The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

The bipartisan group, the Constitution Project, whose members include Asa Hutchinson, a former undersecretary of Homeland Security, called for sweeping changes in agency policies and amendments to immigration law, including new access to government-appointed counsel for many of those facing deportation.

In its report, the human rights organization, Human Rights Watch, revealed government data showing 1.4 million detainee transfers from 1999 to 2008. The transfers are accelerating, the report found, sending tens of thousands of longtime residents of cities like Philadelphia and Los Angeles to remote immigration jails in Texas and Louisiana, far from legal counsel and the evidence that might help them win release.

“I.C.E. is increasingly subjecting detainees to a chaotic game of musical chairs, and it’s a game with dire consequences,” said Alison Parker, deputy director in the United States for the human rights group, and author of its report. The data underlying the report was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse of Syracuse University, which issued its own report.

The inspector general’s report found that the consequences of haphazard transfers included a loss of access to legal counsel and relevant evidence, additional time in detention, and “errors, delays and confusion for detainees, their families, legal representatives” and the immigration courts.

Officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is part of Homeland Security, said the agency would issue advisories reminding the field office staff of 10-year-old national detention standards that require them to review a detainee’s “Alien file” before any transfer, and reinforcing the need to coordinate with immigration court administrators.

Earlier this year, the Obama administration announced ambitious plans to overhaul immigration detention, a disjointed penal network that relies heavily on private prisons and county jails. But taken together, the three reports underscored the gap between the plans for an overhaul and the problems on the ground in a system that is expected to detain more than 442,000 people this fiscal year — more than double the number in 2003, the immigration enforcement agency’s first year of operation, according to the inspector general’s report.

In contrast to what John T. Morton, who heads the immigration enforcement agency, described as a long-term vision of a “truly civil detention system” shaped by more centralized agency control, the recommendations by a bipartisan committee of the Constitution Project would shrink the use of detention, in part by restraining government power to detain by adding more of the constitutional safeguards required in the criminal justice system.

“None of the recommendations being made should in any way compromise national security,” Mr. Hutchinson said in a telephone interview before he presented the Constitution Project report at the National Press Club in Washington. “It simply allows for a more humane and more efficient system.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/03/us/03immig.html?_r=1