Around this time, a militia group called the Nusra Front, with ties to al-Qaida, had formed near Nahas’s town. He had heard rumors that they’d kidnapped and killed several gay men.

Nahas, who had near perfect grades in his third year of college, stopped going to school, fearful that his soft voice and gentle gestures might reveal what he’d kept secret his whole life. Since the war’s beginning earlier that year, friends he’d known since grade school were beginning to affiliate with extremist groups. He spent most days and nights in his bedroom—never expecting violence at the hands of his own family. But his father, an affluent contractor with close ties to the Assad government, saw his son’s effeminacy as an affront to their family’s honor.

In the hospital, Nahas made a decision that would change the course of his life: Despite huge risks, he would flee to Lebanon, nearly 15 hours away by road. Scraping together bills and coins, he bribed a taxi driver to take him to the border and pretend that his passenger was mute. At each checkpoint, Nahas sat paralyzed in silence, fearing guards would see through the ruse, interrogate him, and return him to Idlib. Or worse.

His plan worked. He made it to Beirut, then Turkey, where he applied for refugee status with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. Nearly two and a half years later, he boarded a plane to San Francisco to begin a new life.

Between World War II and the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the United States resettled more refugees than any other country in the world. In 2013, for the first time, the U.S. began concerted efforts to resettle people persecuted due to sexual orientation and gender identity. Hillary Clinton’s State Department, via the Department of Health and Human Services, issued its first major grant to help resettle queer refugees to an agency in the San Francisco Bay Area, Jewish Family and Community Services—East Bay.

I met Nahas at JFCS, where I was volunteering while producing a documentary about dislocated queer immigrants. As horrific as his account sounded, I quickly learned that nearly all queer refugees experience trauma, if not torture. As LGBTQ civil rights and marriage equality were accelerating quickly in many western countries, being gay or transgender in many parts of the world had become a hostile proposition. Anti-queer violence and state-sanctioned homophobia was on the rise, especially in countries in Africa and the Middle East. To this day, it’s illegal in 70 countries to be gay or lesbian; seven of these punish homosexuality with the death penalty.

In the early days of my research, I couldn’t have told you the difference between a refugee and asylum seeker, or how refugee resettlement works. Refugees get their asylum or “refugee status” conferred outside of the United States through the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Once approved and vetted by Homeland Security, they are assigned to cities with refugee resettlement agencies who receive federal money to help them integrate into American society. Part of this support includes small living stipends, food stamps, and basic medical insurance. Asylum seekers, on the other hand, are people who have already made their way into the United States, often on student or tourist visas, and then must present their case before immigration courts; they receive no benefits while they wait for a ruling.

From 2013 to 2016, as LGBTQ people fleeing persecution began to find refuge in the United States, the effort to integrate them was made more complicated by the fact that refugee resettlement is traditionally predicated on families: A family flees a war-torn region of the world and is resettled in an American locale connected to a community of its diaspora. An Iraqi family resettling in the Bay Area might be introduced to local mosques, grocery stores, or community centers of other Iraqis and Iraqi Americans.

Most LGBTQ refugees are not fleeing with families; they’re often fleeing from families. So a gay or trans Iraqi arriving in San Francisco might prefer to see anybody but other Iraqis. This conundrum leaves LGBTQ refugees isolated and at much higher risk, according to researchers, for post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and what is called “internal displacement.”

“Internal displacement”: I learned this phrase while working closely with Junior Mayema, another client at the agency where I volunteered. A gay man from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Mayema had fled repeated harassment in Kinshasa, then faced anti-gay police brutality in Cape Town, South Africa, before receiving refugee papers to resettle in San Francisco. He, too, had dreamed of America’s queer sanctuary, hoping for community, stability, and perhaps even a new love in his life. But in the first year I knew him, over many hours of filming, I witnessed Mayema experience anything but stability: moving more than 10 times in as many months, couch-surfing his way through the San Francisco Bay Area, and relying on strangers, sometimes older benefactors, for support.

It might have seemed noble to help LGBTQ refugees resettle in San Francisco, with its immigrant-friendly policies and a culture steeped in queer liberation. But the Obama administration forgot one basic reality: Try living on a monthly refugee benefit of $350 in one of the world’s most expensive cities. For someone whose life was fraught with trauma and the precariousness of major migration, repeated displacements within San Francisco meant repetition of that trauma.

There were other hurdles. Mayema, for example, is a dark-skinned, gender-nonconforming person with HIV, whose thick Congolese-French accent made his English difficult to understand. One host enthusiastically invited Mayema into her home to provide a diverse “cultural experience” for her inquisitive high school daughter—until they discovered that he drank and was often depressed. He was quickly made to pack his bags again.

For such reasons, many LGBTQ refugees find themselves isolated with few options for housing and livelihood. I met Cheyenne and Mari—a charming mid-20s couple whom I was introduced to through Melanie Nathan, director of the African Human Rights Coalition, a small organization based in San Anselmo, California. They had been successful musicians and popsicle entrepreneurs in Luanda, the capital of Angola. But neighbors had cut their electricity and water, killed their dog, and harangued them incessantly every time they left the house. Nathan recalls: “One man would come and masturbate outside their window threatening: ‘We’re coming in to rape you, to kill you… and we’re going to burn your house down.’”

Desperate to find safety, Mari convinced her mother to let the couple stay temporarily at her home. But instead of offering them refuge, Mari’s mother prepared a dinner that made them violently ill.

Unable to get to a United Nations office to apply for refugee status, Cheyenne and Mari applied for student visas and registered for a two-week English course at a language academy in San Francisco. Such visas are extremely difficult to secure for short courses, yet they’d managed to get them and book plane tickets out of Angola.

As difficult as life is for refugees, it’s doubly hard for asylum seekers. In addition to that monthly stipend of $350 for eight months, refugees receive a one-time payment of $1,100 upon arrival, medical insurance, and food stamps. Asylum seekers receive nothing. And, once in the U.S., the onus falls on asylum seekers to find an attorney and navigate a legal process that takes years. They are also unable to receive a work authorization permit until six months after filing their petition. This cruel regulation puts them in a double bind: To survive as they navigate the bureaucratic quagmire and heal from intense trauma, they either have to work under the table, legally jeopardizing their asylum case, or rely on the generosity of others.

For some LGBTQ refugees in San Francisco, it was the kindness of strangers that filled the gap. By late 2015, many individuals, often older LGBTQ retirees and members of faith communities, had begun offering housing, jobs, donations, and other assistance. Among my fellow volunteers, I found unexpected alliances forming between many older white gay Americans who had faced McCarthy-era persecution in the 1950s and present-day LGBTQ refugees. Over the course of making our film Unsettled, the numbers of queer refugees and asylum claims rose. A new and robust infrastructure to support dislocated LGBTQ people took root in San Francisco, and cities such as New York and Chicago as well.

Then, everything changed.

A year after the 2016 presidential election, I called Amy Weiss, then-director of refugee services at JFCS. While donations were at an all-time high, and strategies for more effectively resettling and integrating queer refugees had greatly matured, the number of refugees allowed into the United States had fallen to a trickle under Donald Trump’s new immigration policies. Currently, the number of refugees allowed into the U.S. is at an all-time low and 80 percent less than in 2016. This closing of America has come when the world has more refugees and migrants than at any time since World War II.

Over the past few years, speaking at film festivals and events to draw attention to the plight of LGBTQ refugees, I’m often asked whether I think America’s turn toward tribalism and xenophobia will continue to pervade national discourse. It’s a fair question: Anti-immigrant rhetoric that energized Trump’s campaign has translated consistently into policies maligning and restricting immigrants of every stripe. The new migration protocols on the U.S.-Mexico border are more draconian than at any other time in recent history. Under the “remain in Mexico” policy, most Central American asylum seekers are now being denied their right to have their day in asylum court.

However, I try to remain cautiously optimistic: Back before the Trump administration, during one of our film shoots, I attended the San Francisco Pride Parade, an increasingly corporatized event to which many activists have become inured. But this time, I saw something new: Nahas, Mayema, Cheyenne, and Mari, and a dozen LGBTQ refugees were all marching together in a small contingent. Their simple handmade signs stood out among the fancy rainbow logos of corporate behemoths like Facebook and Google, even Walmart.

Not long after, Nahas was made Grand Marshal of the New York City Pride celebration and was invited by then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power to testify before the Security Council: the first time that august body heard live testimony from an openly gay person.

During that trip, Nahas and I visited the Stonewall Inn, site of the 1969 unrest that helped catalyze a national gay rights movement. We hopped on the Staten Island Ferry to catch a better glimpse of the Statue of Liberty. I couldn’t help but wonder at his journey: This self-professed shy man, whose sole strategy to survive growing up in Syria was to remain silent, was now speaking on an international stage and carrying a new banner for queer liberation.

Looking at the statue and at the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed at its base, I began to wonder, given the Trump policies: How many fewer people from the masses of tired, poor and queer we will ever get to know? And how quiet will this land be without their voices?

The post When San Francisco Tried to Be the World’s ‘Queer Sanctuary’ for Refugees and Asylum Seekers appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But, as someone who has been analyzing asylum since the 1980s, I look at these announcements and see continuity. Sessions’ policies fit a pattern, going back decades, of excluding asylum seekers from Central America from the human rights protections afforded by U.S. and international law.

Central America should not be singled out in this way. After all, asylum law is supposed to be politically neutral. But the reality for decades has been anything but. Concerns about admitting asylees from Central American countries that are close to us, and who are fleeing from regimes that the United States supports, have led to disparate outcomes for citizens of these nations.

Such exclusions began during the civil wars of the 1980s when Central Americans immigrated to the United States in increased numbers, fleeing political violence in their homelands. Because the United States supported repressive right-wing governments in El Salvador and Guatemala, accepting refugees from those countries threatened to undermine U.S. foreign policy.

In this process, politics trumped reality. Central American civil wars were actually fought over such issues as access to land, a more equitable distribution of resources, and political repression, but the United States saw these wars as part of a Cold War fight against communism. So, for example, the United States provided more than $1 million a day in military and economic assistance to El Salvador, despite its government committing widespread human rights abuses, including massacres of peasants and death squad activity.

In 1984, less than 3 percent of the asylum claims filed by Salvadorans and Guatemalans were granted, in contrast to approval rates in the range of 32 to 60 percent for applicants from Poland, Afghanistan, and Iran. U.S. detention centers also used coercive practices to pressure Salvadorans and Guatemalans to agree to depart the country voluntarily instead of filing asylum claims. Detainees generally were not informed of their right to apply for asylum, were threatened with lengthy detention, and were prevented from meeting with attorneys.

This discriminatory treatment gave rise to a community of advocates who, throughout the 1980s, pursued redress in the courts while also trying to sway public opinion. A class action suit, Orantes Hernandez v. Meese, resulted in a permanent injunction in 1988 preventing coercive tactics against detainees.

The process for Central Americans was so unfair that, beginning in the 1980s, religious congregations declared themselves to be “sanctuaries” for Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees in order to draw attention to the need for asylum while also challenging U.S. aid to the Salvadoran and Guatemalan governments. Following the conviction of two priests, a minister, a nun and four layworkers on alien-smuggling and conspiracy charges, religious groups and Central American community organizations sued the U.S. government, charging that asylum processes were discriminatory.

This case, known as American Baptist Churches v. Thornburgh or “ABC” was settled out of court, enabling these asylum seekers to file claims under rules designed to ensure fair consideration of their cases. At the same time, the 1990 Immigration Act created Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and designated Salvadorans as the first group to receive it.

By joining forces across political divides, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Nicaraguans were able to secure passage of the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act (NACARA) in 1997. To do so, they, their allies, and Central American leaders argued successfully that the U.S. government had granted these immigrants temporary documentation, and that they should be exempted from immigration restrictions adopted in 1996. Importantly, NACARA provides a precedent for creating a pathway to lawful permanent residency and eventually citizenship for TPS recipients.

During the post-war years, violence in Central American countries continued, but shifted from civil war to gangs and crime. The gang violence is the product of multiple factors: impunity granted to human rights abusers; an abundance of weapons; corruption; income inequality; the trauma of the war years; and the rise of drug cartels and U.S. deportation policies, which have sent U.S.-based gang members to Central American countries.

Central American families—particularly in the Northern triangle of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador—experienced extreme insecurity including forcible gang recruitment, extortion, sexual violence, assault, and murder in the late 1990s and the 2000s. Yet, just as during the war years, the U.S. government is now arguing that the violence experienced by Central Americans is generally not grounds for political asylum. For example, in a 2008 Board of Immigration Appeals decision, three Salvadoran youth who had been beaten, harassed, and threatened with death and rape for refusing to join the MS-13 gang were denied asylum, despite widespread evidence of such abuses, including the shooting and killing of another youth in their neighborhood who had also refused to join.

While obtaining asylum remained restricted, immigrants living in the United States were increasingly treated as suspects, a process of criminalization that increased their risk of being deported. Immigration reforms adopted in 1996 expanded the range of criminal convictions that incurred immigration penalties, restricted avenues for immigrants to legalize their status, and made detention mandatory for many. Secure Communities, a program launched under President George W. Bush and expanded under President Obama, increased collaboration between police, prisons, and immigration authorities, with the result that for noncitizens, coming into contact with the criminal justice system could result in being deported from the United States.

Prosecution of immigration violations escalated to the point that these now comprise a significant portion of the federal docket. Individuals who had spent most of their lives in the United States and who may even have acquired lawful permanent residency were being removed permanently, resulting in devastating family separations. Latinos—particularly Mexicans and Central Americans—are disproportionately targeted in these enforcement practices.

The current administration’s policies toward Central Americans extend this history of criminalization and of restricting access to asylum—by defining the violence that is part of everyday lives as outside the boundaries of U.S. protection. President Trump has repeatedly associated Central Americans with crime and gangs, referring to their homelands as “shithole countries,” and suggesting that all who enter the country without authorization might be MS-13. Such statements fly in the fact of criminologists’ findings that the foreign-born commit fewer crimes on average than do people born in the United States.

Other Trump actions revisit the past. The administration rescinded TPS, or temporary protections, that had been issued to Salvadorans and Hondurans following natural disasters, despite ongoing violence in Honduras and El Salvador. Sessions also reversed progress that had been made in making the legal case for domestic violence and gang violence as a basis for asylum. It’s true that even before Sessions overruled these rationales, asylum cases based on such violence were very difficult to win, with 75 to 80 percent of such claims being denied. But one impact of Sessions’ ruling is that many asylum seekers will not even pass the first hurdle for asylum seekers—interviews at which they must demonstrate credible fear—and therefore will be unable to submit their claims.

Likewise, even though family separations have garnered attention since the Trump administration adopted a zero tolerance policy on unauthorized border crossings, immigrant families have had to contend with separations of various sorts for decades, if not longer. When legalization opportunities were restricted by the 1996 reforms, immigrant parents were unable to acquire lawful permanent residency, which would have enabled them to petition for children who were left behind in their countries of origin to immigrate legally. Temporary statuses such as TPS do not confer the right to leave the United States and reenter without permission from the U.S. government, so TPS recipients have been unable to visit family members in their countries of origin for years. Deportees are often separated from family members in the United States, and are unable to return legally for visits. Such separations are not as dramatic as those that have currently captured public attention, but they are nonetheless devastating. When I have interviewed immigrants who are seeking legalization opportunities, interviewees have broken down in tears describing their inability to visit their parents on their deathbeds to say goodbye.

This history of exclusion has not prevented immigration. On the contrary, a study by the Pew Research Center found that between 2007 and 2015, the U.S. immigrant population from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras rose by 25 percent, at a time when the immigrant population from Mexico declined by 6 percent. Perhaps this is because immigration is driven less by U.S. policies than by conditions in immigrants’ countries of origin. If so, what is being accomplished by exclusionary policies?

Ending the repeated exclusion of Central American asylum seekers would require bringing asylum policies into alignment with the forms of violence that actually occur in the communities these individuals are fleeing. Then, protections must be zealously enforced, for example, by creating meaningful opportunities for individuals to apply for asylum, providing those who pass credible “fear interviews” with temporary permission to remain in the country instead of placing them in detention, allowing parents and children to remain together; in short, caring for victims of persecution instead of punishing them. Doing so would promote family integrity, support human rights, and alter the dynamics of the historic relationship between the United States and Central American nations.

The post Why the U.S. Is So Unfair to Central American Refugees appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

News of a tent city dedicated to holding children in harsh conditions should evoke alarm, not least because child detention has a long and nasty history. For centuries, children have been used as pawns by governments seeking to control their parents or their leaders. And children have been forcibly relocated in the United States before. Under slavery they were separated from their parents to extort labor and build wealth, while Native American children were taken from their families for re-schooling and to foster the expropriation of land.

But the idea of holding whole groups of children in detention on a widespread basis—not as labor in a rapacious economic system or to steal land, but with detention itself as the point—is part of a newer phenomenon. And this more recent form of detention, the version that the Trump administration has embraced for now, sits cleanly within the tradition of concentration camps.

While writing a book on camp history, I defined concentration camps as the mass detention of civilians without trial, usually on the basis of race, religion, national origin, citizenship, or political party, rather than anything a given individual has done. By this definition, the new child camp established in Tornillo, Texas, is a concentration camp. While tragic, this is hardly surprising, since the innovation of concentration camps rose in part out of the willingness to detain children.

Women and children, together, constituted the overwhelming majority of the populations in the first detention sites publicly referred to as “concentration camps,” which appeared near the turn of the 20th century in Cuba and southern Africa. During a rebellion in Cuba, hundreds of thousands of women and children were driven off their land by Spanish soldiers, who destroyed their homes and crops, forcing them into miserable conditions behind barbed wire beginning in 1896.

American reporter Richard Harding Davis visited camps in three Cuban cities, finding detainees—known as reconcentrados—infected with smallpox and yellow fever in squalid temporary housing. He met babies whose “bones showed through as plainly as the rings under a glove.” Well over 100,000 Cuban civilians died as a result of conditions in these camps, a significant percentage of them children.

Concentration camps appeared again when the British forced families of rebel Boer fighters into tent cities in brutal conditions in southern Africa. It was understood at the time that the noncombatants were effectively hostages meant to get the men to surrender. A November 1901 letter to The New York Times about the British camps laid out the dynamic: “England, unable to conquer the Boer men, is striking at the women and children.” From the beginning, concentration camps targeted the most vulnerable.

Historian Peter Warwick records that in all, more than 27,000 Boer internees died, in the range of double the total number of combat casualties on both sides. Nearly 80 percent of the deaths in the camps were children. Segregated camps for black Africans had even worse conditions and less food, and ended up killing more than 14,000 detainees. In camps in both Cuba and southern Africa, atrocious death rates came not from massacres or gas chambers but from disease and starvation. Yet in these early camps, lethal as they were, most children remained with siblings and their mothers.

Later camps would break with that precedent in shocking ways. In the last years of the World War II, Germans took children from non-Jewish foreign parents upon arrival in the regular concentration camp system, the Konzentrationslager, sending them for denationalization and integration into German society. The children of Jewish parents were more often sent to the subset of Nazi death camps dedicated to extermination of Jews as a people; typically, they were murdered on arrival.

Jewish twins kept alive to be used in Mengele’s medical experiments. These children were liberated from Auschwitz by the Red Army in January 1945. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

In the wake of the death of millions and the abomination that Auschwitz and other death camps represent, classifying any other type of detention facility as a concentration camp can now seem obscene. But it is a mistake to avoid the term. The phrase “concentration camp” was used for sites of mass detention of civilians for nearly four decades before the Nazis came to power. Even their gentler incarnations, such as the internment of military-age males during World War I, harmed internees, and helped to rehabilitate and institutionalize the idea of camps, setting the stage for more lethal models.

Even after World War II’s end exposed concentration camps’ horrors, the mass detention of children continued and evolved. Between 1976 and 1983, officials of Argentina’s military dictatorship detained thousands of adults and stole their children. Some detainees gave birth in a room of the torture center in the officers’ residence at the Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada in Buenos Aires, where detainees were interrogated and most of them executed, with hundreds of their children raised by pro-dictatorship families.

In Cambodia during the same era, the Khmer Rouge put children into forced labor camps, creating dedicated children’s work brigades. Elizabeth Becker, reporting from Phnom Penh, noted the shuttered schools and suspected some clandestine horror was underway when she caught a lone glimpse of “thin children, barefoot and in rags” carrying firewood near the highway. As a nine-year-old, Sopheline Cheam Shapiro had to dig in rice fields from dawn to dusk after losing her father, two brothers, and a grandmother, along with uncles and cousins. “I am no different,” she later wrote, “from most of my generation.”

Camps have often emerged at moments of crisis or in response to a social challenge, when societies are vulnerable to fear or division. Just as detention of children was meant to wear down Boer guerrillas resisting imperial rule a century ago, the detention of children today is meant to deter parents from seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.

These shelters may seem like a temporary solution, but irregular detention tends to persist and warp over time. The torture and extrajudicial detention that began at Guantanamo, Cuba, during America’s 21st-century “War on Terror” had roots in the treatment of Haitian asylum-seekers who were intercepted at sea and imprisoned on the base in the 1990s. HIV-positive detainees were segregated and held in such grotesque conditions (without access to adequate medical or legal assistance) that U.S. courts intervened.

Mrs. Shigeho Kitamoto and her four children, along with other Japanese Americans, were forced from their homes on Bainbridge Island, Wash., to an inland internment site, March 30, 1942. Image courtesy of Associated Press.

Concentration camps rose out of aggressive strategies intended for use in fighting guerrilla insurgencies. Today neither a war on the border nor even a civil conflict can serve as an excuse for this policy. Though there is plenty of military rhetoric, what we really have is a concentration camp policy wielded against refugees, which has devolved into a war on children. The American Academy of Pediatrics has already announced that the policy of separation alone is enough to do significant harm to children. This shift in policy has been sprung on a complex, already overburdened asylum and immigration system with a history of abuse. Under the best of leadership, the surge in children detained would mean overcrowding, sanitation problems, and physical and mental health issues. We do not yet know how many children will be unable to reunite with family members as a result of bureaucratic mix-ups, language barriers, and other issues. And things are unlikely to get better without intervention that ends the policy of separation. History shows that problematic detention practices become normal, and then they get worse.

We can already see the background demonization of refugee children in the pamphlet titled “Unaccompanied Alien Frequently Asked Questions” available through the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement. It reveals both how strongly fears of foreigners have taken root in the United States today, and how the process of locking up children is turning them into targets. The first three questions cover what impact shelters will have on the community, whether kids are carriers of infectious diseases, and whether they are involved with violent gangs.

What is likely to come next? The historical parallels are already evident. As in the era of the Boer War, politicians are saying that detainees locked up by the government against their will are burdening American taxpayers. Asylum-seekers are blamed for bringing detention upon themselves, and more reprehensibly, on their children.

During the two-year existence of the Boer camps, mothers were blamed by British military officials and unsympathetic members of the public alike for the deaths of their children, said to be largely due to the ignorance and unsanitary habits of the mothers themselves. There was little acknowledgment of their involuntary confinement in dangerous conditions without enough food. And yet, it was obvious to early observers that this would not end well. In November 1901, an editorial in The New York Times cited the rising death toll in the camps, explaining that at current levels, “the Boer reconcentrados would be exterminated in less than four years.”

There is no need to see how much history is willing to repeat itself before stopping the current experiment.

The post Why the Tent City for Children Is a Concentration Camp appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Curiously, the nation’s decision to admit asylum-seekers was not a direct consequence of our Revolutionary idealism. Instead, the extension of political asylum owes much to a naval uprising—on a British ship—in 1797.

On the night of September 22, the bloodiest mutiny ever suffered by the Royal Navy erupted aboard the frigate HMS Hermione off the western coast of Puerto Rico. Stabbed repeatedly with cutlasses and bayonets, ten officers, including the ship’s sadistic captain, Hugh Pigot, were thrown overboard.

The mutiny thrust upon the administration of President John Adams a set of incendiary issues involving natural rights, American citizenship, and political asylum—a consequence of the purported presence of impressed (i.e. conscripted) American sailors aboard the Hermione and, in turn, the prospect of their extradition to Great Britain after seeking refuge in the United States.

The decade of the 1790s wasn’t necessarily friendly to asylum seekers. Although President George Washington favored a liberal immigration policy, limited to be sure to “white Europeans,” the French Revolution coupled with unrest in Ireland against British occupation contributed to a lapping tide of xenophobia in the early Republic, especially among leading members of the Federalist Party, who viewed England as a lone bastion of civil order in Europe.

Nativist fears crested with congressional passage in 1798 of the Alien Acts, which granted President Adams, as Washington’s successor, the power to deport émigrés without due process of law. Another Alien Act, in a thinly veiled attempt to deter immigration, extended the minimum period of residence from five to 14 years for prospective citizens. A Federalist representative from Massachusetts railed that he did “not wish to invite hoards [sic] of wild Irishmen.”

The mutiny challenged Federalist xenophobia.

In the summer of 1799, Adams ignited a political firestorm by authorizing a federal court in Charleston, South Carolina, to surrender to the British a seaman named Jonathan Robbins—a native son, he claimed, of Danbury, Connecticut, who had been impressed by the Royal Navy. The outrage was fanned in subsequent weeks by news from Jamaica of the sailor’s hanging, not as Jonathan Robbins, a United States citizen, but, the British claimed, as the reputed Irish ringleader Thomas Nash.

Although his true identity remained hotly contested, that did not put an end to the martyrdom of Jonathan Robbins. Mourned by Jeffersonian Republicans as a freedom fighter against British tyranny, the incident proved pivotal to Adams’s bitter loss to Jefferson in the monumental presidential election of 1800. The Robbins crisis also contributed to a dramatic shift in United States immigration policy.

In his first address to Congress, on December 8, 1801, President Jefferson pointedly invoked America’s messianic pledge to afford a haven for persecuted refugees. In stark contrast to the nativism of the Adams years, he demanded, “Shall we refuse to the unhappy fugitives from distress, that hospitality which the savages of the wilderness extended to our fathers arriving in this land? Shall oppressed humanity find no asylum on this globe?”

For 43 years after the extradition of Robbins, not one person, citizen or alien, would be surrendered by the federal government to another country, including other mutineers from the Hermione. And when the United States finally signed an extradition agreement with Great Britain in 1842 as part of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, “political offenses,” including mutiny, desertion, and treason were exempted from a list of extraditable crimes in order to avoid reviving the “popular clamour” of the Robbins controversy.

In subsequent treaties, political offenses would also remain exempt from extradition, as they would in Congress’ first extradition law (1848). That was the point at which political asylum became the express policy of the United States, a major legislative achievement in helping to fulfill the promise of the American Revolution. And in agreeing to extradition agreements with additional nations, the United States significantly promoted the doctrine of political asylum not only at home but also abroad.

The U.S. has not always lived up to these ideals, or these laws. Too often in recent decades, foreign policy priorities have influenced asylum decisions, with preference openly extended to a handful of nationalities (such as Cubans fleeing the Castro regime). Like other federal tribunals, immigration courts should function as part of the judiciary—not as an extension of the executive. After all, it was Adams’ 1799 authorization that a federal judge extradite Jonathan Robbins that touched off the fierce backlash against his presidency.

This political crisis led to a tradition of political asylum that predates the Statue of Liberty’s famous affirmation that foreign nations send “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” It would take the martyred Jonathan Robbins, and another 50 years, but political asylum’s establishment in 1848 effectively enshrined Tom Paine’s promise in 1776 that America would be a beacon of liberty for victims of oppression and violence.

The post How the Bloodiest Mutiny in British Naval History Helped Create American Political Asylum appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.