The Snakehead

by Patrick Radden Keefe

  Sean Chen was huddled in the hold, overtaken by excitement. Word had spread among the passengers that they would be landing soon. Some people claimed to have been above deck long enough to catch a fleeting glimpse of the lights of the United States. Then, around midday, the passengers whom Kin Sin Lee had deputized as his onboard enforcers clambered down the ladder and into the hold. We will soon be landing in America, they said. When the ship lands, you will need to brace yourselves, because it will land hard. If you know how to swim, you should get off the ship first and swim to shore.

  According to some accounts, it was announced that those who did not know how to swim should stay on board and someone would arrange to pick them up later. But according to others, the passengers were told that even those who did not know how to swim should jump and try to swim for shore, because everyone who remained on board would be arrested.

  It may never be clear how it was that the Coast Guard, which had spotted the Golden Venture and was monitoring the ship, ultimately failed to prevent the catastrophe that followed. It is a frequent refrain of those in the business of actually keeping track of ships that the ocean is a very big place, crisscrossed at any moment by all manner of craft large and small, and it is not as easy as it sounds to monitor a ship continuously. But the Golden Venture was quite close to shore, and as it approached New York its course took it on a trajectory that ran directly perpendicular to the shipping lanes in the area—a dangerous move, and one that might have attracted some notice. What we do know is that on that Saturday evening, as the Golden Venture followed its slow course toward Rockaway the Coast Guard dispatched boats to intercept it. But they couldn’t find it.

  When the ship reached the water off Rockaway, at around 11 P.M., Kin Sin Lee tried calling Charlie, but he couldn’t make contact. He instructed the crew members and onboard enforcers to take flashlights and start giving light signals to confirm that Weng and Charlie were waiting on shore and would be ready to transport the passengers. There were many lights along the shoreline: streetlights, house lights, the occasional headlights of passing cars. But nothing answered their signal. Shortly after midnight, Lee turned to Lwin. “Nobody is picking up,” he said. “We have to go to shore.”

  They consulted the chart to try to identify a sandy portion of beach that they could use as a target.

  “Do we really have to do this?” Lwin asked.

  “Yes,” Kin Sin Lee replied.

  As darkness fell, the weather had grown stormy. The wind had picked up, and the waves were choppy now, and very rough. The aggressive tide was actually a good thing, Lwin said. As the ship approached the beach, the surge of the strong waves would push it farther up onto the shore. When Lwin had selected the appropriate angle for their final approach, Kin Sin Lee pulled a bell which sent a command to the engine room: full speed ahead.

  “Let’s do it,” he told Lwin.

  Overcome by adrenaline, Lwin hugged Lee. “God bless you,” he said. Then, as the ship picked up speed, he instructed Lee to sit down and hold on tight.

  “Let’s give New York a surprise,” he said.

  In the last moments at sea, Sean could feel the Golden Venture pick up speed. They had been warned to brace themselves, and he had grown accustomed, during the months in the hold, to clutching his belongings and positioning his limbs in such a way that he did not roll helplessly with every undulation. The hold was electric with excitement and anticipation: it had all been worth it, the sacrifice, the danger, the hunger, seasickness, and storms; the treks through Burma, the lonely months in Bangkok, the terrors of the Najd II, and the hopeless interlude in Africa. It was over. They had triumphed. They were about to set foot on American soil.

  A huge thwump sent a shudder through the hold as the bow plowed into a sandbar. Everyone around Sean was thrown by the impact, rolling and sprawling, then trying to get purchase on the plywood floor, grab their belongings, and get out of the hold. They mobbed the ladder leading to the deck. Sean joined the throng, eventually getting his hands on the ladder and climbing up and out into the night. The wind was strong, the air salty, the lights of New York a glimmer in the distance. The small deck of the ship was chaotic—people were shouting and screaming, gathering their few belongings and jumping overboard into the sea. Sean could swim. He wasn’t a strong swimmer, but he had learned how to swim growing up and knew that if he kept moving all four limbs in the water, he would stay afloat. He made his way to the front of the Golden Venture, took off his T-shirt and his pants, summoned his nerve, put a leg over the edge, and jumped.

  His first sensation was the severe, terrible coldness of the water, the kind of chill that saps any strength or energy you have, seeming literally to freeze your limbs, turning them brittle and useless, paralyzing you. Sean found the strength to move his arms and legs. He swam, eyes on the lights of the shore. He could have been in the water for ten minutes, or it could have been an hour—he didn’t know. He just kept pushing against his exhaustion, buffeted by the surf, one arm over the other, until his feet hit sand. He half walked, half crawled the last remaining yards until he reached the beach, where others were coming ashore around him. Then he straightened, took a few more steps, and collapsed.

  When he came to, he was lying in a bed in a brightly lit room. He was wearing an unfamiliar garment: a simple cotton shift, a hospital johnny. He looked around. He was in the hospital. There was a black man standing above him, in a uniform—a police officer. The officer was speaking to him in English.

  Sean tried to remember the English he had learned from his dictionary in Bangkok and practiced over the months at sea with anyone who could speak it.

  “Where am I?” he asked.

  “You’re in New York City,” the cop replied.

  Sean felt an enormous, almost overwhelming sense of relief. But the relief was tempered somewhat by one especially strange detail of his new surroundings. As Sean lay there in his johnny in the hospital with the police officer and slowly took it all in, he made an alarming discovery. He was handcuffed to the bed.

  Chapter Eleven

  A Well-founded Fear

  FOR MUCH of its history the United States has suffered from a kind of bipolarity when it comes to matters of immigration. The country’s growth has been fueled by successive waves of strivers from other shores, who helped animate the westward push across the continent, fuel the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, and accelerate the high-tech boom of the late twentieth century. The notion that America is a “nation of immigrants” is an enduring cliché. Yet while a steady demand for cheap labor and a sense that the United States should welcome the downtrodden of the world have led to a generally liberal immigration policy, American history has also been punctuated by periods of acute xenophobia and hostility to outsiders, particularly during difficult economic times, and a recurrent suggestion that the American dream will remain attainable only so long as the country fends off the fortune-seeking hordes and limits the number of people who can obtain access to the opportunities the country has to offer.

  Whether through some accident of history or because of the industriousness with which they have answered America’s siren call, or perhaps because their foreignness is written so indelibly on their faces, the Chinese seem to have suffered more than other immigrant groups at the mercy of the pendulum swing of American attitudes toward immigration. One historian referred to the Chinese as “the indispensable enemy”—needed for the labor they can provide, but also feared—and it does seem that the history of the Chinese in America serves as an object lesson in this country’s fickle indecision on the subject of immigration. The Chinese who had the misfortune to be lured with the promise of work in the gold mines or on the railroads in the mid-nineteenth century, only to arrive and experience anti-Chinese pogroms and the advent of Chinese exclusion, experienced (and perhaps precipitated) one of these moments of sharp nativist reaction. The passengers aboard the Golden Venture happened to arrive during another.

  In the summer
of 1993, the mood in the United States had shifted perceptibly against immigrants, and perhaps especially against those immigrants who came seeking asylum. Six months before the Golden Venture arrived, in January, a Pakistani named Mir Aimal Kasi had gone on a shooting spree outside the CIA headquarters in McLean, Virginia, after applying for political asylum and using his work authorization documents to obtain a driver’s license and purchase an AK-47. In February, five months before the ship ran aground, the World Trade Center was bombed in an operation masterminded by Ramzi Yousef, who had entered the country without a visa the year before and applied for political asylum, and by the Blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman, whose own asylum case was pending at the time of the bombings. Connecting these sensational examples of murderers who slipped through the system with the uptick in asylum applications from China, the press sounded the alarm: the United States had an immigration problem, and it was growing out of control. In March the New York Times warned of “a new boomtide of political asylum seekers that is swamping the process.”

  One person who was feeding the hysteria, in frequent interviews with the press, was Bill Slattery, the brash, determined head of the INS office in New York. Slattery felt that America’s immigration policies were encouraging illegal immigrants to undertake the journey. The asylum system was broken, in his view, and the backlog was making it impossible to process migrants once they arrived. He sounded dire warnings to reporters that fraudulent asylum-seekers were “taking control of U.S. borders away from the U.S. government.”

  Slattery was hard-nosed and not given to self-doubt. He had volunteered for the Marine Corps in 1965, while he was still in high school, hoping to be sent to Vietnam. Instead he was sent to a training command in Yuma, Arizona, where he became fascinated by the Border Patrol. America’s schizophrenia about immigration plays out in the culture of immigration officials. Historically, in the INS, one side of the job was known as “benefits” and involved accepting people—who we let into the country and under what circumstances, how long they can stay, whether they can send for their families. The other side of the job was “enforcement”—fighting to keep people out or to send them back where they came from. The benefits/enforcement dichotomy is a matter of professional specialization for immigration officials, but also, on a deeper level, of philosophy. And from his early years with the Border Patrol, when Slattery was assigned to an outstation in the town of Hebbronville, east of Laredo, in what he thought of as “the tit” of Texas, he regarded his relationship with Mexicans as essentially an adversarial one. He learned to “cut for sign,” stalking groups of migrants through the brush, noting each disturbance in the undergrowth, judging the age of a footprint by whether dew had settled on it or it had been traversed by bugs. The illegals were determined to outsmart Slattery, and he didn’t want to let them.

  After stints in Philadelphia and Newark, Slattery joined the New York office, rising through the ranks until he was made district director. His appointment, in 1990, coincided with the snakehead boom, and he spent the early nineties contending with the overwhelming numbers of Chinese who began disembarking from planes at JFK Airport. Slattery complained to his superiors, and also to the press, that as long as he was obliged to release asylum-seekers pending resolution of their claims, people would abuse the system. He wanted the authority to detain undocumented immigrants when they arrived in New York and to hold them while their asylum applications made their way through the system. If they were deprived of the opportunity to get out and work, Slattery guessed, word of the policy would make its way to China, and there would be fewer asylum-seekers in the future.

  Before dawn on June 6, 1993, the telephone rang in Slattery’s house in New Jersey. Slattery answered, and couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “A ship?” he said. “In Queens?” He hung up and dressed. A special agent was en route to pick him up and take him to Rockaway. As the reality of what had happened sank in, Slattery’s temper began to flare. The smugglers had brought a ship full of Chinese directly to New York City and run it aground on a beach in Queens. This was a final, unmistakable fuck you from the smugglers to the United States government, and Slattery took it personally.

  As the car sped through the empty streets to Queens, Slattery took a call from the White House. Since the inauguration of Bill Clinton six months earlier, the INS had been a headless operation; Clinton had not yet appointed a commissioner, and many of the top positions were still unfilled. On the phone was a young National Security Council official, Eric Schwartz, who some months earlier had been charged with managing the Chinese boat smuggling issue. Earlier in his career, Schwartz had been the Washington director of Asia Watch, a human rights organization, and Slattery regarded him suspiciously, as an “alien activist.” Schwartz seemed concerned with how the event was going to play out on television, and also with the human rights of the people on the ship. But Slattery had made up his mind before he reached the beach. “I’m detaining them, Eric,” he said. “I’m going to lock them all up.”

  Sean Chen and the other passengers aboard the Golden Venture had been told that when they reached the United States, they would be questioned and processed, then released. That had indeed been the practice in recent years. Later, there would be much speculation about who made the decision to detain the Golden Venture passengers, and when. But there was no doubt in Slattery’s mind. Washington was terrified, paralyzed by its own indecision. There was no leadership to speak of at the INS. Slattery bestrode the bureaucratic void created by the interregnum in Washington and made a decision. “I led. Washington followed,” he would later recall, adding, “Nobody in Washington ever told me not to detain them.”

  Slattery faced something of a logistical challenge, however: there were simply not enough beds in the immigration detention centers in the New York area to house all of the Golden Venture passengers. Initially Sean and the other passengers were bused to the small detention facility on Varick Street. But the space was already overcrowded, and it was clear to Slattery that if the government was going to continue to detain the passengers for any length of time, some alternative arrangement would have to be made. Another problem, from Slattery’s point of view, was that all the publicity surrounding the arrival of the Golden Venture seemed to have brought out the city’s bleeding-heart contingent. Attorneys were showing up at Varick Street, offering to represent the Chinese. “It’s been our tradition to protect these people,” one of the lawyers told a reporter, citing the text of the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. “If you ever wanted to see a picture of ‘huddled masses yearning to breathe free,’ it was on the front page of today’s New York Times.”

  Slattery was not so easily moved. It rankled him when people referred to the Chinese as “refugees.” Why was it that undocumented migrants from Mexico or Guatemala who arrived by truck were invariably described as “illegal aliens,” but Cubans or Chinese who arrived by boat merited the designation “refugees”? Did the manner in which they came to the United States really make such a difference? To Slattery, Sister Ping and the other snakeheads in New York City seemed capable of exploiting every aspect of the American system. Some snakeheads had been known to collaborate actively with immigration attorneys, hiring them to assist clients in preparing bogus asylum applications. It wasn’t unheard of for whole boatloads of passengers to end up represented by the same immigration attorney, prompting exasperated officials in New York to observe that “they didn’t all look on the same page in the Yellow Pages.” At Varick Street, someone placed a sign on a bulletin board saying that until further notice, lawyers would not be permitted to see the detainees. “Attorneys are permitted access when they’ve actually been retained by the detainees,” an INS spokesman explained. But the attorneys would not be allowed to enter the facility “in an attempt to solicit business.”

  If Slattery could not turn the ship around and send it back to China or put the passengers on a plane immediately, it was clear that the process of removing them was going to
take some time, and during that time he did not want to release them onto the streets. If he did so, it would send a message to China that the United States was a lax and permissive nation that could happily absorb untold numbers of illegals. Perhaps worst of all, Slattery knew from past experience with snakeheads that if he released the Golden Venture passengers, they would immediately find work and start saving money so they could pay off the balance of their $30,000 fees. Setting them free would be tantamount to giving $9 million to organized crime. Before long a plan was devised to farm out the passengers to detention facilities across the country, away from the immigration lawyers and the media glare of New York. The attorneys had maintained their presence at Varick Street, trying to get in to represent the passengers. But within forty-eight hours of the ship’s arrival, volunteers who went to the facility were told it was too late. All the Chinese had gone.

  Sean Chen found himself on a bus, in a convoy of buses that made its way out of New York City. It was a long ride, and Sean was hungry. He was unaccustomed to American food and unimpressed by the flimsy ham-on-white sandwich he was offered for the ride. He gazed out the window as the great asphalt and concrete snare of New York fell away and the bus traversed the highways and toll plazas of New Jersey and eventually entered Pennsylvania, pushing west into countryside that was more and more rural, with great verdant trees and sloping pastures segmented by lengths of whitewashed fence, and eventually the buggies and barns and silos of Amish country. Central Pennsylvania was the greenest place Sean had ever seen. It was beautiful.

  On the outskirts of York, a rust belt town on the banks of the Susquehanna River, the buses came to a halt before a complex of low-slung beige buildings, the York County Prison. Sean filed in with the others and was issued a prison jumpsuit, then led to his cell. There were over a hundred Golden Venture passengers at York, all of them men. (The women had been sent to a prison in New Orleans.) Sean had been frightened on a number of occasions on his journey to America—when he passed through the mountains in Burma, when the local guide pointed a gun at him on the Thai border, when the Golden Venture nearly capsized in the gale off the Cape of Good Hope. But as the reality began to sink in that he was now a prisoner in an American jail, in a remote part of the country, far from any Chinatown or immigration lawyer, a deep, chilling fear of a sort that he had not felt before began to set in.