Get Them Back in Yemen Where They Can Be Droned

The experiences people report have the same essential ingredients. The typical tale involves a Yemeni-American man (all of our cases so far involve men) who has been living in the United States, as a US citizen, since childhood. As an adult, he travels to Yemen to visit his parents, wife or children, and needs to apply for a visa for his spouse or relative, or to document his children as US citizens born in Yemen. He requests an appointment, for which there is often a six-month wait. He travels hundreds of miles through politically unstable territory to reach the embassy in Sanaa. There, he typically waits several hours before being called. In the course of the appointment at the consular window, a law enforcement officer takes the petitioner away to an interrogation room for several hours. The officer aggressively lobs groundless accusations of fraud at him, sometimes accusing him of having another name, sometimes accusing him of lying about who his parents are. Keep in mind that this man has already proven, to the satisfaction of a US government official, that he is a US citizen, and no one has taken any action to challenge that. He’s got valid proof of US citizenship, like a Certificate of Citizenship, a Certificate of Naturalization or a Consular Report of Birth Abroad.

But that’s not enough. The officer doesn’t believe anything the man says and at this point is not vetting the application, but basically reinvestigating the man’s claim of citizenship -- an investigation with which the man has absolutely no obligation to cooperate. The officer then terrorizes the individual with threats that failure to confess could result in several years of prison time and denial of all of the family’s applications, which would be devastating to the family, subjecting them to indefinite separation. Sometimes there are also false promises that the officer just wants to help out, that everything will be fine and that all the paperwork will be processed as soon as a confession is signed. So, after hours in an interrogation room, with all of his identity papers and legal documents in the officer’s possession, without access to an attorney or other legal assistance, the individual feels like he has no choice but to sign the papers. Of course, once the papers are signed, many people are simply dismissed from the embassy. Their passports are not returned, and their applications are not approved. No notice, no explanation, no instructions for appealing or for returning to the United States.

The use of forced confessions is especially alarming; if the government had hard proof of fraud, it wouldn’t need confessions. It’s hard to imagine why anyone would sign one and risk losing everything without being coerced or misled. That may explain why the reported encounters have the hallmarks of coercion -- such as threats of harm and hours of detention in an interrogation room -- and why the people who signed papers were generally surprised by what happened to them next.

  MERIP