By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov 28 2003 (IPS)

"I have never felt so angry, humiliated and powerless in my life, and I think it will take me a long time to absorb what happened," said Brazilian cardiologist Marcia Barbosa after being deported from the United States.

The 49-year-old physician says she is no longer able to concentrate, and adds, "It’s unlikely that I will be able to return to work in the near future," as she describes the lingering psychological effects of her run-in with the U.S. migration authorities, which culminated in her forced return to Brazil on Oct. 19.

"I will only return to the United States if there are compelling professional reasons to do so. But go back of my own free will? No," Barbosa told IPS via telephone from her home in Belo Horizonte, capital of the south-eastern state of Minas Gerais.

She said she will seek alternatives, such as a course she is interested in taking in Toronto, Canada.

Barbosa has spread the word about her ordeal, using the Internet to alert fellow Brazilians that "honourable, hard-working and respected" individuals can be treated with "arbitrariness and arrogance" in the United States as a result of the government’s crackdown on immigrants and visitors since the Sep. 11, 2001 terror attacks in New York and Washington.

President of the Minas Gerais Cardiology Society, Barbosa boarded a flight Oct. 18 to the United States, where she was to attend a three-day course on magnetic resonance imaging of the heart at the American College of Cardiology. She had paid 695 dollars for the class.

When she disembarked at the airport in Dallas, Texas, she was detained because her B2 tourist visa was not the appropriate one for someone visiting the country for a professional course. She was told that she needed a B1, or work visa.

She spent five hours waiting and being interrogated, along with three other Brazilians – another doctor and two business executives. All were ultimately deported. To go to the toilet while she was detained, she had to be accompanied by a male police agent.

After the interrogations, another six hours passed before Barbosa was finally released. She spent that time with another Brazilian woman, who was accused of people-trafficking.

"We were shut into a cold bathroom in which there was just one hard chair. We were not allowed to keep our bags or even a book to read," she said.

Nor was she allowed to contact a lawyer.

She felt further humiliation when she was escorted by police as she boarded the aircraft to return to Brazil – as if she were a criminal, paraded before the eyes of the rest of the passengers, she said.

"I was flabbergasted, I couldn’t believe it when they told me I was being deported," the doctor told IPS, adding that she had travelled to the United States "more than 20 times in the past 10 years" to participate in medical congresses, sometimes as the guest of local medical institutions.

"They are making a big mistake, confusing decent people with terrorists and feeding anti-American sentiment," she said of the U.S. government and that country’s Immigration and Naturalisation Service.

Legislative Deputy Joao Magno de Moura, of the governing Workers’ Party (PT), told IPS he has received numerous reports from Brazilians who have travelled to the United States and were subjected to similar mistreatment.

But Magno de Moura’s immediate concern – and that of three of his colleagues who will go to the United States next week – is to obtain the freedom of 922 Brazilians being held in U.S. prisons and to bring them back home.

Since the suicide attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon (Department of Defence) in Washington, 3,691 Brazilians have been detained for questioning in the United States.

And many of them remain behind bars, according to information from the U.S. Embassy in Brasilia, as Senator Helio Costa, another member of the mission, told IPS.

Around 90 percent of the detainees are in the southern state of Texas, and most are would-be immigrants who tried to enter the United States illegally from Mexico. The rest were arrested inside U.S. territory for as undocumented immigrants or for working without a visa.

The parliamentary mission will concentrate its efforts in Texas, meeting with the imprisoned Brazilians and with the immigration authorities to learn more about the situation and to seek solutions, said Costa.

The Brazilians are being held in prison alongside common criminals and there have been reports of ill treatment, according to the lawmakers.

Some have been behind bars for more than three years, waiting for the legal bureaucracy to process their deportation, but 349 have already finalised their paperwork and can return immediately, said the senator.

The Brazilian government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has rejected the U.S. proposal to charter aircraft to send the prisoners home saying it would be a form of humiliating discrimination.

On this matter, the parliamentarians will consult the people most interested, the prisoners themselves.

Magno de Moura says the main objective is to obtain better treatment for undocumented immigrants, both by the U.S. authorities and Brazilian consular services in that country, which the detainees complain have not provided due assistance.

Senator Costa underscored the need for caution in evaluating the denunciations, in order to avoid complicating relations between the two countries. He added that there is a reciprocity agreement, and that Brazil also requires a 60-dollar work visa of foreigners visiting the country to engage in business.

Furthermore, the detention of Brazilians abroad is not limited to the United States, but occurs – and is on the rise – in many other countries as well.

High unemployment triggered by the economic crisis that began in the 1980s turned Brazil into a country of net emigration, after centuries of taking in immigrants from other continents.

Around two percent of the national population, that is, 3.5 million Brazilians, are living abroad, and the United States is the biggest magnet, according to ambassador Adolfo Westphalen, director of consular affairs at the Brazil’s foreign ministry. Most are living in other countries illegally.

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