On the day that President Barack Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway, pro-immigration activists in New York were ready to remind him of what they consider a human rights crisis in the United States: the condition in which thousands of immigrants are detained throughout the nation.
Varick immigrant detention center in Downtown Manhattan. (Photo: Google Live View)
Most of the thousands of New Yorkers who walk by the Varick Federal Detention Facility every day are probably unaware of its existence, but the immigration jail on Hudson Street in New York City’s Greenwich Village holds thousands of detainees every year.
Over one third of those detainees “had reasonable claims” for being released, but most didn’t have access to legal counsel –not guaranteed to immigrants under U.S. law– and many were shipped away from New York, some before a “volunteer lawyer could finish researching the case,” says a report released Monday by the New York City Bar Association’s Justice Center.
The document (click for pdf) –reported on first by The New York Times— also found that 90% of those who had been granted bond were unable to raise the funds necessary for their release and remained in detention.
Pro-immigrant activist Humberto De La Cruz holds a copy of the letter advocates will send to the New York City council, during the press conference at Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan. (Photo: Maibe Gonzalez Fuentes)
Saidah Mohammed, an 18-year-old from Brooklyn, New York, hasn’t seen her boyfriend, Jaun Pierre, for over a year. He’s being detained while he awaits deportation to his native Jamaica, an island he hasn’t visited since his parents brought him to the U.S., settling in Brooklyn some 10 years ago.
Jaun, 19, has spent the past 11 months in immigration detention. Before that he spent months detained on a minor charge in New York City’s Rikers Island prison. It was while he was a prisoner at Rikers that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents caught Jaun. His lawyer advised him to plead guilty to charges stemming from a fight he was allegedly involved in without informing him that such a plea would set grounds for deportation. Now proceedings are underway to return Jaun to Jamaica, away from his parents, siblings, friends and Saidah. (*In response to a reader’s comment, this paragraph was edited for clarity.)
Saidah told her boyfriend’s story through tears at a press conference Tuesday in New York where advocates and religious groups launched a new campaign to end the presence of ICE at the city’s jails.
Advocates called on New York City’s government to pass legislation that would preclude ICE from accessing detainees’ place of birth information prior to conviction. A bill drafted by the groups and sponsored by Council Member Eric Gioia will be introduced in the City Council next week.
After years of criticism by immigrant advocates and numerous scathing reports from national and international organizations, the Obama administration is making some changes to the immigration detention system. The changes were announced on Thursday by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on its website.
Immigrant detainees. (Photo: Amnesty International/Steven Rubin)
One measure getting a positive reaction from advocates is the discontinuation of the practice of keeping families at the T. Don Hutto detention facility in Texas. But other changes to the system that houses more than 30,000 people on any given day are seen by some as more of a reorganization than an actual overhaul. They include the creation of a new supervisory office to “design and plan” the detention system; the appointment of detention managers to supervise the 23 biggest facilities in the country; and the establishment of an Office of Detention Oversight.
In addition, ICE says it will create two “advisory groups” with advocacy organizations, which will deal with “general policies and practices,” on the one hand, and detainee health care, on the other.
Advocates already expressed some misgivings about the changes, announced as “major reforms” by ICE.
“…(W)ithout independently enforceable standards, a reduction in beds, or basic due process before people are locked up, it is hard to see how the government’s proposed overhaul of the immigration detention system is anything other than a reorganization or renaming of what was in place before,” Vanita Gupta, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer, told The New York Times.
Immigrants in a Louisiana detention center began a hunger strike this week to protest the dismal conditions in which they say they are being held.
The detainees’ decision comes in the same week that two new reports –by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the National Immigration Law Center (NILC)– showed that the U.S. government continues to violate the rights of detained immigrants –held for breaking civil, not criminal, laws.
The hunger strike is also a response to the Obama administration’s refusal to change the system for inspecting immigration detention centers that was created during the Bush era and for enforcing minimum standards the government set in 2000. This decision, according to The New York Times, “disappointed and angered immigration advocacy organizations around the country.”
Immigrants at the detention center in Basile, Louisiana, decided to start the protest after reporting “egregious violations to jail staff, immigration officials and advocates,” said the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice, which is supporting them. According to About.com’s immigration specialist Jennifer McFadyen, this is the fifth hunger strike in four weeks at the jail.
While New York immigration advocates demonstrated Wednesday against Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, evidence kept piling up that the U.S. government is violating the rights of immigrants in detention.
Immigrants in some detentions centers in Texas and Arizona are held in “unacceptable conditions,” with their rights to due process “compromised,” concluded a report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), which visited the centers just last week.
A separate report released Tuesday by the National Immigration Law Center (NILC), said that “information not available to the public until now reveals substantial and pervasive violations of the government’s own minimum standards for conditions at facilities holding detained immigrants.”
A candlelight vigil outside the Sandra Day O’ Connor Federal Courthouse in Phoenix on Wednesday in support of prisoners on a hunger strike in Maricopa County jails. Photo: www.josemunozphotos.com
PHOENIX, Arizona – A movement to protest alleged mistreatment of immigrants being held in Maricopa County jails gathered momentum this week as jail detainees initiated a series of hunger strikes, and protests were held in various parts of the county.
The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) confirmed several instances of inmates refusing food over the past week.
“We’re surprised, we never expected this. But we’re supporting them,” said activist Salvador Reza, an organizer from the pro-immigrant movement PUENTE. His group held a candlelight vigil Wednesday night with relatives of inmates.
The county jail system, administered by Sheriff Joe Arpaio, houses about 9-thousand inmates. On average, undocumented immigrants make up 20 percent of the prison population.
Last Saturday PUENTE led a 6 mile-march to the Durango jail complex to denounce alleged abuse of immigrant women in the county jails. Sheriff Arpaio was the first to report that 43 women in the Estrella Jail had gone on a hunger strike to support the protesters. Citing security reasons, Arpaio had ordered all prisoners to be placed in lock-down during the march.
On Tuesday, May 5th Spanish-language TV station Univision 33 reported on another strike in the Durango jail through an interview with family members of inmates. MCSO confirmed to Feet in Two Worlds that 900 inmates refused their evening meal that same day. Arpaio said Wednesday that the strike was over. But later on Wednesday evening his office reported that 245 inmates had again refused dinner. (more…)
“In the criminal justice system, anyone arrested is assumed innocent, but in the immigration system, they’re put in detention, and then it’s the individual’s burden to prove they shouldn’t be detained,” Sarnata Reynolds told the San Francisco Chronicle. “That’s why you’ll see long periods of detention, because it’s an incredibly high burden.”
Alternatives to detention are significantly cheaper, AI says. (Photo: Amnesty International/Steven Rubin)
Reynolds is one of the authors of yet another report that is highly critical of the detention conditions people –both immigrants and wrongfully-detained American citizens– are subject to when held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The report, Jailed Without Justice: Immigration Detention in the USA, published Wednesday by Amnesty International, adds to other dismal appraisals published in recent weeks. Anticipating its publication, an ICE special advisor on detention said it would be taken into account, and acknowledged the need to change the detention system.
The Chronicle’s Tyche Hendricks writes about the cases of two American citizens from the Bay Area, one born in Thailand, the other from Afghanistan, who were taken into custody by ICE in 2007.
Though the men told immigration officials of their citizenship, neither had papers to prove it, and both languished in immigration custody in Santa Clara County jail –Nasir for 11 months, Simma for seven– before a lawyer finally secured their release.
Immigrant women at a detention center . (Photo: Human Rights Watch)
The immigration detention system has been under fire from all sides in the past few weeks. Let us count the ways:
As with other aspects of immigration policy, the Obama Administration has hinted that it may address the issue of immigrant detention soon, but it has yet to announce any concrete measures on the matter.
Raymond Soeoth, a 41-year-old Pentecostal minister from Indonesia, spent more than two years under detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after his asylum claim was denied. Even after he agreed to be deported, he was drugged through forced injections — only to learn, while hallucinating at the airport, that he could not leave because his paperwork was not in order.
After becoming a plaintiff in a class-action suit, Soeoth was allowed to stay in the U.S. for at least two more years.
Soeoth’s case is one of several dramatic stories of undocumented immigrants that portray a disfunctional detention system in a special investigation The Associated Press published today. According to the news organization, “(a) computer analysis of every person being held on a recent Sunday night shows that most did not have a criminal record and many were not about to leave the country — voluntarily or via deportation.”