The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream (27 page)

Before dawn on June 6, 1993, the telephone rang in Slattery’s house in New Jersey. Slattery answered, and couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “A ship?” he said. “In Queens?” He hung up and dressed. A special agent was en route to pick him up and take him to Rockaway. As the reality of what had happened sank in, Slattery’s temper began to flare. The smugglers had brought a ship full of Chinese directly to New York City and run it aground on a beach in Queens. This was a final, unmistakable
fuck you
from the smugglers to the United States government, and Slattery took it personally.

As the car sped through the empty streets to Queens, Slattery took a call from the White House. Since the inauguration of Bill Clinton six months earlier, the INS had been a headless operation; Clinton had not yet appointed a commissioner, and many of the top positions were still unfilled. On the phone was a young National Security Council official, Eric Schwartz, who some months earlier had been charged with managing the Chinese boat smuggling issue. Earlier in his career, Schwartz had been the Washington director of Asia Watch, a human rights organization, and Slattery regarded him suspiciously, as an “alien activist.” Schwartz seemed concerned with how the event was going to play out on television, and also with the human rights of the people on the ship. But Slattery had made up his mind before he reached the beach. “I’m detaining them, Eric,” he said. “I’m going to lock them all up.”

Sean Chen and the other passengers aboard the
Golden Venture
had been told that when they reached the United States, they would be questioned and processed, then released. That had indeed been the practice in recent years. Later, there would be much speculation about who made the decision to detain the
Golden Venture
passengers, and when. But there was no doubt in Slattery’s mind. Washington was terrified, paralyzed by its own indecision. There was no leadership to speak of at the INS. Slattery bestrode the bureaucratic void created by the interregnum
in Washington and made a decision. “I led. Washington followed,” he would later recall, adding, “Nobody in Washington ever told me not to detain them.”

S
lattery faced something of a logistical challenge, however: there were simply not enough beds in the immigration detention centers in the New York area to house all of the
Golden Venture
passengers. Initially Sean and the other passengers were bused to the small detention facility on Varick Street. But the space was already overcrowded, and it was clear to Slattery that if the government was going to continue to detain the passengers for any length of time, some alternative arrangement would have to be made. Another problem, from Slattery’s point of view, was that all the publicity surrounding the arrival of the
Golden Venture
seemed to have brought out the city’s bleeding-heart contingent. Attorneys were showing up at Varick Street, offering to represent the Chinese. “It’s been our tradition to protect these people,” one of the lawyers told a reporter, citing the text of the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. “If you ever wanted to see a picture of ‘huddled masses yearning to breathe free,’ it was on the front page of today’s
New York Times.”

Slattery was not so easily moved. It rankled him when people referred to the Chinese as “refugees.” Why was it that undocumented migrants from Mexico or Guatemala who arrived by truck were invariably described as “illegal aliens,” but Cubans or Chinese who arrived by boat merited the designation “refugees”? Did the manner in which they came to the United States really make such a difference? To Slattery, Sister Ping and the other snakeheads in New York City seemed capable of exploiting every aspect of the American system. Some snakeheads had been known to collaborate actively with immigration attorneys, hiring them to assist clients in preparing bogus asylum applications. It wasn’t unheard of for whole boatloads of passengers to end up represented by the same immigration attorney, prompting exasperated officials
in New York to observe that “they didn’t all look on the same page in the Yellow Pages.” At Varick Street, someone placed a sign on a bulletin board saying that until further notice, lawyers would not be permitted to see the detainees. “Attorneys are permitted access when they’ve actually been retained by the detainees,” an INS spokesman explained. But the attorneys would not be allowed to enter the facility “in an attempt to solicit business.”

If Slattery could not turn the ship around and send it back to China or put the passengers on a plane immediately, it was clear that the process of removing them was going to take some time, and during that time he did not want to release them onto the streets. If he did so, it would send a message to China that the United States was a lax and permissive nation that could happily absorb untold numbers of illegals. Perhaps worst of all, Slattery knew from past experience with snakeheads that if he released the
Golden Venture
passengers, they would immediately find work and start saving money so they could pay off the balance of their $30,000 fees. Setting them free would be tantamount to giving $9 million to organized crime. Before long a plan was devised to farm out the passengers to detention facilities across the country, away from the immigration lawyers and the media glare of New York. The attorneys had maintained their presence at Varick Street, trying to get in to represent the passengers. But within forty-eight hours of the ship’s arrival, volunteers who went to the facility were told it was too late. All the Chinese had gone.

Sean Chen found himself on a bus, in a convoy of buses that made its way out of New York City. It was a long ride, and Sean was hungry. He was unaccustomed to American food and unimpressed by the flimsy ham-on-white sandwich he was offered for the ride. He gazed out the window as the great asphalt and concrete snare of New York fell away and the bus traversed the highways and toll plazas of New Jersey and eventually entered Pennsylvania, pushing west into countryside that was more and more rural, with great verdant trees and sloping pastures segmented by lengths of whitewashed fence, and eventually the buggies
and barns and silos of Amish country. Central Pennsylvania was the greenest place Sean had ever seen. It was beautiful.

On the outskirts of York, a rust belt town on the banks of the Susquehanna River, the buses came to a halt before a complex of low-slung beige buildings, the York County Prison. Sean filed in with the others and was issued a prison jumpsuit, then led to his cell. There were over a hundred
Golden Venture
passengers at York, all of them men. (The women had been sent to a prison in New Orleans.) Sean had been frightened on a number of occasions on his journey to America—when he passed through the mountains in Burma, when the local guide pointed a gun at him on the Thai border, when the
Golden Venture
nearly capsized in the gale off the Cape of Good Hope. But as the reality began to sink in that he was now a prisoner in an American jail, in a remote part of the country, far from any Chinatown or immigration lawyer, a deep, chilling fear of a sort that he had not felt before began to set in.

The
Golden Venture
passengers were segregated from the general population, in a separate wing of the prison. On that first day they tried to acclimate themselves to their new surroundings. They played cards and watched television to pass the time. They were puzzled by the strange food the prison served: beef pot pie, coleslaw, applesauce. But Sean was beginning to wonder if the various tribulations he had been through were for naught, if the whole odyssey had been a gross miscalculation. He thought about his parents back in Changle and how he could ever explain his misfortune to them. He felt, for the first time, that he had failed.

On Friday, June 11, six days after the arrival of the ship, Bill Clinton convened a meeting in the Oval Office. Senior staffers from the National Security Council, the Domestic Policy Council, the Coast Guard, and the INS discussed the
Golden Venture
incident and the larger policy
dilemmas associated with boat smuggling. One of the agenda items at the meeting was “detention of smuggled aliens who do not have credible claims.” The snakehead business was being discussed not merely as an immigration issue but as a matter of national security. Before the
Golden Venture
even arrived, the press was heralding a “smuggler ship invasion.” It emerged that the month before, another ship, the
Pai Sheng
, had dumped 250 passengers on a pier near Fort Point in San Francisco, and a decision had been made to detain those passengers as well. Before the Oval Office meeting, the associate attorney general, Web Hubbell, wrote a letter to the national security adviser, Anthony Lake, suggesting that according to U.S. intelligence, as many as fifty-four additional vessels might be en route to the United States.

“Alien smuggling is a shameful practice of unspeakable degradation and unspeakable exploitation,” Clinton declared in a speech at the White House the following week. He announced a new plan to combat the snakehead trade through aggressive pursuit of the smugglers, stiffer criminal penalties for smuggling, and efforts to interdict and redirect ships. (No mention was made of the many opportunities the United States had been afforded to interdict the
Golden Venture
or the
Najd II.)

Nor did Clinton discuss the decision to detain the
Golden Venture
passengers. But his message about the new arrivals was unmistakable. “It is a commonplace of American life that immigrants have made our country great,” Clinton said. “But we also know that under the pressures that we face today, we can’t afford to lose control of our own borders or to take on new financial burdens at a time when we are not adequately providing for the jobs, the health care, and the education of our own people.”

As he concluded his remarks, the president announced the nomination of a new commissioner to head the INS, a fifty-one-year-old immigration expert named Doris Meissner, who had held posts in the Carter and Reagan administrations before becoming director of immigration policy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Meissner had been informed when she was offered the job that halting abuse of the asylum system was her “first-order immigration imperative.”

D
eciding who should be entitled to refuge in the United States and who should be turned away entails a truly awesome responsiblity If the individual who stands before you is an economic migrant masquerading as a refugee and you should happen to see through the ruse and send him packing, the migrant may come to regret the misadventure, but you can safely send him home and sleep soundly, knowing that you have done your job. But what if you mistakenly take a bona fide refugee for an economic migrant? What if his fear of persecution is indeed well founded, but because some element of his story aroused your skepticism he is sent home to certain persecution—to imprisonment, torture, even death?

In principle, grants of asylum should entail a minimum of discretion: if an individual has a well-founded fear of persecution, then his or her claim should be granted, and whether or not the fear is well founded should be an objective test, subject to empirical inquiry. But in practice the determination is rarely so simple. People leaving their homelands in a hurry, under cover of dark, and making their way around the world to the United States do not always have the relevant documentation to substantiate the claims they make in their asylum applications. Information about current conditions in the countries they have fled is not always readily available. And to make matters worse, even individuals with a genuine asylum claim are sometimes inclined to lie, or to exaggerate one element of their story over another, in an effort to secure safe harbor. Desperate people are driven to desperate actions. Even those who tell the truth do not always make the best witnesses—they may garble a time line, misremember some small detail, mumble, give a weak handshake, or avert their eyes.

In practice, the individual hearing the asylum claim, whether it is
an immigration officer or an immigration judge, is forced to make a judgment about the credibility of the claimant, and with the introduction of discretion comes an enormous measure of disparity, luck, and chance for the asylum-seeker. During the cold war, the ostensible objectivity of the asylum process was warped by political ideology, and life-and-death determinations were made not on the basis of the facts of a specific case but on the larger geopolitics involved. If you were coming from Cuba, you had a good shot at asylum. If you were coming from Haiti, you didn’t. If you were fleeing a Communist regime in Eastern Europe, the door was often open; if you were fleeing a right-wing dictator in Latin America, it was generally closed.

Throughout the 1990s, asylum caseloads were exploding, and immigration judges were often underresourced and overworked. As a result, this most solomonic determination—who should be saved and who should be sent back—became an arbitrary and erratic activity. Disparities began to emerge in the ways that similar asylum cases were treated in different places. If you are a Chinese asylum-seeker applying for asylum in San Francisco today, for instance, you have a 74 percent chance of success, as opposed to 18 percent if you apply in Newark. When your case is assigned to an immigration judge, the assignment is random—there is no way to select which judge will hear your claim. But enormous differences exist in the grant rates of individual judges. One immigration judge in Los Angeles grants asylum to roughly 81 percent of all Chinese applicants, while a colleague in the same court grants asylum to only 9 percent. (Interestingly, female judges are much more likely than males to grant asylum. If your case is randomly assigned to a female judge, you automatically have a 44 percent better chance of getting approved.) “Whether an asylum applicant is able to live safely in the United States or is deported to a country in which he claims to fear persecution is very seriously influenced by a spin of the wheel,” one study concludes, “by a clerk’s random assignment of an applicant’s case to one asylum officer rather than another, or one immigration judge rather than another.”