly 10 months, since the middle of June.
“The petitioner paid taxes for ten years, worked hard and has never been on public assistance,” he wrote about himself from the Plymouth County Correctional Facility in his neat, large cursive script that has no spelling errors. “The petitioner has never committed any crime and contributes actively and constructively to the society and poses no danger to anyone as clearly reflected in his criminal record and is not a flight risk.”
When an illegal immigrant hasn’t received his or her travel documents to their home country after six months in prison, he or she can request to be released to await deportation outside custody. The released immigrants are expected to check in with immigration officials once a month and can be deported when their travel documents come through.
But the U.S. government, in its response to Singh’s petition, maintains that he should not be released because his travel documents to India are forthcoming and because India has not rejected him as a citizen. In a letter dated March 5, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement states that he “entered the United States without inspection” at Brownsville, Texas, on October 17, 1996, and that he should not be released because he is believed to be a flight risk.
The letter continues to say that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is confident that the consul will issue Singh’s travel documents soon and that his “removal will occur in the reasonably foreseeable future.”
According to David Potvin, a removal officer at the Department of Homeland Security, whose job is to act as a liaison with the Consulate of India concerning the repatriation of Indian nationals who are detained in Massachusetts, the department first requested an Indian travel document for Singh on July 6 and has been in touch with the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs in New Delhi.
However the documents have not yet come through.
The Consulate General of India in New York and the Embassy of India in Washington, D.C. did not return phone calls asking for a comment on Singh’s case or for an explanation about why his travel documents aren’t ready months after the U.S. government requested them.
However Laura Rotolo, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said Singh’s case is not unusual.
Approximately 1,200 illegal immigrants are currently held in prisons all over New England, awaiting deportation to their home countries, she said. They are not entitled to lawyers — unless they can pay for one on their own — and are often detained longer than the maximum six month period, she said. They are often arrested in the middle of the night in unannounced raids and are thrown in prison together with criminals.
“Immigration detention is the number one fastest-growing incarceration in the country,” she said. “So the jails are just filling up with immigrants who never committed a crime. ... It’s definitely one of the issues we see quite a bit here in Massachusetts.”
Although Rotolo said she does not know anything specific about Singh’s case, she said it is likely he wrote the petition for release after learning about it from another detainee. Rotolo also said she does not have specific information about how many of the 1,200 immigrant detainees in New England are South Asian, how many of them have been held for longer than six months and how many do not have attorneys.
“Immigration is not very good about releasing statistics like that,” she said.
In addition, Rotolo said that mistakes can happen, especially with people who have very common names.
“They could be wrong, they could have his file wrong. ‘Singh’ is not an uncommon name,” she said.
Navjeet Singh, the New England director of the of the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund, said he knows of at least one Sikh person who was detained in Plymouth for six months a few years ago because of a mistake. The man’s name appeared on the government’s deportation list after a letter that requested him to appear in court was not forwarded to his new address.
INDIA New England learned about Gulbarg Singh’s detainment by typing common Indian names into the online court database PACER in mid-March. The newspaper has been unable to speak to Singh because prisoners cannot receive phone calls or visits from people who are not on their guest list. INDIA New England received no reply to a letter that was mailed to Singh at the Plymouth County Correctional Facility requesting that he phone a reporter. Paula Grenier, who works for the Department of Homeland Security, did not respond to an email asking for an in-person interview with Singh.