CARIBBEAN immigrant advocates yesterday joined the chorus of concern over a ruling by US Attorney-General John Ashcroft that illegal immigrants can be held in detention indefinitely even if they have no known links with terrorism.

“We have some concerns that rights are being eroded,” Irwin Clare, the Jamaican-born head of the New York-based Caribbean Immigrant Association, told the Observer. ‘It has been a concern of ours for some time, even in other proceedings where people have been detained.”

Ashcroft raised eyebrows on Friday with a decision in a case of a Haitian would-be asylum seeker, David Joseph, who waded ashore in Miami last October after a boat in which he and others were ran aground off the Miami coast.

Joseph and the others, who were detained by US Immigration, applied for political asylum and Joseph was released on bail while awaiting a decision on his immigration claim.

Ashcroft ruled that Joseph’s release would “tend to encourage further surges of mass migration from Haiti by sea with attendant strains on national security and homeland security resources”.

US officials say that because immigration judges are part of the Justice Department, rulings of the kind made by Ashcroft must serve as a basis for any decision in bail hearings involving illegal immigrants.

Ashcroft’s ruling was seen as another move by the Bush administration to use the detention of immigrants as one of its mechanisms to address security concerns following the September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States.

While people suspected of links with terrorist organisations have been held in detention, this is the first time the US Government has decided to detain immigrants with no such suspected ties.

Clare, in an telephone interview from New York, characterised the latest development as part of an “ongoing onslaught on immigration” that has intensified since the 9/11 bombings of the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre.

“We’re not surprised because this is the mood of the day, the order of the day,” he said, adding that most people were afraid to speak out.

“There is dead silence even in the corners of those who would normally speak up about these issues,” he said. “This matter is not a very hot political issue and those who will rise up against it would be seen as a ‘humbug’ in the fight against terrorism.”

Yesterday William McKoy, the chairman of New Jersey’s Paterson Municipal Council, described Ashcroft’s ruling as “un-American” and warned that the Bush administration was threatening the foundation of what built America in the first place — immigration.

“I believe that although we are under this threat, we must keep in mind that the US is a land of immigrants and that immigrants have always played and continue to make significant contributions to the US,” McKoy told the Observer in a telephone interview from his New Jersey home.

McKoy argued that Americans would be much better off if the authorities focused on “protecting and observing the civil rights and civil liberties of the citizens and residents of the US regardless of their place of birth”.

“In doing so, (it) would foster a greater appreciation of the American ideal of freedom and liberty for all,” he said. “As we look to export democracy and the rule of law to places such as Afghanistan and Iraq, it is even more so important that we demonstrate the strength of this democracy through equal justice for all.”

At the weekend, human rights groups and civil libertarians also hit out at Ashcroft’s ruling in much the same terms as McKoy.

“It’s short-sighted, it’s wrong and it does not make us safer,” Elisa Massimino of the Washington office of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights told the New York Times. “What it means is that people will languish in detention without the opportunity to prove to a judge or anyone else that they don’t pose a threat to national security.”

It was not immediately clear how widely the Americans would enforce the policy, but Ashcroft had argued that the US lacked the capacity to screen Haitian immigrants individually, to determine whether they posed national security risks, particularly in the context of its need to use resources in the wider war on terrorism.

“Under the circumstances, it is reasonable to make a determination and aliens arriving under the circumstances presented by the October 29 influx should be detained rather than released on bond,” the attorney-general said.

ASHCROFT… says illegal immigrants can be held in detention indefinitely even if they have no known links with terrorism

MCKOY… we must keep in mind that the US is a land sof immigrants