By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor

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:

• There was the Associated Press special report showing most immigrant detainees are not criminals and many are held for lengthy periods before being deported.
• There was the announcement that the Inter-American Court for Human Rights will hold a hearing on immigrant detention conditions in the U.S. today in Washington.
• There were two reports –from Human Rights Watch and the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center– saying that immigration authorities provide dismal medical care to detainees.

• All of this came after high-profile detainee deaths in Rhode Island and Virginia called attention to the treatment immigrants receive while they await to be deported.

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.

(more…)

By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor

Migrants in the French town of Calais, hoping to seek asylum in the UK. (Photo: The Times)

With an historic recession casting its shadow on economic prospects around the world, the U.S. is not the only country where the immigration debate has become heated these days.

Australia –a traditionally immigrant-friendly country– announced this week it will reduce its intake of immigrant workers for the first time in a decade.

The argument that pits immigrants against rising unemployment is also winning support in the U.K., where an opposition spokesman called for following the Australian example in setting limits to immigration as a response to the crisis.

“We don’t want people coming in who are going to compete with Australians for limited jobs,” Australian Immigration Minister Chris Evans said Monday, when he announced a 14% cut in the number of immigrants to be allowed in this fiscal year, according to Reuters.

(more…)

By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor

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.”

(more…)

By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor

Immigration detention centers have seen several detainee deaths. (Photo: Univision.com/AFP)

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights announced this week it will hold a hearing on conditions at detention centers for undocumented immigrants in the U.S. The hearings come after a series of detainee deaths prompted complaints from immigrant and civil rights organizations.

According to a story on Univision.com, the commission –which is part of the Organization of American States (OAS)– expects to publish a report on immigration detention centers later this year.

Santiago Cantón, the commission’s executive secretary, said at a press conference Tuesday that his panel has requested U.S. government authorization to visit some of the detention centers, but negotiations stalled over conditions for the visits.

The hearing will be held on Friday, March 20th, at OAS Washington headquarters, according to the official schedule for the IACHR’s 134th period of sessions.

The case of the detainees will be presented by the Transnational Legal Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas School of Law.

According to Cantón, the schools’ involvement and the hearing itself might help convince the U.S. government to allow the commission to visit the jails.

A recent Government Accounting Office report said the detention centers display bureaucratic deficiencies, medical personnel under staffing, slow response times to medical emergencies and poor food quality, according to a recent special report on Univision.com.

The American Civil Liberties Union has asked Congress to pass a law that would increase supervision of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and improve the treatment of immigration detainees.

Ninety immigrants have died in detention since 2003, according to the ACLU.

Some of the more high-profile deaths –like those of Guido Newbrough in Virginia and Hiu Lui ‘Jason’ Ng in Rhode Island— have brought attention to the plight of detainees.

But others are shrouded in secrecy, ACLU attorney Monica Ramirez told Univision.com.

“We don’t know all the causes for those deaths,” she said. “The government doesn’t give out information and many times we learn about what happened through families’ accounts.”

By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor

Napolitano (Photo: Washington Times/AP)

When Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided an engine remanufacturing plant in Bellingham, Wash. on Tuesday, it looked like the Bush administration policy of work-site enforcement would continue under the new White House. This, despite President Barack Obama’s campaign statement that “communities are terrorized by ICE immigration raids.”

“The Obama administration decided against ‘change we can believe in’ and, instead continued the Bush legacy,” the Standing Firm pro-immigrant blog said. “I CANNOT believe the administration is allowing this to happen.”

Today, the mood is much lighter among immigration advocates, after the director of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, late yesterday ordered a review of the operation, the first work-site raid to take place since she took office:

This is a great victory and the first step to winning Comprehensive Immigration Reform.

(more…)

By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor

Haitians in South Florida celebrated Obama's victory on Nov. 4, 2008. (Photo: Haitian Times)

In one of our end-of-the-year pieces last December, Haitian-American journalist Macollvie Jean-François summed up the hopes of Haitians in the U.S. after many of them helped elect Barack Obama to the presidency: “People here hope for a policy toward Haiti that is comprehensive, streamlined, smart and empathetic.”

It seems those hopes are not being realized despite the change at the White House. Monday, an article in the South Florida-Sun Sentinel revealed that 30,000 Haitians have been ordered to leave the U.S., after a temporary halt in deportations had made many hopeful they would be granted temporary stays.

Haiti has reacted by blocking the deportations through a simple measure: it is not processing travel documents for its citizens, leaving some 600 of them in immigration detention centers in the U.S.

(more…)

By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor

Immigrants at an Arizona detention center. Photo: NPR/AP

The system for keeping undocumented immigrants in detention pending the resolution of their cases, and, for many of them, their deportation, has been under strong criticism recently after detainee deaths exposed the deplorable treatment inmates receive in some of those jails.

Turns out some of the jails also represent a windfall for the communities that host them.

According to a report by The Boston Globe, this year “the federal government budgeted $1.7 billion nationwide” to cover the expenses of holding detainees. Thirty thousand of them are held on any given day, “almost four times as many as in 1995.”

The Globe’s Maria Sachetti wrote,

Bristol (County, Massachusetts) and other cash-strapped county jails are increasingly embracing the immigration business, capitalizing on the soaring number of foreign-born detainees and the millions of federal dollars a year paid to incarcerate them. Bristol County alone has raked in $33 million since 2001 (…)

“That money is a tremendous boost for us,” said Plymouth County Sheriff Joseph D. McDonald Jr., whose jail houses 324 immigrants, up from 44 a decade ago, bringing in $15.6 million last year. “We aggressively try to market ourselves to get as many of those inmates into our doors as we can.”

(more…)

By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor

“The reason for this letter is to let you know what is happening at this Immigration detention center,” a man identified as J.E.R. wrote in a letter to a central Virginia Spanish-language newspaper, referring to the Piedmont Regional Jail in Farmville, Va. He then described how a German immigrant held at the facility died for lack of medical attention.

Guido Newbrough's parents, Jack and Heidi - Photo: New York Times

“He was never given attention for the strong pain that afflicted him,” J.E.R. wrote. “One morning, he got up asking for assistance, he was knocking on the door seeking help and the jail guards threw him on the floor and dragged him to a corridor and then to a cell called ‘the hole,’ where the person is isolated from the rest and cannot use the phone.”

From ‘the hole,’ he asked for help and he died a day after Thanksgiving. (Jail officials) say he died of natural causes, but those of us who were there know that he died because of negligence.

The narration fits what the family of Guido R. Newbrough told The New York Times about the death of the German-born man, who spent 42 of his 48 years in the United States and apparently did not know he was not an American citizen.

(more…)