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Most of these are pursuing their immigration cases in the courts, if they can wangle access to a lawyer. This is a system that puts little children in prison scrubs, that regularly denies detainees basic needs, like contact with lawyers and loved ones, like soap and sanitary napkins. It is a system that incarcerates whole families. It is also a system that separates parents from children. It is a system where people who are not dangerous criminals - in case you don't know, alleged immigration violations are civil, not criminal, offenses -- get injured, sick and die because of indifference or the lack of availability of timely medical care. It is a system that has produced more than 90 detainee deaths since 2003.
And just this week, prompted by an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit seeking previously unreleased documents related to the deaths of immigration detainees in U.S. custody, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials revealed 11 deaths that have occurred at detention facilities since 2004 that the government had previously failed to publicly disclose.
ICE's city, county and private prisons and jails also house serious criminals. Yet immigration detainees -- including asylum seekers, legal immigrants, victims of human trafficking, and immigrants with no criminal records -- are mixed in with the general prison population. They are stashed away in penal-like facilities for months and sometimes years, with virtually no due process and often without the most basic safeguards -- like hearings to assess the need for continued detention.
Many illegal immigrants who will be deported cannot leave the U.S. due to the fact that their country of origin will not accept them, so they must stay in the immigration jails for years or even life until a country will agree to take them. Some immigrants cannot go back to their original country out of fear of persecution and death. So we keep them locked up.
At the T. Don Hutto detention center in Texas, 26 immigrant children between the ages of one and 17 were detained with their parents who, in almost all cases, were seeking asylum.
More than 60 detainees have recently been on hunger strikes to protest conditions at the immigration detention center in Basile, Louisiana. Authorities there retaliated by putting the hunger strikers in solitary confinement.
In California, detainees are held in a private facility in San Diego, a government-run center in El Centro and at 13 local jails throughout the state. There has been a ton of well-documented violations of normal standards for legal and family visits at both San Pedro and at a Lancaster facility run by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.
Among the findings of one reliable study, there were that at least 41 facilities did not give detainees the minimum number of hours and days of recreation required by their own standards and that 19 centers did not offer any outdoor recreation time at all. The report also found deficiencies in access to phones and legal information. For example, at least 29 detention facilities had no law library, and 30 centers failed to provide reasonable privacy for legal calls. In addition, detainees were often placed in solitary confinement without justification.
We're not talking about some bizarre fiction like "Death Panels."
You just can't make this stuff up!
Think I'm kidding? Read on.
One 23-year-old was found not guilty of transporting explosives during a road trip with a friend who had packed model rocket propellants in the trunk of his car. But three days later, in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Tampa, he was arrested again by immigration authorities. The new charge was that he "is engaged in or is likely to engage in" terrorist activities, a violation of his legal residency in the U.S.
A 26-year-old Chinese woman told Amnesty researchers that she fled to the U.S. after she and her mother were beaten in China for handing out religious fliers. She arrived in America seeking asylum in 2008 and was detained at the airport, then transferred to a county jail. No one told her why she was being held. Without explanation, ICE ordered her to remain in detention unless she could pay a $50,000 bond, which neither neither her relatives in the U.S. nor her family in China was able to raise. After almost a year in detention, they were able to post the bond and win her release.
Wait. It gets worse.
One young man was deported and then caught when he tried to sneak back in over the Canadian border. He was convicted and spent five years in jail. As he was about to be released, a prison official looked at his file and discovered that he was a natural-born U.S. citizen!
How did this happen? Well, it's been happening for many years. Since back when ICE was the INS - the Immigration and Naturalization Service. But, after 9/11, Bush officials ramped it all up, cobbling together a network of federal centers, state and county lockups and private, for-profit prisons. They needed lots of beds to warehouse the tens of thousands of people its raiders and local police were flushing out of the shadows.
