How weak immigration laws allow killers and sadistam to obtain asylum in the United States

This could be your Uber driver or a security guard at your local airport. The elderly man who lives next door or the ice cream seller. They came to the United States from all corners of the globe—Somalia, Rwanda, El Salvador, the Balkans, Germany, Iraq—claiming they were being persecuted. In fact, they were the pursuers, writes Fox News.

For decades, war criminals lived with those whom they tortured or hunted. Under the guise of a refugee, they were looking for a new life in America. The authorities are gradually making efforts to expose and punish as many of these hidden criminals as possible, and also to ensure that none of them find a reliable refuge in the United States.

“What survivors want is for the truth to be known through due process,” he said Fox News Dixon Osburn, Executive Director of the Center for Justice and Responsibility.

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Just over a month ago, in a civil case defended by a non-profit organization CJA located in San Francisco, an American jury found that a native of Somalia, Yusuf Abdi Ali, tortured at least one refugee who now also lives in the United States. Then Ali served as commander in the national army during the civil war in Somalia at the end of 1980, and then fled to the United States. Until the trial, Ali worked as a taxi driver at Uber and Lyft in Virginia. Interestingly, he worked as a driver while he was on administrative leave at a previous security guard position at Dulles International Airport near Washington. He was sent to administrative leave after a second lawsuit was filed against him.

A jury awarded torture to about $ 500 000 dollars in compensation for the CJA lawsuit.

Фото: Depositphotos

This was CJA’s third victory in cases against those who committed shocking human rights violations, starting in the 90s in Somalia alone. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg. In fact, many more war criminals are hiding and working in the United States, having received asylum in the country.

CJA successfully represented 45 Cambodian Americans in court who accused high-ranking officials responsible for carrying out mass genocides, famines and other atrocities in the 1970s under the repressive regime of the Communist Party of Kampuchea. And after the Bosnian War, CJA—on behalf of torture victims—secured the conviction of Nikola Vukovic, who was able to enter the United States as a refugee and live a quiet life in Atlanta before being accused of torturing his Muslim neighbors at the height of the conflict.

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In April, 2019, ten years after the end of the brutal civil war in Sri Lanka, against the former head of the country's defense department, and at that time already a US citizen, Gotabey Rajapaks, filed a lawsuit. He is accused of murder and torture. A spokesman for Gotabey consistently denied the allegations and considered them "politically motivated." Since then, the man has taken steps to renounce his American citizenship.

Фото: Depositphotos

The main prosecutor is the Center for Combating Human Rights Violations (HRVWCC), which was established by the US Immigration and Customs Administration more than ten years ago. The center is managed by the Internal Security Service. Thanks to an inter-agency approach and a growing team of analysts, researchers, lawyers and investigators from around the world around 50, HRVWCC constantly investigates people living in the United States or American citizens abroad who are suspected of serious human rights violations. including genocide, torture and war crimes.

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“When conflicts arise, the perpetrators end up among the refugees or displaced people. Sometimes we can figure it out pretty quickly, and sometimes it takes ten or fifteen years for someone to come to us and say, 'This guy did it in my country,'" HRVWCC chief Mark Shaffer told Fox News.

Since 2003, ICE has arrested more than 415 people for human rights violations under a number of criminal or immigration laws. As Fox News learned, during the same 16-year period, ICE received deportation orders and physically expelled more than 900 human rights violators (whose guilt was established or suspicion was reported to them) and contributed to the departure of 152 people from the United States.

HRVWCC prevented more human rights violators and war crimes suspects from entering more 300 countries.

Currently, HSI conducts more 170 active investigations into suspected human rights violators, and also checks more 1600 reports of potential human rights violators entering the United States.

Where possible, HRVWCC will team up with the US Department of Justice for criminal prosecution of genocide, torture, war crimes, and recruitment or use of child soldiers. But most often, the authorities are instead forced to turn to the Immigration and Citizenship Act and use administrative immigration fraud charges to expel the perpetrators and human rights violators from the United States.

"We're using the 'Al Capone method' to try to get justice," explained Mona Ragheb, senior counsel at DHS.

In one case, 47-year-old Rwandan Jean Leonard Teganya was sentenced to at least eight years in prison for lying about the role he played in the genocide in the country in 1994 year in order to get asylum in the United States.

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Meanwhile, Ilya Josipovich, who settled as a refugee with his family in Ohio in 2003, dismissed any previous military service, 12 years later was charged with war crimes. ICE agents brought him back to Bosnia in 2017.

In the same year, 73-year-old Delaware resident Mohammed Jabat was convicted of hiding his past life as a war criminal in Liberia during the 1990 conflict. And in 2014, two former members of the organization accused Lebanese-born Mahmoud Bazzi of violating human rights. He came to the US on someone else's passport in 1993, then received a valid green card and founded an ice cream company in Michigan. He was convicted and deported.

Even Nazi war criminals in the United States have been in the shadows in recent decades.

Characterized as the last Nazi war criminal in America, Yakiv Paly, who served as a guard in a concentration camp and trained other Nazi criminals, arrived in the US four years after the end of World War II as a "farmer", and later became a citizen. When his dark past surfaced, decades later, Palia was finally deprived of citizenship. This happened in the 2003 year, but only last year, at the insistence of President Trump, was the 95-year-old male deported to Germany.

Photo: .ice.gov

Prior to this incident, research conducted by HRVWCC set the stage for the deprivation of American citizenship of a security guard at the concentration camp John Demianyuk. In 2009, the American passport was taken from him and sent to Munich for trial. In addition, Alexandras Lileikis, a naturalized American citizen in Massachusetts, who was the main Nazi employee, was deprived of US citizenship after decades of life in America, after which he was deported to his native Lithuania.

The HRVWCC team is also working to ensure that violators of human rights will not be allowed to enter the United States in the future, what they call a "preventive mission."

“This is a team of intelligence specialists who specialize in a particular region of the world or a particular conflict. Typically, the information we collect is sufficient to prevent the person involved from entering the United States,” Shaffer said.

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