You Should Know This American

By: Elaine Lehman

 

Alma Bowman, daughter of Filipina mother and U.S. military father, has been held by ICE in detention since 2017 and was slated for deportation on November 9, 2020. On November 2, it was reported that proceedings were halted – for now – and she was returned from Arizona where she was preparing for deportation back to the Irwin County Detention Center in Irwin, GA, the site of the alleged forcible sterilization and medical abuse on more than 60 women. Bowman has been a key witness, for attorneys and journalists, of a doctor performing the allegedly unnecessary or overly aggressive procedures.

Since being transferred to the Irwin facility in January 2018, Bowman has tried to call attention to alleged medical abuses at the facility, which she said she has been both subjected to and has witnessed. She has also decried the general conditions of uncleanliness, leaking roofs, moldy bathrooms, favoritism, and rule-changing. Shortly after news broke in September 2020 about a whistleblower complaint submitted to the Department of Homeland Security alleging mistreatment, inadequate care, and human rights abuses against migrants held at the Irwin County Detention Center, several of the complaining witnesses have had their deportations seemingly expedited. At least five women subjected to treatment were deported in the month following submission of the September Complaint. Bowman was transferred to the detention facility in Arizona in preparation for her deportation.

In the course of her complex legal and immigration cases, Bowman did not have an attorney and represented herself in immigration court. She asked for asylum and, after she was denied, languished in immigration detention.

One of the immigration judges who presided over Bowman’s claim was William Cassidy, who previously came under scrutiny for deporting a citizen, Mark Lyttle, to Mexico in 2008. A district court judge in 2012 wrote that Cassidy had “rubber-stamped the false conclusion and unsupported record constructed by North Carolina ICE and the Georgia ICE Defendants that stated Lyttle was a citizen of Mexico.” In 2019, Attorney General William Barr appointed Cassidy to the Board of Immigration Appeals. (Immigration courts are civil courts operated by the Justice Department, not an independent branch of government.).

Bowman’s deportation was ultimately stopped following interventions by her lawyer Van Huynh and advocates with Georgia Detention Watch, Project South, and South Georgia Immigrant Support Network, assisted by Congressman Johnson.

After attorneys with the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, or GLAHR, began representing her in October 2020, they discovered that Bowman is, in fact, a U.S. citizen.

Alma Bowman was born in 1966 in the Philippines. Her parents married in 1968, legitimating her. They brought her to the U.S. when she was 11 years old and raised her in Georgia. Her birth certificate names her father as a U.S. citizen. Her maternal grandfather is also a U.S. citizen.

Bowman said she told both an ICE officer and more than one immigration judge — four separate judges have presided over her case in the past three years — about her citizenship. The immigration officials seemed indifferent. “They were not paying attention,” Bowman said, when asked how the officials reacted to her claims of citizenship. “They didn’t believe me, and I got it in my head that maybe I wasn’t.” One ICE officer, she told The Intercept, questioned whether the man who raised her as his daughter was actually her biological father.

Sources: Government Accountability Project, Buzzfeed News, Vice News, mic, The Intercept, Southern Poverty Law Center, Texas Interfaith Center for Public Policy, Transnational Legal Clinic, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School

Alma Bowman with her son at his graduation from Jones County High School, at a ceremony held at Georgia College and State University Centennial Center in Milledgeville, Ga., in 2015. (Source: The Intercept Photo: Courtesy of Bowman’s family)