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LOS ANGELES, Calif. – Denied access
to loved ones, lawyers and basic necessities, men and women within the
nation’s immigration detention system find their fundamental rights
routinely and systematically violated, according to
a report released
today by the National Immigration Law Center (NILC), the ACLU of
Southern California, and the international law firm of Holland & Knight,
LLP. The first nationwide comprehensive report of its kind, “A Broken
System: Confidential Reports Reveal Failures in U.S. Detention Centers”
sheds new light on the conditions suffered by hundreds of thousands of
people housed in detention centers around the country, and offers
policymakers specific recommendations to ameliorate the situation.
“Though the detainees are accused of civil immigration charges, there is
nothing civil about our detention centers,” said Karen Tumlin, co–author
of the report and a staff attorney at NILC. “These centers, where people
are detained for months and often years at a time, often fail to provide
people with their fundamental rights: access to loved ones, the basic
materials needed to research and prepare their cases, or even a simple
explanation of their rights while within the immigrant detention
system.”
Added Linton Joaquin, co–author and general counsel at NILC, “The
government’s own standards for immigration detention are routinely
violated. Such a flagrant disregard for this country’s values for
fairness and justice on behalf of the United States government is
appalling.”
Though Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) claims to conduct a
formal review of each detention facility on a yearly basis, “A Broken
System” shows that such reviews carry little enforcement weight, as many
of the detention facilities fail to rectify problems identified by ICE’s
own inspectors. Even more troubling, the inadequacy of the ICE reviews
is demonstrated when they are compared with independent reviews by the
American Bar Association (ABA) and the United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees (UNHCR) of the same facilities, which often found a greater
number and more severe violations in detention centers than was reported
by ICE.
For instance, the ABA and UNHCR reviewers found detainees were
retaliated against or punished more severely than allowed for minor
disciplinary infractions. ICE reviewers, on the other hand, overlooked
these serious violations.
Ranjana Natarajan, a report co-author and former ACLU/SC attorney said,
“At every level, federal, state and local jails and prisons have legal
and binding rules they must abide. But in immigration detention, the
government refuses to adopt binding rules. The result is utter disregard
for basic humane conditions. Because we don’t have rules, we don’t have
accountability.”
The report highlights the importance of having independent monitors of
detention centers. In the Kenosha County Detention Center, for example,
a UNHCR report found that while men were allowed two daily hours of
recreation, women housed in the same facility were denied recreation
rights. The following year, ICE inspectors rated that same facility
“acceptable,” despite the fact that women were still being denied access
to recreation facilities.
“A Broken System” is based on an analysis of hundreds of ICE, ABA and
UNHCR detention facility review reports from 2001 through 2005. The
reports, which had been withheld from the public, were obtained through
discovery in litigation. Although the report is the most comprehensive
analysis of its kind, the government withheld a significant number of
documents it was ordered to produce. As a result, the violations
outlined in the report represent only a fraction of the number of
violations that actually occurred but could not be documented.
Christopher Nugent, pro bono senior counsel at Holland & Knight, said,
“Though this report provides the most complete picture the public has of
this massive system, it is still a sketch. We can, however, determine
even more definitively that the immigration detention centers routinely
violate the government’s own standards for immigration detention, and
based on this information we have made specific policy recommendations
to encourage those with the power to change the system to do so.”
The recommendations in the report are based upon thousands of hours of
research and analysis of the detention center reviews. Key among them is
the proposal that ICE revise its standards for immigration detention to
make them judicially enforceable. The report also determines that, given
the gross abuses, further expansion of the immigrant detention system
should be stopped, and more use should be made of humane alternatives to
detention.
The findings from “A Broken System” are particularly timely, as they are
released in the wake of a DHS decision to reject the long-standing
request of NGOs and the ABA to promulgate regulations that would require
immigration detention facilities to adhere to basic standards of care.
This agency statement responds to a petition for rulemaking submitted in
January 2007 by dozens of immigrant detainees and advocacy groups in the
wake of public reports detailing the humanitarian crisis in the
facilities. The name of the case involved in the petition is Families
for Freedom v. Napolitano, No. 08-CIV-4056 (DC).
To read “A Broken System,” go to
www.nilc.org/immlawpolicy/arrestdet/A-Broken-System-2009-07.pdf
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