Seized With Heavy Hand at Border, for Paperwork Errors

New York Times/February 14, 2006
By Nina Bernstein

The details in these cases vary, as do the technical visa infractions committed by each of the foreigners. But they all testify to a larger issue looming on the front lines of immigration enforcement: how low-level gatekeepers and prosecutors in the customs and immigration system are using their growing discretionary power over travelers who pose no security risk...

Amy L. Peck, an immigration lawyer in Omaha who heads the association committee that works with Immigration and Customs Enforcement [said], "So that translates into this rigid what one could also describe as extreme policy of turning away and not using discretion in cases that scream for it."

...There are the seven Tibetan monks who were visiting Omaha two weeks ago. After their church sponsor abruptly withdrew its support, their religious visas were revoked and a dozen immigration officers in riot gear showed up to arrest them...

Sometimes the case for leniency is in the eye of the beholder. In the case of the Tibetan monks, Ms. Peck said they had been abandoned without money in Arizona by their sponsor, the Church of Shambhala, because they refused to recognize its leader [Ronald Lloyd Spencer] as the reincarnation of Buddha and Jesus. They traveled to Omaha for Buddhist workshops, unaware that their visas had been revoked, she said. But Mr. Raimondi defended the arrests, saying that the monks had been notified that their visas were revoked, and became "fugitive aliens" when they left Arizona...