Fear and confusion
The man protested, and eventually, one of the regular security guards arrived, confirming to Immigration Officers that he was not the person named on their deportation order.
Last December the Irish Refugee Council strongly condemned the “degrading” way in which deportations are routinely carried out in Ireland after it emerged that a group of 34 Nigerians were badly mistreated by immigration officers aboard a chartered deportation flight from Dublin to Lagos. In the days following the scandal a coalition of migrant rights NGOs demonstrated outside Leinster House, demanded that unsuccessful asylum applicants be allowed to “leave in a more dignified manner”.
But such a dignified exit from the state remains a long way off for those whose application for asylum has been turned down. In Ireland for six years now, Teresa*, originally from Nigeria, received a deportation order three year ago after being refused both refugee status and subsidiary protection.
“The first three years I was a bit cocky,” says the mother-of-two, one of whose children was born in Ireland. “But now there’s a difference, the feeling before and now are poles apart. You would not wish a deportation letter even on your worst enemy. Because when you have that hanging on your head, your life is destabilised. You don’t have a focus anymore. Because you don’t know your left from your right.”
And Teresa has been left rattled by the heavy-handed deportations she has witnessed during her time at the Reception Centre. “It is horrible. They come in around 4am. You’re sleeping. They knock on your door, and you’re told, ‘Get ready to go.’
“I have witnessed cases where they have to separate families. The kids watch their fathers being dragged and pulled and they’re crying and there’s nothing they can do. The effects are still on the kids until now. It is two years now and the kids still wake up remembering the day their daddy was taken.”
Unfortunately for Teresa and the scores of other failed asylum seekers awaiting removal from the state, dawn raids on direct provision asylum centres by immigration officers remain common practice on the day a deportation is finally carried out.
“The manner in which deportations are currently conducted, it gives people no way to prepare for their return,” says Fiona Finn, CEO of NASC, a Cork-based NGO assisting migrants’ integration in the Munster area. “Picking them up in the dead of night — this is absurd. If people remain living in the hostels, check in with An Garda Siochána when they are asked to, then clearly they are consenting to the terms of a deportation order. They are not an evasion risk.”
A number of requests to the GNIB for a comment on deportation procedures went unanswered.
There’s an even bigger discomfort for those awaiting removal, says Finn. That’s the limbo they find themselves in, never knowing if today is going to be their turn.
“We have people come to us all the time and say, ‘I want to go — I can’t bear this waiting anymore. If only the department would give me a time, a date. Then I could plan for my return.” And this endless waiting is what gets to Teresa the most. “If the asylum process could be ended in six months, then it would be easier for people to cope. Don’t keep them for years here.
“If you are not strong willed, it could destroy you. It has that strong an effect. That’s why you find people losing it, getting psychological problems. Mentally, people’s character changes once they get the deportation letter.
“People you’ve know through other times, you see them change. They go from being nice to sarcastic to rude — and you keep wondering what is it? It is that fear that the deportation is coming today.”
Much of the delay, says Sharon Waters of the Irish Refugee Council, arises from the “split” nature of our asylum system. Rather than applying for the different types of protection offered by the state all at once — refugee, subsidiary protection and humanitarian leave to remain — asylum seekers must apply sequentially.
In most instances, this leaves applicants lingering in the asylum system for years, first seeking refugee status, applying for subsidiary protection if the original application is negative, and requesting leave to remain failing that.
The Irish Examiner recently reported the case of a man who arrived in Ireland seeking asylum 14 years ago. The first 11 years he spent waiting for a final decision on his asylum application, but for the last three years he has been awaiting deportation. Embarrassingly for the Government, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has called for an overhaul to our asylum system, demanding that processing times be radically reduced. Figures collected by the UNHCR shows the average waiting time in Ireland for a deportation order to be issued is four years, but a “significant proportion” waited five years and more.
“Ireland is now the only European Union member state without a single procedure for the determination of refugee and subsidiary protection status,” the latest UNHCR report notes. “In all other EU member states the authorities examine all the protection needs of an applicant at the same time.”
Another serious flaw, says Finn, is the record low refugee acceptance rates that come with it. The Office of the Refugee Applications Commissioner’s 2010 report released this Tuesday shows that Ireland now has the lowest rate of recognition of refugees in the EU. Of 1,939 asylum applications received last year, 24 applicants were granted protection by the state — an acceptance rate of 1.1% of all asylum claims that the UN have described as “extraordinarily low” and “extreme”. The average EU recognition rate is 27%.
“The state has a need to protect its borders, we accept that,” says Finn, “but because the acceptance rate is so low, we would question how the asylum system works. We think it is broken.
“Currently we are deporting people to Iran, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Afghanistan. We would question if these applications have been assessed correctly because these people are potentially being returned to a situation of danger, of warfare.”
And the extraordinarily high rejection rates have also led Teresa to question how asylum applications are reviewed here.
After years of appeals, injunctions and judicial challenges against her deportation proceedings, she finally accepts her own impending removal from the state. But when she received a letter from the Department of Justice seeking the deportation of her Irish-born son — now five-years-old — she gave up entirely on the system.
“I don’t think they ever even looked at my child. For them to send my son a deportation letter, it means they’ve already got their mind made up. The end has already been decided for him.”
Teresa never applied for asylum for her Irish-born child, wrongly assuming he was automatically entitled to live in the country.
“The others in the hostel, they look at me with pity. Some even start to cry because they know what you are going through.”
*not her real name
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