Volunteer MDs Aid Asylum Seekers

By Andrea Appleton
POSTED OCTOBER 1, 2007

Jean-Pierre Kamwa boarded a plane in Cameroon on Nov. 19, 1999, headed for New York City. He carried only the clothes on his back and a forged passport. His parents, brother, and grandfather were all dead, victims of the same regime that had brutally tortured him for speaking up for democracy.

“Please, I need protection,” Kamwa said to the first immigration official he saw at Kennedy Airport. He spoke little English, and there were no French translators.

Kamwa spent the night shackled to a bench, and was later taken to a detention center near the airport. He was left in a room with 40 other asylum seekers, where he was to spend the next five months. The toilets and showers had no doors, and he and the other detainees wore orange jumpsuits, the uniform of prisoners.

“At first I was sure I wasn’t in the United States,” Kamwa recalled. “How can someone who has been persecuted come here and be treated like this?”

Today Kamwa is a free man, with a family, an apartment in the Bronx, and a newly earned Master’s degree in social work. He might still be in detention, or back in the hands of his torturers, if it were not for a non-profit organization that moved to the Financial District last fall.

Doctors of the World (DOW), with offices at 80 Maiden Lane, is an international health and human rights organization dedicated to bringing better medical care to marginalized people in nine countries around the globe—from training health workers in Mexico to aiding victims of sex trafficking in Nepal. Fortunately for asylum seekers like Kamwa, they are in the United States as well.

People seeking asylum in the U.S. must prove they have a well-founded fear of persecution or torture at home, and direct evidence can be difficult to come by.

DOW’s Human Rights Clinic  provides torture survivors seeking asylum with medical evaluations to aid them in their cases. Volunteer physicians and mental health professionals trained in matching up a client’s story with evidence of torture write supporting affidavits. The clinic operates in 10 states, and has helped over 1,550 clients in their 14-year history. (Most cases are referred to them by pro-bono lawyers.)

“It’s an impartial assessment,” said DOW’s executive director, Tom Dougherty. “They just say, ‘This is what I find physically or mentally, and does it make sense given the story.’”

Those assessments have a powerful influence in immigration courts. An asylum seeker with a DOW affidavit has more than an 80 percent chance of success. Without it, only about a fourth of the petitioners are granted asylum.

Elizabeth Singer, an emergency room physician and Human Rights Clinic volunteer for 10 years, said it’s often emotionally exhausting. “A lot of times I go home and am just baffled and amazed at the potential we have for destruction as human beings,” she said. “I don’t think you really become immune to that.”

Gary Stadtmauer, an allergist with a background in internal medicine, has seen some 80 asylum seekers since he started with Doctors of the World in 1999. He says being one of the organization’s 100 local volunteer doctors is “the best thing” he does in medicine.

“When you see client after client after client, you start to think, my God, how much evil is there in the world?” said Stadtmauer. “But some of the best people I’ve met are people seeking asylum. Some of the bravest.”

Jean-Pierre Kamwa was one of Stadtmauer’s first clients. Asylum seekers here on temporary visas or by other legal means come to Stadtmauer’s private practice on lower Broadway to be examined. But often, the doctor must go to the client.

On March 27, 2000, Stadtmauer arrived at the now defunct Wackenhut Detention Center in Queens. Guards brought Kamwa to a visiting room, where he told Stadtmauer his story. He spoke of the history of political activism in his family and the resulting deaths; of being raped by soldiers after taking part in a student strike; of his eight arrests, for protesting against the government in favor of democracy; of the beatings with belt buckles, batons, military boots, and the flat side of a machete.

In his affidavit on Kamwa, Stadtmauer describes his medical findings: “numerous somewhat irregularly shaped 2 X 2 cm scars on his lower extremities” consistent with the beatings Kamwa claimed to have suffered. “My assessment is that Mr. Jean-Pierre Kamwa has suffered repeated traumas,” the affidavit concludes. Shortly after, the detainee won his case, and his freedom.

Stadtmauer recalled the case of another asylum seeker who said he’d been tied to a tree and left overnight. He claimed to have been bound with ropes across his neck: one rope above the larynx and another rope below.

“I asked him ‘What did you feel?’” Stadtmauer recalls, “And he said ‘I drooled all night long.’ His larynx was trapped and he couldn’t swallow.” Stadtmauer wrote an affidavit stating that in his opinion, only someone who had gone through such an experience would recount such a detail. The man was given asylum.

Since his release, Kamwa has kept in touch with Stadtmauer. And like the doctor who helped him, he has devoted himself to helping others, working full time as a social worker. Recently he launched his own non-profit organization, called Espoir (“Hope”) with a mission of helping current and former asylum seekers. (For information, e-mail jpkamwa@yahoo.com.)

“They used to say in French that when a problem is exposed clearly, it’s half solved,” said Kamwa. “When I saw someone who touched me, listened to me, that helped me regain a little bit of my humanity, my dignity.”

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