The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog: Immigration Archives

July 16, 2008

Criminal Charges Filed Against Immigrants at Unprecedented Rate

HispanicLink, News Report, Alex Meneses Miyashita, Posted: Jul 15, 2009
Criminal immigration violation charges are being filed by the federal government at unprecedented levels this year, a report by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) reveals.

The study released in June reports there were 9,350 immigration prosecutions in March, representing a 50 percent surge from the month before, based on official records obtained by the group. When compared to a year ago, the increase was 73 percent.

The independent, nonpartisan group attributes the rise to intensified federal policies under the so-called “Operation Streamline” initiative which launched as a pilot project in Del Rio, Texas, in December 2005.

There were 8,104 immigration convictions in March, representing a 24.4 percent increase from February.

The vast majority of cases referred for prosecution, 99 percent, were charged by U.S. attorneys. The median sentence was about a month, the report indicates.

The Labor Council for Latin American Advancement notes that immigration violations are normally civil offenses prosecuted by immigration judges,adding that under Operation Streamline, the federal government has criminalized these offenses, barring immigrants from future legalization.

“Undocumented workers are a voiceless group of people who live in fear and today they are much more exploitable,” stated LCLAA president Milton Rosado. “The administration’s current policies and the criminalization of this group of people only exacerbate this situation. Immigrants are not criminals.”

The report states the vast majority of the cases were prosecuted in southwest border districts.

In the Western District of Texas, for instance, prosecutions increased from 626 in January to 3,555 in March. All but 142 were in U.S.-Mexico border districts.

The main charges brought against immigrants in March were for illegal re-entry, bringing in or harboring certain immigrants, entry at improper time or place, visa and document fraud, and misuse and conspiracy to commit offense or defraud the United States.

Other charges included fraudulent statements or entries, false personification as a U.S. citizen, false statement in application and use of passport, and forgery.

The largest increase in prosecution from a year ago (96.2 percent) was for conspiracy to commit offense or defraud the United States. Document falsification and related activities has seen the largest surge over the past five years (74.4 percent).

The LCLAA said it is “extremely concerned about the implications that higher incarceration rates of immigrants will have on the overall Latino community and its image in the eyes of the American public.”

The organization maintained that criminalizing immigrants will strengthen the myth that ties immigrants to crime even if research has claimed that they tend to commit less crime than other groups.

Rosado attributed the large flow of immigrants to harmful economic policies that have affected workers throughout the hemisphere “causing dislocation and displacement.“

“We need to address the root causes of migration and understand that this is a regional problem that requires a combination of domestic policy as well as comprehensive, humane and commonsense international solutions,” he added.

July 13, 2008

The Shame of Postville, Iowa

July 13, 2008
Editorial
The Shame of Postville, Iowa

Anyone who has doubts that this country is abusing and terrorizing undocumented immigrant workers should read an essay by Erik Camayd-Freixas,(URL below) a professor and Spanish-language court interpreter who witnessed the aftermath of a huge immigration workplace raid at a meatpacking plant in Iowa.

The essay chillingly describes what Dr. Camayd-Freixas saw and heard as he translated for some of the nearly 400 undocumented workers who were seized by federal agents at the Agriprocessors kosher plant in Postville in May.

Under the old way of doing things, the workers, nearly all Guatemalans, would have been simply and swiftly deported. But in a twist of Dickensian cruelty, more than 260 were charged as serious criminals for using false Social Security numbers or residency papers, and most were sentenced to five months in prison.

What is worse, Dr. Camayd-Freixas wrote, is that the system was clearly rigged for the wholesale imposition of mass guilt. He said the court-appointed lawyers had little time in the raids’ hectic aftermath to meet with the workers, many of whom ended up waiving their rights and seemed not to understand the complicated charges against them.

Dr. Camayd-Freixas’s essay describes “the saddest procession I have ever witnessed, which the public would never see” — because cameras were forbidden.

“Driven single-file in groups of 10, shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, chains dragging as they shuffled through, the slaughterhouse workers were brought in for arraignment, sat and listened through headsets to the interpreted initial appearance, before marching out again to be bused to different county jails, only to make room for the next row of 10.”

He wrote that they had waived their rights in hopes of being quickly deported, “since they had families to support back home.” He said that they did not understand the charges they faced, adding, “and, frankly, neither could I.”

No one is denying that the workers were on the wrong side of the law. But there is a profound difference between stealing people’s identities to rob them of money and property, and using false papers to merely get a job. It is a distinction that the Bush administration, goaded by immigration extremists, has willfully ignored. Deporting unauthorized workers is one thing; sending desperate breadwinners to prison, and their families deeper into poverty, is another.

Court interpreters are normally impartial participants and keep their opinions to themselves. But Dr. Camayd-Freixas, a professor of Spanish at Florida International University, said he was so offended by the cruelty of the prosecutions that he felt compelled to break his silence. “A line was crossed at Postville,” he wrote.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/opinion/13sun2.html?ei=5087&em=&en=098eabaf7e4d48a7&ex=1216094400&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 06:45 PM | Comments (0)

July 11, 2008

GEO Group Expands prison for immigrants to more than 1,500 in WA

Locked and loaded

GEO Group will incarcerate more immigrants.
Posted: Jul 10, 2008 by John Herbert
NORTHWEST DETENTION CENTER: More immigrants will cross these tracks.

Tacoma officials have confirmed that Florida-based private prison corporation the GEO Group has plans to expand a prison for immigrants on the Tacoma tide flats by 50 percent, providing capacity for more than 1,500 prisoners.

With capacity for 1,000 prisoners, the Northwest Detention Center is already the largest GEO private prison on the West Coast. Aggressive, ongoing efforts to expel illegal immigrants from the United States have created an overwhelming demand for private prisons, which generally charge the federal government about $100 per day to keep immigrants locked up while awaiting deportation.

The Northwest Detention Center opened quietly in 2004, under contract with The United States Department of Homeland Security. The prison operation was later transferred to the GEO Group, which also operates prison facilities in Australia, The United Kingdom, South Africa and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Private prisons for immigrants awaiting deportation are a cash cow for companies such as the GEO Group. According to organizations such as the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, the phenomenal growth of the immigrant prison business is driven by operations launched by I.C.E. (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) in 2003. Dubbed “Operation End Game,” the effort to deport all undocumented migrants by 2012 is part of the largest police operation in United States history. Since July 2007, raids have increased the number of detained migrants from 18,000 to 26,000 nationwide. Prisoners headed to the Tacoma facility are taken mostly from Oregon, Idaho, Alaska and Washington. According to the Detention Watch Network, the U.S. government detains more than 280,000 people a year in a hodgepodge of more than 400 facilities at an annual cost of more than $1.2 billion.

“The widespread detention of individuals because of civil violations of immigration law is one of the clearest examples of how our current immigration system is failing,” says Northwest Immigrant Rights Project Director Jorge L. Barón in a public statement denouncing expansion of the facility. “Although many people in our community do not realize this, a significant proportion of the individuals detained at the Tacoma detention center have resided in the United States for many years and have either no criminal record or a record composed of only traffic offenses. Detaining these individuals while their cases are processed before the immigration court results in the needless separation of family members and makes it harder for people to obtain legal representation.”

Local activists have called for closure of the facility on grounds that it doesn’t meet fundamental safety standards, and hasn’t produced required evacuation plans or documents. City officials contend they have no right to limit the expansion of the facility because it meets essential public facility standards as outlined in the state’s Growth Management Act. Groups such as Tacoma Smash I.C.E. and the Bill of Rights Defense Network Tacoma continue to oppose the facility’s presence, claiming that conditions there are unhealthy and that some prisoners are abused, while others are denied medical care while detained.

Stories offered by human rights advocates from inside the center do not paint a pretty picture.
The Detention Watch Network, for example, tells the story of a couple taken and imprisoned in the facility this past May. The daughter of the couple claims that her mother relayed stories of pregnant prisoners being denied proper medical care, and were forced to sleep on hard, thin mattresses and eat prison slop. The woman, whose name was not provided, told her daughter that people in the facility have died because their jailers refused to answer requests for medical care. Two pregnant prisoners experiencing medical complications were taken to the emergency room and examined in chains, on orders from accompanying prison officials.
The woman relaying the tales was later released, having been imprisoned for months.
http://www.weeklyvolcano.com/article/for_print/2417/

Posted by lois at 11:40 AM | Comments (0)

Interpreter for some of the 400 immigrants arrested and sentenced in meat packing raid speaks up in their defense

July 11, 2008, NY Times
An Interpreter Speaking Up for Migrants
By JULIA PRESTON

WATERLOO, Iowa — In 23 years as a certified Spanish interpreter for federal courts, Erik Camayd-Freixas has spoken up in criminal trials many times, but the words he uttered were rarely his own.

Then he was summoned here by court officials to translate in the hearings for nearly 400 illegal immigrant workers arrested in a raid on May 12 at a meatpacking plant. Since then, Mr. Camayd-Freixas, a professor of Spanish at Florida International University, has taken the unusual step of breaking the code of confidentiality among legal interpreters about their work.

In a 14-page essay he circulated among two dozen other interpreters who worked here, Professor Camayd-Freixas wrote that the immigrant defendants whose words he translated, most of them villagers from Guatemala, did not fully understand the criminal charges they were facing or the rights most of them had waived.

In the essay and an interview, Professor Camayd-Freixas said he was taken aback by the rapid pace of the proceedings and the pressure prosecutors brought to bear on the defendants and their lawyers by pressing criminal charges instead of deporting the workers immediately for immigration violations.

He said defense lawyers had little time or privacy to meet with their court-assigned clients in the first hectic days after the raid. Most of the Guatemalans could not read or write, he said. Most did not understand that they were in criminal court.

“The questions they asked showed they did not understand what was going on,” Professor Camayd-Freixas said in the interview. “The great majority were under the impression they were there because of being illegal in the country, not because of Social Security fraud.”

During fast-paced hearings in May, 262 of the illegal immigrants pleaded guilty in one week and were sentenced to prison — most for five months — for knowingly using false Social Security cards or legal residence documents to gain jobs at the Agriprocessors kosher meat plant in nearby Postville. It was the largest criminal enforcement operation ever carried out by immigration authorities at a workplace.

The essay has provoked new questions about the Agriprocessors proceedings, which had been criticized by criminal defense and immigration lawyers as failing to uphold the immigrants’ right to due process. Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the House Judiciary immigration subcommittee, said she would hold a hearing on the prosecutions and call Professor Camayd-Freixas as a witness.

“The essay raises questions about whether the charges brought were supported by the facts,” Ms. Lofgren said.

Bob Teig, a spokesman for Matt M. Dummermuth, the United States attorney for the Northern District of Iowa, said the immigrants’ constitutional rights were not compromised.

“All defendants were provided with experienced criminal attorneys and interpreters before they made any decisions in their criminal cases,” Mr. Teig said. “Once they made their choices, two independent judicial officers determined the defendants were making their choices freely and voluntarily, were satisfied with their attorney, and were, in fact, guilty.”

Mr. Teig said the judges in the cases were satisfied with the guilty pleas.

“The judges had the right and duty to reject any guilty plea where a defendant was not guilty,” Mr. Teig said. “No plea was rejected.”

The essay by Professor Camayd-Freixas, who is the director of a program to train language interpreters at the university, has also caused a stir among legal interpreters. In telephone calls and debates through e-mail, they have discussed whether it was appropriate for a translator to speak publicly about conversations with criminal defendants who were covered by legal confidentiality.

“It is quite unusual that a legal interpreter would go to this length of writing up an essay and taking a strong stance,” said Nataly Kelly, an analyst with Common Sense Advisory, a marketing research company focused on language services. Ms. Kelly is a certified legal interpreter who is the author of a manual about interpreting.

The Agriprocessors hearings were held in temporary courtrooms in mobile trailers and a ballroom at the National Cattle Congress, a fairgrounds here in Waterloo. Professor Camayd-Freixas worked with one defense lawyer, Sara L. Smith, translating her discussions with nine clients she represented. He also worked in courtrooms during plea and sentencing hearings.

Ms. Smith praised Professor Camayd-Freixas’s essay, saying it captured the immigrants’ distress during “the surreal two weeks” of the proceedings. She said he had not revealed information that was detrimental to her cases.

But she cautioned that interpreters should not commonly speak publicly about conversations between lawyers and clients. “It is not a practice that I would generally advocate as I could envision circumstances under which such revelations could be damaging to a client’s case,” Ms. Smith said.

Professor Camayd-Freixas said he had considered withdrawing from the assignment, but decided instead that he could play a valuable role by witnessing the proceedings and making them known.

He suggested many of the immigrants could not have knowingly committed the crimes in their pleas. “Most of the clients we interviewed did not even know what a Social Security card was or what purpose it served,” he wrote.

He said many immigrants could not distinguish between a Social Security card and a residence visa, known as a green card. They said they had purchased fake documents from smugglers in Postville, or obtained them directly from supervisors at the Agriprocessors plant. Most did not know that the original cards could belong to Americans and legal immigrants, Mr. Camayd-Freixas said.

Ms. Smith went repeatedly over the charges and the options available to her clients, Professor Camayd-Freixas said. He cited the reaction of one Guatemalan, Isaías Pérez Martínez: “No matter how many times his attorney explained it, he kept saying, ‘I’m illegal, I have no rights. I’m nobody in this country. Just do whatever you want with me.’ ”

Professor Camayd-Freixas said Mr. Pérez Martínez wept during much of his meeting with Ms. Smith.

Ms. Smith, like more than a dozen other court-appointed defense lawyers, concluded that none of the immigrants’ legal options were good. Prosecutors had evidence showing they had presented fraudulent documents when they were hired at Agriprocessors.

In plea agreements offered by Mr. Dummermuth, the immigrants could plead guilty to a document fraud charge and serve five months in prison. Otherwise, prosecutors would try them on more serious identity theft charges carrying a mandatory sentence of two years. In any scenario, even if they were acquitted, the immigrants would eventually be deported.

Worried about families they had been supporting with their wages, the immigrants readily chose to plead guilty because they did understand that was the fastest way to return home, Professor Camayd-Freixas said.

“They were hoping and they were begging everybody to deport them,” he said.

Ms. Smith said she was convinced after examining the prosecutors’ evidence that it was not in her clients’ interests to go to trial.

“I think they understood what their options were,” she said. “I tried to make it very clear.”

Legal interpreters familiar with the profession said that Professor Camayd-Freixas’ essay, while a notable departure from the norm, did not violate professional standards.

Isabel Framer, a certified legal interpreter from Ohio who is chairwoman of the National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators, said Professor Camayd-Freixas did not go public while the cases were still in court or reveal information that could not be discerned from the record. Ms. Framer said she was speaking for herself because her organization had not taken an official position on the essay.

“Interpreters, just like judges and attorneys, have an obligation to maintain the confidentiality of the process,” she said. “But they don’t check their ethical standards at the door.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/us/11immig.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1215788693-AFbZ6gGAM8xzoFc/rEQsWw&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 11:10 AM | Comments (0)

July 04, 2008

WA: GEO detention center expands by 50%

Tacoma, WA - Friday, July 4, 2008
Immigration center plans expansion

SCOTT FONTAINE; The News Tribune
Last updated: July 3rd, 2008 12:20 PM (PDT)
The corporation that runs the federal immigration detention center on Tacoma’s Tideflats plans to expand the facility’s capacity by 50 percent.

When completed, the Northwest Detention Center should be able to hold up to 1,500 immigrants in federal custody.

The GEO Group, the Florida-based company that runs the detention center, has made no formal announcement. Several voicemails left with its spokesman were not returned. Calls to the Northwest Detention Center were referred to a spokeswoman with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who said the company is handling the expansion and therefore should answer all questions.

But the company has been in talks with the city manager’s office and the Tacoma Police Department, officials confirmed. They weren’t certain about the cost or timetable of expansion, but the company’s contract with the federal government for use of the Tacoma facility is set to expire in April 2009, according to the company’s Web site.

The expansion may fuel controversy over the facility, which has become a local flashpoint of the nation’s immigration debate. The detention center has been the subject of several protests in recent months, including some in downtown Tacoma.

“There’s a lot of debate of the function of the facility as it stands today,” City Manager Eric Anderson said. “Expanding that will only intensify that debate. It tends to get focused on the facility. The larger the role of the facility, the more intense the debate can get.”

Even if the city were opposed to the expansion, Anderson said, its status as essential public facility under the state’s Growth Management Act restricts Tacoma’s ability to prevent its growth.

The detention center holds immigrants detained throughout Pacific Northwest and is almost always at capacity, officials told The News Tribune in November. Many detainees enter federal custody after they’re arrested during raids or through Criminal Alien Program, in which federal officials take custody of illegal immigrants incarcerated in local or state jails or prisons.

The average stay at the detention center just over a month. An Executive Office for Immigration Review courtroom inside the facility hears the cases, and most detainees are deported to their countries of citizenship. About half of those in custody are routinely Mexican, but citizens from almost every country on earth have passed through the facility. The majority of detainees are held only for being in the country illegally.

ICE did not request the expansion of the facility, ICE spokeswoman Lorie Dankers said, and the current contract for use of the Northwest Detention Center still calls for The GEO Group to supply 1,000 beds.

The $115 million facility opened in 2004 with the ability to hold about 500 detainees, replacing a 160-bed center in Seattle. It has since expanded twice.

The company’s original contract with the government ran from April 2004-April 2005 but contained four one-year options, according to its Web site.

The GEO Group operates 67 facilities throughout the United States, Canada, South Africa, Australia and the United Kingdom. It also has plans to expand or build sites this year in Michigan, New Mexico, Texas, Mississippi and Colorado, according to a June conference call. Most of those sites are correctional facilities.

In a letter from Anderson to an engineering consulting firm working on behalf of The GEO Group, the city manager said Tacoma’s Public Works Department “no immediate issues with regards to impact on existing services” but added that company must undergo the full permitting process before expansion.

The Tacoma Police Department has met with officials from the detention center about the expansion, spokesman Mark Fulghum said.

He added that the few problems with the Northwest Detention Center have stemmed from protests.

“It’s not an issue as far as we’re concerned,” he said. “We’ve had no problems with the officials there. They’ve been great to work with.”

Originally published: July 3rd, 2008 09:18 AM (PDT)
http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/updates/v-printerfriendly/story/404167.html

Posted by lois at 10:12 AM | Comments (0)

June 19, 2008

Locked and Loaded. CCA, the private jailer and one of Nashville’s richest companies, is facing heightened scrutiny after a year of particularly heinous controversies

June 19, 2008
Locked and Loaded
CCA, the private jailer and one of Nashville’s richest companies, is facing heightened scrutiny after a year of particularly heinous controversies
by Matt Pulle

Located in a bland, almost anonymous Green Hills ofﬁce park of fake lakes and fountains is the headquarters of the nation’s largest private prison company, which, at the moment, may be the most disparaged corporation in the country. Since its inception in 1983, CCA has encountered legions of angry detractors who believe that the business of punishing criminals should not be—well, a business. But if the company has become accustomed to criticism over the years—like a best-selling author whose novels garner predictably bad reviews—it is now mired in a series of scandals, embarrassments and public-relations catastrophes that may tar its reputation for years to come.

In the last 18 months alone, CCA has been the target of several stinging lawsuits supported by detailed afﬁdavits and third-party reports alleging dangerous and inhumane practices that have put inmates’ lives at risk. Whistle blowers, once in positions of trust at CCA, have emerged from the shadows to tell vivid tales of corporate misconduct. Federal authorities have castigated the publicly traded corporation for operating an immigration detention facility in Texas on the cheap. And at that CCA complex—which at one point forced children of immigrant detainees to dress in prison garb—dozens of incarcerated women and children have come forward with gut-wrenching tales of anguish and neglect.

Here in Nashville, CCA’s ofﬁcers volunteer on the boards of noble nonproﬁts. But the company’s local detention center, far removed from the world of tony fundraisers and white-tie dinners, has been the setting for a string of grim events. One inmate beat his cellmate to death. A mentally ill man apparently went nine months without being allowed a shower. And another inmate lost his ear in a ﬁght.

So considering the company’s problems in its own backyard, not to mention its near-epic failings in Texas, it may seem odd to begin our story at a CCA facility in West Tennessee, where last May a few inmates brawled inside a prison chapel. The disturbance at the Hardeman County Correctional Center, located in the tiny town of Whiteville, was no different from any other jailhouse scufﬂe, and it’s not clear that anyone was even hurt. But an inmate who saw the ﬁght—and maybe even threw a punch or two—got a lesson about the workings of CCA’s particular brand of law and order and its longtime penchant of avoiding scrutiny.

On May 16, 2007, James Ingram, an inmate from Memphis who battled a drug problem, was serving a 17-year sentence for aggravated robbery at the medium-security prison. Clean-cut and not much older than 30, Ingram was walking to his pod at the time of the brawl and overheard a group of inmates ﬁghting at the chapel. Ingram fell into a fetal position to demonstrate, in his lawyer’s words, “a spirit of surrender and cooperation.” If that sounds implausible, consider the next part of the inmate’s story.

After prison ofﬁcials quelled the ﬁght, they took Ingram to a back room and demanded that he give up the names of the prisoners who squared off. Ingram saw who was involved, but he wouldn’t talk. So the warden, a 40-something man named Glen Turner and the brother of one of CCA’s corporate vice presidents, placed him in solitary conﬁnement. Shortly after, Turner shoved him to the ground and Ingram fell on his back. The warden then punched him in the face, opening a 2-inch cut below his eye.

Typical convict hogwash, right? The state didn’t agree. Ingram called a lawyer, who called the Tennessee Department of Correction (TDOC) to look into what happened. Joined by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, TDOC investigated the incident and determined that Turner assaulted Ingram by “throwing him to the ﬂoor and striking him at least twice in the head with the closed ﬁst of his right hand.” In August, Ingram resigned as warden. A month later, he pled guilty to a charge of ofﬁcial oppression.

It’s not clear when CCA’s headquarters learned what happened at its West Tennessee prison. But state authorities hint that company ofﬁcials were slow to act. In an email to his colleagues, Jerry Lister, then TDOC’s acting director of internal affairs, notes that it was only when his department learned of the allegations from Ingram’s lawyer that “anyone at the facility [began] to acknowledge the excessive use of force by Warden Turner.”

As a private company, CCA doesn’t have to answer for what happened at its prison. It refused a request from the Scene to review Turner’s original résumé, job application and disciplinary ﬁle. Meanwhile, TDOC never issued a press release about the ﬁndings of its investigation. As a result, the publicly traded company escaped the rounds of bad publicity that a state-run prison would have endured had one of its wardens pummeled an inmate. Until now, the media has never reported the details of Turner’s attack on Ingram.

But if CCA was able to dodge a PR nightmare last summer, its luck has since faded. Now it can’t seem to serve so much as a cold meal without landing in hot water. The well-heeled company ﬁnds itself embroiled in an array of ugly incidents, both in Nashville and throughout the country, that have been featured on the pages of national newspapers and magazines and in the bold type of heavy-hitting lawsuits. Taken separately, the company’s struggles may not seem extraordinary. The business of incarceration is a rough one, even for those who don’t view it as a business. But for CCA, which for most of the decade has been able to avoid criticism from everyone other than a thin cast of anti-privatization foes, there seems to be a growing series of corroborated accounts that sketch a new portrait: that of a reckless, callous enterprise that treats inmates—even those who haven’t been convicted of a crime—as if they were cattle. Maybe, then, it’s appropriate that we move our story to cattle country.

Elsa is a sturdy woman in her mid-20s with soft, round cheeks and straight, black hair that she sometimes pulls behind her head. Before she found herself locked up in a dusty Texas town, she lived in Honduras with her two children, Richard and Angelina. Here is her story:

Elsa was happy in her native country and “didn’t need anything from anyone to be well-off.” Then one day, while walking on a quiet road, a man grabbed her hair and put a gun to her head. He forced her to take off her clothes, and then he hit her. He called her a “perra” or bitch and laughed as he ran his weapon over her body.

Elsa cried and screamed and then, after being raped, begged for her life. “Please don’t kill me. I have two children.” The man struck her again, but let her live so that he could haunt her once more, showing up on a whim at her friend’s place to let her know he could have her again whenever he chose.

The man’s father worked for the local police department, and Elsa knew the only way to ﬂee him was to ﬂee Honduras with Richard and Angelina. When she arrived in the United States, an immigration agent took her and her family to the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, Texas, 30 miles north of Austin. It would be anything but a safe haven.

In 2005, Michael Chertoff, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, which runs the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Division (ICE), ended the practice of “catch-and-release”—which permitted undocumented immigrants like Elsa to remain free at-large while they awaited their day in court. Under catch-and-release, no-shows were common. So after 9/11, the specter of illegal immigrants from all over the world roaming the country became a security issue. Pilot programs sprung up that tracked immigrants with electronic bracelets, though Chertoff went with a draconian plan instead: Throw many of these men, women and children in Hutto, a former medium-security prison that was surrounded by a 15-foot fence topped with rings of barbed wire when it reopened in 2006 as a place for immigrant families.

After she arrived in Taylor, Elsa and her family shared a tiny living area, where they’d be loudly awoken at 5:45 a.m. Elsa, Richard and Angelina then had 20 minutes to eat breakfast. When they didn’t ﬁnish on time, guards would just snatch their food and throw it in the trash. “When this happens, the children cry and cry,” Elsa later explained in an afﬁdavit that chronicled her plight.

The detention center was very cold, so much so that the guards walked around wearing gloves. But they’d yell at Elsa if she asked for a blanket. One time they came into her cell and conﬁscated two of her sweaters.

“They don’t care that we are cold,” she said. “They don’t care if we eat or if we don’t eat.”

Elsa and her children wore prison uniforms and spent hours in their pod, often with no toys or books for the kids. One day, Elsa and her family were in the doctor’s ofﬁce, where all the kids were playing with crayons. Angelina drew a picture, but a guard grabbed the girl’s artwork. She cried a lot at Hutto, wondering what her family had done wrong.

“Mommy, where is God that he doesn’t want to help us? Mommy, tell God to come and take us out of here and take us to our house,” Elsa recalled her daughter saying. “Mommy, why do they have us as prisoners if we have never killed anybody?”

In March 2007, the ACLU helped bring suit against Michael Chertoff and the immigration ofﬁcers who ran Hutto. As a part of that litigation, attorneys collected more than 20 afﬁdavits from detainees like Elsa, nearly all of whom were bidding to receive political asylum from their home countries. The detainees hail from different continents—some are adults, others young children—but they all tell the same story because they lived it together.

Raouitee Pamela Puran ﬂed her home country, where her husband was kidnapped and murdered. Seeking political asylum in the United States, she and her daughter Wesleyann wound up at Hutto. The young girl, just 4 years old, had trouble sleeping. It was always cold, and it didn’t help that the guards kept turning the lights on and off in their living quarters. The food was awful too. When Wesleyann would talk to her aunt on the phone, she’d plead with her to cook her chicken curry and rice. That always stung her mom.

Even worse, Wesleyann would hear the guards threaten the children who acted up. If you don’t behave, they’d tell them, we’re going to separate you from your parents. Wesleyann was terriﬁed.

A sixth-grader at a junior high school in Ohio, Aissha Ibrahim came to Hutto with his mother, brother and sister on Nov. 30, 2006. Aissha, whose family had ﬂed war-torn Somalia, said in an afﬁdavit that when his sister Bahja got in trouble, the guards threatened to take her away from her family. Another guard told Aissha that if he complained, he would never see his mother again.

“I would be scared if I never got my mom back, and I would think of how she took care of me when I was a baby,” he said.

Just about every afﬁdavit from a child or mother portrayed Hutto the same way—as a rough and cold place, where kids lie awake at night hungry and crying in the dark. And if they act up, like children often do, a guard would threaten to remove them from their families. To hear the stories from inside the walls, Hutto seems more like a medieval dungeon than a 21st century facility run by a wealthy company.

“The conditions were shocking,” says Barbara Hines, a University of Texas law professor who spent many hours inside the facility representing detainees. “There were children in prison garb dressed like their parents; it was like an adult prison system. Seven times a day parents and their children were required to stay in their pods so they could be counted. Laser beams shined through the cells at night.”

Just about everyone else who walked through the gates at Hutto, including federal authorities, saw it as a deeply troubling facility. In March 2007, ICE inspectors visited Hutto and, in their own distinct bureaucratic language, corroborated the anguished accounts of the detainees. The inspectors noted that their “overall review of the facility can be accurately rated as deﬁcient” and determined that the staff wasn’t following basic standards of detention.

“The Review Team’s observation of CCA’s overall attitude is of disinterest and complacency in their work performance,” the agency noted in its report.

A month later, an interofﬁce memo from ICE said that at Hutto, CCA is “losing staff as quick as they can hire them.” That’s because the company was only paying its detention ofﬁcers around $10 an hour, nearly $4 less than what they could make at the county jail.

“As long as CCA continues to hire employees at this rate per hour, they will continue to experience the problems they are currently experiencing on the ﬂoor,” read the memo. “The current problems CCA is experiencing are a direct result of what ‘they are paying their employees for.’ Unfortunately, it is at ICE’s expense.”

Among other issues, the Scene asked CCA to address the portrayal of Hutto that emerges from both federal ofﬁcials and the people who lived there. The company declined to comment on any and all matters in this story, instead emailing news clips and a U.S. magistrate’s report of the facility. That report, which came three months after the ACLU ﬁled its federal lawsuit, depicted a more humane place than other earlier accounts and noted, “there have been attempts to ‘soften’ the feel of the building.” The magistrate observed that the staff removed door locks and hung murals on the walls, “although the building still retains a very institutional feel.”

In August, the ACLU announced a settlement with ICE over the treatment of immigrant families at the Hutto facility. The settlement called for several common-sense measures, including installing privacy curtains around toilets in common areas and letting kids play with toys in their rooms. All 26 children and their parents who took part in the suit were released into the custody of family members who are legal residents of the United States.

By all accounts, Hutto is no longer as oppressive as it was when Elsa and her family ﬁrst arrived from Honduras. But why didn’t CCA get it right from the start? Or to put it more bluntly, why did a rich company—one with $388 million in revenues last quarter—have to be told by the ACLU to cease treating innocent children like criminals?

“The point I’d like to make is that none of these changes were done voluntarily,” says Hines, the attorney. “When you look at CCA and ICE, the question is, how would this facility have been if no one found out about it?”

The apathetic treatment of Hutto’s immigrants was hardly an anomaly. CCA also operates a detention facility in San Diego that drew a separate ACLU lawsuit last year. In the complaint, the group claims that CCA routinely denied basic medical care to immigrant detainees with hepatitis, diabetes and other serious illnesses. One man from Ghana died from heart failure after the center’s staff allegedly asked him to ﬁll out some paper work—even though he was seen kneeling on the ﬂoor of his cell and complaining of chest pains.

At jails and prisons across the country, inmates routinely die under dire circumstances; some commit suicide after nurses fail to ﬁll their anti-psychotic prescriptions, others ﬁnd themselves on the wrong end of a baton stick. And in fairness, CCA doesn’t have a monopoly on jailhouse horror stories. For every dark tale of cruelty at CCA, there is an equal travesty in a county jail or federal penitentiary. The difference, though, is that CCA can duck responsibility for what happens inside its walls, whereas a government-run facility can’t. CCA doesn’t have to turn over the disciplinary ﬁle of a disgraced guard or give a press conference when one of its inmates escapes over the fence. It has the luxury to operate in the shadows and turn a booming proﬁt without having to explain how it runs the business.

We don’t know a lot about Patrick Perry, a onetime captain for CCA’s Metro Detention Facility, located on Harding Road in South Nashville. But we do know that on the morning of Jan. 31, 2008, Perry arrived at the Metro Health Department to talk about his employer and offer a glimpse into some of its secret practices. Metro Health ofﬁcials would later write a memo detailing what the captain told them.

Perry was worried about a troubled inmate named Frank Horton, who was imprisoned on a drug conviction and had stayed in the same segregation cell since May 2007. Perry said that CCA’s policy dictates that an inmate has to leave his cell at least once every three days or else guards need to remove him by force. But at CCA’s Harding facility, the warden reprimanded the staff if they followed this policy. That’s because every time they had to escort an inmate against his will, it raised the facility’s “use of force” numbers. And that placed the Metro Detention Center in a negative light when CCA ofﬁcials evaluated it against its other jails and prisons across the country.

At ﬁrst blush, the warden’s directive may not seem out of order. If an inmate doesn’t want to leave his cell, why should the guards care? But Frank Horton was a special case. As Perry told Metro ofﬁcials, the 23-year-old inmate seemed disoriented and was speaking gibberish. At the very least, he needed medical care. (Metro Health Department ofﬁcials say they made sure Horton received a psychiatric screening after their visit with Perry, but say they can’t divulge any more details due to privacy concerns.)

Horton’s mother, Cytherea Braswell, had tried to visit her son before Christmas but says that a guard couldn’t ﬁnd the necessary forms. She later had a lawyer, John Clemmons, drop in to see him in March, after she learned her son wasn’t well.

When Clemmons arrived, a guard told him that Frank was just ﬁne, that he’d received a shower and a shave. But when he went to see his client, what he saw troubled him.

“He had a big, unkempt goatee, and some stubble on his face and lint on his hair,” Clemmons says. “He was completely naked except for a blanket draped around him, and when they walked me back there, they didn’t act like this was unusual.”

Now contemplating a lawsuit against CCA, Clemmons says that his client went nine months without taking a shower, which dovetails with Perry’s account of how Horton went the better part of 2007 without leaving his cell. Even worse, Horton appeared as if he were completely oblivious to the outside world and lost in his own muddled thoughts.

Brawell says that, as a child, her son was diagnosed with hyperactivity and mild to moderate bipolar disorder. As a young adult, he worked at a Wafﬂe House and played basketball with his friends. With the right treatment, she says, he could live a normal life.

“He was an average person,” she says. “He had a job, he went to work every day, he had friends. He knew how to take care of himself.”

But when Clemmons went to visit Braswell’s son, he was talking in the same mysterious language that Perry described in his visit with Metro ofﬁcials. It was an odd blend of broken Spanish and English, and Horton spoke it as if it were his native tongue, repeating the same incoherent phrases to identical questions.

“When I saw him, he was in a state where he had no awareness of his mental capacity,” Clemmons says.

With the help of the Metro Legal Department and the Davidson County Sheriff’s ofﬁce, Clemmons was able to transfer Horton to a state facility for inmates with special needs. Now in the process of researching his case, Clemmons isn’t sure what kind of, if any, mental health treatment his client received behind bars. For that, he may subpoena Patrick Perry to discover whether the CCA facility risked Horton’s health to polish its internal data.

“When I was there, the only medical staff I saw was a nurse who merely walked from window to window and looked at the inmates through a slot in the door,” he says. “It just looked like all they were concerned with was that their physical well-being was intact.”

In his meeting with Metro Health ofﬁcials, Patrick Perry also said that an alarm for inmates to trigger in the event of an emergency wasn’t working. He added that CCA knew the call system was a problem “but did nothing about it.” The former captain may ﬁnd himself testifying about that observation as well.

Two weeks before Perry came forward, Gerald Townsend, a 36-year-old inmate at the Harding facility who loved scary movies, died at Vanderbilt University Medical Center after being diagnosed with internal bleeding. His spleen was ripped open and blood had ﬂooded his lungs. In his ﬁnal hours, Townsend told a nurse that Ronnie Sullivan, his 22-year-old cellmate, assaulted him. Metro police later charged Sullivan with Townsend’s murder.

Attorney Blair Durham is representing Townsend’s mother, Jackie, who plans to ﬁle a suit against CCA this week. Durham says he’s learned that inmates were banging on their cells as Sullivan began to assault his cellmate. But no one rushed to help. Durham also heard that the alarm, which could have saved Townsend’s life, wasn’t working.

A month after Townsend’s death, an inmate ﬂed the same jail through an air vent. At ﬁrst, the company announced that the man, who had a history of escape attempts, was simply hiding inside the grounds. A day or so later, when the Scene called to see if he had been found, the company refused to comment.

Earlier this year, after CCA endured a series of PR nightmares at the Metro Detention Center during which the company largely ducked interviews with the media, the private jailer reassigned the facility’s warden, Brian Gardner. For the Davidson County Sheriff’s ofﬁce, which contracts with CCA to run the Harding jail, the company needed to reevaluate its management of the facility.

“We are satisﬁed that CCA has responded with a policy change as well as the fact that they have changed their management since these incidents have occurred,” says Karla Wiekal, the sheriff’s spokesperson. “At some point, (CCA) recognized there needed to be a leadership change and at this point forward we will see if these changes are effective.”

In June 2007, President George Bush nominated CCA corporate counsel Gus Puryear to a federal seat in the U.S. District Court of Middle Tennessee. Initially viewed as a safe bet to receive a lifetime appointment, Puryear faltered badly in his hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in February, appearing to some as arrogant and unprepared. The 39-year-old nominee, who twice served as debate coach for Vice President Dick Cheney, struggled in particular to explain how his company handled the brutal 2004 death of Nashville inmate Estelle Richardson, at one point wrongly stating that the guards initially charged in connection with her murder were “exonerated.” Now Puryear’s bid has turned into an unofﬁcial referendum on CCA, and it appears unlikely that the Senate will conﬁrm him before the end of Bush’s presidency.

It’s been that kind of year for the private jailer. Puryear’s struggles, playing out awkwardly on a big stage, make up just the latest bout of bad publicity for the Nashville company, which has also been battered in the national press. In February, The New Yorker reported the deﬁnitive story about the company’s Hutto facility in Texas. The magazine detailed how immigrant families shared a tiny cell with a bunk bed, thin mattress and an exposed toilet, while ill-trained guards rounded them up seven times a day for a head count. Then in March, Time.com detailed the accusations of a former high-ranking CCA ofﬁcial who claimed that the company repeatedly misled state and local authorities about the rate of violent incidents at the prisons and jails it had under contract.

In May, The New York Times chronicled how an ailing detainee was treated at a CCA facility in New Jersey just before he lapsed into a coma and died. The paper uncovered records that show that the man, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea who overstayed a tourist visa, was “shackled and pinned to the ﬂoor of the medical unit.” He vomited and moaned and then was dumped in a disciplinary cell for 13 hours, even though he was foaming at the mouth.

Operating 65 facilities in the country with more than 70,000 inmates and detainees in its custody, CCA will never have a perfect record. But what may say more about the company anchoring a Green Hills ofﬁce park is not the middle-aged detainee who died of a heart failure or the sinister warden who struck an inmate, but the 9-year-old boy who was forced to live like a common criminal.

Kevin Yourdkhani, whose parents ﬂed from torture in their native Iran, wound up at CCA’s Hutto facility on Feb. 9, 2007. There, he shared a small cell with his mother and had to climb a tall ladder to get to his bunk bed. He slept right next to an open toilet that smelled. The boy also complained about the food—he called it “garbage”—saying that all he was ever fed were beans.

“We are lucky if we get 30 minute to eat,” he said an afﬁdavit for the ACLU’s lawsuit against the place. “It is usually 20 minutes, and they are always rushing.”

In his pod, a small living area that he shared with other detainees, the children were always sick. Lots of kids had eye infections. Kevin attended school but rarely learned anything. All he did was watch “Spanish movies” and color and draw pictures.

One day his father, who was being kept at another part of the facility, came to visit Kevin. That infuriated a guard, who told Kevin that he would be placed in foster care if his dad ever dropped by to see him again.

“I cried and cried so much that I lost my energy and went to sleep.”
http://www.nashvillescene.com/Stories/Cover_Story/2008/06/19/Locked_and_Loaded/index.shtml#

Posted by lois at 09:24 AM | Comments (0)

Homeland Security's Enemy Next Door

Americas Program Commentary
Homeland Security's Enemy Next Door
Tom Barry | June 10, 2008
What began as a war on terrorists has become a war on immigrants. The Department of Homeland Security says that it prioritizes its immigration enforcement actions by "targeting the greatest national security and public safety threats"—an approach not taken prior to 9/11.

At home, like abroad, the war on terrorism has lost its focus. Faced with failure, the Bush administration's stated resolve to dismantle international terrorism has devolved into an attack on a far more vulnerable and proximate target—Latin American immigrants.

President George W. Bush has asked for a 6.8% increase in Homeland Security's 2009 budget, while the department's immigration enforcement operations will receive a 19.1% increase. Since the incorporation of immigration enforcement into the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2003, the two DHS immigration agencies—Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have received a greatly disproportionate share of Homeland Security's annual budget increases.

In the president's 2009 budget proposal, DHS says its main priority is "to prevent terrorist attacks against the nation and to protect our nation from dangerous people." DHS "will continue to prevent the entry of terrorists while facilitating the legitimate flow of people by strengthening border security efforts and continuing to gain effective control of America's borders."

Department Secretary Michael Chertoff can point to many numerical indicators of progress. Border Patrol agents and detention beds have doubled; arrests by ICE fugitive operation teams doubled in 2007; and the "removal" of "criminal aliens" increases each year.

DHS spends more than $12 billion annually for operations "to protect our nation against dangerous people." Partnering in immigration enforcement, the Justice Department has also enjoyed hundreds of millions of dollars in budget increases over the past few years. Large increases for the DOJ's role in immigration enforcement are included in its 2009 request for "National Security Efforts," specifically under its budget requests for "Fighting Criminal Activity on the U.S. Southwest Border."

A large sector of the U.S. population—12-13 million—that, prior to the creation of Homeland Security in March 2003, were described by DHS and DOJ as "illegal aliens" are now commonly labeled "dangerous people" because they lack proper documentation and may be falsifying their documents to obtain work, go to school, or pay taxes.

Homeland Security has launched waves of new anti-immigrant initiatives, many with militaristic names: Operation Streamline, Operation Jumpstart, Community Shield, Fugitive Operations, Return to Sender, Border Security Initiative, among others.

Why all the anti-immigrant fervor in government? What are the politics behind this offensive?
Restrictionists Set the Pace

The rising influence of the immigration restrictionists—including Minuteman vigilantes on the border, the Immigration Reform Caucus in Congress, and such policy institutes in Washington as Numbers USA, Center for Immigration Studies, and Federation for American Immigration Reform—has moved the immigration debate decidedly to the right and they have succeeded in framing immigration as a "rule of law" issue.

In the debate on comprehensive immigration reform, the forces that have traditionally shaped immigration politics—the "immigrants are good for profits" leaders of the Republican Party and the "immigrants are part of our electoral coalition" leaders of the Democratic Party—were overpowered and out-maneuvered by the restrictionist leaders and their deep reservoir of grassroots activists.

Those concerned about the rights of immigrants and the ethical obligations of a host country were pushed to the margins of the debate by restrictionists. These hardliners insisted that there could be no discussion of legalization or temporary work programs until the government secured its borders, enforced its immigration laws, and re-established the "rule of law" in the country.

With all proposals for comprehensive immigration reform blocked by the restrictionist grassroots lobby and their Washington representatives, leading elements of both parties accepted the "enforcement-first" agenda of the restrictionists.

Congress has approved billions of new dollars for immigration enforcement to double the number of Border Patrol agents, double the number of beds in detention centers, construct a 670-mile border fence, mount a high-tech virtual fence, and hire brigades of immigration attorneys, judges, and U.S. marshals at the Justice Department.

Many in Congress, especially liberal Democrats, hoped that by authorizing a full-throttle enforcement agenda they would be creating more political space for a comprehensive immigration reform that includes legalization. But comprehensive reform was quashed in the Senate along with other bills that opponents deemed to be pro-immigrant. By caving to the enforcement agenda, they actually lost political space as the immigrants-as-criminals, or worse, terrorists, image took even deeper hold in the media and national consciousness fueled by a barrage of images of fences, armed border guards, etc.

But the restrictionist camp did not declare victory. Instead, anti-immigration organizations quickly moved a step beyond the enforcement-first agenda and began brandishing an enforcement-only immigration policy. The restrictionist policy institutes call this their "attrition through enforcement" plan.

In effect, the departments of Homeland Security, Justice, and Defense have adopted an enforcement-only approach. With no legalization proposal on the horizon, the government has stepped up the pace of immigration enforcement, increasing workplace raids, opening new immigrant detention centers, and encouraging local governments to join in the national immigrant hunt—spreading terror throughout immigrant communities.

There is no plan to deport all illegal immigrants. Rather the crackdown aims to sow fear among immigrants so that large numbers decide to leave the United States and to deter others from migrating north. While the Bush administration publicly supports immigration reform, it has done little to advance a reform policy during its two terms.

A month after immigration reform failed in the Senate in June 2007 the administration announced a 26-point plan of administrative measures to increase immigration enforcement, such as extending the border fence and hiring more Border Agents. The plan also included measures to streamline the temporary worker program, an apparent attempt to assuage businesses that were complaining about congressional failure to expand the HB2 program. The Bush administration has unsuccessfully promoted the corporate proposal to expand temporary work programs, providing cheap labor without acquiring broader obligations to workers.

There is widespread speculation that the administration has unleashed DHS on immigrants with the hope that the resulting shortages of immigrant workers will create more political room for a renewal and expansion of temporary worker programs.

The administration recently adjusted the HB2 visa program to allow temporary workers to stay three years rather than ten months. This underscored the criticism that on the one hand the administration is detaining and deporting historic numbers of immigrants, while on the other hand it is opening the doors for business to employ foreign workers temporarily in resort hotels, shipyards, and golf courses.

All involved parties—the restrictionists, both political parties, the president, and the federal agencies charged with carrying out the immigration crackdown—bear some responsibility for the immigration crisis that is deepening in America. But the lion's share of the blame lies with President Bush. His leadership gap allowed restrictionist proposals to gain momentum, he has spent billions of dollars on trumped-up border security, and he has unleashed DHS to pursue a war of terror on immigrants.

The politics of immigration restrictionism do not fully explain the war on immigrants. Anti-immigration and anti-immigrant forces would not have advanced so quickly without Sept. 11. The new national commitment to homeland security set the stage for an enforcement-only immigration policy and serves as the ideological framework for the immigration crackdown.
Immigrants as Criminals and Terrorists

At Homeland Security, which was established in reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks, there is no confusion about what is the driving force behind the immigration crackdown. As DHS explains, "The National Strategy for Homeland Security and the Homeland Security Act of 2002 served to mobilize and organize our nation to secure the homeland from terrorist attacks." Its mission is to "lead the unified national effort to secure America. We will prevent and deter terrorist attacks and protect against and respond to threats and hazards to the nation."

ICE explains that its predecessor, the Immigration & Naturalization Service (INS), was folded into the new Homeland Security department to allow it "to more effectively enforce our immigration and customs laws and to protect the United States against terrorist attacks." ICE says it does this "by targeting illegal immigrants: the people, money, and materials that support terrorism and other criminal activities. ICE is a key component of the DHS 'layered defense' approach to protecting the nation."

Similarly, CBP, whose main component is the Border Patrol, boasts of its national security mission: "We are the guardian of our Nation's borders. We are America's frontline. We safeguard the American homeland at and beyond our borders. We protect the American public against terrorists and the instruments of terror." There is no mention of immigrants in CBP's mission, even though obstructing illegal immigration is its most prominent function.

DHS points to statistics that testify to its progress in arresting, detaining, and deporting immigrants. The Justice Department, responsible for prosecuting immigrants and transporting them to jails, points to the mushrooming of immigration cases as evidence of its commitment to upholding immigration law.

But what does all this immigration enforcement have to do with protecting the country against terrorists and criminals that threaten our security and safety?

A 2007 study by the Transnational Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University found that there has been no increase in terrorism or national security charges against immigrants since 2001. In fact, despite the increased enforcement operations by Homeland Security, more immigrants were charged annually in immigration courts with national security or terrorism-related offenses in a three-year period in the mid-1990s (1994-96) than in a comparable period (2004-06) since Sept. 11.

According to the TRAC study, "A decade later, national security charges were brought against 114 individuals, down about a third. Meanwhile for the same period, terrorism charges are down more than three-fourths, to just 12."

"Despite repeated claims by high officials of the Bush administration that fighting terrorism has been the central mission of the Department of Homeland Security," reported TRAC, "the data show that in the last three years a claim of terrorism was made against only 12 (0.0015%) out of individuals against whom the DHS has filed charges in the immigration courts." Of those 12 charges, "six were withdrawn by the DHS, one was not sustained, two are still pending, one was otherwise dealt with, and only four were sustained."

Although ICE claims it targets immigrants accused of crimes that threaten national security and public safety, in practice the agency has made undocumented immigration itself a crime thus blurring the lines between immigration violations and serious crime. Immigrants are now being charged with federal crimes for actions that were in the past considered administrative violations. The criminals that DHS, ICE, and Border Patrol are arresting and imprisoning are increasingly immigrants who have falsified documents or Social Security numbers to obtain and hold jobs—often with the tacit cooperation of employers.

ICE has mounted a national dragnet with 75 teams stationed around the country looking for "fugitive immigrants." ICE says its new operation is intended "to dramatically expand the agency's efforts to locate, arrest, and remove fugitives from the United States." But most of these fugitives are not criminals on the lam but rather immigrants who have failed to respond to administrative orders issued by immigration courts.
New Administration Needs to Delink Security and Immigration

By merging Homeland Security and Border Patrol into one department, the Bush administration has created a monster agency that has betrayed its original mandate on terrorism, diverting a tremendous amount of resources to hunting down and "removing" immigrants who represent no threat to national security.

Some immigrants might be terrorists, just as some citizens might be terrorists. However, by having such a large population to monitor—as many as 30 million non-citizen (legal and illegal) immigrants in addition to foreign visitors—DHS is unable to focus on homeland security. Instead it has clumsily taken on the administration of a badly flawed immigration system.

Incorporating immigration agencies into Homeland Security has further complicated and distorted what was already a dysfunctional immigration system. The administrative merging has created a merging in the public mind between "threats" of terrorists and immigrants. ICE and Border Patrol agents now regard immigrants lacking proper documents as criminals and potential terrorists, and they are encouraging local law-enforcement officials to do the same.

Immigration policy and homeland security have become so entangled that for DHS and its component immigration agencies the mission of protecting America has become synonymous with cracking down on immigrants. It's one more policy mess from the Bush legacy that the next administration will need to untangle.

The politics of restrictionism can be defeated. More difficult, though, for a new Congress and president will be a rolling back of the Homeland Security apparatus that has taken over immigration policy. A real focus on terrorism and organized crime could make those programs more professional and more effective. But the unfocused and punitive enforcement-only measures on the border need to be defunded and shut down.

Immigrants aren't the enemy next door. They are our employees, coworkers, and neighbors.

The challenge for the next president and a new Congress will be to articulate an immigration policy that is independent of the national security imperative. No doubt that the immigration system is in crisis, but it's a failure to set sustainable immigration flows and fair practices—certainly not a national security crisis.

Tom Barry is a senior analyst with the Americas Policy Program (www.americaspolicy.org) of the Center for International Policy.
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5286

For More Information

See other articles in this series of new reports on the immigration crackdown:

Reframing the Immigration Debate: The Actors and the Issues
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/2959

The Deterrence Strategy of Homeland Security
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5269

County Jails Welcome Immigrants
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5253

Paying the Price of the Immigration Crackdown
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5234

Truth about Illegal Immigration and Crime
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/4903

Posted by lois at 09:18 AM | Comments (0)

June 18, 2008

Federal prosecution of illegal immigrants soars. The White House lauds the dramatic increase, but critics cite higher priorities.

"This is an effort to use the federal criminal justice system in immigration enforcement," Long said. "What it means is that immigration cases are dominating the federal court system these days. The volume of cases is
really huge. This is a big deal."

Federal prosecution of illegal immigrants soars
The White House lauds the dramatic increase, but critics cite higher priorities.
By Nicole Gaouette
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

June 18, 2008

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration has sharply ratcheted up prosecutions of illegal immigrants along the U.S.-Mexico border in the last year, with increases so dramatic that immigration offenses now account for as much as half the nation's federal criminal caseload.

In the widening crackdown, administration officials prosecuted 9,350 illegal immigrants on federal criminal charges in March, up from 3,746 a year ago and an all-time high, according to statistics released Tuesday. Those convicted have received jail sentences averaging about one month.

The prosecutions are among the most visible steps in a larger effort that includes work-site raids, increased border patrols and the use of technology and fences. Often controversial, the patchwork of measures represents the administration's response to failed congressional attempts last summer to overhaul federal immigration laws.

Administration officials and conservative groups have lauded the increase in prosecutions. But critics say data show illegal immigrants are still trying to enter the country. And some lawyers argue that the push is overwhelming a federal court system with limited resources and higher priorities.

Even so, administration officials announced this month that they would be funneling more resources toward the effort, called Operation Streamline.

"The results of this criminal prosecution initiative have been striking," said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

Chertoff's agency and the Justice Department, which oversee the effort, recently announced a plan to assign 64 attorneys and 35 staff members to prosecutions along the Southwest border.

The program began as a pilot around Del Rio, Texas, in 2005 and spread to other areas. Officers and prosecutors participating in it practice "zero tolerance," and jail times can range from two weeks to six months.

"The reason this works is because these illegal migrants come to realize that violating the law will not simply send them back to try over again but will require them to actually serve some short period of time in a jail or prison setting, and will brand them as having been violators of the law," Chertoff said. "That has a very significant deterrent impact."

The statistical analysis released Tuesday was compiled by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, considered an authoritative source for such figures. It called the increase "highly unusual."

Operation Streamline's larger aim is to give the administration another tool to use in its crackdown on illegal immigration, said Susan B. Long, a TRAC co-director and Syracuse University professor.

Of 16,298 federal criminal prosecutions recorded nationwide in March, immigration cases accounted for more than half, Long said. The next-highest number, 2,674, was for drug offenses, followed by 702 for white-collar crime.

TRAC researchers found that all but 142 of the 9,350 new federal immigration prosecutions in March occurred in certain areas along the border with Mexico. Texas was most active, followed by Southern California.

California is not formally a part of the program. But prosecutions of people who smuggle illegal immigrants across the state's border have increased sharply in the last five years, nearly doubling to 118 cases in March.

The deluge of prosecutions is overwhelming some lawyers involved in the process.

Heather Williams, a federal public defender in Tucson, said the operation had a crushing effect when it was begun this year on a limited basis.

Defense attorneys fear for clients who are hustled into court, en masse, after spending days crossing the desert.

"We have to be concerned our clients are competent to plead, that they understand what's going on," Williams said.

Other immigrant advocates were critical of the increase in federal prosecutions.

"It doesn't mean we have an end to illegal immigration or a way of dealing with it," said Angela Kelley, director of the Immigration Policy Center.

A recent study showed that would-be border crossers were more concerned about heat and harsh conditions than border enforcement, she said. The study, by Wayne A. Cornelius, director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at UC San Diego, found that 98% of immigrants from the Mexican state of Oaxaca were eventually able to enter the U.S.

But groups that want to see immigration tightly controlled applauded the new statistics.

"It sounds like very good news," said Roy Beck, director of NumbersUSA, which advocates stricter immigration controls.

"It's part of a pattern we've seen since last August where the administration, on the border and in the interior, seems almost monthly to be tightening the vise," he said.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/washingtondc/la-na-immig18-2008jun18,0,7626509,print.story

Posted by lois at 09:27 PM | Comments (0)

May 23, 2008

297 Illegal Immigrants Sent to Prison in Federal Push

May 24, 2008
297 Illegal Immigrants Sent to Prison in Federal Push
By JULIA PRESTON
NY Times

WATERLOO, Iowa — In temporary courtrooms at a fairgrounds here, 270 illegal immigrants were sentenced this week to five months in prison for working at a meatpacking plant with false documents.

The prosecutions, which ended Friday, signal a sharp escalation in the Bush administration’s crackdown on illegal workers, with prosecutors bringing tough federal criminal charges against most of the immigrants arrested in a May 12 raid. Until now, unauthorized workers have generally been detained by immigration officials for civil violations and rapidly deported.

The convicted immigrants were among 389 workers detained at the Agriprocessors Inc. plant in nearby Postville in a raid that federal officials called the largest criminal enforcement operation ever carried out by immigration authorities at a workplace.

Matt M. Dummermuth, the United States attorney for northern Iowa, who oversaw the prosecutions, called the operation an “astonishing success.”

Claude Arnold, a special agent in charge of investigations for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said it showed that federal officials were “committed to enforcing the nation’s immigration laws in the workplace to maintain the integrity of the immigration system.”

The unusually swift proceedings, in which 297 immigrants pleaded guilty and were sentenced in four days, were criticized by criminal defense lawyers, who warned of violations of due process. Twenty-seven immigrants received probation. The American Immigration Lawyers Association protested that the workers had been denied meetings with immigration lawyers and that their claims under immigration law had been swept aside in unusual and speedy plea agreements.

The illegal immigrants, most from Guatemala, filed into the courtrooms in groups of 10, their hands and feet shackled. One by one, they entered guilty pleas through a Spanish interpreter, admitting they had taken jobs using fraudulent Social Security cards or immigration documents. Moments later, they moved to another courtroom for sentencing.

The pleas were part of a deal worked out with prosecutors to avoid even more serious charges. Most immigrants agreed to immediate deportation after they serve five months in prison.

The hearings took place on the grounds of the National Cattle Congress in Waterloo, in mobile trailers and in a dance hall modified with black curtains, beginning at 8 a.m. and continuing several nights until 10. On Wednesday alone, 94 immigrants pleaded guilty and were sentenced, the most sentences in a single day in this northern Iowa district, according to Robert L. Phelps, the clerk of court.

Mr. Arnold, the immigration agent, said the criticism of the proceedings was “the usual spate of false allegations and baseless rumors.”

The large number of criminal cases was remarkable because immigration violations generally fall under civil statutes. Until now, relatively few immigrants caught in raids have been charged with federal crimes like identity theft or document fraud.

“To my knowledge, the magnitude of these indictments is completely unprecedented,” said Juliet Stumpf, an immigration law professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore., who was formerly a senior civil rights lawyer at the Justice Department. “It’s the reliance on criminal process here as part of an immigration enforcement action that takes this out of the ordinary, a startling intensification of the criminalization of immigration law.”

Defense lawyers, who were appointed by the court, said most of the immigrants were ready to accept the plea deals because of the hard bargain driven by the prosecutors.

If the immigrants did not plead guilty, Mr. Dummermuth said he would try them on felony identity theft charges that carry a mandatory two-year minimum jail sentence. In many cases, court documents show, the immigrants were working under real Social Security numbers or immigration visas, known as green cards, that belonged to other people.

All but a handful of the workers here had no criminal record, court documents showed.

“My family is worried in Guatemala,” one defendant, Erick Tajtaj, entreated the federal district judge who sentenced him, Mark W. Bennett. “I ask that you deport us as soon as possible, that you do us that kindness so we can be together again with our families.”

No charges have been brought against managers or owners at Agriprocessors, but there were indications that prosecutors were also preparing a case against the company. In pleading guilty, immigrants had to agree to cooperate with any investigation.

Chaim Abrahams, a representative of Agriprocessors, said in a statement that he could not comment about specific accusations but that the company was cooperating with the government.

Aaron Rubashkin, the owner of Agriprocessors, announced Friday that he had begun a search to replace his son Sholom as the chief executive of the company. Agriprocessors is the country’s largest producer of kosher meat, sold under brands like Aaron’s Best. The plant is in Postville, a farmland town about 70 miles northeast of Waterloo. Normally it employs about 800 workers, and in recent years the majority of them have come from rural Guatemala.

Since 2004, the plant has faced repeated sanctions for environmental and worker safety violations. It was the focus of a 2006 exposé in The Jewish Daily Forward and a commission of inquiry that year by Conservative Jewish leaders.

In Postville, workers from the plant, still feeling aftershocks from the raid, said conditions there were often harsh. In interviews, they said they were often required to work overtime and night shifts, sometimes up to 14 hours a day, but were not consistently paid for the overtime.

“We knew what time we would start work but we did not know what time we would finish,” said Élida, 29, a Guatemalan who was arrested in the raid and then released to care for her two children. She asked that her last name not be published because she is in this country illegally.

A 16-year-old Guatemalan girl, who asked to be identified only as G.O. because she is illegal and a minor and was not involved in the raid, said she had been working the night shift plucking chickens. “When you start, you can’t stay awake,” she said. “But after a while you get used to it.”

The workers said that supervisors and managers were well aware that the immigrants were working under false documents.

Defense lawyers, who each agreed to represent as many as 30 immigrants, said they were satisfied that they had sufficient time to question them and prepare their cases. But some lawyers said they were troubled by the severity of the charges.

At one sentencing hearing, David Nadler, a defense lawyer, said he was “honored to represent such good and brave people,” saying the immigrants’ only purpose had been to provide for their families in Guatemala.

“I want the court to know that these people are the kings of family values,” Mr. Nadler said.

Judge Bennett appeared moved by Mr. Nadler’s remarks. “I don’t doubt for a moment that you are good, hard-working people who have done what you did to help your families,” Judge Bennett told the immigrants. “Unfortunately for you, you committed a violation of federal law.”

After the hearing, Mr. Nadler said the plea agreements were the best deal available for his clients. But he was dismayed that prosecutors had denied them probation and insisted the immigrants serve prison time and agree to a rarely used judicial order for immediate deportation upon their release, signing away their rights to go to immigration court.

“That’s not the defense of justice,” Mr. Nadler said. “That’s just politics.”

Christopher Clausen, a lawyer who represented 21 Guatemalans, said he was certain they all understood their options and rights. Mainly they wanted to get home to Guatemala as quickly as possible, he said.

“The government is not bashful about the fact that they are trying to send a message,” Mr. Clausen said, “that if you get caught working illegally here you will pay a criminal penalty.”

Robert Rigg, a Drake University law professor who is president of the Iowa Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said his group was not consulted when prosecutors and court officials began to make plans, starting in December, for the mass proceedings.

“You really are force feeding the system just to churn these people out,” Mr. Rigg said.

Kathleen Campbell Walker, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said that intricate issues could arise in some cases, for example where immigrants had children and spouses who were legal residents or United States citizens. Those issues “could not be even cursorily addressed in the time frame being forced upon these individuals and their overburdened counsel.”

Linda R. Reade, the chief judge who approved the emergency court setup, said she was confident there had been no rush to justice. In an interview, Judge Reade said prosecutors had organized the immigrants’ detention to make it easy for their lawyers to meet with them. The prosecutors, she said, “have tried to be fair in their charging.”

The immigration lawyers, Judge Reade said, “do not understand the federal criminal process as it relates to immigration charges.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/24/us/24immig.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 10:18 PM | Comments (0)

May 10, 2008

Comic book: Mexico draws dire picture for migrants

Mexico draws dire picture for migrants

The cover of a Mexican comic book aimed to deter illegal immigration says "Migrants: Only alive can you do something for your families."

By Chris Hawley and Sergio Solache, USA TODAY. April 21, 2008

MEXICO CITY — One migrant gets his legs sliced off by a train's wheels. Another is shot by bandits on the Arizona border. Others are beaten and robbed by crooked Mexican police.

In a new effort to dissuade people from crossing the border illegally, Mexico's top human-rights agency has published two comic books packed with tales about the horrors that migrants may face. The tone is very different from previous government publications that focused more on travel and safety tips.

One of the two Migrantes comics is aimed at Mexicans, while the other focuses on Central Americans traveling through Mexico on their way to the USA. The National Human Rights Commission began distributing 20,000 of them this month at migrant shelters and bus terminals.

"We could have made the stories a little softer, but the (commission) asked us to be very realistic," said Domingo Perea, editorial director of Comics and Visual Arts, the firm hired to produce the comic books. "That was the intention, to discourage people from migrating."

In the past, several Mexican states have published booklets with advice for migrants. And in 2004, the Mexican Foreign Ministry published a comic-style Guide for the Mexican Migrant that offered safety tips for those attempting to cross the border, information on their legal rights and advice for living unobtrusively in the USA. That booklet outraged U.S. immigration-control groups, including the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which said the comic style and frank advice trivialized U.S. immigration laws.

The new comics have a more depressing tone, Perea said. "We knew about that previous one, and both we and the Human Rights Commission felt it was too light," he said.

The commission has been accused of being cavalier about illegal immigration in the past. In 2006, it abruptly abandoned plans to distribute maps of the Arizona desert to migrants after U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff objected.

The National Human Rights Commission is funded by Mexico's federal government but operates independently. Its two Migrantes books are particularly harsh on Mexican authorities, portraying police and soldiers as corrupt.

In Issue No. 1 of Migrantes, a group of Mexicans is robbed by two Mexican police officers, abandoned by a smuggler and attacked by bandits on the Arizona-Mexico border. All the migrants turn back except one, who is seen dying in the desert on the last page.

Issue No. 2 follows a group of teenagers from Central America as they try to cross Mexico on their way to the USA. They are harassed by Mexican soldiers, beaten and robbed by Mexican police, kidnapped and beaten again by a machete-wielding gang, and then suffer extortion by another gang member. Two teens are killed by a train, and only one continues onward.

Perea said there are no immediate plans for more comic books.

Guillermo Alonso, a demographer at the College of the Northern Border, said the commission should be giving out travel information if it really wants to save lives, especially as the U.S.-Mexican border approaches its hottest season.

"I think the National Human Rights Commission is using the wrong strategy," Alonso said. "What the migrants need are maps or radio programs to tell them what the weather is like."

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2008-04-21-mexico-comics_n.htm
Hawley is Latin America correspondent for USA TODAY and The Arizona Republic

Posted by lois at 07:21 PM | Comments (0)

May 09, 2008

Two responses in the NY Times to aricle and editorial about detention centers

Two of the five letters printed by the NY Times today in response to the "Death by Detention" editorial and the article “Few Details on Immigrants Who Died in U.S. Custody” (front page, May 5).

To the Editor:

Your May 6 editorial “Death by Detention” was right to point out the secrecy and lack of transparency surrounding the treatment of immigrant detainees held in for-profit facilities. But your call for holding detention centers to the same enforceable standards that apply to prisons would do little to help.

Sadly, there are no enforceable national standards for prisons and jails in the United States. There is one national accreditation body that had developed standards, the American Correctional Association, but its standards are not enforceable, and there is no requirement for facilities to be accredited.

There are constitutional standards that fluctuate as the Supreme Court changes its view of the meaning of the Eighth Amendment.

There are standards imposed by the international treaties that we have signed and ratified, including the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment and Punishment, but the Bush administration was dismissive of the criticisms of our prison systems made by the committee of oversight last year.

We should develop enforceable national standards, including systems of oversight and monitoring, for all places of detention in the United States.

Jenni Gainsborough
Director, Washington Office
Penal Reform International
Washington, May 6, 2008

To the Editor:

The suffering and death of immigrants in United States detention facilities point to a still bigger outrage: the alarming breakdown of health care for detained immigrants and asylum seekers. This is a direct result of the longstanding abdication of responsibility by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Public Health Service, private contractors and local jails for the health of immigration detainees in their custody.

The harsh circumstances of detention and the detrimental effect on health have been known for years, and the victims include asylum seekers who have come to this country to escape persecution in other lands, only to find themselves imprisoned instead of supported while their claims are pending.

Congress and immigration officials must immediately take at least four steps:

First, they should provide the funds needed to protect the health of immigration detainees.

Second, they should enforce compliance with established standards of medical care in detention facilities, no matter who operates them.

Third, they should release from detention asylum seekers who pose no risk of flight or danger to the community.

Fourth, a bill to address many of these issues, introduced this week by Representative Zoe Lofgren, should be passed quickly.

Fifth, both Congress and the appropriate executive agencies should investigate the deaths of immigrant detainees in United States custody, ensuring that the health and human rights of those still in these facilities are protected.

Frank Donaghue
Chief Executive
Physicians for Human Rights
Cambridge, Mass., May 5, 2008

•

Posted by lois at 06:13 PM | Comments (0)

May 07, 2008

NY Times Editorial: Death by Detention in CCA Prison

May 6, 2008
Editorial, NY Times
Death by Detention

A chilling article by Nina Bernstein in The Times on Monday recounted the secrecy, neglect and lack of oversight that are a few of the shameful symptoms of the booming sector of the nation’s prison industry — the detention of undocumented foreigners.

Ms. Bernstein chronicled the death of Boubacar Bah, a tailor from Guinea who was imprisoned in New Jersey for overstaying a tourist visa. He fell and fractured his skull in the Elizabeth Detention Center early last year. Though clearly gravely injured, Mr. Bah was shackled and taken to a disciplinary cell. He was left alone — unconscious and occasionally foaming at the mouth — for more than 13 hours. He was eventually taken to the hospital and died after four months in a coma.

Nobody told Mr. Bah’s relatives until five days after his fall. When they finally found him, he was on life support, soon to become one of the 66 immigrants known to have died in federal custody between 2004 and 2007. Mr. Bah’s family still does not know the full story of when or how he suffered his fatal injuries.

It is shameful, though hardly a surprise, that they remain in the dark. There is no public system for tracking deaths in immigration custody, no requirement for independent investigations. Relatives and lawyers who want to unearth details of such tragedies have found the bureaucracy unresponsive and hostile. In the case of Mr. Bah, records were marked “proprietary information — not for distribution” by the Corrections Corporation of America, a private company that runs the Elizabeth Detention Center and many others under contract with the federal government.

Secrecy and shockingly inadequate medical care are hardly the only problems with immigration detention. Immigrants taken into federal custody enter a world where many of the rights taken for granted by people charged with real crimes do not exist. Detainees have no right to legal representation. Many are unable to defend or explain themselves, or even to understand the charges against them, because they don’t speak English and lack access to lawyers or telephones.

What standards do exist for the treatment of immigrants in federal custody are only recommendations. A detainee, family member or lawyer who finds a violation has no way to force the government to correct it.

As authorities at the federal and local level continue rounding up illegal immigrants in these harsh days of ever-stricter enforcement, the potential for abuse will continue to grow — largely out of sight. Although immigration law is every bit as complex as tax law — and the consequences for violators more dire — the detention system seems designed to sacrifice thoughtful deliberation and justice to expediency and swift deportation.

Many detainees may have a valid defense — and at any rate have committed only administrative violations such as overstaying a visa or entering the country without authorization. Yet their cases are handled with a toxic mixture of secrecy and inattention to basic rights. This mistreatment of a vulnerable population, which advocates for immigrants trace to the roundups of Muslims after 9/11 and the subsequent clamor for tougher immigration laws, is hostile to American values and disproportionate to the threat that these immigrants pose.

Congress has failed repeatedly to enact meaningful immigration reform, and the prospects in the next year or so are slim. It can act on this. The government urgently needs to bring the detention system up to basic standards of decency and fairness. That means lifting the veil on detention centers — particularly the private jails and the state prisons and county jails that take detainees under federal contracts — and holding them to the same enforceable standards that apply to prisons. It also means designing a system that is not a vast holding pen for ordinary people who pose no threat to public safety, like the 52-year-old tailor, Boubacar Bah.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/06/opinion/06tue1.html?sq=Death%20by%20Detention%26st=nyt%26scp=1%26pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 08:56 AM | Comments (0)

May 05, 2008

CCA Immigrant Detention: Immigration agency, contractors are accused of mistreating detainees

U-T SPECIAL REPORT
graphs and other links at this URL:

Immigrant detention
budget soars
The number of people held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement has jumped 36 percent since 2005, when the agency held a daily average of 19,718 detainees, who include illegal immigrants, asylum seekers and legal U.S. residents facing deportation. By the end of 2007, that number had grown to 30,881.

At the end of last year, 13 percent of ICE detainees were held in agency facilities. Seventeen percent were in private facilities that contract directly with ICE; 21 percent were in facilities contracted from local governments, usually with the county acting as middleman for a private company. An additional 46 percent were in county jails, where ICE rents beds, and a handful in other facilities, including rented federal prison space.

Many of these jails and prisons, while under government jurisdiction, also are privately operated.

In the past three years, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has more than tripled what it spends on detention. Its annual appropriation for custody has grown to $1.6 billion this year from $504 million in 2005.

The White House has requested funding for 1,000 more beds by Sept. 30.

The immigration agency has no plans to build any more of its own detention centers, of which there are eight in the nation, including one in El Centro. Officials say it's easier to contract the beds.

“It just provides us with a quicker way to provide detention space,” said Gary Mead, acting director of ICE detention and removal operations in Washington, D.C.

The savings are substantial: According to ICE, it cost $87.99 per day on average in fiscal year 2007 to hold someone at a contract detention facility, while it cost roughly $119.28 a day to house a person at an ICE-run facility.

Detention increased after 1996, when legislative changes made it easier to deport immigrants residing here legally who had been convicted and served a prison sentence, and made detention mandatory as they awaited deportation.

Then the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, occurred, and the federal government intensified its focus on border security.

In 2003, there came a new emphasis on tracking down people who had missed an immigration hearing or ignored a deportation order. In fiscal year 2007, ICE fugitive teams made more than 30,000 arrests.

Detentions expanded again after late 2005, when the Bush administration called for an end to the practice of “catch and release” for non-Mexican illegal immigrants who were being released with a notice to appear in court. Most Mexican nationals are quickly repatriated at the border.

Plastic 'boats'
Until early last year, the 10-year-old San Diego Correctional Facility in Otay Mesa, built and operated by Corrections Corporation of America, held up to 1,000 detainees.

In June 2006, the company lost 200 beds when the lease on part of the county-owned property expired. Yet according to CCA's 2006 financial report, the population of detainees wasn't reduced “as we had the ability to consolidate inmates.”

The following January, in its lawsuit, the ACLU cited the per-person fees paid by ICE to the contractor as an incentive for putting three people in a two-man cell. The third slept on the floor in a plastic cot referred to as a “boat.”

Lead plaintiff Isaac Kigondu Kiniti, a Kenyan detainee in ICE custody since 2004, said his head was so close to the toilet when he slept on the floor that he was showered with urine when cellmates used it. Kiniti criticized the contractor.

“Because they are a for-profit company, they will give you only the bare minimum of things to increase their profits,” said Kiniti, a former student-visa holder, appealing a deportation order stemming from a drug conviction.

ICE has since set the facility's maximum capacity at 700.

CCA, which like its competitors touts its cost-effectiveness, says there is no skimping at detainees' expense.

“We do not cut corners,” said Louise Grant, a spokeswoman. “Safety and security is our highest priority. We are extremely committed to offering strong programming for offenders in our care, as well as the highest medical care.”

Grant said costs are reduced by using efficient construction methods. While wages vary depending on the contract, she said, staff salaries frequently reflect the local cost of living. Many private prisons, like public ones, are in low-cost rural areas.

Grant said almost 90 percent of the company's facilities abide by the voluntary standards of the American Correctional Association, which includes public and private prisons.

However, according to the overcrowding lawsuit, the association's standards for “adult local detention facilities” call for cells housing more than one person to provide 25 square feet of unencumbered space per occupant. At Otay Mesa, when there were three detainees per cell with the cot on the floor, it amounted to no more than 15 square feet for all three, the complaint reads.

Oversight concerns
Critics of prison privatization cite oversight as perhaps one of the biggest concerns when private companies perform public incarceration duties.

According to ICE, 71 people have died in the agency's custody since the beginning of 2004. Of these, 57 were in contract facilities that ranged from private detention centers to county jails, raising questions about whether a lack of government oversight played a part.

Three people have died at Otay Mesa since 2003, including Yusif Osman, 34, a Ghanian man who died in his cell in 2006 after complaining of chest pain.

According to the county medical examiner's report, it took personnel more than an hour to call 911 after Osman's cellmate began asking for help. The report claims that Osman was seen on his knees, and that a medical supervisor, upon finding no medical history on him, “informed the control officer to have Mr. Osman file a request to seek medical assistance.”

In the ACLU medical-care lawsuit, plaintiffs complained about delays in getting treatment and prescription refills. One plaintiff is a diabetic man whose requests for care for a small injury to his foot were delayed so long that he developed gangrene.

Also cited is the case of Francisco Castañeda, a detainee who had to wait several months to see an off-site oncologist for what turned out to be penile cancer. Castañeda sued the federal government a few months before his death in February. His family has continued the lawsuit. The government recently acknowledged that there was medical negligence, one of the allegations made.

Health care at Otay Mesa is provided by the federal government, which according to the ACLU complaint took over health services from Corrections Corporation of America in 2002 after finding the company's health program deficient.

However, because company guards are the first to hear requests for medical care, “that does not mean that CCA is off the hook entirely,” said David Blair-Loy, legal director of the ACLU in San Diego.

“They may be interfering with access to treatment,” Blair-Loy said. “And they may or may not have a direct financial incentive to prevent people from getting treatment.”

There is no way to know, he said, because the public cannot obtain government contract information from private companies.

CCA's Grant, whose company earned nearly $1.5 billion last year, said that if the quality of CCA's service to inmates was not meeting expectations, the federal agency would cancel its contracts.

In February 2007, the month after the overcrowding lawsuit, Immigration and Customs Enforcement created a new detention-inspection task force charged with responding to complaints at all facilities where it houses detainees.

Posted by lois at 04:22 PM | Comments (0)

CCA Detention Centers: For Immigrants Who Died in U.S. Custody, Few Details Provided

May 5, 2008
For Immigrants Who Died in U.S. Custody, Few Details Provided
By NINA BERNSTEIN
NY Times

Word spread quickly inside the windowless walls of the Elizabeth Detention Center, an immigration jail in New Jersey: A detainee had fallen, injured his head and become incoherent. Guards had put him in solitary confinement, and late that night, an ambulance had taken him away more dead than alive.

But outside, for five days, no official notified the family of the detainee, Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea who had overstayed a tourist visa. When frantic relatives located him at University Hospital in Newark on Feb. 5, 2007, he was in a coma after emergency surgery for a skull fracture and multiple brain hemorrhages. He died there four months later without ever waking up, leaving family members on two continents trying to find out why.

Mr. Bah’s name is one of 66 on a government list of deaths that occurred in immigration custody from January 2004 to November 2007, when nearly a million people passed through.

The list, compiled by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after Congress demanded the information, and obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act, is the fullest accounting to date of deaths in immigration detention, a patchwork of federal centers, county jails and privately run prisons that has become the nation’s fastest-growing form of incarceration.

The list has few details, and they are often unreliable, but it serves as a rough road map to previously unreported cases like Mr. Bah’s. And it reflects a reality that haunts grieving families like his: the difficulty of getting information about the fate of people taken into immigration custody, even when they die.

Mr. Bah’s relatives never saw the internal records labeled “proprietary information — not for distribution” by the Corrections Corporation of America, which runs the New Jersey detention center for the federal government. The documents detail how he was treated by guards and government employees: shackled and pinned to the floor of the medical unit as he moaned and vomited, then left in a disciplinary cell for more than 13 hours, despite repeated notations that he was unresponsive and intermittently foaming at the mouth.

Mr. Bah had lived in New York for a decade, surrounded by a large circle of friends and relatives. The extravagant gowns he sewed to support his wife and children in West Africa were on display in a Manhattan boutique.

But he died in a sequestered system where questions about what had happened to him, or even his whereabouts, were met with silence.

As the country debates stricter enforcement of immigration laws, thousands of people who are not American citizens are being locked up for days, months or years while the government decides whether to deport them. Some have no valid visa; some are legal residents, but have past criminal convictions; others are seeking asylum from persecution.

Death is a reality in any jail, and the medical neglect of inmates is a perennial issue. But far more than in the criminal justice system, immigration detainees and their families lack basic ways to get answers when things go wrong.

No government body is required to keep track of deaths and publicly report them. No independent inquiry is mandated. And often relatives who try to investigate the treatment of those who died say they are stymied by fear of immigration authorities, lack of access to lawyers, or sheer distance.

Federal officials say deaths are reviewed internally by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which reports them to its inspector general and decides which ones warrant investigation. Officials say they notify the detainee’s next of kin or consulate, and report the deaths to local medical authorities, who may conduct autopsies. In Mr. Bah’s case, a review before his death found no evidence of foul play, an immigration spokesman said, though after later inquiries from The Times, he said a full review of the death was under way.

But critics, including many in Congress, say this piecemeal process leaves too much to the agency’s discretion, allowing some deaths to be swept under the rug while potential witnesses are transferred or deported. They say it also obscures underlying complaints about medical care, abusive conditions or inadequate suicide prevention.

In January, the House passed a bill that would require states that receive certain federal money to report deaths in custody to their attorneys general. But the bill is stalled in the Senate, and it does not cover federal facilities.

The only tangible result of Congressional concern has been the list of 66 deaths, which names Mr. Bah and many other detainees for the first time, but raises as many questions as it answers.

For Mr. Bah’s survivors, the mystery of his death is hard to bear. In Guinea, his first wife, Dalanda, wept as she spoke about the contradictory accounts that had reached her and her two teenage sons through other detainees, including some who speculated that Mr. Bah had been beaten.

In New York, a cousin who is an American citizen, Khadidiatou Bah, 38, said she was unable to bring a lawsuit, in part because other relatives were afraid of antagonizing the authorities.

“They don’t want to push the case, or maybe they will be sent home,” she said. “This guy was killed, and we don’t know what happened.”

Lingering Questions

The list of deaths where Mr. Bah’s name surfaced is often cryptic. Along with 13 deaths cited as suicides and 14 as the result of cardiac ailments, it offers such causes as “undetermined” and “unwitnessed arrest, epilepsy.” No one’s nationality is given, some places of detention are omitted, and some names and birth dates seem garbled. As a result, many families could not be tracked down for this article.

But when they could be, they posed more disturbing questions.

In California, relatives of Walter Rodriguez-Castro, 28, said they were rebuffed when they tried to find out why his calls had stopped coming from the Kern County Jail in Bakersfield in April 2006. Then in June, his wife went to his scheduled hearing in San Francisco’s immigration court and learned that he had been dead for many weeks, his body unclaimed in the county morgue.

The coroner found that Mr. Rodriguez-Castro, a mover from El Salvador in the country illegally, had died of undiagnosed meningitis and H.I.V., after days complaining of fever, stiff neck and vomiting. The cause of death on the government’s list: “unresponsive.”

Immigration authorities said on Friday that the case was now under review, but would not answer questions about it or other deaths on the list. Sgt. Ed Komin, a spokesman for the jail, said the death had been promptly reported to immigration officials, who were responsible for notifying families.

Four sons in another family, in Sacramento, described trying for days to get medical care for their father, Maya Nand, a 56-year-old legal immigrant from Fiji, at a detention center run by the Corrections Corporation in Eloy, Ariz. Mr. Nand, an architectural draftsman, had been ailing when he was taken into custody on Jan. 13, 2005, apparently because his application for citizenship had been rejected, based on an earlier conviction for misdemeanor domestic violence. In collect calls, the sons said, he told them that despite his chest pains and breathing problems, doctors at the detention center did not take his condition seriously.

The Corrections Corporation said he had been seen and treated “multiple times.” But a letter to the family from an immigration official said his treatment was for a respiratory infection. The letter said that Mr. Nand was taken to an emergency room on Jan. 25, where congestive heart failure was diagnosed, and that he “suffered an apparent heart attack while at the hospital.” He died on Feb. 2, 2005, shackled to a hospital bed in Tucson.

Boubacar Bah had more going for him than many detainees. He had a lawyer and many friends and relatives in the United States, and his detention center in New Jersey was one of the few frequented by immigrant advocates.

But three days after he suffered a head injury in detention last year, no one in his New York circle knew that he was lying comatose in a Newark hospital, where he had already been identified as a possible organ donor.

“Thank you for the referral,” an organ-sharing network wrote on Feb. 3, 2007, according to hospital records. “This patient is a potential candidate for organ donation once brain death criteria is met.”

Four days after the fall, tipped off by a detainee who called Mr. Bah’s roommate in Brooklyn, relatives rushed to the detention center to ask Corrections Corporation employees where he was.

“They wouldn’t give us any information,” said Lamine Dieng, an American citizen who teaches physics at Bronx Community College and is married to Mr. Bah’s cousin Khadidiatou.

On the fifth day, they said, a detention official called them with the name of the hospital. There they found Mr. Bah on life support, still in custody, with a detention guard around the clock.

“There was one guard who knew Boubacar,” Ms. Bah said. “He told me on the down-low: ‘This guy, you have to fight for him. This guy was neglected.’ ”

Within the week, word of the case reached a reporter at The Times, through an immigration lawyer who had received separate calls from two detainees; they were upset about a badly injured man — named “something like Aboubakar” — left in an isolation cell and later found near death.

But advocacy groups said they were unaware of the case. And Michael Gilhooly, the spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said that without the man’s full name and eight-digit alien registration number, he could not check the information.

For those who knew Mr. Bah, it was hard to understand how such a man could lie dying without explanations.

“Everybody liked Boubacar,” said Sadio Diallo, 48, who has a tailor shop in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where he and Mr. Bah had shared an apartment with fellow immigrants since arriving in 1998. “He’s a very, very, very good man.”

For six years, Mr. Bah had worked for L’Impasse, a clothing store in the West Village, sewing dresses that sold for up to $2,000 with what a former manager, Abdul Sall, called his “magic hands.” Mr. Bah often spent Sundays at the Bronx townhouse his cousins had inherited from the family’s first American citizen, a seaman who arrived in 1943.

In Africa, Mr. Bah’s earnings not only supported his first wife, sons and ailing mother, but in Guinean tradition, allowed him to wed a second wife, long distance. It was his longing to see them all again after eight years that landed him in detention. When he returned from a three-month visit to Guinea in May 2006, immigration authorities at Kennedy Airport told him that his green card application had been denied while he was away, automatically revoking his permission to re-enter the United States. An immigration lawyer hired by his friends was unable to reopen the application while Mr. Bah waited for nine months in detention, records showed.

Mr. Bah died on May 30, 2007, after four months in a coma. His lawyer, Theodore Vialet, requested detention reports and hospital records under the Freedom of Information Act. But by the time the records arrived last autumn, the idea of a lawsuit had been dropped.

So Mr. Vialet just filed the records away — until a reporter’s call about a name on the list of dead detainees prompted him to dig them out.

After the Fall

There are 57 pages of documents, some neatly typed by medics, some scrawled by guards. Some quote detainees who said Mr. Bah was ailing for two days before his fall on Feb. 1, and asked in vain to see a doctor.

The records leave unclear exactly when or how Mr. Bah was injured in detention. But they leave no doubt that guards, supervisors, government medical employees and federal immigration officers played a role in leaving him untreated, hour after hour, as he lapsed into a stupor.

It began about 8 a.m., according to the earliest report. Guards called a medical emergency after a detainee saw Mr. Bah collapse near a toilet, hitting the back of his head on the floor.

When he regained consciousness, Mr. Bah was taken to the medical unit, which is run by the federal Public Health Service. He became incoherent and agitated, reports said, pulling away from the doctor and grabbing at the unit staff. Physicians consulted later by The Times called this a textbook symptom of intracranial bleeding, but apparently no one recognized that at the time.

He was handcuffed and placed in leg restraints on the floor with medical approval, “to prevent injury,” a guard reported. “While on the floor the detainee began to yell in a foreign language and turn from side to side,” the guard wrote, and the medical staff deemed that “the screaming and resisting is behavior problems.”

Mr. Bah was ordered to calm down. Instead, he kept crying out, then “began to regurgitate on the floor of medical,” the report said. So Mr. Bah was written up for disobeying orders. And with the approval of a physician assistant, Michael Chuley, who wrote that Mr. Bah’s fall was unwitnessed and “questionable,” the tailor was taken in shackles to a solitary confinement cell with instructions that he be monitored.

Under detention protocols, an officer videotaped Mr. Bah as he lay vomiting in the medical unit, but the camera’s battery failed, guards wrote, when they tried to tape his trip to cell No. 7.

Inside the cell, a supervisor removed Mr. Bah’s restraints. He was unresponsive to questions asked by the Public Health Service officer on duty, a report said, adding: “The detainee set up in his bed and moan and he fell to his left side and hit his head on the bed rail.”

About 9 a.m., with the approval of the health officer and a federal immigration agent, the cell was locked.

The watching began. As guards checked hourly, Mr. Bah appeared to be asleep on the concrete floor, snoring. But he could not be roused to eat lunch or dinner, and at 7:10 p.m., “he began to breathe heavily and started foaming slightly at the mouth,” a guard wrote. “I notified medical at this time.”

However, the nurse on duty rejected the guard’s request to come check, according to reports. And at 8 p.m., when the warden went to the medical unit to describe Mr. Bah’s condition, the nurse, Raymund Dela Pena, was not alarmed. “Detainee is likely exhibiting the same behavior as earlier in the day,” he wrote, adding that Mr. Bah would get a mental health exam in the morning.

About 10:30 p.m., more than 14 hours after Mr. Bah’s fall, the same nurse, on rounds, recognized the gravity of his condition: “unresponsive on the floor incontinent with foamy brown vomitus noted around mouth.” Smelling salts were tried. Mr. Bah was carried back to the medical unit on a stretcher.

Just before 11, someone at the jail called 911.

When an ambulance left Mr. Bah at the hospital, brain scans showed he had a fractured skull and hemorrhages at all sides of his swelling brain. He was rushed to surgery, and the detention center was informed of the findings.

But in a report to their supervisors the next day, immigration officials at the center described Mr. Bah’s ailment as “brain aneurysms” — a diagnosis they corrected a week later to “hemorrhages,” without mentioning the skull fracture. After Mr. Bah’s death, they wrote that his hospitalization was “subsequent to a fall in the shower.”

The nurse, Mr. Dela Pena, and the physician assistant, Mr. Chuley, said that only their superiors could discuss the case. The Public Health Service did not respond to questions, and the Corrections Corporation said medical decisions were the responsibility of the Public Health Service.

Mr. Bah’s cousins demanded an autopsy, but the Union County medical examiner’s confidential report was not completed until Dec. 6. It was sent to the county prosecutor’s office only as a matter of routine, because the matter had been classified as an “unattended accident resulting in death.”

Prosecutors said they did not investigate. “According to the report, Bah suffered a fall in the shower,” Eileen Walsh, a spokeswoman for the prosecutors, said in an e-mail message. “We are not privy to any other bits of information.”

In the home movies Mr. Bah made of his last journey home, he is only a fleeting presence: a slim man with a shy smile. But without his support, relatives in Africa say they have little money for food and none for his sons’ schooling.

His body went back to Guinea in a sealed coffin.

“I stayed here seven years, waiting for him,” his second wife, Mariama, said in French, recalling their long separation and the brief reunion that led to the birth of their son, now a toddler, while Mr. Bah was in detention.

“I wanted them to open the casket,” she added, “to know if it was him inside. Until today, I cry for him.”

Margot Williams contributed reporting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/05/nyregion/05detain.html?_r=1%26hp=%26oref=slogin%26pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 03:58 PM | Comments (0)

April 20, 2008

Department of Justice FY 2009 Budget Request

Department of Justice FY 2009 Budget Request
President's Request Supports Increase for Department's National Security Efforts

http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/02-04-2008/0004749082&EDATE=

WASHINGTON, Feb. 4 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey today announced that the President's fiscal year 2009 budget proposal for the Department of Justice is $22.7 billion. The FY 2009 budget request includes a 6 percent increase over the FY 2008 enacted budget for the Department's law enforcement and prosecution programs, including $492.7 million to improve the Department's counterterrorism and intelligence capabilities.

"The Department of Justice's mission is multi-faceted: It ranges from investigating and prosecuting terrorists, online predators and drug kingpins, to fighting corporate fraud, to protecting the government's interest in a wide range of litigation," said Attorney General Mukasey. "The fiscal year 2009 budget supports our mission and includes targetedenhancements to ensure the nation's security and to bolster our law enforcement efforts along the Southwest Border."

Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Department has significantly strengthened its efforts to enhance our national security and protect our homeland, and the FY 2009 budget reflects those priorities. Key priorities and requested FY 2009 program increases are as follows:

-- Protecting the American People by Preventing Terrorist Acts: $492.7 million

-- Fighting Criminal Activity on the U.S. Southwest Border $100.0 million

-- Supporting Essential Federal Detention and Incarceration Programs $67.1 million

In addition, the FY 2009 budget includes a total program level of over $1 billion for state and local law enforcement assistance.

PROTECTING THE AMERICAN PEOPLE BY PREVENTING TERRORIST ACTS

The Department's top priority remains the prevention, investigation, and prosecution of terrorist activities against U.S. citizens and interests. The FY 2009 President's Budget requests $492.7 million in investments to improve the nation's counterterrorism investigative capabilities to identify, track, and dismantle terrorist cells operating in the United States and overseas, and to fortify the nation's intelligence analysis capabilities.

The FY 2009 President's Budget bolsters the national security functions of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with $7.1 billion in total resources, including $447.4 million in investments that will support FBI's intelligence and counterterrorism programs, improve surveillance capabilities, bolster weapons of mass destruction response, and protect the security of the nation's cyber systems. In addition, this budget provides $84 million in total resources for the National Security Division, which will strengthen its ability to support intelligence operations to combat terrorism and other threats to national security. The following summarizes the key program changes, for preventing and combating terrorism and improving intelligence:

Federal Bureau of Investigation

-- Operations: $235.5 million to identify and analyze national security and criminal threats and to develop and execute operational strategies, including resources for national security investigations; enhancement of the weapons of mass destruction, cyber and Render Safe missions; computer intrusion investigative support; and foreign intelligence collection and operations.

-- Surveillance: $88.5 million to support a surveillance technology capability to meet operational requirements, including resources for physical and electronic surveillance and collection processing exploitation, ana