The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

November 13, 2009

U.S. Identifies 111,000 Immigrants With Criminal Records

Among the immigrants identified through the program, known as Secure Communities, more than 11,000 had been charged with or convicted of the most serious crimes, including murder and rape, domestic security officials said Thursday. About 1,900 of those have been deported.

U.S. Identifies 111,000 Immigrants With Criminal Records
By JULIA PRESTON - NY Times
Published: November 12, 2009

Federal authorities have identified more than 111,000 immigrants with criminal records being held in local jails, during the first year of a program that seeks to deport immigrants who have committed serious crimes.

Among the immigrants identified through the program, known as Secure Communities, more than 11,000 had been charged with or convicted of the most serious crimes, including murder and rape, domestic security officials said Thursday. About 1,900 of those have been deported.

At a news conference in Washington, John Morton, the top official at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, called the program “the future of immigration enforcement,” because, he said, it “focuses our resources on identifying and removing the most serious criminal offenders first and foremost.”

About 100,000 of the detained immigrants identified through the system had been convicted of less serious crimes, ranging from burglary to traffic offenses, the officials said. Of those, more than 14,000 have been deported.

Obama administration officials have worked to distinguish their immigration enforcement strategy from the Bush administration’s, which centered on high-profile factory raids and searches in communities for immigration fugitives.

The Bush operations drew an outcry from immigrant advocates, who said they led to racial profiling, especially of Latinos, and ensnared many immigrants who lacked legal status but had not committed crimes.

Obama administration officials said Secure Communities, which was started under President George W. Bush but rapidly expanded under President Obama, is a relatively low-cost way for the authorities to concentrate resources on deporting the most dangerous immigrants.

Immigration lawyers remain skeptical, saying the program lumps together relatively minor offenses with serious felonies. They said the program encouraged the local police to arrest anyone they suspect of being an illegal immigrant.

“All you have to do is get them in jail and their immigration status can be checked,” said Joan Friedland, immigration policy director at the National Immigration Law Center, an immigrant advocacy group. Under the program, which started in October 2008 in Houston, the fingerprints of every person booked into jail by the local authorities — including legal and illegal immigrants and United States citizens — are checked against federal immigration databases as well as criminal databases.

When the check produces a match showing both an immigration record and a criminal one, ICE agents can place a hold to ensure the immigrant will remain in custody.

Under an agreement with agencies in the program, ICE agents must take action within 48 hours to detain or initiate deportation proceedings against the most serious offenders. Legal immigrants are subject to deportation if they are convicted of certain crimes, while illegal immigrants can be deported even if they have committed no crime.

In the first year, 95 cities or counties in 11 states have joined the program. The police department of Washington, D.C., announced on Thursday that it would join. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said at the news conference that she hoped the program would expand to the whole country by 2013.

Most immigrants identified in the program remain in this country because the immigration authorities generally allow criminal prosecutions and sentences to run their course before they carry out deportations.

The database checks still have flaws, lawyers said. According to ICE figures, about 5,880 people identified through the program turned out to be United States citizens.

A version of this article appeared in print on November 13, 2009, on page A13 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/us/13ice.html?sq=Immigration&st=cse&adxnnl=1&scp=2&adxnnlx=1258135272-f20ItTzFAroSVg4kL0Hyqg

Posted by lois at 01:06 PM | Comments (0)

November 06, 2009

MI: Former Youth Prison Owned by GEO Bids for BOP for immigrants

Hearing on Lake County prison set
Contract with U.S. could bring 327 jobs to Baldwin

Kevin Braciszeski - Daily News Staff Writer

Friday, November 6, 2009
BALDWIN — The closed — and recently expanded — prison near Baldwin is being considered as a possible home for low-security federal prisoners from foreign countries.

That designation would create an estimated 327 jobs, with most paying $20 an hour or more.

There is competition for that role, however, coming from Lake City, Fla., where a company has proposed building a prison if it receives a contract from the U.S. Bureau of Prisons (BOP).

Area residents will have a chance Tuesday, Nov. 24 to comment on the issue during a public hearing scheduled for 5 p.m.

Paul Griffith estimated 135 people attended the BOP’s July 7 public scoping hearing on the issue at Baldwin and he expects many people will also attend the public hearing Nov. 24.

“This community of Baldwin realizes what 220 jobs mean and what it means when they are taken away,” Griffith said about the prison, which closed in 2005.

About 22 percent of those employees lived in Lake County with the other 78 percent living in neighboring communities in Mason, Manistee, Oceana, Newaygo, Mecosta, Osceola and Wexford counties.

Baldwin prison history

The Geo Group owns the currently empty prison and is spending about $60 million to expand the facility by 1,225 beds to potentially attract contracts to house prisoners from different states or the federal government. It now has 1,725 beds.

Construction of the facility — which was formerly known as the Michigan Youth Correctional Facility and originally operated by what was then known at Wackenhut Corrections of Florida — began in 1998 and it opened as a “punk prison” for up to 480 13- to 19-year-old boys and young men.

It closed in 2005 and about 220 people had to find new jobs.

The corporation changed its name to The GEO Group and is calls the Lake County prison building the North Lake Correctional Facility. GEO is seeking a contract for housing federal government prisoners.

Baldwin vs. Lake City Fla.

The federal government is now seeking a new, privately owned prison to house 900 to 2,500 low-security male prisoners who are not American citizens.

The BOP will choose between the existing North Lake Correctional Facility near Baldwin, which has the capacity to house 1,889 inmates, according to the BOP’s draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) on the issue, and an as-yet unbuilt prison near Lake City, Fla., that would house up to 1,268 inmates.

If the contract is awarded to Lake City, the contractor would have one year to construct the facility.

Among the findings listed in the DEIS are:

• locating the prisoners at either site would not result in significant adverse impacts to the environment.

• beneficial economic impacts are expected in the Baldwin area with the creation of 327 permanent jobs; and are expected in Lake City with new permanent jobs there and the short-term gains from construction activities.

• neither alternative is expected to cause significant negative impacts on community services, including emergency services, hospitals and schools.

• roads at both sites would be able to handle traffic increases associated with the prisons.

• neither alternative would cause a significant impact on air quality.

• neither alternative would cause a significant impact on noise levels.

• no historic properties near the Baldwin facility would be impacted by the contract, and the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians concurred. The southern half of the Lake City site was identified as a prehistoric site, but it is not eligible for listing on the National Register of Historical Places due to prior extensive disturbances.

• the contract would not cause impact on the geology, topography, soils or vegetation at the Baldwin site because the facility already exists. There would be minor impacts to the topography and soils at the Lake City site as it is cleared for construction of a prison. Wetlands are also present at the Lake City site.

• an excess level of lead was found in a groundwater sample taken about 800 feet north of the Baldwin facility and a potential exists for the contaminated groundwater to migrate. The Lake City site does not have an environmental condition that would indicate the presence of hazardous contaminants or petroleum products.

Next

The BOP is accepting comments on the DEIS and people can make them in person during the 5 p.m. Nov. 24 public hearing at Webber Township Hall or send them in writing to Richard A. Cohn, Chief, Capacity Planning and Site Selection Branch, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 320 First St. NW, Washington, DC, 20534.

Cohn’s telephone number is (202) 514-6470.

The public comment period on the issue began Oct. 30 and is scheduled to end Dec. 14.
http://www.ludingtondailynews.com/news.php?story_id=46485

Posted by lois at 03:53 PM | Comments (0)

November 05, 2009

Focus on “Criminal Aliens” Increases Demand for Private Immigrant Detention Business – According to New Profit Reports

Focus on “Criminal Aliens” Increases Demand for Private Immigrant Detention Business – According to New Profit Reports
5 November 2009

From the Business of Detention http://www.businessofdetention.com/
In earnings reports released this week the nation’s two largest private prison operators cited “significant growth opportunities” for detaining immigrants, driven largely by the Obama administration’s emphasis on detaining “criminal aliens.”

The GEO Group – an international private prison operator that draws about 75 percent of its revenue from controlling a quarter of the U.S. private prison industry – said it believes that “this federal initiative to target, detain, and deport “criminal aliens” throughout the country will continue to drive the need for immigration detention beds over the next several years.”

A Third Quarter earnings report released on Monday shows The GEO Group is adding another 1,100 beds to its Aurora, Colorado, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Processing Center for a total of 1,532 beds. As part of its renewed contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for the continued management of our Northwest Detention Center, capacity there will be increased from 1,030 to 1,575 beds.

Today Corrections Corporation of America – which manages more than 50 percent of all prison beds under private contract in the United States – said in its Third Quarter earnings report that revenue from its federal customers increased 4.9 percent, “primarily driven by the commencement of our new management contract with the Federal Bureau of Prisons at our newly constructed Adams County Correctional Center.” This facility in Natchez, Mississippi houses 2,567 “criminal alien offenders – low-security illegal immigrants who committed offenses in the United States and will be returned to their country of origin upon completion of their sentence.”

The company’s newly appointed CEO, Damon Hininger, told investors during a conference call that the company continues to focus on filling vacant capacity. He said he was pleased with an increase of 1,300 detainees in CCA’s U.S. Marshall’s facilities since January 2009. The company recently completed renovations of its 502-bed North Georgia Detention Center. It began receiving detainees from ICE in October and currently houses about 100 detainees there.

Hininger said CCA has its eye on an ICE contract to build and operate a 2,200-bed detention center in Los Angeles, and expects a procurement as early as December, though the company is not listed among the interested vendors on a government website listing the request for proposals for the contract.

Funding for expanded immigrant detention is provided in the FY2010 budget for the Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is a member agency. President Obama signed the budget into law on October 29. It includes $5.4 for ICE, about half a billion more than in FY2009. From this amount, $2.5 million is allocated for detention and removal operations, including $1.5 million for the identification and removal of “criminal aliens” who are at large or already incarcerated. At least $200 million is provided for the Secure Communities program, which began in 2008 to screen for undocumented immigrants by taking the fingerprints of anyone booked into a local jail and checking for a match in ICE’s database.

Critics like Joan Friedland, Immigration Policy Director for the National Immigration Law Center, have noted that as of March 22, 2009, “19,495 individuals were identified as undocumented through the Secure Communities program. Of these, only 1,436 were identified as ‘Level 1 criminals.’ The rest were arrested for lesser crimes, which include minor traffic offenses like driving without a license.”
http://www.businessofdetention.com/2009/11/05/secure-communities-increases-demand-for-private-detention-business/

Posted by lois at 05:06 PM | Comments (0)

Western MA: women arrested in 8 massage parlors by ICE and police

3 women arrested on prostitution charges as police raid 8 massage parlors in Hampden, Hampshire counties
By Patrick Johnson
November 04, 2009, 8:10PM
Springfield Republican

SPRINGFIELD – State and local police and federal officials Wednesday afternoon arrested three women on prostitution charges and six others for immigration violations during simultaneous raids on several area massage salons in Hampden and Hampshire counties, officials said.

Raids were conducted at two salons in the Forest Park section of Springfield, two in Hadley, and at single salons in Chicopee, West Springfield, Longmeadow and East Longmeadow. Taking part were local and state police and officials with state Department of Professional Licensure, and the federal Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Department of Diplomatic Security.

Assistant District Attorney Michael H. Cahillane of the Northwestern District Attorneys office in Northampton said the raids were all part of the same investigation, which remains ongoing.

In Hadley, two women, each from Flushing, N.Y., were arrested at two Route 9 salons and charged with engaging in sexual activity for a fee, according to Hadley police.

The owner, identified as Xiuli Li, 48, of Springfield, was also charged with operating an unlicensed massage facility, police said.

She is due to be arraigned Wednesday in Springfield District Court.

Li is also the owner of Chinese Massage, 217 Belmont Ave., which was also raided by police. Officials charged three employees there with being in this country illegally, officials said.

In Hadley, a deployment totaling 30 town and state police and officials with Immigration and Diplomatic Security moved in on Jane’s Spa, 206 Russell St., and Hadley Massage, 215 Russell St.

Xiumei Zheng, 43, of Flushing, N.Y., was arrested at 206 Russell St., and Zenshu Li, 47, also of Flushing, was arrested at 215 Russell St., police said. Each was charged with soliciting sexual conduct in exchange for a fee, police said.

The two are scheduled to be arraigned Wednesday in Eastern Hampshire District Court in Belchertown.

Another employee, a 47-year-old women whose name was not released, was cited for being an unlicensed massage therapist, police said.

A brochure optioned at 215 Russell St. indicates that Jane’s Spa is affiliated with two other locations, Jane’s Spa, 249 Belmont Ave., Springfield and Fiona’s Spa, 1888 Memorial Drive. Each of those locations was among the salons being raided Tuesday.

Springfield police Capt. Peter J. Dillon, head of the vice unit, said police had been investigating the two Springfield locations for some time for allegations of prostitution, but did not find enough evidence to arrest anyone on those charges.

In addition to the raid at 271 Belmont Ave., Dillon said police also moved in on Jane’s Spa, 249 Belmont Ave. The business was cited for being an unlicensed massage parlor, he said.

Longmeadow police obtained a search warrant for 809 Maple Road and an arrest warrant for Li after a lengthy investigation into the business being a front for prostitution, said police Lt. Gary LaFontain.

As part of the investigation, Longmeadow police learned the business was not properly licensed and gathered evidence that it was engaged in prostitution.

Li is licensed as a massage therapist in Massachusetts, but the state Division of Professional Licensure has no record of her business in Longmeadow or in Springfield.

East Longmeadow police also took three women into custody on immigration charges following a raid at Korean Massage Therapy, 611 North Main St., police said.

In addition to being in the country illegally, the three women were also living in the salon, a violation of town zoning and health codes, police said. Two of the three were also found not to be properly licensed to give massages by the state, police said.

Police identified the owner of the business, Shuz Zi Li, of Flushing, N.Y., and he did not have a license from the state to operate a massage parlor.

The town health and building inspectors were also called to inspect the property for code violations for modifying a part of the shop into living quarters, police said.

Paula Grenier, spokeswoman for the Boston regional office of Immigration and Custom Enforcement, said the six people arrested for immigration violations will remain in custody pending removal proceedings before a federal immigration judge.

The hearing will either be at the immigration court in Boston or Hartford. She was not sure of which location or when it would take place.

She did not have any information on the identities, ages or countries of origin of the six people.

She said immigration officials regularly take part in local police actions if notified in advance of the possibility of illegal aliens being involved.

West Springfield police detectives, accompanied by federal and state officials, also executed a search warrant at an unnamed massage therapy salon at 2260 Westfield St., said police detective Scott A. Manser said.

The salon, which had no name on the door, was open for business.

He said no arrests were made but evidence was recovered and the investigation is ongoing and charges may later be filed.

Chicopee Detective Bureau Capt. William R. Jebb said five Chicopee detectives and four federal immigration and customs officers raided Fiona’s Spa at 1888 Memorial Drive, and confiscated paperwork and computers. No one was arrested.

The business was operating without a state license and charges may be filed on that, he said.

Police began investigating after receiving an anonymous tip from a customer who reported being offered sex in exchange for money during a massage.

Undercover officers went to the salon more than once but were never propositioned, he said.
http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2009/11/3_women_arrested_on_prostituti.html

Posted by lois at 04:56 PM | Comments (0)

November 02, 2009

NYC: Varick Street jail for detained immigrants run by Alaska Native Corporation bills ICE $227.68 for each prisoner

Immigrant Jail Tests U.S. View of Legal Access
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: November 1, 2009- NY Times

A startling petition arrived at the New York City Bar Association in October 2008, signed by 100 men, all locked up without criminal charges in the middle of Manhattan.

Daniel I. Miller, a former detainee at the Varick Street center, complained of abuses there. “These people have no rules,” he said.

In vivid if flawed English, it described cramped, filthy quarters where dire medical needs were ignored and hungry prisoners were put to work for $1 a day.

The petitioners were among 250 detainees imprisoned in an immigration jail that few New Yorkers know exists. Above a post office, on the fourth floor of a federal office building in Greenwich Village, the Varick Street Detention Facility takes in 11,000 men a year, most of them longtime New Yorkers facing deportation without a lawyer.

Galvanized by the petition, the bar association sent volunteers into the jail to offer legal counsel to detainees — a strategy the Obama administration has embraced as it tries to fix the entire detention system.

“Immigration and Customs Enforcement considers the access to legal services at Varick Street as a good model,” said Sean Smith, a spokesman for Janet Napolitano, secretary of homeland security, who oversees immigration enforcement.

But the lawyers doing the work have reached a different conclusion, after finding that most detainees with a legal claim to stay in the United States are routinely transferred to more remote jails before they can be helped. The lawyers say their effort has laid bare the fundamental unfairness of a system where immigrant detainees, unlike criminal defendants, can be held without legal representation and moved from state to state without notice.

In a report to be issued on Monday, the association’s City Bar Justice Center is calling for all immigrant detainees to be provided with counsel. And an article to be published this month in The Fordham Law Review treats the Varick jail as a case study in the systemic barriers to legal representation.

The new focus on Varick highlights the conflict between two forces: the administration’s plans to revamp detention, and current policies that feed the flow of detainees through the system as it is now. A disjointed mix of county jails and privately run prisons, where mistreatment and medical neglect have been widely documented, the detention network churns roughly 400,000 detainees through 32,000 beds each year.

“Any attempt to get support or services for them is stymied because you don’t know where they’re going to end up,” said Lynn M. Kelly, the director of the Justice Center.

When she asked that the lawyers’ letters of legal advice be forwarded to detainees who had been transferred from Varick, she said the warden balked, saying he had to consider the financial interests of his private shareholders: 1,200 members of a central Alaskan tribe whose dividends are linked to Varick’s profits under a $79 million, three-year federal contract.

Federal officials would not discuss their transfer policies, but asked for patience as they try to make the detention system more humane and cost-effective.

“We inherited an inadequate detention system from the previous administration that does not meet ICE’s current priorities or needs,” said Matthew Chandler, a Homeland Security spokesman. Officials say they are committed to a complete overhaul, including less-penal detention centers with better access to lawyers.

The volunteer lawyers and the petition’s author, an ailing refugee from torture in Romania who spent eight months inside Varick, say many problems persist there, though the added scrutiny has led to improvements. Detainees who want a Gideon Bible no longer have to pay the commissary $7. Immigration officials are more responsive when a lawyer complains that a detainee in pain is not getting treatment.

But most detainees do not have a lawyer, and the few who do include men who have fallen prey to incompetent or fraudulent practitioners. Recurrent complaints include frigid temperatures, mildew and meals that leave detainees hungry and willing to clean for $1 a day to pay for commissary food. That wage is specified in the contract with the Alaskan company, which budgeted 23,000 days of such work the first year, and collects a daily rate of $227.68 for each detainee.

The Alaska connection is one of the stranger twists in the jail’s fitful history. Opened as a federal immigration detention center in 1984, Varick became chronically overcrowded after 1998, when new laws mandated the detention of all noncitizens who had ever committed a crime on a list of deportable offenses, expanded to include misdemeanors like drug possession.

A Dominican man there died of untreated pneumonia in 1999 — the first reported death in the nationwide detention system, which now counts 106 since October 2003.

The Varick facility, which is on the corner of Houston Street, fell short of national detention standards adopted in 2000, because it lacks any outdoor recreation space. But under a grandfather clause, it was allowed to remain open until 9/11, when the terror attack, blocks away, forced its evacuation. For years, it was shuttered. It quietly reopened in February 2008, operated by Ahtna Technical Services Inc., a subsidiary of Ahtna Inc. — still with no access to fresh air.

As an Alaska Native corporation, Ahtna has won numerous federal contracts without having to compete with other companies; last year it paid its tribal shareholders about $500 each in dividends. It hires a Texas subcontractor to supply guards and transportation, along with the shackles and belly chains routinely used on detainees being moved in or out.

Varick’s population includes illegal immigrants, asylum-seekers and legal immigrants who face deportation because they have past criminal convictions. Almost half of those screened by the volunteer lawyers have already been in detention for four to six months, according to the bar association report, and nearly 40 percent have legal grounds to contest deportation.

A few, the report says, have a possible claim to citizenship, which would make their detention unlawful. But the volunteers, including lawyers from 16 corporate firms, say they can offer only rudimentary legal triage to a handful of detainees a week.

The Department of Justice is asking Congress for money to expand the law project, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement invites Washington officials to visit the weekly triage sessions. The agency allowed a reporter to observe a session, but not to tour the jail. On a recent Thursday, only 11 of 35 detainees who had signed up made it into one of five glassed-in booths where they could consult with pairs of legal volunteers.

One, a 25-year-old Mexican, had been delivering food for an Italian restaurant on Madison Avenue until his detention. After a week in Varick, the government had not served him with a “notice to appear” telling why he was detained and setting the date and place where he would be heard by an immigration judge.

Volunteers were researching his case a week later when he was transferred to Atlanta. It could just as easily have been Louisiana or Texas, far from any free legal help, said Maria Navarro, a Legal Aid lawyer who supervises the volunteers. Even in cities, she said, lawyers are reluctant to represent detainees who may be suddenly moved far away.

Another 25-year-old, who had come to New York as a legal immigrant from Belize at age 2, told lawyers he had worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken to support his 5-year-old daughter, a citizen, when his sickle-cell anemia permitted. After a standing huddle, the lawyers told him that because his notice listed old convictions for possession of marijuana, he was ineligible for release on bond or with an electronic monitoring bracelet.

A Haitian, who had served time for at least one drug-related offense, had a lawyer but wanted a second opinion after being held in Varick for 16 months. He described himself as a barber, interpreter and legal resident of Brooklyn for 23 years.

“It is double jeopardy,” he protested, nursing a swollen jaw with teeth missing. “I become a diabetic here, because of anxiety, stress and suicidal conditions.”

Yet a detainee from the former Soviet Union praised the jail. “Varick is heaven” compared with some county jails in New Jersey (Bergen and Monmouth) and Florida, he said, citing abuse by anti-immigrant guards.

A century-long line of Supreme Court decisions holds that immigration detention is not a punishment or deprivation of liberty, and does not require legal counsel for fundamental fairness.

But Daniel I. Miller, 39, the Romanian whose petition reached the bar association, said his own case showed how high the stakes can be. Mr. Miller, a chef, fled his native land in 1994 after the secret police mutilated him for advocating gay rights. In New York, he had already been paroled for a criminal conviction — for signing his partner’s name on a contract — when immigration authorities detained him.

To no avail, records show, his lawyer and an outraged doctor at St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan urged his release from Varick for treatment of tumors on his liver. Instead, he was transferred in April to the Orange County Jail in Goshen, N.Y., where he said he also circulated a petition. The authorities there accused him of trying to start a riot and sent him to segregation with a murder defendant.

“These people have no rules, that’s the main problem,” Mr. Miller said, speaking from the Midtown office where he is starting an organic catering business. He credits his lawyer, Howard Brill, for that turnaround: On Sept. 2, after almost a year in custody, an immigration judge granted him the right to stay in the United States.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/02/nyregion/02detain.html?_r=1&ref=nyregion

Posted by lois at 09:01 PM | Comments (0)

October 23, 2009

Risks and Returns: Exploiting the Immigrant Detention Industry

Risks and Returns: Exploiting the Immigrant Detention Industry
In These Times
October 23, 2009
By Michelle Chen

Last winter, a remote Texas prison convulsed in a cry of outrage, voicing the desperation of the immigration system's silenced captives.

Two recent articles in the Boston Review and Texas Observer reflect on violent uprisings at the Reeves County Detention Center in Pecos last December and January. Tom Barry and Forrest Wilder describe a system of calculated lawlessness in the heart of Dixie.

The clash was driven by detainees' protests about inhumane conditions, particularly poor medical care and overcrowding. The catalyst was the death of Jesus Galindo, an epileptic who had been isolated in solitary confinement. Immigrant detention has become a political flashpoint for the Obama administration amid reports of abuse and miserably inadequate healthcare.

Although the White House recently pledged to improve detention conditions, there's been little real questioning of the economic underpinnings of the system. The Pecos rebellion illustrated the consequences of marrying America's prison-industrial complex with zero-tolerance immigration enforcement.

As he toured various “prison towns” along the U.S.-Mexico border, Barry observed that “all the prisons I saw had two common features: they were managed and operated by private-prison corporations—including two of the world’s largest, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO [which runs Reeves]—and they were located in remote, rural areas, invariably described by locals as being 'in the middle of nowhere.'”

The industry, he says, capitalizes on towns hungering for economic development.

The prison industry introduces the governments of desperate communities to what some call “backdoor financing”: project revenue bonds in the tens of millions of dollars that suddenly make them feel like economic players....

The full cost of the public-private immigrant prisons that now litter the Southwest and elsewhere is not yet known. Most counties and municipalities are still ten to fifteen years away from paying off the bonds.

The private detention sector works much like the crooked lenders who drove the country into financial crisis, building facilities as “speculative” ventures.

Though business slumped during the 1990s, CCA struck gold with the Bush administration's anti-immigrant crackdowns. Reporting on the Hutto family detention center, Margaret Talbot wrote in the New Yorker, “When immigration detention started its precipitate climb following 9/11, private prison companies eagerly offered their empty beds, and the industry was revitalized.”

Wilder describes how the detention boom-bust cycle works in a cash-strapped Texas town:

In the mid-1980s, with the regional economy devastated by the Texas oil bust, local business and government leaders decided to move into a recession-proof industry that was exploding in an increasingly criminalized America: prisons. In 1986, the county built a 300-bed prison. The prison filled rapidly with federal inmates, pumping revenue into the county’s budget and adding decent-paying jobs to the local work force. By 2002, Reeves had 2,000 beds. In 2003, the county completed ­construction on a $39 million, 960-bed unit only to find that the feds had no interest....

While the prison sat empty, payments on the bonds, reduced to junk status, were coming due. On the verge of default, county officials begged the Bush administration to send prisoners and hired Randy DeLay, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s brother, to lobby in Washington, D.C. That’s when Wackenhut Corrections Corp., now GEO Group, rode to the rescue. In November 2003, GEO agreed to take over management of the whole 3,000-bed prison complex and soon struck a deal with the Bureau of Prisons to fill the new unit.

Now cut to winter 2008. Jesus Galindo, a 32-year-old Mexican American who was caught crossing the border illegally, desperately needed careful treatment for his epilepsy, Wilder reports. Instead, he got locked up in solitary and spiraled toward his death. An autopsy traced the death to his epilepsy and noted signs of medical neglect.

According to a report by the National Immigration Forum, it's unclear exactly how many private entities are working under Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but prison corporations are well fed by federal largess.

The $1.7 billion budget for “Custody Operations” provides ICE with funding to maintain its current detention capacity of 33,400 people in over 500 facilities on any given night, including operational expenses....

The two largest private prison companies in the U.S. each receive over ten percent of their revenue directly from ICE, which pays an average per diem fee of $87.99 for every immigrant detainee.

All this despite the Obama administration's acknowledgement that most detainees pose no real public danger. Many could in fact be monitored safely outside prison at a far lower cost to taxpayers. Nonetheless, ICE pushed privatization as a revenue-boosting scheme in its initial budget proposal for fiscal year 2010.

Even in the midst of a recession, the detention market is looking bullish. Just as Homeland Security announced its detention reform initiatives earlier this month, Business of Detention project reported, CCA unveiled a brand new 500-bed facility in Gainesville, Georgia.

A company spokesperson boasted, “Our positive impact, for more than a decade, on the State of Georgia is considerable, in terms of bringing strong careers to hard-working Georgians and much needed taxes and local dollars.”

Profit-driven immigrant detention is just one facet of a much larger epidemic that is destroying poor communities of color across the country. Yet Pecos is an especially striking display of the cruel economics of mass incarceration.

The detainees, as well as those running their prisons, have more in common than they probably know. As economic desperation propels migrants to seek work across the border, impoverished American communities, which are conditioned to dehumanize immigrant workers, gravitate toward a prison business underwritten by draconian federal laws.

And so the machine whirs on, muffling the cries of immigrants like Galindo. Once they're inside, it seems, no one has to listen anymore.
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/5079/risks_and_returns_exploiting_the_
immigrant_detention_industry/

Posted by lois at 09:47 PM | Comments (0)

October 20, 2009

TX: How a private prison pushed immigrant inmates to the brink.

How a private prison pushed immigrant inmates to the brink.
Forrest Wilder | October 2, 2009 | Features
Texas Observer
http://www.texasobserver.org/features/the-pecos-insurrection

Last Dec. 12, on the outskirts of Pecos, Texas, the immigrants doing time in the world’s largest privately run prison decided to turn the tables on their captors. It was the Day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, an important religious holiday in Latin America. But the inmates were in no mood for celebration.

The motin, as the overwhelmingly Spanish-speaking inmates called their uprising, began in the Reeves County Detention Center’s Special Housing Unit (SHU), better known as solitary confinement, with two men—a Honduran and a Mexican—using the wires in an electrical outlet to set a mattress on fire.

They broke out the windows of their cell, and when prison guards tried to extinguish the fire by sticking a fire hose through a port in the door, the two broke the sink off the wall and held it up as a shield. One brandished, but didn’t use, a “shiv,” a crude jailhouse knife. Meanwhile, the two men yelled for other inmates to join in the uprising. Soon, at 12:45 p.m., a lockdown order went out across the prison. Staff tried to hustle prisoners on their way to lunch or the recreation center back to their cells. Inmates in one of the housing areas refused, and they forced the guards to release friends from their cells. “Open the doors or we will take your keys,” the prisoners demanded, according to an FBI account. “We’ll see who has control in a bit,” one inmate told a guard.

The prison’s emergency-response team deployed an arsenal including rubber bullets, pepper spray, expulsion grenades and bean-bag guns. To little avail. The insurrection quickly spread to the other housing areas. The rioters assembled in the outdoor recreation yard armed with rocks, concrete, and steel poles as well as horseshoes, hammers and box cutters they had pilfered from the recreation building. Many of them, aware of the prison’s extensive surveillance system, hid their faces with T-shirts, hats and bandanas. Some wore sunglasses.

Two prison employees were taken hostage. (Neither was harmed.) With more than 1,200 inmates milling around outside and hordes of law enforcement officials, the prison must have looked like a war zone.

It was not mere anarchy, though.

By midafternoon, members of the FBI, Texas Rangers, DPS and the Odessa Police Department arrived at the prison. As the crisis negotiators quickly found out, the riot had not been prompted by gang infighting, racial tensions or a spontaneous outburst of violence. The men incarcerated at the Pecos prison are considered “low-security”; most are serving relatively short sentences for immigration violations or drug offenses. All are set to be deported at the end of their sentences.

Leaders of the rebellion were demanding a meeting with the Mexican Consulate, the FBI and the warden to discuss a number of grievances that they said GEO Group, the prison company that manages the 3,700-bed facility, had refused to address.

The evening of the uprising, the inmates sent a delegation of seven men—a Venezuelan, a Cuban, a Nigerian, and four Mexicans—to meet with the authorities.

They explained that the uprising had erupted from widespread dissatisfaction with almost every aspect of the prison: inedible food, a dearth of legal resources, the use of solitary confinement to punish people who complained about their medical treatment, overcrowding and, above all, poor health care.

The delegates pointed to a string of deaths (according to public records, five men died in Reeves between August 2008 and March 2009, including two suicides) they attributed to the prison’s inattention to medical needs. The riot had been sparked by the death of Jesus Manuel Galindo, an epileptic, who had been carried out of the prison’s Special Housing Unit in a body bag that same day. “Suspect(s) are talking about the guy being out of the shoe [SHU],” the Odessa Police Department report said. “Someone should have been there with him. Special housing was not the place for [him].”

The authorities jotted down the concerns and promised to take them seriously.

Twenty-four hours after it began, the uprising was over. More than $1 million worth of damage had been done to the prison. Less than two months later, on Jan. 31, the prison would be under inmate control again—and this time the rioting would last for five days and end with one building destroyed and some $20 million in damage.

To critics of GEO and other for-profit prison companies, the two huge riots in as many months—rare, especially in low-security prisons—were the logical consequence of the largest experiment in prison privatization to date.

The story of the death of Jesus Manuel Galindo is the story of a death foretold.

For weeks, Galindo, a 32-year-old epileptic Mexican citizen who had lived in the United States since he was 13, had been complaining to anyone who would listen that something terrible was going to happen to him because of poor medical care.

In May 2007, Galindo was found illegally crossing the border in El Paso. Galindo, nicknamed “Negro” for his dark complexion, was sentenced later that year to 30 months for illegal re-entry (crossing into the U.S. after being deported). Ten years ago, he would likely have been quickly deported, not prosecuted. But the Bush administration piloted a “zero-tolerance” policy in Texas that eventually spread across the border: All illegal border crossers would be arrested, detained and, if possible, prosecuted in federal court. Prosecutions surged, as did the need for detention centers, jails and prisons to hold the tens of thousands of newly minted criminals. The Obama administration has more than embraced the policy. The number of prosecutions for immigration crimes—almost 68,000—during the first nine months of 2009 is on track for a 14 percent increase over 2008. More than half of those prosecutions took place in Texas.

The result has been a system swamped with low-level immigration cases and prisons bursting at the seams with illegal immigrants. Rather than build and run the facilities themselves, federal agencies have turned in large part to private prison companies, such as Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group. In 2008, GEO reported more than $1 billion in revenue, an 80 percent increase over 2005.

Privatization has been less profitable for others. GEO’s Texas facilities have been plagued with suicides, filthy conditions, sexual abuse scandals, hunger strikes, riots and lawsuits.

Jesus Galindo became another case in point. According to his family, Galindo had had seizures before his incarceration but they grew worse and more frequent under the care of the Physicians Network Association, a Lubbock-based medical services provider that serves 17,000 inmates in 24 facilities across the nation. In 2002, Reeves County hired PNA to run the prison’s health care, attracted by its promise to improve services and cut costs. (The county pays PNA $6.03 per inmate per day, about $8 million a year at full capacity.)

Four months into their contract, then-warden Rudy Franco lauded PNA at a county commissioners meeting for drastically reducing the number of surgeries, X-rays, outside visits and other medical services, the latter of which had dropped from 3,148 to 222.

On Nov. 12, Galindo was locked up in the Special Housing Unit. The mostly Spanish-speaking inmates call it la celda de castigo, the punishment cell. Prisoners and others say the SHU was frequently used to isolate and punish men with health problems who complained about their medical care.

According to Galindo’s family, the prison authorities said they put him in the SHU to keep an eye on him. “That’s not true,” says Jesus Galindo Sr., his father. “It was to punish him.”

Galindo pleaded with prison officials to return him to the ­general population where he had friends who woke him up to take his pills and took care of him during his frequent seizures.

“He would say he was really afraid because if he got sick who was going to help him?” says his mother, Graciela Galindo. She begged officials to look after her son. “They told me he was in a high security place; that was what the warden said, and that I should not worry about him. They told me they were taking good care of my son.”

Galindo did what he could to reassure his family, singing love songs to his mother over the phone. “He had hope,” his brother Jesus Galindo Jr. said. “He was real strong. The only thing that bothered him was his condition. I saw him on his birthday [Nov. 29]. I said, ‘Hey, hang in there. Think of us like we think of you.’”

Judy Madewell, the public defender in charge of Galindo’s criminal case was so worried that she sent an investigator to the prison on Dec. 4. The investigator, Octavio Vasquez, urged the authorities to put Galindo back into the general population.

On Dec. 9, Graciela talked to her son on the phone. “He told me to tell Belinda [his daughter] to do a dance to the Virgin because he’s getting out of the SHU on Friday [Dec. 12] ... and that if he wasn’t, to contact the jail.”

The following day, Dec. 10, Galindo wrote a letter to his family saying that he felt bad and had asked the doctor and warden to do something. The letters begins in the morning, with Galindo noting that a nurse had promised him that she would return later that day to take his blood.

Two days later, on Dec. 12, Graciela called to see if her son had been released from the SHU. “I called and to my surprise he was dead. They kept me on the phone for an hour. They said we have to wait for the doctors. I told them please do something. But my son was already dead.”

“Mama, the day already passed and nothing,” he writes later that same day. “All they did was walk up and down but here, where I am, no one even stopped. We’ll see what happens tomorrow.”

When Galindo was found in his cell, rigor mortis had already set in. His body was purple and stiff. The El Paso County medical examiner ruled the cause of death as epileptiform seizure disorder. A toxicology report found “below-therapeutic levels” of Dilantin, a cheap anti-epileptic drug, in Galindo’s blood and urine. The drug is only effective at certain dosages, and a patient’s blood must be checked regularly to make sure it’s not too high or low, says Robert Cain, an Austin neurologist who reviewed the autopsy.

“With multiple seizures, inadequate levels of medication and left in isolation without supervision, he was set up to die,” Cain says.

Galindo’s experience was strikingly similar to those of other inmates under PNA’s care. In 2003, the Justice Department investigated the Santa Fe County Jail in New Mexico, which was then run by Management & Training Corp. (MTC). Just as it does at Reeves, PNA had a subcontract to provide health care there. The Justice Department found nearly non-existent medical and mental health care, and specifically noted PNA’s inattention to properly calibrating dose-sensitive medications, especially anti-epileptics.

“We found several instances in which PNA failed to monitor inmates on these types of medications, even when inmates reported experiencing side effects,” the report states. In one case, blood testing showed that an inmate with a seizure disorder did not have enough of the anti-seizure drug to be effective. The PNA medical staff did nothing, and seven days later the inmate attempted suicide and then suffered a seizure. “Even with all the attention from medical staff due to his suicide attempt, his seizure medication blood level was not measured until four days” later, the report says.

No such authoritative report has been done for the Pecos prison. But in interviews and correspondence, prisoners, their relatives, attorneys and immigrant rights advocates describe a facility overrun with corruption and dangerous cost-cutting measures. Prisoners writing to the Observer have made allegations ranging from physical abuse to tacit arrangements between guards and prisoners to traffic drugs and other contraband inside the facility. (GEO Group declined to comment.)

A prisoner we’ll call Juan, who asked that his real name not be used for fear of retribution, describes an environment of fear where hardened criminals serving long sentences live side by side with men who are there solely for crossing the border illegally. Juan says that prisoners in the jail are divided into groups based on their home state in Mexico with the tacit approval of the guards and the warden. Prisoners who have money and can buy influence and authority run these groups. These bosses dole out punishments and determine with the guards who gets sent to the punishment cell, Juan says. “We are threatened and beaten if we complain. While [the prison bosses] can have cell phones and other benefits that are forbidden.”

Another prisoner, Jose—who also asked that his name be changed—writes that he has hepatitis. “I begged for medicine and they sent me a bottle that was unsealed and only half full,” Jose writes. “I haven’t received treatment for my hepatitis since December 2008.”

“The problem with Reeves is that there are no medical services,” says Graciela Arredondo, the mother of a man who served part of his sentence at Reeves. “They won’t bring a doctor if you are sick. They don’t want to spend the money, but these are human beings and they deserve medical services.”

After the riots in December and January, the ACLU of Texas called on the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General to investigate the prisoners’ charges. This wouldn’t be the first time the OIG was asked to look into reports of abuse at the Reeves facility. In 2006, an investigation resulted in the arrests of five employees at the jail for smuggling drugs into the facility and having sex with inmates. Because it hasn’t received an answer from the OIG, the ACLU is starting its own investigation.

“Riots are relatively rare, and are an indicator of serious problems at a facility,” says Lisa Graybill, legal director for the ACLU of Texas. ”We continue to receive complaints that the Bureau of Prisons and its contractors, GEO and Physicians Network Association, are systemically failing to address life-threatening and chronic medical conditions of detainees.”

None of this is surprising to longtime prison activist Bob Libal, co-coordinator of Grassroots Leadership, an Austin nonprofit that fights private prisons. “Conditions at GEO facilities have been horrendous, and it stretches across every type of facility,” says Libal. “It’s case after case after case. Whether Coke County, Val Verde, Dickens County, Reeves, Pearsall, it’s one horrendous thing after another.”

In 2007, the Texas Youth Commission removed 197 youths from GEO Group’s Coke County Juvenile Justice Center after inspectors found deplorable conditions including filthy cells that reeked of feces and urine, insects in the food, and inmates only being allowed to shower and brush their teeth every few days.

A year before, the family of 23-year-old LeTisha Tapia sued GEO Group after Tapia killed herself at the Val Verde County Jail, which the company runs. Tapia had told her family that she was raped, beaten, sexually humiliated and deprived of psychological and medical treatment in retaliation for telling the warden about guards allowing inmates to have sex with each other. The suit was settled out of court.

In the past two years, the state of Idaho has pulled out of contracts at two GEO-operated jails—the Dickens County Correctional Center, near Spur, and the Bill Clayton Detention Center in Littleton—citing chronic understaffing, a lack of required treatment programs, and suicides linked to squalid conditions.

In a lawsuit set to go to trial in March, two detainees at the GEO-run South Texas Detention Complex in Pearsall claim that the company “intentionally and systematically violates the rights of mentally disabled detainees.” Echoing the Reeves County allegations, both of the plaintiffs, Miroslava Rodriguez-Grava and Isaias Vasques Cisneros de Jesus, allege that instead of treating them for their mental disabilities, GEO put them in segregation for extended periods of time.

“I think that any time you insert profit into the equation that care and also the rehabilitative elements of corrections goes out the window,” said Libal. “They try to do things as cheap as possible. You get what you’re paying for in a lot of ways.”

The Pecos prison, a remote, austere correctional campus flanked by farmland and a weirdly out-of-place cemetery, sprawls across several acres a few hundred yards from Interstate 30. To travelers zipping by at 80 mph, the facility is little more than a blur of barbed wire and guard towers. But to the people of Reeves County (population 13,137), it’s an engine of progress.

In the mid-1980s, with the regional economy devastated by the Texas oil bust, local business and government leaders decided to move into a recession-proof industry that was exploding in an increasingly criminalized America: prisons. In 1986, the county built a 300-bed prison. The prison filled rapidly with federal inmates, pumping revenue into the county’s budget and adding decent-paying jobs to the local work force. By 2002, Reeves had 2,000 beds. In 2003, the county completed ­construction on a $39 million, 960-bed unit only to find that the feds had no interest.

“They built a $39 million prison on speculation,” said Jon Fulbright, a reporter for the Pecos Enterprise. While the prison sat empty, payments on the bonds, reduced to junk status, were coming due. On the verge of default, county officials begged the Bush administration to send prisoners and hired Randy DeLay, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s brother, to lobby in Washington, D.C. That’s when Wackenhut Corrections Corp., now GEO Group, rode to the rescue. In November 2003, GEO agreed to take over management of the whole 3,000-bed prison complex and soon struck a deal with the Bureau of Prisons to fill the new unit.

Despite the troubles at the Pecos prison under GEO management, local officials are grateful.

“A lot of people criticize GEO but I don’t,” says Sheriff Arnulfo “Andy” Gomez. “We had a hard time and they pulled us out. They’ve got lobbyists and all that.” Besides, he says, “You’re going to have trouble in every prison.”

Some more than others. On Jan. 31, a month and a half after the first uprising, prisoners at the Reeves County Detention Center rose up again. Prison and law enforcement officials have released little information on the disturbance, but inmates, advocates and family members say it began when Ramon Garcia, 25, was forced into solitary confinement after complaining of dizziness and feeling sick.

“We spoke with the warden and we told him to take our countryman out of the punishment cell and take him to the hospital because he needs medical attention,” an inmate told Laura Rivas, an advocate with the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. “We told them that if they were not going to do it then we would do it, we would take him out, because we have more strength, and they laughed at us. And that’s when it all started.”

Lana Williams, a friend of Garcia’s family, told KFOX-TV in El Paso that Garcia had been put into solitary confinement whenever he complained of feeling sick. “He’s gotten to the point where he can’t walk down the hall without holding on to the wall, and this has been going on and getting progressively worse,” Williams said.

During the five-day takeover, the inmates drafted another list of demands: better medical treatment, adequate food (especially for those who are ill or have diabetes) and no guard retaliation against any person.

“To them, we don’t matter,” the inmate told Rivas. “If we die, it doesn’t matter to them. The only thing that interests them is money—nothing more.”

Melissa del Bosque contributed reporting for this story.

AND

http://borderlinesblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/talking-about-insurrection.html

via Border Lines by Tom Barry on 10/9/09

Getting into the federal building in Pecos, Texas takes political sophistication – something I was apparently lacking when attempting to enter the building for the trial of a couple of immigrant inmates indicted for their role in the Dec. 12-13 incident, let’s call it, at the immigrant prison in this far West Texas town.

It’s the same all over the country. After Sept. 11 the federal halls of justice have been on virtual lockdown status. To get into these buildings – which typically house the district courts and U.S. Marshals Service offices, you need to pass through metal detectors, present identification, and rid yourself of all electronic devices. As many as half dozen or more federal security guards – usually retired police officers and sheriff deputies – are usually in the courthouse foyer to block entry to criminals and terrorists.

In Pecos, which has a privately run, federally supplied, and locally owned immigrant prison on the outskirts of town, people are feeling jittery about the criminal alien business. It’s a business that has for the past two decades been a source of a steadily expanding number of local jobs and increasing county revenues, as the prison has gone through three expansions to accommodate the ever larger number of immigrant inmates under Bureau of Prisons custody.

I felt it as soon as I stepped pass the doorway: suspicion and outsider disdain. “What are you here for? Who are you,” one of the guards demanded.

“Well, I am here for the trial of the immigrant prisoners indicted for the disturbance at the prison last December,” I said, handing the questioning guard my business card (from Center for International Policy).

“Disturbance, there was no disturbance,” says he. (It wasn’t until later that I asked how HE was.) “There was a riot, and it’s costing us tens of millions of dollars.”

During several trips to Pecos since the second inmate news event of Jan. 31 –Feb. 5, I had been alternating between “riot,” “protest,” “mutiny,” and “disturbance.”

What happened at the Reeves County Detention Center in two separate occasions was that immigrant inmates – officially classified “criminal aliens” who will be processed for deportation upon completing their 1-5 year sentences – set fire to prison buildings to protest the deaths and untreated illnesses of fellow prisoners. In both cases, the main prisoner concern was that sick inmates were being placed in the Secure Housing Unit (SHU) assigned for “medical observation.”

The SHUs in modern prisons and detention centers are the modern equivalent of the old “solitary confinement” – intended as both punishment for disciplinary infraction and as deterrence to prevent unruly behavior. But, as the practice at the Reeves County Detention Center, SHUs are often used simply to better manage prison populations – to isolate and punish problem inmates whether they break the rules or not.

At the Reeves County Detention Center (RCDC) – which since 1985 has expanded from 300-bed prison to one that holds up to 3700 inmates – the SHU is systemically and routinely used to house severely ill inmates. That’s because there is no infirmary at what the prison giant GEO Group (which the county contracts to run the BOP prison) calls RCDC “the largest detention/
correctional facility under private management in the world.”

The first incident was precipitated by the death of Jesus Manuel Galindo, 32, who was serving a 30-month sentence for illegal reentry from Mexico. Galindo was picked up by the Border Patrol after an epileptic seizure at a convenience store near the borderland town of Anthony, NM, where he had lived with his family since he was in his mid-teens. The local police, who responded to the call for assistance from the clerk at the local 7-11, turned Galindo over to the Border Patrol after it was determined he was an “illegal alien.” Galindo, after being deported to Ciudad Juárez (about 20 miles from his home in the United States), attempted to return home to his extended and nuclear family (three children and second wife) – all of whom were legal residents or citizens -- two years ago after spending a month in the Mexican border town across from El Paso.

But increased border security and a new “criminal alien” policy that criminalizes and penalizes illegal border crossing combined to put Galindo into the federal slammer in Pecos, where an estimated 75% of his fellow inmates were also serving time for illegal border crossings and the balance for nonviolent crimes, mostly drug violations.

Another severe epileptic seizure in mid-November 2008 sent Galindo to an area hospital – and in the SHU. The greatest fear of inmates at the Reeves County Detention Center is getting sick and being consigned to the SHU – what they call “el hoyo” (the hole). It’s the hole not because it’s so dark or dirty, but rather because it’s where there is no relief from the walls, the loneliness, the emptiness.

Galindo corresponded frequently with his mother, Graciela Galindo. His letters from mid-November until the day before he died tell of his fear and despair at being kept in the hole without any company, without the friends he made in prison. He tells his mother of the inhumanity of most of the guards who didn’t seem to recognize the humanity of the immigrant inmates. He writes of the urgency to get the right medicine to prevent his seizures – medicine, his mother told me, for which he had a prescription before he was imprisoned but was replaced by the nurses at Reeves with sedatives that kept him sleepy and unable to stand up. On Dec. 5 he wrote of being “afraid” of what would happen to him if he stayed in the hold any longer, of how his was being ignored by the guards and nurses, of his bruises from thrashing around during unattended seizures.

The day before he died he wrote a letter to his mother that the family didn’t read until much later when they received his few personal belongings along with his body.

In his Dec. 11 letter he wrote: “I told them that I have been here (in SHU) for a month, and I’ve gotten sick twice, and let’s see if they move me or do something quickly. All they say is 'yes, yes.' and they don't do anything.”

What happened after two of his fellow inmates in the SHU saw his body being removed in a black body bag on the morning of Dec. 12 is a matter of interpretation and interests.

The Dec. 12-13 incident resulted in some damage – several hundred thousands of dollars -- to the SHU and in a badly burnt recreation building. Reeves County attributed the property loss at the RCDC III prison (the most 2005 expansion of the immigrant prison) to a “disturbance.” Calling it a “riot” would have precluded the insurance company from covering the losses, said County Judge Sam Contreras.

The inmates themselves referred to it as a “motín” or mutiny – a term that conveys the sense of an uprising against authority.

After the Dec. 12-13 incident in Pecos and after the second closely related incident of Jan. 31-Feb 5 (when inmates also rebelled and set fire to prison buildings in an incident also sparked by medical malpractice and mistreatment concerns involving the use of the SHU for “medical observation”), the criminal justice system, the insurance system, and the financial system are providing most of the follow-up.

Despite demands by the Texas ACLU and immigrant advocacy groups, the Office of Inspector General of the Justice Department has not initiated an investigation. But the criminal justice system did immediately kick in other respects. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Midland, Texas immediately began investigating the new crimes of the immigrant inmates who, in part out of solidarity with those sick fellow prisoners shut in the hole and in part out of fear that too would be released from prison in a body bag, took control of the two different sections of the prison to highlight their concerns.

Like the inmates, the U.S. attorney called the incidents “mutinies” and like the media and the security guards in the federal building lobby is also referring to the incidents as riots. Twenty six inmates from the first incident have been indicted. At first, they faced two counts – causing a riot or mutiny, or aiding and abetting in a mutiny or riot. The first count declared that the defendants “and other persons known or unknown to the grand jury, unlawfully, willfully, and knowingly, did combine, conspire, confederate and agree together and with each other and others to instigate, connive, attempt to cause, assist, and conspire to cause a riot at the Reeves County Detention Center, a federal penal, detention, or correctional facility.”

(Apparently, the U.S. attorneys are as confused as everyone else about what the Reeves County Detention Center really is, a prison or detention center. And while it does hold federal prisoners – all immigrants with orders for deportation – there is much confusion about whose prison is it. It is county owned – hence the Reeves County – but it is operated by GEO Group while the BOP contracts with the county to run it and the county subcontracts with GEO.)

The second count was the essentially the same but in this count the defendants purportedly “aided and abetted by each other and others did instigate, connive, attempt to cause, assist, or conspire to cause a riot.” In brief, the criminal indictment described the incident as a “mutiny or riot.” Those two counts were filed April 9 and May 12.

But they didn’t have the desired result. Not all the defendants were entering guilty pleas, thereby saving the U.S. attorney the trouble of presenting evidence and actually trying the case. Then, on July 14, the U.S. John Murphy came to the grand jury with a superceding indictment that includes a new charge: “the use of fire to commit a federal felony offense.”

Mary Stillinger, one of the court-appointed attorneys appointed to represent the immigrants, said the new indictment “really hammered” the immigrants, since it came with a mandatory ten-year sentence.

There was little hard evidence against the men, and even with the court-appointed defense attorneys, most of whom simply go through the motions of defending immigrants in the flood of criminal charges resulting from immigration violations that is overwhelming the judicial system along the border. As part of the prison reconstruction, GEO has insisted that the county install a comprehensive system of security cameras and video recording units so as to insure that the next time around, as was explained in a county commissioners meeting in Pecos by the architect directing the reconstruction: “Cameras and recording equipment are among the highest things on their list, because if say that if they had more security cameras, better recording equipment, when they had this disturbance, they would have been able to prosecute more, indict more people, if they had more proof of what everybody did.”

No one in a position of responsibility– not in county government, not in GEO, not in the correctional healthcare subcontractor Physicians Network Association (of Lubbock, Texas), not in the BOP , not in the U.S. Attorney’s Office – is apparently concerned of prosecuting, indicting, gathering evidence, or even investigating the conditions at RCDC that sparked the riots and the death of Jesus Manuel Galindo.

But the county has other concerns that involve high finance and keeping prison jobs in Reeves County.

Since 1985 the county has issued approximately $115 million in revenue bonds to finance the construction and maintenance of the RCDC immigrant prison complex. Going into the riots/mutinies/disturbances, the county had $92 million in outstanding prison debt. This debt is in the form of tax exempt municipal bonds called project revenue bonds that are issued by a specially established county public facility corporation to create a project that brings revenue to the county.

The county got off relatively easily from the first incident. The insurance companies paid by the county over the past couple of decades for the prison covered most of the rebuilding expenses. But then came the proverbial ‘fire next time.’

Less than two months after the first inmate protest, inmates renewed the Dec. 12-13 protest with a much larger incident – one that completely destroyed the oldest prison unit and resulted in reconstruction and upgrading expenses project to approach $40 million. This time the insurance companies are expected to come through with only $25 million, leaving the county $15 million short.

Here comes Barry Friedman of Carlyle Capital Markets, the bond underwriting firm that has been with Reeves County since the beginning of its prison enterprise. Friedman assures the county that he can sell another $15 million plus in bonds to cover the gap. “I have been on the side of Reeves County since 1986,” Friedman recently told the county commissioners, assuring them that he only wants what is good for the county.

Not only is Friedman underwriting the new bond issue but after the prison disturbances he was hired as a special financial consultant to the county for about $15,000 a month. In addition to his commission for bond underwriting, he is also advising the county on what is in their best financial interest, as he told the commissioners. “As financial adviser, my responsibility is to the county,” he explained, angrily and righteously dismissing a complaint raised by County Attorney Alva Alvarez. “Do you represent the bondholders,” he was asked. “No, I represent the county,” he replied.

Reeves County is angry, worried, and deep in debt – and going deeper. No wonder then the reaction of the elderly security guard at the federal building. After I asked who he was, he threatened to call the U.S. Marshals. Knowing about justice in Reeves County, I turned around and walked out. Just as well, the immigrants had all decided to plead guilty. The scheduled trial was cancelled.

Tempers are also flaring in the county building across the street with conflict-of-interest charges swirling around having Carlyle’s Friedman work two sides of the prison business and with fears that if the county doesn’t get the prison back together the BOP might, as one county official noted, “bring in the buses and bring the inmates out.”

That would leave Reeves County with massive prison bond debt, Pecos with any empty prison complex on the edge of town, and more than four hundred area residents without a job. It would be a near fatal blow to the county, where a quarter of the population lives in poverty and unemployment stands at 14.1%. Poor Reeves County.

And poor immigrants who still suffer the same medical conditions that sparked the incidents.

See related articles:

Tom Barry
February 24, 2009
“Medical Claims and Malpractice in Correctional Healthcare”
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5895

Forrest Wilder
October 2, 2009
“The Pecos Insurrection”
http://www.texasobserver.org/features/the-pecos-insurrection

Posted by lois at 09:35 PM | Comments (0)

SF: Gavin Newsom's policy of contacting ICE for juveniles arrested of crimes voted down by council

San Francisco to Vote on Immigration Reporting Policy

By JESSE McKINLEY
Published: NY Times October 20, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO — The San Francisco board of supervisors voted Tuesday to overturn a city policy that has been at the center of a national debate over offering illegal immigrants sanctuary.

The policy, ordered by Mayor Gavin Newsom last summer, requires the police to contact Immigration and Customs Enforcement whenever they arrest a juvenile on felony charges who they suspect is in the United States illegally. Since the policy took effect last summer, more than 100 undocumented minors have been turned over to federal immigration authorities.

Mr. Newsom has said that the ordinance is necessary to prevent young criminals from using the city’s so-called sanctuary policy, which prevents the use of city money for immigration enforcement.

“Sanctuary city was never designed to protect people who commit crimes,” said Nathan Ballard, a spokesman for Mr. Newsom.

But under the changes approved Tuesday, referrals would be required only after juveniles were convicted of crimes, instead of after their arrest. Immigration advocates say that referrals upon arrest have resulted in the deportation of innocent youths, the breakup of families, and a fear among immigrants of contacting the police when they are the victims of crime.

“We recognize that there’s a need to do some reporting” of illegal juveniles, said David Campos, the supervisor who sponsored the new ordinance. “But we’re trying to strike a balance.”

Tuesday’s meeting was filled to capacity, with hundreds of supporters of Mr. Campos’s bill filling the board’s chambers and two overflow rooms. Simultaneous translation of supervisors’ comments were offered in Mandarin and Spanish, and when the bill was passed, by 8 to 2 with one absentee, cheers erupted in the chambers, with chants of “Yes We Can” in English and Spanish echoing through the ornate City Hall.

Supporters continued chanting as they filed out past a bust of Harvey Milk, the trailblazing San Francisco supervisor and gay rights advocate whose name was invoked by supporters of Mr. Campos’s bill.

The vote was a sharp rebuke to Mr. Newsom, a Democrat who is running for governor and who has promised to veto it, though supporters seem to have enough votes to overturn that.

San Francisco adopted its sanctuary policy in 1989, and has long refused to refer minors in police custody to the federal authorities, although adults accused of felonies have always been referred. Some of these minors were later flown to their home countries at taxpayer expense rather than being turned over to immigration authorities. Mr. Newsom learned of those flights last May and ordered them stopped.

Mr. Newsom’s policy was also a response to a series of embarrassing revelations in The San Francisco Chronicle, including that the city, rather than turning a group of young Honduran crack dealers over to ICE, sent them to a group home in Southern California, from which they walked away.

The city was also shocked by a June 2008 triple murder, which prosecutors say was committed by Edwin Ramos, a suspected gang member and an illegal immigrant from El Salvador who had been picked up as a juvenile by the San Francisco police but not referred to immigration authorities.

The fate of the sanctuary policy may well be decided in court.

An August memorandum from the office of the city attorney, Dennis Herrera, to Mr. Newsom said that while federal and state law concerning sanctuary cities was “not settled,” the ordinance that passed Tuesday could also “adversely affect” the city’s position in several pending cases concerning its sanctuary policy, including a criminal investigation by the United States attorney’s office in San Francisco.

Mr. Ballard, Mr. Newsom’s spokesman, echoed this, saying the supervisors’ vote, which will be formalized at a final reading of the bill next week, could invite a federal legal challenge to the entire sanctuary city policy.

“The supervisors did a foolish thing today by passing this bill that moves one step closer to imperiling the entire sanctuary city ordinance,” Mr. Ballard said.

But Mr. Campos, the supervisor and a naturalized citizen who emigrated — illegally — from his native Guatemala when he was 14, said the vote to change Mr. Newsom’s policy was necessary to maintain the city’s reputation as a safe haven for illegal residents.

“We went from being one of the most enlightened cities,” Mr. Campos said, “to be a place many steps backward to where the rest of the country is.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/us/21sanctuary.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1256086898-tNQerOlRfPHPXNfA/o0uZg

Posted by lois at 09:06 PM | Comments (0)

October 07, 2009

TX: Mineral Wells rejects buidling an immigrant "detention" center on spec

Mineral Wells rejects Emerald detention center financing deal
Wed, 10/07/2009

From the Mineral Wells Index ("Council declines Emerald finance proposal," October 7),

Mineral Wells City Council on Tuesday declined to second a motion to finance a proposed Immigrations and Customs Enforcement detention facility.

Emerald Correctional Management Company said it was unable to date to secure private financing for the 500- to 1,000-bed facility that would house detained or arrested illegal immigrants. The company asked the city to issue public revenue bonds to build the estimated $50 million project.

After a presentation during Tuesday's council meeting, council members asked several questions, and Councilman John Ritchie made a motion to approve the financing request. However, no member of council seconded the motion, and the motion died with no further action or discussion.

What that means for the project's future is not certain. The Index is working on the story and will post it later today.

ICE project deal dead: Emerald says it will offer facility to other cities after City Council fails to support public financing proposal.
http://www.mineralwellsindex.com/local/local_story_281100232.html

By Christin Coyne
ccoyne@mineralwellsindex.com
A two and-a-half year effort to bring an illegal immigrant detention center to Mineral Wells ended Tuesday night with several long seconds of silence from city council members.

A resolution to continue negotiations with Emerald Correctional Management to build a detention facility funded by non-recourse revenue bonds issued by the Mineral Wells Local Government Corporation failed when council members failed to second a motion in support.

“That’s a pretty clear message that the city council has no interest in doing this project,” Steve Afeman, chief operating officer of Emerald, said Wednesday morning. “We’re not about to go back.”

The failure to move ahead with negotiations seemed to come as a surprise to several.

Afeman said Emerald met with mayor Mike Allen, Industrial Foundation representative Steve Butcher and city manager Lance Howerton and was told they believed council would support the public finance proposal.

Allen told those attending the meeting there would be no public comments. “This is for the council to understand,” he said before a presentation from Hull Youngblood, Emerald’s attorney and representative.

“[While switching sites earlier this year], we lost that window to get private financing that you could use,” Youngblood said. Initially the city offered Emerald land near Mineral Wells Municipal Airport, but 11th-hour public opposition to the site forced its move to Wolters Industrial Park, with the Industrial Foundation buying land to accommodate the switch.

Youngblood told the council the city would not be obligated if they authorized the local government corporation to issue non-recourse revenue bonds.

“The LGC will not have to pay anything on the debt except what is generated by project revenue,” Youngblood said. “[If the bonds were defaulted on] think of it like lenders and they’ve got a lien on the building. They could sell it or refinance it.”

Because the local government corporation would own the title to the building, the facility would also be exempt from ad valorem taxes.

“We would now take that pool of money [that would go to the city and Parker County] and give it to the city [as the per diem fee per inmate],” Youngblood said.

Councilman Bill Terry wanted to know if the facility went defunct how much control the city would have.

“[Once the facility is foreclosed on] they could do whatever they want,” Youngblood said, but added they would have to abide by applicable law.

“What kind of black eye is it to the city or the LGC [if they are unable to pay off the bonds]?” council member Tommy Blissitte asked.

Howerton said they talked with the city’s financial advisor and were told a default on the bonds would not technically affect the credit rating and would not likely impair the city.

However, the city might have to explain the situation and that could raise a red flag with other possible underwriters, Howerton said.

“What risk, if any, does Emerald have?” council member Deartis Nickerson asked.

“[There is] not additional equity being paid to the lender beyond the significant development costs [already incurred],” Youngblood said.

“I’ve been dealing with this for about a month and I’ve come to a conclusion our liability (would be) no different than private financing,” Allen said.

Allen noted unemployment is over 8 percent in the county and said the project would generate jobs and bring in at least $6 million for the city over a 20-year period.

Afeman said they’ve received about 30 job applications for the proposed Mineral Wells facility, which was supposed to have created 140 jobs, though many of the applications were from people in other parts of the state looking to return to Mineral Wells.

Council member John Ritchie moved to approve the resolution authorizing the local government corporation to continue negotiations for the publicly financed proposal but did not receive a second.

After several seconds of silence from the council, Allen requested a second to the motion but did not receive it from the other four council members present. Chris Crawford was absent.

“It’s been a long, hard journey,” Allen said after the meeting. “I’ve put a lot of time into it.”

Richard Ball, president of the Industrial Foundation, said afterward it was time to replace some city council members.

“I don’t think it’s the right thing at the right time,” Terry said. “I want to see the Baker Hotel situation [succeed] and I don’t want anything to get in the way … I just think there are better deals out there and eventually they’ll come. I feel that Emerald is not being up front with us.”

Terry was the lone dissenting vote when the council agreed to accept a lower impact fee than Emerald announced they would pay the city before the site was moved, asking whether it would be a sign of things to come.

“I don’t like the idea of the city having to issue bonds,” councilman Tommy Blissitte told the Index Wednesday. “It would look bad on the city if they defaulted.”

Blissitte said he also had concerns that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement would still be interested in an detention facility for illegal immigrants when it came time to write an agreement after several months of issuing bonds and then the 16-month building phase.

“If they got their own financing, I don’t have a problem,” Blissitte said. “I voted my conscience.”

“It’s a business decision that the city made and we respect that,” Afeman said. “There are two other sites that we’ve been in contact with this week.”

Posted by lois at 11:47 PM | Comments (0)

October 06, 2009

Ideas Immigrant Detention Include Converting Hotels and Building Models

Ideas Immigrant Detention Include Converting Hotels and Building Models
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: October 5, 2009- NY Times

The Obama administration is looking to convert hotels and nursing homes into immigration detention centers and to build two model detention centers from scratch as it tries to transform the way the government holds people it is seeking to deport.

These and other initiatives, described in an interview on Monday by Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, are part of the administration’s effort to revamp the much-criticized detention system, even as it expands the enforcement programs that send most people accused of immigration violations to jails and private prisons. The cost, she said, would be covered by greater efficiencies in the detention and removal system, which costs $2.4 billion annually to operate and holds about 380,000 people a year.

“The paradigm was wrong,” Ms. Napolitano said of the nation’s patchwork of rented jail space, which has more than tripled in size since 1995, largely through Immigration and Customs Enforcement contracts for cells more restrictive, and expensive, than required for a population that is largely not dangerous. Among those in detention on Sept. 1, 51 percent were considered felons, and of those, 11 percent had committed violent crimes.

“Serious felons deserve to be in the prison model,” Ms. Napolitano said, “but there are others. There are women. There are children.”

These and other nonviolent people should be sorted and detained or supervised in ways appropriate to their level of danger or flight risk, she said. Her goal, she said, is “to make immigration detention more cohesive, accountable and relevant to the entire spectrum of detainees we are dealing with.”

Several of the initiatives Ms. Napolitano described, to be formally announced on Tuesday afternoon, are steps on a road outlined in August, when John Morton, the assistant secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, announced an ambitious plan to transform the penal network into a “truly civil detention system.”

But the corrections expert he had put in charge of the overhaul, Dora B. Schriro, quit last month to become the corrections commissioner in New York City, after delivering a report on her eight-month top-to-bottom review of the system. The report had remained under wraps until now.

Dr. Schriro’s departure, and the delay in making her report public, dismayed many of the dozens of immigrant advocacy groups she consulted. Her 35-page report, provided to The New York Times after the interview on the condition that it not be posted on its Web site until Tuesday afternoon, calls for prompt attention to individual complaints about a lack of medical care, and “a credible grievance process, sustained in an environment free from intimidation and retaliation.”

In her interview, Ms. Napolitano said little about medical care but promised that within six months the Department of Homeland Security would “devise and implement” a classification system to better place people with medical or mental health needs in the right detention centers.

That vow puzzled some immigrant advocacy groups that deal with seriously ill detainees, including some who have died in federal custody after not getting proper treatment. The groups said they were concerned about the gap between announced plans to improve medical care and the actions of immigration officials.

Cheryl Little, the director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, pointed to the case of a woman she called Rosemarie, who, while being detained at the Glades County Detention Center, has suffered severe daily bleeding as a result of a fibroid tumor in her uterus.

“This has gone on for more than the five months she has been in ICE custody,” Ms. Little said. “Since June, we have tried everything to get her proper treatment. We started the requests at the local level and escalated up to D.H.S. headquarters. Ultimately we’ve had to file a lawsuit, and Rosemarie still hasn’t had the surgery she needs.”

Ms. Napolitano noted repeatedly that some of the initiatives she was announcing were “easier said than done.” Plans to speed the implementation of an online system for families and lawyers to locate detainees, for example, have been complicated by privacy issues and by the fact that many detainees share names and some stay in the system for only a couple of days, she said.

Likewise, though alternatives to detention are much cheaper than the jails under contract — $14 a day at most per person, compared with more than $100 a day — the overall cost is more complicated to calculate, she said.

About 19,000 noncitizens are supervised daily using alternatives like electronic bracelets, but their immigration cases are moved to the back of the line for adjudication. Homeland Security is working with the Justice Department, which oversees immigration courts, to modify that practice, she said, and this fall will submit a proposal to Congress to expand detention alternatives.

A request for proposals to build two model detention centers, one in California, will be issued within a year, said Mr. Morton, the ICE official. On Oct. 30, he said, he will solicit proposals and market research about converted hotels, nursing homes and other residential facilities that could serve as less expensive and less restrictive detention centers.

Mr. Morton said that on Sept. 18 the agency began housing nonviolent detainees, including new asylum seekers, at the Broward Transitional Center in Pompano Beach, Fla., near free legal help. But Charu al-Sahli, the statewide director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, said the Broward center, run for profit by GEO, a large prison company formerly known as Wackenhut, had been housing asylum seekers since 2003.

A former work-release center now surrounded by barbed wire, it is being expanded to house 700, up from 530.

“Even though it’s a nicer environment than a jail,” Ms. al-Sahli said, “these are still the people we would hold up for release, not just nicer detention.”

Editorial
Salvaging Immigration Detention
NY Times
Published: October 5, 2009

The Obama administration is unveiling on Tuesday an ambitious plan to repair the immigration detention system, a scandal-plagued mix of federal, state and local lockups that grew vastly and rotted under the enforcement crusade led by former President George W. Bush.

The homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, and John Morton, the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, deserve credit for proposing to clean up a system notorious for shabby and abusive conditions, poor or nonexistent medical treatment and a trail of preventable injuries and deaths. The reforms, if they work and are maintained, would be a necessary corrective to years of willful neglect.

Ms. Napolitano and Mr. Morton say that they want to make the system more efficient, more accountable and less costly. The whole point of detaining immigrants, after all, is to quickly figure out which ones should be deported and to deport them, not to let them languish and certainly not to inflict punishment or undue suffering.

But immigration detention has strayed far from that basic mission. Tuesday’s announcement includes statements of “core principles” so fundamental that you have to wonder what they are replacing. Consider these:

• “ICE will detain aliens in settings commensurate with the risk of flight and danger they present.” That means the government has finally come to understand that detainees are not all violent criminals. They include young mothers and their children, asylum seekers, upright members of communities who, but for a lapsed visa or bureaucratic snafu, would not be in trouble with the law. Those who can make no case for staying here should be deported. But it’s gratifying to hear Ms. Napolitano and Mr. Morton acknowledge that nonviolent noncriminals — particularly those seeking refuge — should not be warehoused behind bars. They have promised to increase alternatives to detention, and we expect them to do that — even if it means a vast effort nationwide.

• “ICE will provide sound medical care.” This fundamental government responsibility has been shamefully neglected in centers around the country. The reform plan refers vaguely to a new “medical classification system” for detainees that should improve treatment and reduce unnecessary and disruptive medical transfers. ICE should make clear what that means and how that will help those who become sick or injured only after they are admitted and classified.

Perhaps the most important principle behind these reforms is the reassertion of central control over the sprawling, subcontracted system. The new plan asserts that central control is not only smarter and more efficient but also cheaper. “Each of these reforms,” the agency says, “are expected to be budget-neutral or result in cost savings through reduced reliance on contractors to perform key federal duties.”

Immigration detention is a prime example of things going bad when the government subcontracts a vital mission to poorly supervised outsiders. The Obama administration, like its predecessor, is under ferocious political pressure to be seen as tough on people who have been unfairly depicted as a fundamentally criminal, dangerous crowd. It is pushing back with an effort to be sane and proportionate. If the reforms announced on Tuesday work half as well as promised, the country will be closer to a detention system it does not have to be ashamed of.
A version of this article appeared in print on October 6, 2009, on page A30 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/opinion/06tue1.html
This and other news about immigration can be found at www.realcostofprisons.org/blog/

Posted by lois at 11:07 AM | Comments (0)

September 22, 2009

Adelanto CA: GEO plans to build private prison for 2,200 immigrants

Private company plans illegal-immigrant prison in Adelanto
2,200-bed facility hinges on winning federal contract
September 21, 2009
NATASHA LINDSTROM Staff Writer

ADELANTO • A private prison operator has plans to build a 2,200-bed detention center that holds illegal immigrants on 51 acres near two other local prisons.

City Council will decide on Wednesday whether to approve the GEO Group Inc.’s development plan and conditional use permit to construct a new correctional facility on the northeast corner of Raccoon Avenue and Rancho Road.

But the proposed facility also hinges on GEO Group winning a federal contract from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to Adelanto City Manager Jim Hart.

Earlier this year the Department of Homeland Security posted a notice saying it would be looking for contractors to construct a possible detention center that can hold up to 2,200 illegal immigrants and others suspected of violating immigration laws. The notice said the center should be located within 120 miles of downtown Los Angeles and privately owned and operated.

However the official request for proposals for the new ICE center has not yet been issued, according to ICE spokeswoman Virginia Kice, while the agency undergoes a comprehensive overhaul of its detention system.
http://www.vvdailypress.com/news/adelanto-14600-prison-private.html

Posted by lois at 05:08 PM | Comments (0)

September 20, 2009

NV: Pahrump: fight continues against detention center

"At the time, there was no group like Concerned Citizens for a Safe Community, no anti-prison privatization consultants like Frank Smith of the Private Corrections Institute, and only a couple residents who attended the relevant meetings and spoke up."

Proposed distance from 'prison' was redlined by staff
By MARK WAITE and MARK SMITH
PVT
Sep. 18, 2009
It all began a long time ago.

Jan. 24, 2007 -- more than two and a half years ago -- the PVT printed on its front page a story titled "Town has no lock on fed prison plan."

And so what has become a major issue regarding development, revenue, jobs and political viability, got under way.

Over the intervening months, the PVT has been riddled with stories about the detention center, many on the front page and for which it won a number of Nevada Press Association awards in 2008.

But one issue has persisted as a burr under the saddle -- the reduction in the minimum distance between a prison, as many insist the detention center is, and the nearest residences.

Nye County commissioners long ago, on April 18, 2007, passed what remains a controversial motion to change the county zoning code and eliminate the minimum distance requirement of 50,000 feet between a correctional institution and residences.

At the time, there was no group like Concerned Citizens for a Safe Community, no anti-prison privatization consultants like Frank Smith of the Private Corrections Institute, and only a couple residents who attended the relevant meetings and spoke up.

Despite ongoing publicity about the detention center, it was a year later, during the summer of 2008, before the code change began to attract significant public attention.

The idea of revising the zoning to allow a correctional facility first came up during a March 9, 2007, county commission meeting held via a conference call, when then County Manager Ron Williams told commissioners a provision in the county code would have to be changed.

At the time, Nye County Code allowed only for a lockup for people already convicted, he said. Williams said the code also required such facilities be at least 50,000 feet, about 9.5 miles, from the nearest residence.

That minimum distance in the county code was enacted after the Pahrump Regional Planning Commission in the late 1990s decided it didn't want a correctional facility in Pahrump.

At that time, there had been talk of building a prison somewhere in Southern Nevada, Williams told commissioners. Pahrump Valley was sufficiently expansive to include areas where a correctional facility could be built 10 miles from homes, he said.

Williams said if the ordinance wasn't changed, Nye County could catch flack from some of the companies spending money on surveying land for possible detention center sites.

Commissioner Butch Borasky expressed concerns over the increasing size of the privately-built, federal detention center, which was originally going to be 350 beds, but at the time, there was talk of boosting it to 1,000 beds.

Former Commissioner Peter Liakopoulos and Borasky both talked about trying to situate the facility as far away from town as possible.

The county commission had just backed off from a suggestion to submit Nye County's own bid to build a federal detention center, after former Commissioner Roberta "Midge" Carver raised concerns over liability.

Williams added Nye County didn't have the experience to compete with private contractors already established in the industry. It also wouldn't be a good idea to revise the solicitation for bids by the U.S. Department of Justice to include beds for the county's own inmates, he said.

On March 23, 2007, county commissioners voted to set an April 18 hearing date for what had become bill 2007-07 that would establish a new community facilities zone that would allow a federal detention center in the zoning code.

It would also dump the minimum distance requirement.

County commissioners were being urged to take action as contractors were required to submit phase one environmental surveys on proposed locations for the detention center by April 30, 2007.

Former Pahrump Town Board Chairman Laurayne Murray talked about the tremendous financial impact from a detention center requiring 200 to 250 jobs, an annual payroll of $9 million and tax payments of $800,000 per year.

She urged commissioners to move quickly in light of competition from other communities for the project. There were 11 original sites proposed.

The Pahrump Regional Planning Commission recommended approval of the bill April 11, 2007.

At the April 18, 2007, public hearing by the Nye County Commission, Borasky suggested a minimum distance remain between correctional facilities and residences.

"I would really like to see some distance between residential housing and that type of facility -- a mile and a half -- and also be on a paved road as well," Borasky said.

The proposed bill, 2007-07, had five special conditions at the end, one of which was a requirement that "the facility must be located at least five miles from any established residential use."

Those special conditions, however, were deleted sometime between March 23, 2007, when the bill was first scheduled for a hearing, and the RPC April 11 meeting with a red line through them. No one objected to the red line deletion -- no one took credit for the deletions at the time, and who actually redlined them is unclear even today -- but Williams told commissioners the county was supposed to be removing the 50,000-foot setback.

"Again, I'll make the same statement: Are we going to add a mileage requirement or not?" Borasky asked.

"The way we're drafting this ordinance, there is no distance or mileage requirement from the residents to the facility," Nye County Planning Director Jack Lohman said.

Borasky, in a front page April 25, 2007, PVT story titled "Released detainees concern town board member," said he felt satisfied the county would have enough control over where the detention center was to be located when it came to approving the conditional use permit.

The story specified that the minimum distance had been removed from the special conditions.

But when it came to the rezoning of the Mesquite Avenue property in July 2007, Williams said the county would vote on a development agreement instead of a conditional use permit.

"Would planning approve a correctional facility within a residential neighborhood?" Commissioner Gary Hollis asked at the April 2007 hearing.

"Well, not without a general plan amendment," said Lohman, "and it would be up to you folks to decide where to put it."

Hollis, then the county commission chairman, mistakenly called for the vote on the bill before the public comment period.

When public comment was reopened, however, only a couple of people spoke up.

Pahrump resident John Koenig, a regular attendee at county commission meetings, said, if the county set a minimum distance from residences, "it will make it a lot easier at decision time to say that's a good site."

Pahrump Town Board member John McDonald had concerns over detainees being released onto the streets of Pahrump.

Attorney Tony Celeste, representing the Geo Group, one of the two contractors bidding on a detention center project, said, placing a minimum separation distance would preclude the county commission from evaluating a potentially viable site for consideration.

Liakopoulos made the motion to approve bill 2007-07. It passed on a 4-1 vote. Carver cast the sole vote in opposition without explaining her objection.

There was an attempt shortly afterward to build a separate Nye County detention facility.

In May 2007, county commissioners voted 3-1 to negotiate with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on a 500-bed detention facility to be built and operated by the county.

Nye County Sheriff Tony DeMeo said he met with Mike Webb, a supervisory agent for ICE, about the proposal, which would allow the county to house its own prisoners and lease bed space to other agencies.

Somehow that plan became mingled in the minds of some with the federal detention center.

On July 11, 2007, the RPC voted to recommend a site farther north on Parque Avenue, almost into Johnnie, for the detention center, while reviewing five zoning applications.

A week later, the county commission passed a motion by Borasky to approve a non-conforming zoning change for 160 acres at the 2250 E. Mesquite Ave., detention center site from open use-general commercial to a community facilities zone, overruling the RPC denial of that site.

County planner Rick Osborne said the nearest residence was 600 feet away.

http://www.pahrumpvalleytimes.com/2009/Sep-18-Fri-2009/news/31275071.html

Posted by lois at 08:19 PM | Comments (0)

September 10, 2009

Dora Schriro to leave ICE to run NY Dept of Correction

Immigration Official to Run New York’s Jails

By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: September 8, 2009

The corrections expert appointed just a month ago to direct an overhaul of the nation’s troubled immigration detention system is leaving the Obama administration to be commissioner of correction for New York City, Department of Homeland Security officials said on Tuesday.

The expert, Dora B. Schriro, did not return calls for comment, and the Homeland Security officials who confirmed her departure were not authorized to speak for attribution. But an administration official who discussed the decision with Dr. Schriro said her main reason was the needs of a sick family member in New York, not any policy disagreements with the administration.

Immigrant advocates who learned of her imminent departure from a reporter expressed dismay and concern that the ambitious overhaul announced by the Obama administration last month would be delayed, if not derailed, by her loss.

But in a statement sent by e-mail to The New York Times, the department vowed to conduct an immediate national search to replace Dr. Schriro as director of the new Office of Detention Policy and Planning, a position in which she was to reinvent the patchwork of private prisons and county jails where hundreds of thousands of people accused of being immigration violators are held each year while Immigration and Customs Enforcement tries to deport them.

Dr. Schriro, 59, was appointed to the post in August, and was expected to bring to bear the findings she made during a six-month review of the detention system as a special adviser to Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security.

“The Department of Homeland Security is grateful for Dr. Schriro’s service over the past six months in improving the ICE detention system, prioritizing health and safety while ensuring security, efficiency and fiscal responsibility,” the department’s statement said. “Prior to departing, Dr. Schriro will meet with Secretary Napolitano and ICE Assistant Secretary John Morton to deliver her completed review of the system and make recommendations for comprehensive, long-term reform.”

The Bloomberg administration would neither confirm nor deny the appointment of Dr. Schriro to head the city’s Department of Correction, where she was an assistant commissioner 20 years ago. But Homeland Security officials said the announcement was expected Wednesday afternoon.

“It will be a huge gain for them,” said Dr. Homer D. Venters, an expert in detention health care and one of many advocates with whom Dr. Schriro met around the country as she reviewed the detention system. “There’s a very short supply of people who are operationally experienced but also are committed to improving the plight of people within these systems.”

The city’s jail complex, much of it on Rikers Island, has been plagued by recent scandals, including the fatal beating of a prisoner, accusations that correction officers had turned discipline over to gang members, and the revelation that a city chaplain had arranged a lavish bar mitzvah party in jail for the son of a prisoner. The commissioner, Martin F. Horn, retired on July 31.

For a veteran correction director like Dr. Schriro, who led corrections in Missouri before tackling the Arizona prisons when Ms. Napolitano was governor there, fixing Rikers may be less challenging than refocusing immigration detention.

Detention centers have increasingly come under fire for mistreatment of detainees and substandard, sometimes fatal medical care. The Obama administration announced that it would change the much-criticized penal detention system over a three- to five-year period into one that was “truly civil.”

“I think this is a significant loss,” Mary Meg McCarthy, director of Heartland Alliance Immigrant Justice Center, based in Chicago, said of Dr. Schriro’s departure. “She really seemed to have the energy and the passion to address the reform that was so desperately needed — and the creativity that I think was going to be required to do this.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/nyregion/09detain.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=homeland%20security&st=cse

Posted by lois at 09:26 AM | Comments (0)

August 07, 2009

Overhaul of detention centers could include new "centers" built and run by the government

"Asked if his vision could include building new civil detention centers, he said yes. The current 32,000-bed network costs $2.4 billion a year, but the agency is not ready to calculate the cost of a revamped system."

U.S. to Reform Policy on Detention for Immigrants
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: August 5, 2009
NY Times

The Obama administration intends to announce an ambitious plan on Thursday to overhaul the much-criticized way the nation detains immigration violators, trying to transform it from a patchwork of jail and prison cells to what its new chief called a “truly civil detention system.”

Details are sketchy, and even the first steps will take months or years to complete. They include reviewing the federal government’s contracts with more than 350 local jails and private prisons, with an eye toward consolidating many detainees in places more suitable for noncriminals facing deportation — some possibly in centers built and run by the government.

The plan aims to establish more centralized authority over the system, which holds about 400,000 immigration detainees over the course of a year, and more direct oversight of detention centers that have come under fire for mistreatment of detainees and substandard — sometimes fatal — medical care.

One move starts immediately: the government will stop sending families to the T. Don Hutto Residential Center, a former state prison near Austin, Tex., that drew an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit and scathing news coverage for putting young children behind razor wire.

“We’re trying to move away from ‘one size fits all,’ ” John Morton, who heads the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency as assistant secretary of homeland security, said in an interview on Wednesday. Detention on a large scale must continue, he said, “but it needs to be done thoughtfully and humanely.”

Hutto, a 512-bed center run for profit by the Corrections Corporation of America under a $2.8 million-a-month federal contract, was presented as a centerpiece of the Bush administration’s tough approach to immigration enforcement when it opened in 2006. The decision to stop sending families there — and to set aside plans for three new family detention centers — is the Obama administration’s clearest departure from its predecessor’s immigration enforcement policies.

So far, the new administration has embraced many of those policies, expanding a program to verify worker immigration status that has been widely criticized, bolstering partnerships between federal immigration agents and local police departments, and rejecting a petition for legally binding rules on conditions in immigration detention.

But Mr. Morton, a career prosecutor, said he was taking a new philosophical approach to detention — that the system’s purpose was to remove immigration violators from the country, not imprison them, and that under the government’s civil authority, detention is aimed at those who pose a serious risk of flight or danger to the community.

Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, said last week that she expected the number of detainees to stay the same or grow slightly. But Mr. Morton added that the immigration agency would consider alternative ways to assure that those who face deportation — and are not dangerous — do not flee.

Reviewing and redesigning all facilities, programs and standards will be the task of a new Office of Detention Policy and Planning, he said. Dora Schriro, special adviser to Ms. Napolitano, will become the director, assisted by two experts on detention management and medical care. The agency will also form two advisory boards of community groups and immigrant advocates, one focusing on detention policies and practices, the other on detainee health care.

Mr. Morton said he would appoint 23 detention managers to work in the 23 largest detention centers, including several run by private companies, to ensure that problems are promptly fixed. He is reorganizing the agency’s inspection unit into three regional operations, renaming it the Office of Detention Oversight, and making its agents responsible for investigating detainee grievances as well as conducting routine and random checks.

“A lot of this exists already,” he said. “A lot of it is making it work better” while Dr. Schriro’s office redesigns the detention system, which he called “disjointed” and “very much dependent on excess capacity in the criminal justice system.”

Asked if his vision could include building new civil detention centers, he said yes. The current 32,000-bed network costs $2.4 billion a year, but the agency is not ready to calculate the cost of a revamped system.

Vanita Gupta, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who led the lawsuit against the Hutto center, was jubilant over the decision to stop sending families there, but cautious about the other measures.
“The ending of family detention at Hutto is welcome news and long overdue,” she said in an e-mail message. “However, without independently enforceable standards, a reduction in beds, or basic due process before people are locked up, it is hard to see how the government’s proposed overhaul of the immigration detention system is anything other than a reorganization or renaming of what was in place before.”

Ms. Gupta said the changes at Hutto since 2006 illustrated the importance of enforceable rules. Before the A.C.L.U. lawsuit was settled in 2007, some children under 10 stayed as long as a year, mainly confined to family cells with open toilets, with only one hour of schooling a day. Children told of being threatened by guards with separation from their parents, many of them asylum-seekers from around the world.

Only through judicial enforcement of the settlement, she said, have children been granted such liberties as wearing pajamas at night and taking crayons into family cells. The settlement also required the agency to honor agency standards that had been ignored, like timely reviews of the decision to detain a family at all. Some families have been deported, but others were released or are now awaiting asylum decisions in housing run by nonprofit social service agencies.

That kind of stepped-up triage could be part of the more civil detention system envisioned by Mr. Morton and Dr. Schriro, who has been reviewing the detention system for months and is expected to report her recommendations soon.

But the Hutto case also points to the limits of their approach, advocates say. Under the settlement, parents and children accused of immigration violations were detained when possible at the country’s only other family detention center, an 84-bed former nursing home in Leesport, Pa., called the Berks Family Shelter Care Facility. The number detained at Hutto has dropped sharply, to 127 individuals from as many as 450.

Advocates noted that Berks, though eclipsed by the criticism of Hutto — the subject of protest vigils, a New Yorker article and a documentary — also has a history of problems, like guards who disciplined children by sending them across the parking lot to a juvenile detention center, and families’ being held for two years.

The Hutto legal settlement expires Aug. 29. In the most recent monitoring report last month, Magistrate Judge Andrew W. Austin wrote: “Although the use of this facility to hold families is not a violation of the settlement agreement, it seems fundamentally wrong to house children and their noncriminal parents this way. We can do better.”

Mr. Morton, a career prosecutor, seemed to agree. Hutto will be converted into an immigration jail for women, he said, adding: “I’m not ruling out the possibility of detaining families. But Berks is the better facility for that. Hutto is not the long-term answer.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/us/politics/06detain.html?scp=1&sq=Detention%20Policy&st=cse

Posted by lois at 07:32 PM | Comments (0)

ICE will revamp prisons for holding immigrant families

"Barbara Hines, an attorney who oversees the University of Texas immigration law clinic and was one of the first nonprofit attorneys to visit the Hutto facility, praised ICE's addition of monitors to oversee daily operations at larger immigration facilities.
“Having ICE monitors in prisons is a good step forward because I think in the last couple years, the expansion of detention has gotten out of control, leading to deaths and a lack of medical care,” Hines said. “But I don't think ICE is capable of policing itself.”"

ICE will revamp detainee system
Policy of using converted prisons to hold families of illegal immigrants is on its way out
By SUSAN CARROLL and STEWART POWELL
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Aug. 7, 2009,
Three years ago, immigrant families sent to a Central Texas immigration detention center found themselves at a converted prison rimmed in razor wire. Child inmates slept with their parents in cells monitored by lasers, stood still for daily head counts and donned navy detention uniforms available in sizes as small as infant onesies. They reported getting only one hour of school a day and going weeks without playing in the sun.

As word spread about conditions for families at the T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility, critics pointed to the former medium-security prison as being emblematic of problems associated with the Bush administration's immigration detention practices.

On Thursday, top Department of Homeland Security officials announced plans to end the controversial policy of housing families at the center as part of a major overhaul of the nation's immigration detention system.

John Morton, chief of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, announced plans to increase direct federal oversight of the immigration detention system, which houses an estimated 400,000 people annually in more than 350 facilities — with the largest share of beds in Texas.
Not the usual inmates

The detention centers have been sharply criticized in recent years amid reports of substandard medical care, detainee deaths and poor access to attorneys. Morton said the system will be revamped to get away from a penal detention model that relies heavily on contracts with correctional facilities and private industry. Within the next three to five years, he said, the agency aims to use facilities designed, located and operated specifically for immigration purposes.

“What we're trying to do is design a system that reflects the unique civil detention authorities that we're exercising,” Morton said. “The population that we detain is different than the population that is detained in a traditional prison or jail setting.”

Morton said ICE will hire detention managers to work at each of the 23 largest immigration detention facilities in the country, which collectively house more than 40 percent of ICE detainees. The managers will provide direct oversight of daily operations at those centers, he said. His list of planned reforms also includes improved medical care, detention conditions and system oversight.
Praise for oversight

ICE has dozens of agreements to house detainees in Texas jails and prisons, and reported an average daily population of about 3,700 through those partnerships in Texas during the 2008 fiscal year, according to ICE data. Nationally, the agency also administers eight of its own facilities and has seven contract detention facilities owned and operated by private companies, including the Houston Contract Detention Facility, which in May housed an average of 877 detainees.

Immigrant advocates and some members of Congress applauded ICE's announcement of the reforms, though some called for additional changes to strengthen oversight and due process protections for detainees.

“We hope it signals an approach that is more fair, more humane and more in keeping with our American value system than putting innocent children behind bars and detaining nonviolent, noncriminal immigrants,” said ACLU of Texas executive director Terri Burke.

Barbara Hines, an attorney who oversees the University of Texas immigration law clinic and was one of the first nonprofit attorneys to visit the Hutto facility, praised ICE's addition of monitors to oversee daily operations at larger immigration facilities.

“Having ICE monitors in prisons is a good step forward because I think in the last couple years, the expansion of detention has gotten out of control, leading to deaths and a lack of medical care,” Hines said. “But I don't think ICE is capable of policing itself.”

In March 2007, attorneys for immigrant children detained with their parents at Hutto sued the U.S. government. As part of a settlement agreement later that year, ICE agreed to enforceable standards at Hutto, including external oversight and improved education, nutrition and medical care.

Morton said that instead of housing families, the Hutto facility, which is owned by the for-profit Corrections Corporation of America, will house female detainees. He said ICE will continue to house families at a former nursing home in Pennsylvania, and review family detention on a “case-by-case basis,” including exploring alternatives such as electronic monitoring.

But critics were concerned that ending family detention could resurrect the old “catch-and-release” policy. For years, illegal immigrants with children routinely were detained at the border and then released into the U.S., but many failed to appear for court dates.

“One way of circumventing detention was to come across the border with a child,” said U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. “That's why it was important that these detention facilities for families be provided.”

Morton stressed that ICE is not shying away from immigration detention in general. “We are going to continue to detain people, and we are going to continue to detain people on a large scale,” he said.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/special/immigration/6563802.html
This and other news about immigration can be found at www.realcostofprisons.org/blog/

Posted by lois at 09:58 AM | Comments (0)

August 05, 2009

Report is critical of immigration detention centers

Report is critical of immigration detention centers
Gainesville FL Times
August 5, 2009
BY STEPHEN GURR
Link to report below.

Attorney David Kennedy says clients of his who have been held in immigration detention centers in South Georgia and eastern Alabama routinely are denied fundamental rights.

"I have had clients who have had no access to phones for extended periods of time. I have had clients being questioned and induced into signing things they did not understand," said Kennedy, a Gainesville immigration lawyer.

"I have had clients complain they were stuck in their cells for 23 hours a day. There’s definitely a problem with immigration detention in this country."

On the eve of a new immigration detention center opening in Gainesville, a report issued this week by National Immigration Law Center appears to validate Kennedy’s complaints.

The report, based on confidential Immigration and Customs Enforcement documents obtained in litigation, alleges there are pervasive problems throughout the country’s immigration detention facilities, many of which are operated by private contractors.

Detainees are routinely denied visitation with family members, access to legal materials and regular recreation, according to the report. Many never get an explanation of their rights while being detained, the report claims.

"The conditions are much more harsh than they ought to be," said the report’s co-author, Ranjana Natarajan. "This is a civil detention, and these folks are being treated like hardened criminals."

The Corrections Corporation of America could begin boarding immigration detainees at its new North Georgia Detention Center on Main Street as soon as next week. The site of the old county jail adjoining the Hall County Sheriff’s office underwent $4 million in renovations and is being leased from Hall County for $2 million a year. CCA operates the detention center through an agreement with ICE and the county.

This week, ICE officials did not deny the allegations contained in the report, vowing to continue to improve conditions. But Department of Homeland Security officials recently decided against creating uniform detention center standards that the National Immigration Law Center wants. ICE is supposed to conduct yearly evaluations of every detention center, but has no enforceable, binding legal rules on how inmates are treated, according to the report.

"It creates a lot of gray area," Natarajan said. "Because (detention centers) are not expected to follow the rules, they’re all over the map."

ICE spokeswoman Barbara Gonzalez said agency officials "feel the NILC put together a very thoughtful report, and we will carefully review and take seriously this report, as we would any report. We are committed to continuously improving our immigration detention system."

Gonzalez noted that within 10 days of taking office, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano ordered all immigration enforcement policies to undergo a review, "including detention." In February, Napolitano appointed former Arizona Department of Corrections director Dora Schriro as a special advisor for detention and removal.

"Her position was created to focus exclusively on the significant growth in detention and detainment in the last few years," Gonzalez said.

On any given day, ICE holds about 33,000 immigration detainees in facilities across the country, and supervises another 17,000 people facing deportation through electronic monitoring and other means. The National Immigration Law Center estimates that in 2008 about 220,000 people were held in detention centers prior to deportation. The typical stay is 30 to 90 days.

The Gainesville facility operated by CCA is expected to hold about 500 low- and medium-security immigration detainees, many of them from North Carolina.

CCA spokeswoman Louise Grant referred questions on this week’s report to ICE officials, but noted that "CCA does adhere in every one of our ICE detention facilities to the detention standards set by our customer."

The company also has ICE officials on site for detainee access, Grant said.

This week’s report prompted two U.S. senators to call for a change to the system.

Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., on Thursday introduced the "Strong Standards Act," a proposed bill that would set minimum detention standards and require the Department of Homeland Security to ensure that laws concerning the treatment of detainees are enforced.

"These legislative initiatives will help reinforce what our great country has always stood for: liberty, the rule of law and basic human rights," Menendez said in a statement.

To Kennedy, anything would be an improvement.

"If we’re comparing these (detention centers) to their Turkish counterparts, they’re pretty good," Kennedy said. "But by U.S. standards, they’re pretty poor."

"A Broken System: Confidential Reports Reveal Failures in U.S. Immigration Detention Centers" by the National Immigration Law Center and the ACLU of Southern CA. August 2009. http://www.nilc.org/immlawpolicy/arrestdet/A-Broken-System-2009-07.pdf

Posted by lois at 01:54 PM | Comments (0)

July 06, 2009

Editorial: Justice Ignored. The detention of immigrants under Obama continues to be neglectful and abusive

Editorial: Justice Ignored

NY Times
Published: July 5, 2009

In January 2007, two immigrant advocacy groups and two former immigration detainees petitioned the Department of Homeland Security to take a simple but important step. They asked it to establish legally enforceable standards for the detention system, a fast-growing network of federal centers, county jails and private prisons that has been plagued by medical neglect and abuse.

The petition was ignored, even after reports of several preventable deaths. This was typical for the Bush administration, whose war on illegal immigration was notable for its slipshod cruelty. After waiting more than a year, the advocates sued.

More time passed. So did the Bush administration. On Jan. 21, the day after President Obama was inaugurated, Homeland Security told the court it couldn’t meet a deadline set for that month to respond to the petition, or commit to a date by which it would reply. Neither Mr. Obama nor his new secretary of homeland security has since responded or announced any change of policy.

On June 25, a federal district judge in Manhattan declared that the now two-and-a-half-year delay in answering the petition was “unreasonable as a matter of law,” and ordered the department to respond within 30 days. The judge, Denny Chin, took note of the plaintiffs’ assertion that “detainees in D.H.S. custody are dying as a result of the substandard conditions.” He called the department’s continued silence “egregious.”

The Homeland Security secretary, Janet Napolitano, had earlier announced plans for a comprehensive review of the detention system and other messes left by President Bush. But little has changed, and it has been left to federal judges to correct abuses as they can.

Last month, a judge in New Haven halted the deportations of four immigrant men who had been seized in a blatantly unconstitutional raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who stormed a house without permission, warrant or evidence. I.C.E. had refused to let its agents be cross-examined in the court.

Immigrant advocates greeted the election of President Obama as a chance to finally bring moderation and accountability to a rogue, unresponsive immigration system. In late June, advocates celebrated Mr. Obama’s pledge to solve the immigration mess once and for all, maybe with a bill this year.

But a lot of suffering needs to be undone right now. The administration’s promises would be more convincing if it finally fixed the corrupted detention system.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/06/opinion/06mon2.html?hpw

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

July 04, 2009

Study Finds Gaps in Aid for Non-English Speakers in State Civil Courts

Study Finds Gaps in Aid for Non-English Speakers in State Civil Courts
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: July 3, 2009
NY Times
When Maythe Ramirez went to Superior Court in Contra Costa, Calif., for a child custody hearing in 2006, she wanted to tell the judge that her husband beat her and should not be allowed broad visitation rights. The court did not provide an interpreter for her, however, and Ms. Ramirez, who speaks almost no English, could not follow the arcane proceeding, much less participate.

“It is really as if you are doing nothing in court,” she said in Spanish through an interpreter, “standing still and not being able to explain what’s really happening.”

Ms. Ramirez, who came to the United States from Mexico, later divorced her husband and had the visitation rules modified with the help of a lawyer from Bay Area Legal Aid, who got her interpreters for other hearings.

The court system can be a bewildering place for anyone, but it can be terrifying for those who do not understand English. Federal law requires civil and criminal courts that receive federal financing to provide free interpreters for those with limited proficiency in English. But while interpreters are commonly offered in criminal cases, many states do not require the services in all civil cases. The state of California, where Ms. Ramirez’s case was heard, provides interpreters in some civil cases and not others.

A new study of civil courts, from the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University law school, examined the 35 states with the highest immigrant populations and found that interpreter services are not always provided, or not provided well, and are not keeping up with growing demand. Of those states, 46 percent do not require that interpreters be provided in all cases, and 80 percent fail to guarantee that the courts will pay for the interpreter, as the Department of Justice’s view of the law requires.

Thirty-seven percent of those states do not require that the interpreters have proper credentials. The result is a national patchwork of varying rights from state to state.

“This must change,” the report concluded. “Federal law, principles of fundamental fairness, and our need for equal access to the justice system all demand it.”

The disparity in services for non-English speakers between civil and criminal cases makes little sense in light of the high stakes also in civil court, said Richard S. Brown, a state appellate judge in Wisconsin.

“Civil cases can involve denial of constitutional property rights, termination of parental rights, statutory rights to be free from harassment and stalking, consumer transactions, foreclosures and a host of other matters,” Judge Brown said. “If a person cannot understand what is happening in the courtroom proceeding, an unfair result might occur. And that is contradictory to what we want our courts to do: administer justice, fairly and impartially.”

In family law cases, which deal with issues like divorce, child custody and abuse, the lack of language help “can mean the difference between justice and injustice,” said Purvi Shah, executive director of Sakhi for South Asian Women, an organization concerned with domestic violence among South Asians in the United States.

“Your testimony on the experience of abuse is what needs to be articulated to be able to access remedies,” Ms. Shah said.

States that do not provide interpreters in civil court are violating federal law, said Laura Abel, deputy director of the Justice Program at the Brennan Center and the author of the new report. “The law is very clear,” Ms. Abel said, adding that while some states have made progress in the last decade, “the state courts are just slow to comply.”

Wanda Romberger, manager of court interpreting services at the National Center for State Courts, said states were trying to rise to the challenge, but were struggling to find enough qualified interpreters. Forty states have joined a consortium that promotes language access to the courts and sets standards for training and testing interpreters. But progress is uneven, Ms. Romberger said, and many states have barely begun.

Senator Herb Kohl, Democrat of Wisconsin, introduced a bill last week to provide $15 million a year in seed money for states to develop or improve their court interpreter programs.

The federal requirement to provide interpreters in federally financed programs goes back to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and was underscored by the Clinton administration in an executive order in 2000 requiring agencies to take “reasonable steps to ensure meaningful access” to services. It was followed up with guidelines issued two years later by the Department of Justice.

Loretta King, acting assistant attorney general for civil rights, restated the policy in April at a federal meeting devoted to language skills issues. “Even in tough economic times,” Ms. King said, “assertions of lack of resources will not provide carte blanche for failure to provide language access. Language access is essential and is not to be treated as a ‘frill’ when determining what to cut in a budget.”

The states, however, face daunting costs and challenges to bring language aid to their courts. In New York, where state law requires interpreters to be offered in all civil and criminal cases, costs have been rising, from nearly $18 million in the 2004-5 fiscal year to more than $24 million in the 2008-9 fiscal year, with 282,000 hours of interpretation in nearly 90 languages, including Kurdish, Wolof and Cajun French. According to a recent article by Ms. Romberger from the National Center for State Courts, California civil courts provided more than 160,000 days of court interpreter services in 2004-5 in Spanish alone, and provided thousands of days in more than 20 other languages, including Samoan, Romanian and Jhindu.

California’s costs for interpreter services have risen 12 percent a year since 2004. Arkansas’s costs have risen by 74 percent a year since 2003, according to the state courts group.

Federal court costs are rising as well, with $23 million spent on interpreters in the 2007 fiscal year, up from $18 million in 2004, according to the administrative office of the federal courts.

Such figures gall those who oppose permissive immigration policies. “We accommodate for language too much, and that sends a very clear message that it’s O.K. not to learn English,” said Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, a nonprofit group that seeks to limit immigration. “This is an inevitable cost of massive immigration that is never taken into account when making policy.”

The idea that immigrants should simply learn English, however, does not sit well with Judge Brown.

“I wonder aloud how many immigrants from the 1840s through the 1920s lost their liberty, lost their property, lost their homes, their livelihood, all because they could not yet understand the English language to the fullest,” he said in an e-mail interview.

Judge Brown, who is deaf, said, “I think we are a better country because we are now acknowledging what we did not acknowledge in the 19th and early 20th centuries.”
A version of this article appeared in print on July 4, 2009, on page A13 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/04/us/04interpret.html?scp=1&sq=Brennan%20Center&st=cse

Posted by lois at 09:34 PM | Comments (0)

June 16, 2009

Bail granted for imprisoned HIV-positive pregnant woman in Maine

Bail granted for imprisoned HIV-positive pregnant woman in Maine

This morning, National Advocates for Pregnant Women and Center for HIV Law and Policy, and Elizabeth Frankel and Valerie Wright of the Maine law firm Verrill Dana, LLP, filed an emergency amicus (friend-of-the-court) brief on behalf of 28 public health experts, advocates, and organizations challenging the imprisonment of an HIV positive pregnant woman in order to protect her “innocent” “unborn child.”

Ms. Quinta Tuleh, a 28 year-old woman from Cameroon, was arrested in January 2009 for allegedly having false immigration documents. Shortly after her arrest, she learned she was both pregnant and HIV positive. On May 14, 2009, instead of sentencing her to “time served,” which was consistent with the federal sentencing guidelines and the recommendations of her attorney and the United States Attorney’s Office, United States District Court Judge John Woodcock extended Ms. T’s sentence to 238 days, making clear that the sentence was calculated specifically to ensure that she remained incarcerated for the duration of her pregnancy. See Judge Jails Pregnant Woman Until Baby is Born and Behind Bars for Being Pregnant and HIV-Positive.

Judge Woodcock stated: “My obligation is to protect the public from further crimes of the defendant, and that public, it seems to me at this point, should include the child she’s carrying…I don’t think the transfer of HIV to an unborn child is a crime technically under the law, but it is as direct and as likely as an ongoing assault.” Judge Woodcock reasoned that the Federal Sentencing Guideline permits enhanced sentencing for pregnant women and that extended imprisonment would protect her “unborn child. ”

As is often the situation in cases involving pregnant women, Courts feel pressed to make decisions without benefit of full briefing, input from experts or amicus participation. Indeed, uncertain of Ms. T’s due date and how long he would need to extend the sentence to ensure she was imprisoned through her due date, the Judge looked out over the courtroom and said “So maybe we ought to consult with the women here. Any sense of what a safe range would be?”

The Amicus brief filed this morning provided the Court with the expert information unavailable at the sentencing hearings. The brief outlines legal problems with depriving pregnant women of their liberty in order to advance alleged state interests in fetal health and the public health problems with assuming that jails and prisons provide superior or even adequate health care. As an expert declaration filed by Dr. Robert L. Cohen stated: “Based upon my thirty years of experience in the delivery, administration, research, evaluation, and monitoring of medical care in jails and prisons throughout the United States, it is my opinion that it is very often the case that the medical care available to prisoners falls well below that available to non-prisoners.”

Ms. T is being represented by Zachary L. Heiden of the Maine ACLU.

NAPW and Center for HIV Law and Policy are grateful to Laura McTighe, Director of Project UNSHACKLE, Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project (CHAMP), for her extraordinary help in this effort and the numerous public health experts, advocates, and organizations appearing as amici on this brief, including:

National Women’s Health Network, National Association of People with AIDS, Frannie Peabody Center, Mardge H. Cohen, M.D., Howard Minkoff, M.D., ACT UP Philadelphia, African Services Committee, AIDS Foundation of Chicago, Alliance of AIDS Services – Carolina, American Medical Students Association, Black Women’s Health Imperative, Chicago Women’s AIDS Project, Circle of Care, Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project, HIV Law Project, Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project, Liberty Research Group, National AIDS Fund, National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, Rebecca Project for Human Rights, Twin States Network, Women Organized to Respond to Life-Threatening Disease (WORLD), Women Rising Project, Women Together for Change Project, Jeff Berry, Wendy Chavkin, M.D., MPH, Leslie Gise, M.D., and Sean Strub.

We are pleased to report that the Court granted bail this morning, allowing Ms. T’s release pending appeal in the case.
Posted by Wyndi on June 15, 2009 01:54 PM

and

Dear Friends and Allies:

NAPW is pleased to announce that yesterday morning a federal District Court judge, responding to a motion for bail and our emergency amicus brief, released Quinta Tuleh, a 28 year-old pregnant woman, from federal custody.

Ms. Tuleh, a woman from Cameroon, had already served 114 days in jail for allegedly having false immigration documents. Shortly after her arrest, she learned she was both pregnant and HIV positive. On May 14, 2009, instead of releasing her, a US District Court Judge extended Ms. Tuleh's sentence to ensure that she remain incarcerated for the duration of her pregnancy. (Judge Jails Pregnant Woman Until Baby is Born and Behind Bars for Being Pregnant and HIV-Positive.)

At the sentencing hearing, Judge Woodcock stated: "My obligation is to protect the public from further crimes of the defendant, and that public, it seems to me at this point, should include the child she's carrying...I don't think the transfer of HIV to an unborn child is a crime technically under the law, but it is as direct and as likely as an ongoing assault."

As is often the situation in cases involving pregnant women, Courts make decisions without the benefit of full briefing or input from experts. Indeed, uncertain of Ms. Tuleh's due date and how long he would need to extend the sentence to ensure she was imprisoned through her due date, the Judge looked out over the courtroom and said "So maybe we ought to consult with the women here. Any sense of what a safe range would be?"

Yesterday morning, National Advocates for Pregnant Women, the Center for HIV Law and Policy and attorneys Elizabeth Frankel and Valerie Wright of the Maine firm Verrill Dana, LLP filed an emergency amicus (friend-of-the-court) brief on behalf of 28 public health experts, advocates, and organizations, as well as a declaration from prison health expert Dr. Robert L. Cohen. The brief and expert testimony provided legal and public health information challenging the incarceration of a pregnant woman in order to protect an "innocent" "unborn child."

The judge called the brief "articulate and helpful" during yesterday's hearing where he released Ms. Tuleh on bail pending an appeal of her sentence to the First Circuit Court of Appeals. Ms. Tuleh will now be receiving medical, housing, and other support coordinated by the Frannie Peabody Center, a Portland, Maine community-based HIV resource center. Ms. Tuleh has expressed that she is deeply touched by all of the support she has received. The picture of her yesterday, smiling from ear to ear speaks volumes.

Ms. Tuleh is being represented on her appeal by Zachary L. Heiden of the Maine ACLU.

NAPW and Center for HIV Law and Policy are grateful to Laura McTighe, Director of Project UNSHACKLE, Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project (CHAMP), for her extraordinary help in this effort.

Your continued support of NAPW makes this kind of effective, cross issue collaboration possible. Please contribute what you can to NAPW so that we can continue our collaborative and successful advocacy on behalf of all pregnant women.
Yours Truly,
Lynn M. Paltrow
Executive Director
National Advocates for Pregnant Women
www.advocatesforpregnantwomen.org

Posted by lois at 07:25 PM | Comments (0)

May 26, 2009

Texas Dept of CJ begins screening immigrant prisoners in trial run of nationwide Department of Homeland Security program

Inmate screening put to test in Texas
By STEWART M. POWELL WASHINGTON BUREAU
May 25, 2009
WASHINGTON — Texas prisons are test-driving the Obama administration’s planned nationwide immigration screening and are relaying for the first time the digital fingerprints of roughly 1,500 arriving inmates each week to the Department of Homeland Security.

The statewide screening at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s 24 facilities will likely extend to the nation’s 1,200 state and federal prisons and 3,100 local jails during President Barack Obama’s first term — all part of a high profile crackdown on criminal aliens who have committed serious crimes such as major drug offenses, murder, rape, robbery and kidnapping while living illegally inside the United States.

The cost to federal taxpayers is about $200 million this year and could grow to $1.1 billion by 2013, a fivefold increase in barely four years.

California is expected to be the next state to participate.

“We’re accelerating (screening) because it works,” says Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, a former federal prosecutor and two-term governor of Arizona. “Our goal is looking at the public-safety aspects of illegal immigration.”
Targeting thousands

The program potentially targets tens of thousands of criminals who happen to be immigrants rather than the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants who have entered the United States illegally but often remain law abiding after their arrival.

That focus on criminal aliens rather than undocumented immigrants “will be part of our enforcement strategy moving forward,” Napolitano says.

Texas authorities eventually plan to check the immigration status of the remaining 155,000 inmates in the state prison system, as well, says Michelle Lyons, spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

The statewide program builds upon a pilot program that has been providing immigration screening since last fall to jails in 48 counties nationwide including 17 in Texas, one of which is Harris County.

“We pride ourselves on being at the forefront of corrections and new technology,” Lyons said. “We were certainly glad to have the opportunity to use this new technology to improve upon our exchange of information with ICE.”
‘Positive development’

Sen. John Cornyn, R-San Antonio, an architect of earlier attempts by Congress to enact comprehensive immigration reform, applauded the Obama administration’s bid to identify criminal aliens inside prisons.

“It’s a very positive development,” Cornyn said in a Senate hearing.

Greg Palmore, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent based in Houston, said Texas’ prison officials are learning the immigration status and criminal profile of incoming inmates within minutes because of the federal-state partnership.

“This is an additional tool in our arsenal,” Palmore said. “State officials now know exactly where that individual inmate stands.”

Imprisoned criminal aliens who entered the country illegally or have disobeyed a deportation order can be processed for deportation during their prison terms to get them out of the country faster once their sentence is complete.

As many as 450,000 criminal aliens are imprisoned in federal, state and local facilities across the nation.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/6441017.html

Posted by lois at 09:11 AM | Comments (0)

May 22, 2009

Fingerprinting Plan Will Dramatically Increase Deportations 'Secure Communities' Would Ensnare People with Minor and More Serious Convictions

Fingerprinting Plan Will Dramatically Increase Deportations
'Secure Communities' Would Ensnare Minor as well as Serious Offenders
Washington Independent
By Daphne Eviatar 5/22/09

The idea of deporting illegal immigrants who are also hardened criminals wouldn’t seem like a controversial idea. So when David Venturella, Executive Director of the Secure Communities Program at Immigration and Customs Enforcement testified to Congress in April, he proudly announced the expansion of his program as part of a “comprehensive effort to increase national security and community safety by identifying, processing, and removing deportable criminal aliens.”

But while there’s strong support for deporting dangerous criminals, federal programs such as this one are extending far beyond that goal and detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants for such minor infractions as running a stop sign or carrying an open container of alcohol.

The Secure Communities program, highlighted in a Washington Post story this week, started as a pilot program by President Bush last year. It requires local police to check the immigration status of everyone booked into a local jail. When suspects are fingerprinted, their identifying information is immediately sent to ICE to determine the suspect’s immigration status. (ICE maintains fingerprint data on all individuals who’ve had contact with immigration authorities.) Undocumented immigrants (and even some immigrants who are legal residents) can eventually be deported after their criminal cases are resolved and any sentence is served. If fingerprints from all 14 million suspects booked into local jails each year were screened this way, DHS estimates, about 1.4 million immigrants would be deemed “criminal aliens” and deportable. By contrast, only 117,000 “criminal immigrants” were deported last year.

But the large numbers of immigrants that could be swept up in the program’s snare is causing serious concern among immigrants’ advocates. Although ICE says its goal is to deport the most serious offenders, under the program, identifying information on all suspects arrested for any sort of alleged crimes will be immediately sent to ICE. If the person shows up in an ICE database as an undocumented immigrant, ICE can place a retainer on the individual — meaning they could begin deportation proceedings against him. So an undocumented immigrant wrongly arrested for a traffic violation could be deported under the Secure Communities initiative as easily as could a convicted felon.

Few statistics are available on who is being targeted and deported under the program so far, since it only began in a few communities last October. But since then, the program has been operating in local facilities that have booked 288,000 people, said Richard Rocha, a spokesman for ICE. Of those, almost 3,000 have been “aliens arrested for or convicted of Level 1 offenses,” said Rocha. A Level 1 offense is a crime that carries a sentence of more than a year in prison, such as murder, robbery, rape or drug crimes. “But we’ve lodged detainers on more than 6000,” said Rocha. So about half of the offenders to be deported were either charged with or found guilty of relatively minor offenses. (Rocha said he did not know how many of the 6000 were categorized as Level 2, and how many were Level 3.)

“It’s deceptively benign,” said Joan Friedland, Immigration Policy Director at the National Immigration Law Center, talking about the Secure Communities program. Friedland and others are particularly concerned because other federal programs aimed at seizing and deporting criminal aliens, such as the 287(g) program, which deputizes local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration laws, have led to charges of racial profiling and, according to the General Accountability Office, deportation of undocumented immigrants picked up for such minor infractions as speeding, carrying an open container of alcohol, and urinating in public. Local police also worry, as a report released this week from the Police Foundation points out, that the program deters undocumented immigrants from reporting crimes and cooperating with local investigations.

Particularly brazen sheriffs in communities with high anti-immigrant sentiment — such as Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the Arizona sheriff known for marching illegal immigrants past news cameras in leg irons and prison underwear — appear to be taking advantage of the law to try to rid their counties of as many immigrants as possible. Arpaio is now under federal investigation for racial profiling and other potential civil rights violations.

Immigrant advocates worry that the Secure Communities program could cause even more problems because 287(g) at least trains local officials on using the immigration laws and targeting dangerous criminals. The Secure Communities initiative, by contrast, has no safeguards to prevent its abuse by local authorities or to ensure that ICE focuses on deporting felons or other serious or repeat offenders rather than those arrested for minor infractions or as a pretense.

“Because of how other programs have operated you’d think you’d want something in place when this one starts to prevent its abuse,” said Friedland. Yet, as Rocha confirmed, the program has no regulations that govern how ICE or local authorities are supposed to implement it.
“The problem with Secure Communities,” said Marty Rosenbluth, an immigration lawyer with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice in Durham, North Carolina, “is there’s no way that we know of to be able to track it. There’s no accountability, there’s no reporting procedures, there’s no way to document in any systematic fashion who’s getting into deportation proceedings because of Secure Communities.” Secure Communities is now operating in 12 communities in North Carolina, and 48 nationwide. DHS plans to expand it to all local law enforcement agencies by the end of 2012.

“Under 287(g) in North Carolina, most people deported have been picked up for driving-related offenses. With Secure Communities, since the identification process is when people are booked, not when they’re convicted, our fear is that the same pattern will duplicate itself,” said Rosenbluth.

Indeed, Ivan Ortiz, an ICE spokesman, told the North Carolina News & Observer when asked about the program: “If the person ran a light, then we need to prioritize our work, and we may not be able to send an agent to the local jail to get them,” Ortiz said. “But I guarantee you, we will catch up to them later.”

Rocha, the ICE spokesman in Washington, confirmed that. “The goal of this plan is to identify and remove all criminal aliens in jails and prisons.” he said. Although the focus will first be “on those who present the greatest risk to public safety and national security,” ICE will also deport other lower-level criminals “as resources permit.”

Immigration lawyers worry that in fact, the low-level criminals will be the bulk of the program’s victims. “Based on my personal experience with 287(g),” says Rosenbluth, “I find it very unlikely that if someone is arrested on a driving-related offense, that if ICE has the capacity to pick that person up, that ICE will just leave them.”

The other problem is that due to flawed databases, the program can ensnare people who are in the United States legally, including U.S. citizens. “I had a client who was in a local jail for three months on an immigration detainer,” said Rosenbluth. “It took me three months to prove he was a U.S. citizen and couldn’t be deported,” he said.

Unlike in criminal court, immigrants don’t have the right to have an attorney represent them in immigration proceedings. So if someone is acquitted of a crime but shows up in a database as being in the United States illegally, he can be deported even if he’s here legally, simply because he can’t prove his legal status and doesn’t have the right to a lawyer who can help him.

“Once Secure Communities hits, particularly in rural areas where there there are very few lawyers, it’s going to be devastating,” said Rosenbluth, who said he’s one of only two immigration lawyers in North Carolina devoted full-time to representing immigrants in deportation proceedings. “People are going to get picked up at a traffic stop, fingerprinted and identified as undocumented even though they have a right to be here.”

What’s more, the program can target people who are innocent, too. “It applies when anyone is fingerprinted by a cooperating law enforcement agent,” said Tom Barry, who directs the TransBorder Project of the Americas at the Center for International Policy. “So if someone is booked for driving without a license and indeed they had a license,” if they’re undocumented, it applies to them, too.

Even people who are legal residents in the United States can be eligible for deportation under the program if they’re arrested and in the past had been convicted of a crime. “It may have been two decades ago,” said Barry. “So people who are longstanding members of a community and legal residents can be deported.”

Ultimately, the determination is made by the ICE officer and whether ICE has room to detain the person. “It depends if they have enough beds, rather than if the person is a dangerous criminal,” said Barry.

According to David Venturella, the Secure Communities program director, between October 2008 and the end of February of this year, ICE has processed “more than 117,000 fingerprint submissions under the program, which resulted in the identification of over 12,000 criminal aliens.” Of those, 862 “have been identified as dangerous criminals,” or Level 1 offenders — which includes nonviolent drug crimes. Even if 862 is a significant number of criminals who can now potentially be deported, that’s only seven percent of the total number of immigrants the program has identified as eligible for deportation. What will happen to the 93 percent of aliens — both legal and illegal — who were arrested for minor infractions remains to be seen.
http://washingtonindependent.com/44141/fingerprinting-plan-will-dramatically-increase-deportations

Posted by lois at 06:46 PM | Comments (0)

OK: Bill passes that would send immigrant prisoners to federal prisons for deportation.

Oklahoma bill would deport imprisoned aliens

By The Associated Press
Published: May 22, 2009

Legislation that authorizes state prisons to send illegal alien inmates to federal immigration officials for deportation has passed the state House. The bill would also prevent the government from transferring terrorists from the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp to private prisons in Oklahoma.

Lawmakers approved the measure Friday and sent it to the Senate for final passage.

Its author, Rep. Randy Terrill of Moore, says the deportation provisions will save the state millions of dollars in incarceration costs. The provisions apply only to illegal aliens who are incarcerated for nonviolent crimes and have served at least one-third of their sentence.

The bill also makes it illegal for private prison contractors to provide housing, care and control of detainees designated as enemy combatants by the federal government.

http://newsok.com/oklahoma-bill-would-deport-imprisoned-aliens/article/3371840?custom_click=headlines_widget

Posted by lois at 06:42 PM | Comments (0)

WA: Gov moves to deport illegal immigrants in prisons. Will not take part in ICE "rapid removal"

"The governor made it clear that the state would not join in ICE's rapid removal program.
For immigrant advocates, the shift in policy was welcome news. From the beginning, the main concern for immigration groups was protecting due process. Deportation procedures are conducted under a different court system than criminal cases. In many cases, legal representation is hard to obtain and immigrants who may be eligible to stay in the country end up signing deportation papers, advocates argue.
"We're not opposed to the underlying scheme, but we wanted to make sure there's a due process all along," said Shankar Narayan, legislative director for Washington's ACLU chapter."

May, 19, 2009
Gov moves to deport illegal immigrants in prisons
By MANUEL VALDES / Associated Press Writer
SEATTLE -- Gov. Chris Gregoire is moving forward with clearing Washington prisons of illegal immigrants to save money, but at what may be a slower rate than originally planned after lawmakers failed to pass a bill that would have hastened the process.

In a letter sent last week to the state Department of Corrections, Gregoire outlined the state's approach to transferring illegal immigrant prisoners to federal custody. Her proposal, though, does not give the state as much authority as the original bill.
The slower rate of transferring prisoners to federal custody may also mean less savings for taxpayers because not as many prisoners are expected to be moved to immigration authorities.

"Time equals money here, so as long as we have to house them, it runs up additional charges for the state of Washington," Department of Corrections Secretary Eldon Vail said Tuesday.

The original bill aimed to save the state $8 million in the next two-year budget cycle. The measure was part of a slew of bills to cut state costs in the face of a $9 billion deficit.

The bill's demise left an $8 million gap in the Department of Corrections' budget. Vail said state budget writers assumed the bill would pass, and now the department has to fill the budget hole. He added that it's not known how much the department will be able to recoup.

Earlier, Vail said there are about 350 prisoners in Washington who would be eligible to be transferred. On average, he said, it costs the state $90 a day to imprison an inmate.

The bill would have allowed the Department of Corrections more flexibility in transferring illegal immigrant inmates. Now, Vail said, the department will have to coordinate with prosecutors and judges to work out a system in which the state asks for early release of inmates.

Originally, the state had considered copying an Arizona program in which corrections workers would have been trained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to help process inmates suspected of being in the country illegally.

In her letter, Gregoire moved away from such a plan.
The "federal government has exclusive jurisdiction over the determination of immigration status and deportation activities," Gregoire wrote. "At no time shall our state Department of Corrections or its staff be delegated a decision-making role."
Gregoire also said that the Department of Corrections should provide access to information on obtaining legal representation to any inmate being considered for transfer. The governor made it clear that the state would not join in ICE's rapid removal program.
For immigrant advocates, the shift in policy was welcome news. From the beginning, the main concern for immigration groups was protecting due process. Deportation procedures are conducted under a different court system than criminal cases. In many cases, legal representation is hard to obtain and immigrants who may be eligible to stay in the country end up signing deportation papers, advocates argue.
"We're not opposed to the underlying scheme, but we wanted to make sure there's a due process all along," said Shankar Narayan, legislative director for Washington's ACLU chapter.

For most of the legislative session, the two bills relating to clearing the way for the state to remove illegal immigrant prisoners cruised through committees and the Senate floor. However, lawmakers did not begin considering final passage of the measure until the waning hours of the session. Then gridlock hit - and other bills took priority.

Meanwhile, several lawmakers in the House introduced a handful of amendments, which helped shelve the legislation as the session ran out of time.

"One of the concerns that I was trying to address through the amendment was to point out that the policy would affect not only individuals without proper documentation, it would also affect permanent legal residents as well as U.S. citizens," said Rep. Sharon Tomiko Santos, D-Seattle.

She added: "So while it's convenient to talk about it as a measure that is intended to address this so-called illegal alien offender, it misses the understanding that individuals who are here legally with proper documentation, who may mistakenly be arrested for a felony charge, are considered automatically deportable."
Vail said his department is in talks with ICE to create an agreement between the state and the agency, but that none has been reached yet.

http://www.bellinghamherald.com/latestheadlines/story/916474.html?story_link=email_msg

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

May 19, 2009

U.S. to Expand Immigration Checks to All Local Jails Obama Administration's Enforcement Push Could Lead to Sharp Increase in Deportation Cases

U.S. to Expand Immigration Checks to All Local Jails
Obama Administration's Enforcement Push Could Lead to Sharp Increase in Deportation Cases
By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 19, 2009

The Obama administration is expanding a program initiated by President George W. Bush aimed at checking the immigration status of virtually every person booked into local jails. In four years, the measure could result in a tenfold increase in illegal immigrants who have been convicted of crimes and identified for deportation, current and former U.S. officials said.

By matching inmates' fingerprints to federal immigration databases, authorities hope to pinpoint deportable illegal immigrants before they are released from custody. Inmates in federal and state prisons already are screened. But authorities generally lack the time and staff to do the same at local jails, which house up to twice as many illegal immigrants at any time and where inmates come and go more quickly.

The effort is likely to significantly reshape immigration enforcement, current and former executive branch officials said. It comes as the Obama administration and Democratic leaders in Congress vow to crack down on illegal immigrants who commit crimes, rather than those who otherwise abide by the law.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has made it "very clear" that her top priority is deporting illegal immigrants who have committed crimes, said David J. Venturella, program director at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

"We mean this, we're serious about it, and we believe we need to put in an all-out effort to get this done," said Rep. David E. Price (D-N.C.), chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee for homeland security. He has led calls to remove illegal immigrants convicted of crimes after their sentences are served.

The program began as a pilot effort in October and operates in 48 counties across the country, including Fairfax County. This year, fingerprints from 1 million local jail bookings will be screened under the program. It also operates Dallas, Houston, Miami, Boston and Phoenix, according to ICE, and will expand to Los Angeles this year and nearly all local jails by the end of 2012.

The effort differs from programs in several Northern Virginia counties where local law enforcement officers have been deputized to question suspects about whether they are in the country legally. In Montgomery County, police provide immigration authorities the names of those arrested on charges of violent crimes and handgun violations.

Under the new program, the immigration checks will be automatic: Fingerprints currently being run through the FBI's criminal history database also will be matched against immigration databases maintained by the Department of Homeland Security. The effort would not catch people who have never been fingerprinted by U.S. authorities.

Based on the pilot program, the agency estimates that if fingerprints from all 14 million bookings in local jails each year were screened, about 1.4 million "criminal aliens" would be found, Venturella said. That would be about 10 times the 117,000 criminal illegal immigrants ICE deported last year. There are more than 3,100 local jails nationwide, compared with about 1,200 federal and state prisons.

The program, known as Secure Communities, "presents an historic opportunity to transform immigration enforcement," said Julie Myers Wood, who launched it last year while head of ICE.

In his proposed 2010 budget, President Obama asked Congress last week for $200 million for the program, a 30 percent increase that puts it on track to receive $1.1 billion by 2013.

The program could help answer for the first time a question that has been intertwined with debates over immigration policy: How many illegal immigrants in the United States are convicted of non-immigration crimes?

But even some supporters of the program wonder whether it can be implemented smoothly and whether there will be sufficient funding. A surge in deportation cases, noted Stewart Baker, former assistant secretary of homeland security for policy, would require more prosecutors, immigration judges, detention beds and other resources.
Venturella also acknowledged that integrating federal, state and local databases is complex and that the capabilities of local jurisdictions vary. Some counties may take several years to be linked in.
"It's a good program. It's a very expensive program," said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy for the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington think tank that advocates tighter immigration controls. "I don't know if it's feasible or sensible for all state and local governments."

Venturella said ICE will give priority to deporting the most dangerous offenders: national security risks or those convicted of violent crimes. Based on initial projections, the agency estimates that 100,000 of these are "Level 1 offenders" and that deporting them would cost $1.1 billion over four years. Removing all criminal illegal immigrants would cost $3 billion, ICE estimated last year.
Critics say that deporting the worst criminal illegal immigrants, by itself, does not go far enough because it would not fully address the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants already in the United States or deter further illegal immigration.

"If the Obama administration abandons immigration enforcement in all but the most serious criminal cases, then they will create a de facto amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants and will encourage even more illegal immigration," said Rep. Lamar Smith (Tex.), the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee.
He said the Obama administration should complete construction of a border fence, enforce laws against hiring illegal workers and deport illegal immigrants before they commit crimes.
Amnesty International and immigrant advocates warn that the change could lead to immigration checks in other arenas and the "criminalization" of illegal immigration.

Tom Barry, an analyst for the Center for International Policy, a nonprofit research and policy institute in Washington, said the initiative could sweep up foreign-born U.S. residents who have served time for offenses but were not deported.

"Many, many legal immigrants are going to be pulled into this net even for minor violations that they're booked for -- traffic violations, drunk driving, whatever -- and after they've lived here 10 or 20 years, they're going to be deported," Barry said.
By checking all people who are booked, supporters say, the program avoids racial profiling. It also could stem what some see as overzealous efforts by some local authorities who, through a $60 million-a-year ICE training program, have stepped up their pursuit of illegal immigrants through measures such as neighborhood sweeps and traffic stops.

"The administration should reassert the primacy of the federal government's role in enforcing immigration law," said Donald Kerwin, vice president for programs at the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank in Washington. He said, however, that such action should be coupled with efforts to find lawyers for immigrants in deportation proceedings. Unlike in criminal courts, the immigration court system does not provide public defenders.

Posted by lois at 04:29 PM | Comments (0)

May 18, 2009

AZ: Community activists, immigrant-rights advocates, tribal critics and local elected officials don't want to see a federal detention center

Tucson Region
Prison plan opposition grows
County's help sought to fight US facility slated for O'odham land near Sahuarita
By Erica Meltzer
Arizona Daily Star
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 05.18.2009

Community activists, immigrant-rights advocates, tribal critics and local elected officials don't want to see a federal detention center built near Pima Mine Road on the San Xavier District of the Tohono O'odham Nation.

Opponents, including residents of Rancho Sahuarita and the Rev. Robin Hoover of Humane Borders, asked the Pima County Board of Supervisors last week for the county's help in stopping the prison's construction.

The county's power lies only in raising questions and asking the federal government to require more study of the impact before signing off on the project. The county has no direct jurisdiction over projects built on sovereign Indian territory.

Pima County Supervisors Ramón Valadez and Sharon Bronson joined County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry in sending a letter Friday to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. They raised numerous concerns about the project, including impacts on regional flooding, archaeological resources near the Santa Cruz River, traffic and conservation efforts.

The comments are in response to an environmental assessment prepared for the project that critics say ignores effects the prison would have outside the reservation.

The county asked that the federal government require an environmental-impact statement, which is a much more thorough study.
Many residents of neighboring Sahuarita say the assessment treats the project as if its impact stopped at the San Xavier District boundaries. The assessment does not address the schools, homes and parks in Rancho Sahuarita, less than a mile away.
"While they may be a quasi-sovereign nation, they do not exist in a vacuum," Rancho Sahuarita resident Linda Cooper said.
District Chairman Austin Nuñez said anyone who lives near the Tohono O'odham land should have known there was the potential for development there. He said the request for input from other communities is "more a courtesy than anything else."

"We feel the project is being considerate of the neighbors in terms of light pollution, in terms of noise pollution," he said. "We moved it further north of Pima Mine Road. It's a single story and should not be visible. The security will be maximum, even though it's a medium-security facility."

The district is hoping to build a 750-bed, 140,000-square-foot prison on 48 acres just east of the Santa Cruz River and about 4,000 feet north of Pima Mine Road. The prison would create around 300 jobs, and the district would be paid a percentage of the bed fee.

Pima Mine Road is the boundary between Sahuarita and the San Xavier District, one of 11 districts within the Tohono O'odham Nation. It's also the northern boundary of Sahuarita's largest population center, the 4,200-home Rancho Sahuarita master-planned community.
"On a personal level, I just think it's going to change a lot of people's lifestyles," said Julia Whetten, a Rancho Sahuarita resident. "We came here looking for safety and wanting to raise our children with the values we grew up with. To have something that's so close that is a reminder of the evils of the world is just not what I want for my children."
And Rancho Sahuarita residents aren't the only ones opposing the project.

Former Tohono O'odham Tribal Council member David Garcia, who is not a member of the San Xavier District, said the U.S. Border Patrol detention centers that have been built on the reservation should raise questions about the project, including what sort of liability the tribe and the district would face if prisoners were to file lawsuits over their treatment at the planned facility. He said hearings on the proposal are needed.

Hoover told the Board of Supervisors he is concerned that the prison will not meet state and federal standards for treatment of detainees because there is not the same accountability on tribal land.
Nuñez said the facility will meet the highest standards.

Valadez said he believes new prisons should be built in the same area as the existing state and federal prisons on South Wilmot Road, where residents knew what they were getting when they bought houses there.
Bronson said she has serious concerns about possible flooding from the reservation site.

Officials from the Bureau of Indian Affairs could not be reached Friday to talk about whether they would require the San Xavier District to do more to address community concerns.
http://www.azstarnet.com/metro/293306

Posted by lois at 11:07 PM | Comments (0)

April 23, 2009

After Losing Freedom, Some Immigrants Face Loss of Custody of Their Children

After Losing Freedom, Some Immigrants Face Loss of Custody of Their Children
By GINGER THOMPSON- NY Times
Published: April 22, 2009

CARTHAGE, Mo. — When immigration agents raided a poultry processing plant near here two years ago, they had no idea a little American boy named Carlos would be swept up in the operation.

One of the 136 illegal immigrants detained in the raid was Carlos’s mother, Encarnación Bail Romero, a Guatemalan. A year and a half after she went to jail, a county court terminated Ms. Bail’s rights to her child on grounds of abandonment. Carlos, now 2, was adopted by a local couple.

In his decree, Judge David C. Dally of Circuit Court in Jasper County said the couple made a comfortable living, had rearranged their lives and work schedules to provide Carlos a stable home, and had support from their extended family. By contrast, Judge Dally said, Ms. Bail had little to offer.

“The only certainties in the biological mother’s future,” he wrote, “is that she will remain incarcerated until next year, and that she will be deported thereafter.”

It is unclear how many children share Carlos’s predicament. But lawyers and advocates for immigrants say that cases like his are popping up across the country as crackdowns against illegal immigrants thrust local courts into transnational custody battles and leave thousands of children in limbo.

“The struggle in these cases is there’s no winner,” said Christopher Huck, an immigration lawyer in Washington State.

He said that in many cases, what state courts want to do “conflicts with what federal immigration agencies are supposed to do.”

“Then things spiral out of control,” Mr. Huck added, “and it ends up in these real unfortunate situations.”

Next month, the Nebraska Supreme Court is scheduled to hear an appeal by Maria Luis, a Guatemalan whose rights to her American-born son and daughter were terminated after she was detained in April 2005 on charges of falsely identifying herself to a police officer. She was later deported.

And in South Carolina, a Circuit Court judge has been working with officials in Guatemala to find a way to send the baby girl of a Guatemalan couple, Martin de Leon Perez and his wife, Lucia, detained on charges of drinking in public, to relatives in their country so the couple does not lose custody before their expected deportation.

Patricia Ravenhorst, a South Carolina lawyer who handles immigration cases, said she had tried “to get our judges not to be intimidated by the notion of crossing an international border.”

“I’ve asked them, ‘What would we do if the child had relatives in New Jersey?’ ” Ms. Ravenhorst said. “We’d coordinate with the State of New Jersey. So why can’t we do the same for a child with relatives in the highlands of Guatemala?”

Dora Schriro, an adviser to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, said the agency was looking for ways to deal with family separations as it prepared new immigration enforcement guidelines. In visits to detention centers across the country, Ms. Schriro said, she had heard accounts of parents losing contact or custody of their children.

Child welfare laws differ from state to state. In the Missouri case, Carlos’s adoptive parents were awarded custody last year by Judge Dally after they privately petitioned the court and he terminated Ms. Bail’s rights to Carlos.

In February, immigration authorities suspended Ms. Bail’s deportation order so she could file suit to recover custody. Ms. Bail’s lawyer, John de Leon, of Miami, said his client had not been informed about the adoption proceedings in her native Spanish, and had no real legal representation until it was too late.

The lawyer for Carlos’s adoptive parents, Joseph L. Hensley, said his clients had waited more than a year for Ms. Bail to demonstrate her commitment to Carlos, but the judge found that she had made no attempt to contact the baby or send financial support for him while she was incarcerated. The couple asked not to be named to protect Carlos’s privacy.

Ms. Bail came to the United States in 2005, and Carlos was born a year later. In May 2007, she was detained in a raid on George’s Processing plant in Butterfield, near Carthage in southwestern Missouri.

Immigration authorities quickly released several workers who had small children. But authorities said Ms. Bail was ineligible to be freed because she was charged with using false identification. Such charges were part of a crackdown by the Bush administration, which punished illegal immigrants by forcing them to serve out sentences before being deported.

When Ms. Bail went to jail, Carlos, then 6 months old, was sent to stay with two aunts who remembered him as having a voracious appetite and crying constantly. But they also said he had a severe rash and had not received all of his vaccinations.

The women — each with three children of their own, no legal status, tiny apartments and little money — said the baby was too much to handle. So when a local teachers’ aide offered to find someone to take care of Carlos, the women agreed.

Then in September 2007, Ms. Bail said, the aide visited her in jail to say that an American couple was interested in adopting her son. The couple had land and a beautiful house, Ms. Bail recalled being told, and had become very fond of Carlos.

“My parents were poor, and they never gave me to anyone,” Ms. Bail recalled. “I was not going to give my son to anyone either.”

An adoption petition arrived at the jail a few weeks later. Ms. Bail, who cannot read Spanish, much less English, said she had a cellmate from Mexico translate. With the help of a guard and an English-speaking Guatemalan visitor, Ms. Bail wrote a response to the court.

“I do not want my son to be adopted by anyone,” she scrawled on a sheet of notebook paper on Oct. 28, 2007. “I would prefer that he be placed in foster care until I am not in jail any longer. I would like to have visitation with my son.”

For the next 10 months, she said, she had no communication with the court. During that time, Judge Dally appointed a lawyer for Ms. Bail, but later removed him from the case after he pleaded guilty to charges of domestic violence.

Mr. Hensley, the lawyer for Carlos’s adoptive parents, said he had sent a letter to Ms. Bail to tell her that his clients were caring for her son, as did the court, but both letters were returned unopened. “We afforded her more due process than most people get who speak English,” Mr. Hensley said.

Ms. Bail said she had asked the public defender who was representing her in the identity theft case to help her determine Carlos’s whereabouts, but the lawyer told her she handled only criminal matters. “I went to court six times, and six times I asked for help to find my son,” she said. “But no one helped me.”

Ms. Bail got a Spanish-speaking lawyer, Aldo Dominguez, to represent her in the custody case only last June. By the time he reached her two months later — she had been transferred to a prison in West Virginia — it was too late to make her case to Judge Dally, Mr. Dominguez said.

“Her lifestyle, that of smuggling herself into the country illegally and committing crimes in this country, is not a lifestyle that can provide stability for a child,” the judge wrote in his decision. “A child cannot be educated in this way, always in hiding or on the run.”

Next Article in US (1 of 32) » A version of this article appeared in print on April 23, 2009, on page A15 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/us/23children.html?pagewanted=all

Posted by lois at 02:05 PM | Comments (0)

April 04, 2009

Immigrant Detainee Dies in a NJ jail, and a Life Is Buried, Too

Immigrant Detainee Dies, and a Life Is Buried, Too
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: April 2, 2009 NY Times

The hand-scrawled letter from a New Jersey jail was urgent. An immigration detainee had died that day, Sept. 9, 2005, a fellow inmate wrote in broken English, describing chest pains and pleas for medical attention that went unheeded until too late.

“Death ... need to be investigated,” he urged a local group that corresponded with foreigners held for deportation at the jail, the Monmouth County Correctional Institute in Freehold. “We care very much because that can happen to anyone of us.”

Yet like a message in a bottle tossed from a distant shore, even the fact of the detainee’s death was soon swept away.

Inquiries by the local group were rebuffed by jail officials. Complaints forwarded to the Department of Homeland Security were logged, then forgotten. And when pressure from Congress and the news media compelled Immigration and Customs Enforcement to produce the first list of people who had died in their custody, the Freehold case was not on it.

The difficulty of confirming the very existence of the dead man, Ahmad Tanveer, 43, a Pakistani New Yorker, shows how death can fall between the cracks in immigration detention, the rapidly growing patchwork of more than 500 county jails, profit-making prisons and federal detention centers where half a million noncitizens were held during the last year while the government tried to deport them.

The case underscores the secrecy and lack of legal accountability that continue to shield the system from independent oversight, despite years of escalating Congressional inquiries and new efforts by Obama administration appointees to promote transparency.

“We still do not know, and we cannot know, if there are other deaths that have never been disclosed by ICE, or that ICE itself knows nothing about,” said Tom Jawetz, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, which has been battling in court for months to obtain government records on all detention deaths, including the Freehold case and those named on the first government list, obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act and published last year.

Even now, most questions about Mr. Tanveer are unanswered, including just who he was and why he had been detained. The rescue of his death from oblivion took a rare mix of chance, vigilance by a few citizen activists, litigation by the civil liberties union and several months of inquiry by The Times. Even as the newspaper confirmed Mr. Tanveer’s death with jail officials, and tracked his body’s path from a Freehold morgue to the cargo hold of an airplane at Kennedy Airport, immigration authorities maintained that they could find no documents showing such a person was ever detained, or died in their custody.

Not until March 20, in response to a new request by The Times under the Freedom of Information Act, did the agency release an internal e-mail message acknowledging that the death had been overlooked. It issued a corrected list that now includes him — his first and last names transposed — among 90 people who died in immigration custody between Oct. 7, 2003, and Feb. 7, 2009.

“We believe we have accounted for every single detainee death,” Kelly Nantel, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said last week, adding that a death in March was promptly reported to Congress under a policy directive from Dora Schriro, the new administration’s special adviser on detention.

Yet even the latest list, which Ms. Nantel called “comprehensive, thorough,” is missing a known death from 2008: that of Ana Romero Rivera, a 44-year-old Salvadoran cleaning woman who was found hanged last August in an isolation cell in a county jail in Frankfort, Ky., where she was awaiting deportation. Federal officials now disagree whether she was legally in their custody when she died.

There are unverified reports that other detainees may have died unnamed and uncounted. At the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center in Miami, for example, directors cite a letter in late July 2007 from a detainee who described an 18-year-old Haitian woman, “Mari Rosa,” coughing up blood for hours without medical attention at the Glades County Jail in Moore Haven, Fla. The letter said she fell to the ground, had no pulse when she was finally taken to the medical unit and was never brought back, adding, “The detainees think she is dead.”

The center has been unable to confirm what happened to that woman, said Susana Barciela, its policy director.

No central body is required to publicly keep track of deaths in custody in the fragmented detention system. No independent inquiry is mandated. The House recently passed a bill that would require states that receive certain federal funds to report all deaths in custody to their attorneys general. But the measure has yet to be taken up in the Senate, where similar legislation stalled last fall.

“How can you overlook a guy who died in your custody?” asked Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat who has presided over two subcommittee hearings dealing with care and deaths in detention, battling unsuccessfully for full disclosure from immigration officials. “Did they forget other people? Was it an isolated, single error, or was it something more sinister?”

As Congress and the news media brought new scrutiny to the issue, several detention deaths have highlighted problems with medical care and accountability. In one, a Chinese computer engineer’s extensive cancer and fractured spine went undiagnosed at a Rhode Island jail until shortly before he died, despite his pleas for help. In another, records show a Guinean tailor who suffered a skull fracture in a New Jersey jail was left in isolation without treatment for more than 13 hours.

In Mr. Tanveer’s case, efforts to draw public scrutiny were exceptional, yet went nowhere. The scrawled note by his fellow detainee, a Nigerian who garbled the dead man’s name as “Ahmed Tender,” reached citizen activists at the New Jersey Civil Rights Defense Committee, who were unable to confirm it. Other complaints that Mr. Tanveer did not receive proper care separately reached a former member of the group, Jean Blum, a disabled Holocaust survivor who had continued corresponding with dozens of detainees from her home in Paterson, N.J., even though she could barely afford the postage.

“I am very, very aware of the issues that involve displaced people,” said Ms. Blum, 73, who was a child when she and her parents, Polish Jews, fled the Nazis. “I could not turn my back, because that is my history.”

Ms. Blum forwarded a packet of correspondence about the death to the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general by Sept. 20, 2005, seeking an investigation. But within weeks, documents show, the matter was simply passed for internal inquiry to the immigration agency, which is part of Homeland Security, with the notation that it need not bother to report back its findings.

Years after Mr. Tanveer’s death, the scrawled note about his heart attack came to the attention of the A.C.L.U., and its lawyers noticed that no such name appeared on the first government list of 66 people published by The Times in 2008. The union added the name to its lawsuit, and eventually obtained the paper trail on what Ms. Blum had sent the government.

The union learned that the inspector general’s office had written up a synopsis of the allegations for investigation by the immigration agency, saying that “Ahmad Tander,” a Pakistani detainee housed at the Monmouth jail, had died “from a heart attack whose symptoms were obvious, severe and ignored until it was too late,” amid “conditions of neglect and indifference to medical needs.”

But when the A.C.L.U. pressed for more, government lawyers said no further records could be found.

Early this year, The Times called a spokeswoman for the Monmouth County Sheriff, who confirmed the death and gave the name as Tanver — later correcting the spelling to Tanveer.

In names transcribed from a foreign alphabet, such variations often pose a problem of identification. But the facts matched: Mr. Tanveer had arrived at the jail in immigration custody on Aug. 12, 2005, and on Sept. 9 was taken by ambulance to CentraState Medical Center in Freehold, where he died, the spokeswoman, Cynthia Scott, said. Under the jail’s federal contract, she said, nothing more could be disclosed.

A CentraState spokesman initially denied that such a patient had died at the hospital. Later the medical record was found misfiled, and the spokesman, James M. Goss, confirmed the man’s death at age 43. But, citing privacy laws and policy, he declined to answer other questions about the case, including what had happened to the body.

In New Jersey, as in many states, autopsy reports are private. But the county morgue confirmed that an autopsy had been performed. Eventually, two details were shared: the name of the Queens funeral home that picked up the body for burial on Sept. 12, and the fact that the autopsy report was sent two months later to Mark Stokes, an official in the New York office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Yet for more than three years since, the tallies and testimony that the agency submitted to Congress about detainee deaths have not included the Tanveer case.

In January 2009, equipped with confirmation, The Times again requested documents in Mr. Tanveer’s death. President Obama had just directed federal agencies to err on the side of transparency in releasing records to the public. But a Freedom of Information officer soon said she was stymied: Immigration record-keepers told her no documents could be located without the dead man’s date of birth or eight-digit alien registration number.

And the body? The director of the funeral home, Coppola-Migliore in Corona, Queens, said Mr. Tanveer’s New York relatives had it flown to Pakistan for burial, using Pakistan International Airlines. But the funeral director declined to identify the relatives without their permission and said they had not returned phone calls. And the Pakistani Consulate had no record of the case.

Also futile was a search for witnesses among fellow detainees, many since deported. The Nigerian detainee who wrote the urgent letter, an ailing diabetic, was later released pending a deportation hearing. According to social workers at the Queens-based charity that was his last known contact, he is now a homeless fugitive, lost in the streets of New York.

Victoria L. Allred, chief of staff in the financial office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, wrote in an internal e-mail message March 4 that the death had not been discovered until after the chart omitting it had been submitted to Congress for the latest subcommittee hearing, March 3. “I apologize for the discrepancy,” she wrote.

Yet as of Thursday, immigration authorities still have not released records on Mr. Tanveer’s detention or death, which they attribute to “occlusive coronary atherosclerosis,” nor have they addressed the complaint that his heart attack went untreated in the jail for more than two hours.

On the expanded list, he is the only detainee with no birth date. And in the e-mail message acknowledging the death, his alien registration number has been redacted — to protect his privacy, the government said.

Margot Williams contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 4, 2009
An article on Friday about the death of Ahmad Tanveer, a Pakistani New Yorker, in a New Jersey jail in 2005, a case that underscores the secrecy and lack of accountability in the nation’s immigrant detention system, misstated, in some editions, the time period covered by the latest list of deaths in immigrant custody released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The list, which concludes with a death on Feb. 7, 2009, names 90 such deaths beginning on Oct. 7, 2003 — not Jan. 1, 2003.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/nyregion/03detain.html?_r=1&sq=Immigration%20at%20NJ%20detention%20center&st=cse&scp=2&pagewanted=all

Posted by lois at 03:26 PM | Comments (0)

March 25, 2009

"Resistance Behind Bars- The Struggles of Incercerated Women" by Vikki Law

I just finished reading "Resistance Behind Bars" written by Vikki Law. In case you don't know about it or haven't had the chance to I recommend you buy a copy and read it.
I will quote a little from the introduction in which Vikki writes about her response to the comment: "Women (in prison) don't organize."
"I began to search for stories---and women--who would disprove this assertion. I found mentions of lawsuits, and using various state department of corrections' websites looked up their address addresses and wrote them letters asking if they would share their experiences with me." And "To ensure that I was representing their struggles accurately and to give them the opportunity to add, update or delete any of the tales they do not want to share with the public, I sent each woman draft after draft of the chapters her voice and experience(s) appeared in. "
The voices of women form form the majority of the book which took 8 years to complete. The chapters reflect the concerns of the women with whom Vikki corresponded and include Barriers to Basic Care, Mothers and Children, Sexual Abuse,Education, Women's Work, Grievances, lawsuits and the Power of the Media. Other chapters focus on Breaking the Silence, Resistance Among Women in Immigrant Detention and an Historical Background.
The book is written in plain English. It frames resistance by women very differently than the kinds of resistance by men prisoners which has come to define "resistance."
The book is published by PM Press and you can order a copy on-line (https://secure.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=91) or I am sure your local bookstore can order it for you.

Posted by lois at 04:03 PM | Comments (0)

March 19, 2009

The L.A. County Sheriff's Department and other agencies cover budget shortfalls and save positions using ICE money....$55.2 million in 2008

"Washington paid nearly $55.2 million to house detainees at 13 local jails in California in fiscal year 2008, up from $52.6 million the previous year. "

The L.A. County Sheriff's Department and other agencies cover budget shortfalls and save positions using the federal payments.
By Anna Gorman
March 17, 2009
LA Times
Chart with county jails and dollars amounts from ICE at this URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-immigjail17-2009mar17,0,5433919,full.story

At a time when local law enforcement agencies are being forced to cut budgets and freeze hiring, cities across Southern California have found a growing source of income -- immigration detention.

Roughly two-thirds of the nation's immigrant detainees are held in local jails, and the payments to cities and counties for housing them have increased as the federal government has cracked down on illegal immigrants with criminal records and outstanding deportation orders.

Washington paid nearly $55.2 million to house detainees at 13 local jails in California in fiscal year 2008, up from $52.6 million the previous year. The U.S. is on track to spend $57 million this year.

The largest federal contract in the state is with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, whose 1,400-bed detention center in Lancaster is dedicated to housing immigrants either awaiting deportation or fighting their cases in court. The department received $34.7 million in 2008, up from $32.3 million the previous year.

Some smaller cities have seen their income rise much faster. Glendale received nearly $260,000 in 2008, triple what it got the previous year. In Alhambra, last year's $247,000 was more than double the previous year's payments.

For some cash-strapped cities, the federal money has become a critical source of revenue, covering budget shortfalls and saving positions.

Santa Ana's Police Department, for example, expects as much as a 15% budget cut and has had a hiring freeze since October that has resulted in more than 60 sworn and civilian positions remaining vacant, Police Chief Paul Walters said. To offset reductions, Walters plans to convert two multipurpose rooms at the 480-bed jail into dormitory rooms this spring. That will accommodate an additional 32 immigrant detainees, which he expects will bring in $1 million more in revenue each year. He also hopes to get approval to raise the nightly price per detainee from $82 to $87.

"We treat [the jail] as a business," Walters said. "The cuts could have been much deeper if it weren't for the ability to raise money there."

When Santa Ana received bond money to build a police headquarters and jail, it did so with the future in mind. Rather than constructing a facility to house its own inmates, it built a much larger facility and soon started contracting with Orange County and state and federal governments.

The federal contracts cover nearly the entire cost of the jail, said Russell Davis, the jail administrator. On a recent day, the jail housed 20 Santa Ana arrestees, 283 U.S. Marshals prisoners and 165 immigration detainees. Some of the detainees, from Mexico, Vietnam, El Salvador and elsewhere, had landed in immigration custody after serving state prison sentences. Others were arrested after ignoring deportation orders or because of criminal records that made them eligible for deportation.

The contract with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency brought in more than $3.7 million in 2007 and $4.8 million last year.

If he had to do it all over again, Davis said, he would have built another floor on the jail.

The immigration agency "is inundated with detainees," he said. "If I had 100 more beds, they'd fill them."

Immigrant detainees stay in the local jails anywhere from a few hours to many months. At most jails, they are not separated from the rest of the population.

Not everyone is as pleased as Davis over those arrangements. Immigrant rights advocates have raised concerns about local jails not following federal detention standards and not segregating detainees from people suspected of committing crimes.

"Immigration detention is civil, not criminal," said Ahilan Arulanantham, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. "If you are holding them in the same place, that distinction is meaningless."

Even though the cities may benefit financially, the savings do not get passed along to taxpayers, he said. "We're still paying for it," he said. "It's still a waste of resources to detain people who do not need to be detained."

Several of the foreign nationals housed in Santa Ana said they believed they should be let out on bond rather than incarcerated while fighting their immigration cases, especially if they had no criminal records or had already served their time.

Victor Hidalgo, 36, finished a five-year sentence in state prison on a drug charge before being transferred into immigration custody. Hidalgo, who is from Nicaragua, said he and others have jobs, families and homes here and are not a danger to society.

"We're not national security risks," he said.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Virginia Kice said the jails that house detainees for more than 72 hours -- including in Santa Ana and Lancaster -- are subject to "stringent detention standards" and undergo inspection by a contracted company. Other jails are inspected regularly by the immigration agency.

The federal contracts with local jails began about a decade ago but have expanded over the last few years. The federal government operates some of its own detention centers and contracts with private companies to run others but relies heavily on the local jails.

The cost varies from around $80 to just over $100 per detainee per day, generally less expensive than the cost of housing detainees at federal immigration facilities.

"These facilities enable us to place detainees at appropriate sites with minimal travel so we can begin the removal process quickly," Kice said.

In Southern California, the need for bed space became more pressing after the immigration agency closed the San Pedro detention center on Terminal Island in 2007. And in Northern California, where there is no dedicated immigration detention center, Santa Clara County began housing the detainees in 2003.

"It was a strategy to help us financially," said Edward Flores, chief of Santa Clara County's Department of Correction.

Those budget cuts have only gotten worse, with the county expecting $1.25 million less in fiscal year 2010.

In turn, the federal contract has become even more important. Flores said he expects to make up about half the expected deficit with federal contracts, both with the immigration agency and the U.S. Marshals Service. He is also trying to negotiate a higher nightly rate.

The county received nearly $7 million to house detainees in 2008.

"We have become very reliant on this revenue," Flores said.

This and other news about immigration and mass incarceration can be found at www.realcostofprisons.org/blog/

Posted by lois at 01:57 PM | Comments (0)

March 12, 2009

Another excellent article from Tom Barry on "The National Imperative to Imprison Immigrants for Profit"

The National Imperative to Imprison Immigrants for Profit
Tom Barry | March 10, 2009
Americas Program, Center for International Policy (CIP)

There is a codependent relationship between the private prison industry and the federal government's immigration enforcement apparatus. Immigrant detention jumpstarted the two largest prison companies—Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group—in the prison industry.

The Immigration & Naturalization Service (INS) contracted CCA in 1983 and GEO (then Wackenhut Services, Inc.) in 1987 to provide prison beds for detained immigrants. These INS immigrant detention centers were among the first private prisons in the United States.

Although the federal government initiated the privatization of prisons, state governments quickly followed the INS lead. Throughout the late 1980s and the1990s state outsourcing of prisoners drove the expansion of the prison industry. Harsh sentencing laws, ever-increasing drug-related convictions, and the deepening taxpayer reluctance to approve tax increases to pay for prison construction created a favorable climate for the private prison boom.

While INS led the way, other Justice Department agencies soon followed. The U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) and the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) began privatizing their imprisonment responsibilities in the early 1990s. BOP's first private prison contract was in 1991 with Wackenhut Corrections.

By the year 2000, however, a spate of private prison deaths and escapes leading to some states to canceling contracts and the inability of CCA and others to find enough inmates to fill the "speculative" prisons it was building caused the industry's profits and the stock to tumble. But after a brief scare, the industry saw its fortunes soar again as INS and USMS began issuing new contracts for immigrant detention.

In 2000 the INS contracted the CCA to house 1,000 detainees at the company's San Diego Correctional Facility. The contract, in which the INS agreed to pay $89.50 per diem for each occupied prison bed, was hailed by CCA as "one of the largest contracts ever awarded to the private corrections industry." BOP also came to CCA's rescue when in 2000 it entered into an agreement with CCA to send "criminal aliens" to the speculative prison that CCA had built in California to house state prisoners that never arrived.

"The private prison industry was on the verge of bankruptcy in the late 1990s, until the feds bailed them out with the immigration-detention contracts," said Michele Deitch, an expert on prison privatization with the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in Austin.

A San Diego Union-Tribune special report (May 4, 2008) on the prison industry summed up the conjuncture: "Fortunately for the industry, the federal government began seeing a surge in demand around this time, fueled by federal drug-sentencing laws that had created more inmates and tougher 1996 immigration laws that made more immigrants deportable."

Today, federal government contracts to detain a thousand or more detained immigrants are common, and have sparked a new wave of private prisons, particularly in the Southwest. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the INS legacy agency that forms part of the Department of Homeland Security, now contracts all new detainee growth, as does USMS.

Through its Privatization Management Branch, BOP has over the past several years entered into five contracts with private prison operations to hold more than 10,000 "criminal alien residents." When it published its request for contract bids, BOP noted that the "officers" would be required to "house felony offenders, predominantly criminal aliens." BOP cites "flexibility" as the main attraction of prison privatization.

The BOP contract notice for the criminal alien prisons noted that privatization "provides the BOP with flexibility to meet population capacity needs in a timely fashion." Commenting on BOP's decision to privatize criminal alien detention, BOP spokeswoman Felicia Ponce said that contracts with GEO Group and CCA give BOP the "flexibility to manage a rapidly growing inmate population and to help control overcrowding."

The BOP currently has five contracts to house 10,243 "criminal alien residents." The contracts are with GEO and CCA, and four of the five prisons are in remote areas of western Texas—the largest of which was a $187 million contract in 2007 for "contract beds" at the GEO-run 3,700-bed Reeves County Detention Center, where immigrant inmates have recently rioted to protest deficient medical care.

Commenting on the 2007 contract, GEO president George Zoley, said, "This new long term contract is indicative of a continuing trend of lengthy contracts being awarded by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the U.S. Marshals Service, providing for increased revenue certainty for our company and a continuity of services for our federal clients. Approximately 40 percent of our present revenues are generated through similar lengthy contracts involving the three federal detention agencies and GEO-care clients."

Zoley boasted that "the Reeves County Detention Complex (the 'Complex') is the largest detention/correctional facility under private management in the world."

Two years later, when GEO Group announced its fourth-quarter earnings on Feb. 12, 2009, Zoley told representatives of investment companies vested in the private prison industry that he "was very pleased" with 2008 results. When most economic sectors are suffering and shuttering stores, GEO, CCA, and other private prison firms reported record revenues and earnings. Net income rose at GEO from $41.8 million in 2007 to $58.9 million in 2008—an increase of more than 20%.

Zoley noted that federal contracts with ICE, USMS, and BOP accounted for 37% of 2008 revenues but 50% of earnings. GEO has more than 10,000 immigrants in its prisons, two-thirds of whom are classified as "criminal aliens." He assured investors that there was "solid bipartisan support to identify and deport criminal aliens." Zoley pointed out that in 2008 Congress added $200 million to President Bush's $800 million request for ICE's criminal alien program. In President Obama's 2010 DHS budget, $1.4 billion is scheduled for programs to hunt down criminal aliens.

In its 2007 Security and Exchange Commission filing, CCA stated: "We are dependent on government appropriations." Then CCA Chairman William Andrews warned investors that the company's high returns could be threatened by a change in the policy environment: "The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts ... or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws."

Although booming largely because of the surge in immigrant inmates, the private prison industry is also facing a barrage of criticism from immigrant advocates and civil libertarians.

Emblematic of the legal backlash against the private prison industry's role in immigration imprisonment, a lawsuit filed in 2007 (and settled in June 2008) by the American Civil Liberties Union against ICE and CCA charged that the San Diego Correctional Facility—the same detention center that had help revive CCA in 2000—was grossly overcrowded and its unsafe conditions violated inmate civil rights. At the time immigrant inmates were obligated, among other things, to sleep on the floor near toilets and had little access to mental health care.

Jody Kent, public-policy coordinator for the ACLU's National Prison Project, told the Wall Street Journal: "We have serious concerns about for-profit prison companies because they are notorious for cutting essential costs that need to be provided to maintain a safe and constitutional environment for prisoners." The lawsuit was settled in June 2008.

But neither lawsuits nor inmate protests seem to worry the private prison industry. Backed by hefty liability insurance policies—which are usually paid for by the county governments that actually own the immigrant prisons—private prison companies routinely offer investors rosy forecasts of future profits. Both GEO Group and CCA say that the deepening economic downturn has several silver linings for their business, including new incentives for government to privatize given increasing difficulty of securing tax income for prison construction and an increased supply of cheap labor.

As GEO's Zoley sees it, the prison industry will benefit from a new "national imperative" in these difficult economic times "to protect American workers by detaining and deporting immigrants."

Tom Barry directs the TransBorder Project of the Americas Program (www.americaspolicy.org) at the Center for International Policy in Washington, DC. He blogs at http://borderlinesblog.blogspot.com/.
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5946
Additional articles:
or More Information

The New Political Economy of Immigration
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5873

Immigrant Inmates Caught in Outsourcing Labyrinth
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5871

Immigrant Prison Burns in Pecos
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5849

America's Frontline Is Getting Crowded
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5848

Posted by lois at 03:50 PM | Comments (0)

March 11, 2009

Justice Dept. Opens Investigation of Arpaio's Office

NY Times National Briefing | Southwest
Arizona: Inquiry Into County Sheriff’s Office
By PAUL GIBLIN
Published: March 10, 2009

The United States Department of Justice opened an investigation into the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office for suspected civil rights violations. The sheriff’s office is run by Joe Arpaio, who has gained national attention for ordering deputies to patrol rural highways, raid Latino neighborhoods and storm municipal buildings in the dead of night in search of illegal immigrants. “Our investigation will focus on alleged patterns or practices of discriminatory police practices and unconstitutional searches and seizures conducted by the M.C.S.O., and on allegations of national origin discrimination,” Loretta King, acting assistant attorney general, wrote in a letter to Sheriff Arpaio.
Next Article in US (23 of 33) » A version of this article appeared in print on March 11, 2009, on page A22 of the New York edition.

Posted by lois at 04:55 PM | Comments (0)

March 09, 2009

GA:: CCA takes over jail as ICE detention center

March 9, 2009
CCA bringing 160 jobs to Georgia
Atlanta Business Chronicle

Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) landed a contract to manage detainee populations for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the North Georgia Detention Center in Gainesville, Ga.

The deal will bring 160 jobs to Hall County.

Nashville, Tenn.-based CCA will house up to 500 ICE detainees at the facility. The company will lease the former Hall County Jail for 20 years with two five-year renewal options. CCA expects to open the facility during the second quarter.

The facility will employ 160 correctional professionals in security, facility management, accounting, health services, human resources, business management, quality assurance and education.

Georgia’s soaring inmate population is overwhelming its capacity, and the state Department of Corrections has turned to the private sector to help fill the gap.

Georgia, like many states facing a budget crunch in a worsening economy, wants privately owned and operated detention centers to help handle its growing number of prisoners. Private prisons, proponents say, can save governments from 10 percent to 15 percent in inmate housing costs.

Georgia’s inmate population has grown from more than 47,000 in 2002 to 56,022 in 2008, thanks in large part to mandatory sentences. In 2004, Georgia ranked 11th in the nation for length of sentences served, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The state had the fifth-highest inmate population in the United States in 2007 and a budget of $950 million, according to the Department of Corrections.

CCA and Houston-based Cornell Companies Inc. already operate private detention centers housing 5,122 prisoners, or 9.2 percent of state inmates in Georgia. Private prisons held 7.4 percent — or about 120,000 — of the nation’s 1.59 million inmates in 2007.

CCA currently runs 63 facilities in 19 states and Washington, D.C.
http://atlanta.bizjournals.com/atlanta/stories/2009/03/09/daily5.html

Posted by lois at 04:59 PM | Comments (0)

March 03, 2009

GAO Finds ICE Program Expanded Without Proper Oversight

MARCH 3, 2009, 7:03 P.M. ET
Study Finds ICE Program Expanded Without Proper Oversight
Wall St. Journal On-Line
By MIRIAM JORDAN

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement program that trains local police to arrest illegal immigrants suspected of committing serious crimes has expanded without appropriate oversight, leading to the arrest of thousands for minor infractions, according to a study scheduled to be released Wednesday.

The Government Accountability Office report comes amid calls from human-rights organizations and immigrant advocates for former Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, in her new role as secretary of Homeland Security, to bring down the curtain on the so-called 287g program. The program has been a symbol of the Bush administration's crackdown on illegal immigration.

The GAO review, requested by the House and Senate homeland-security panels, found that program participants used their 287g authority "to process individuals for minor crimes, such as speeding, contrary to the objective of the program."

ICE, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, has touted the program as a public-safety measure designed to deport immigrants who committed serious crimes.

The GAO report said that ICE hasn't established clear objectives or supervision for the program after training local law enforcement. More than half of the 29 participating agencies that the GAO contacted for its study reported concerns from community members that the program led to racial profiling and intimidation.

An estimated 12 million immigrants, mainly from Latin America, live in the U.S. illegally. Since January 2006, the program has arrested more than 79,000 individuals suspected of being in the country illegally. More than 950 state and local law-enforcement officials, including highway patrol, sheriff deputies and police, have been trained and certified through the program in 67 jurisdictions, including Alabama, Florida, Arizona and California.

The 287g program has been hailed by politicians and groups who favor tough measures, particularly deportation, to punish people in the country illegally. But there has been growing criticism of the program by immigrant groups and Democratic leaders since President Barack Obama took office.

One of the program's biggest advocates has been Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Arizona's Maricopa County. His deputies have arrested more than 1,400 people in the Phoenix area for immigration violations since the county partnered with ICE in 2007.

Last month, Sheriff Arpaio marched about 200 illegal immigrants in shackles and prison stripes from the county jail to a "Tent City" where inmates are housed. On Saturday, 5,000 immigration activists from across the country descended on Phoenix to protest the sheriff's actions.

"Sheriff Arpaio is the poster boy for all that is wrong with the 287g program," said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, an advocacy group.

Last week, four Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee asked Secretary Napolitano and Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate whether Mr. Arpaio's deputies have used skin color as a pretense to stop Hispanics and arrest illegal immigrants. The four Democrats have also called on Secretary Napolitano to terminate the Maricopa County agreement if irregularities cannot be addressed.

ICE referred all the questions about the 287g program to the Homeland Security Department. "Secretary Napolitano is undertaking a broad review of all immigration and border-security programs, policies and initiatives, specifically the 287g program," said Amy Kudwa, a spokeswoman for the department.

On Wednesday, the House homeland-security panel will hold a hearing to receive testimony about the 287g program. The GAO report, which is entitled "Better Controls Needed Over Program Authorizing State and Local Enforcement of Federal Immigration Laws," will be presented during the session.

The GAO report comes as scrutiny of the 287g program has intensified.

Last week, Justice Strategies, a nonprofit research group, said in its own report about the program that enforcing immigration has distracted local police from their mission of tackling crime and keeping communities safe. The report also said that the ICE program placed a financial burden on states and localities that participate.

Comprehensive immigration reform, which Congress has failed to pass, should be the goal of the Obama administration, according to the report. The 287g program "amounts to a local and state bailout of the failed federal immigration enforcement business," the report says.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123612361681523585.html

Posted by lois at 09:47 PM | Comments (0)

February 26, 2009

Justice Strategies New Report: Local Democracy on ICE: Why State and Local Governments Have No Business in Federal Immigration Law Enforcement

New Report from Justice Strategies (Feb 2009)
Local Democracy on ICE: Why State and Local Governments Have No Business in Federal Immigration Law Enforcement

Democracy on ICE 287(g) is a tiny provision in federal immigration law that allows Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to take local police away from their mission of fighting crime, and pull them into the murky territory of targeting immigrants for arrest without suspicion of crime. ICE described the 287(g) program as a public safety measure to target “criminal illegal aliens,” but its largest impact has been on law-abiding immigrant communities. Rather than focusing on serious crime, police resources are spent targeting day-laborers, corn-vendors and people with broken tail-lights. This report details findings from a year-long investigation of 287(g) by Justice Strategies, and recommends that the ICE program be terminated.
Copies of the report can be found at:
http://www.justicestrategies.net/files/JS-Democracy-On-Ice.pdf

Some coverage of the Report:

Los Angeles Times
Police not focusing on dangerous illegal immigrants, study says
Police officers empowered by a federal program to enforce immigration laws are instead arresting day laborers and street vendors, the report finds.
By Anna Gorman
February 26, 2009

A federal program that empowers local police to enforce U.S. immigration laws has failed in its promise to target illegal immigrants who pose a threat to public safety or national security, according to a study released today.

Instead of focusing on serious criminals, local law enforcement officers are arresting "day laborers, street vendors, people who are driving around with broken taillights," said Judith Greene, coauthor of the study by Justice Strategies, a New York-based nonprofit research organization focusing on humane and cost- effective approaches to criminal justice and immigration law enforcement.

At the same time, the costly enforcement program is diverting resources from local police and sheriff departments, the authors wrote. Many of the agreements are in cities where the crime rates are lower than the national average but had Latino population growth higher than the national average, they said.

There were more than 65 agreements between federal immigration officials and local law enforcement agencies across the nation and more than 950 officers had been trained by federal authorities as of late 2008, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

On the agency's website, the program is described as "one of the agency's most successful and popular partnership initiatives as more state and local leaders have come to understand how a shared approach to immigration enforcement can benefit their communities."

Locally, immigration authorities have partnerships with the Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino sheriff's departments. According to the immigration agency, the program -- known as 287(g) -- is credited with identifying more than 79,000 suspected illegal immigrants between January 2006 and late 2008. The majority of those have been screened at jails.

The best-known local-federal partnership is in Maricopa County, Ariz., where Sheriff Joe Arpaio has attracted headlines for his immigration enforcement tactics that have included marching illegal immigrant inmates in shackles from a local jail to a tent city. Lawmakers have called upon the U.S. attorney general to investigate the actions of Arpaio.

"Joe Arpaio has a media circus going on around him," said Aarti Shahani, coauthor of the study. "But there are mini-Joe Arpaios all over the place."

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has called for a review of the program.
----------------------

Arizona Republic
Experts call ICE program used by Arpaio a failure
by Daniel González
Feb. 26, 2009

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's continuing and controversial crackdown on illegal immigration and the federal program that lets him identify and arrest undocumented immigrants is a financial and public-safety failure, according to a new report.

The program, known as 287 (g), has been touted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement as a public-safety measure aimed at removing criminal illegal immigrants. But the Sheriff's Office and other participating agencies have focused on easy targets such as traffic violators and day laborers who pose little threat, says the report by Justice Strategies, a non-profit nonpartisan research group based in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Arpaio defended his participation in the program, which he said has led to the identification of thousands of illegal immigrants.

Though ICE touts the nearly 8-year-old program as a money saver, Arizona taxpayers are footing a greater share of the bill for enforcing immigration laws, usually the responsibility of the federal government, according to the report to be released today. Enforcing immigration laws detracts local police from their primary job of fighting crime and keeping neighborhoods safe, the report says, and race, not crime, has fueled the program's growth in Phoenix and other areas of the country with growing Latino populations.

"It had enough time to prove itself, and it failed," said Aarti Shahani, a researcher with the Justice Strategies group who co-authored the report. "The immigration system is broken, and 287 (g) is not the way to fix it. It's like pouring water into a cup that is broken, and the water keeps leaking out. It isn't doing anything to solve the problem."

The report concludes by recommending that the Obama administration terminate the program, which was created under the Clinton administration but wasn't promoted until after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, under the Bush administration.

The report comes amid growing opposition to Arpaio's immigration crackdowns. The National Day Labor Organizing Network, Somos America and other pro-immigrant groups plan to hold demonstrations on Friday and Saturday in Phoenix and other parts of the country calling for an end to the crackdowns.

Less than two weeks ago, four key Democratic members of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee asked Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate complaints that since Arpaio signed a 287 (g) agreement with ICE in 2007, deputies have unconstitutionally used skin color to look for illegal immigrants as part of a series of crime sweeps and work-site raids. The four Democrats also asked for Napolitano, the former Arizona governor, to terminate Arpaio's agreement if any problems can't be fixed.

Arpaio this week sent a letter to the four Democrats, including U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Michigan, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, saying that his office is abiding by the agreement and inviting them to come see the program for themselves.

Despite the criticism, polls show that Arpaio's crackdowns have broad public support. In November, he was re-elected to his fifth four-year term.

Under the 287 (g) program, Maricopa County sheriff's deputies have arrested 1,434 people for immigration violations, often after they had been encountered by deputies investigating state crimes, Arpaio said.

Michael Keegan, a spokesman for Homeland Security, said the Justice Strategies report would be reviewed.

"The department takes very seriously any allegations of civil-rights abuses, and Secretary Napolitano is undertaking a broad review of all immigration programs, including the 287 (g) agreements," he said.

ICE credits the program with identifying more than 70,000 people suspected of being in the country illegally.

U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee and author of the 287 (g) program, defended it.

"It is astonishing that anyone would want to end a successful, voluntary program that protects American communities from criminal illegal immigrants," Smith said.

-------------------------
Daily News
Ineffective raids should be ICE'd
Wednesday, February 25th 2009

The image of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as an efficient institution carrying on a heroic struggle for national security has been tarnished.

A couple of weeks ago, a study by the Migration Policy Institute revealed that 73% of the people arrested since early 2008 in much ballyhooed ICE raids had no criminal records. Yet the flashy paramilitary operations were billed by the Homeland Security Department as carefully planned dragnets for dangerous "immigrant fugitives."

The truth, though, came out in the study: Raids do little to enhance national security or solve the immigration crisis.

Now, a report released today, "Local Democracy on ICE," arrives at a similar conclusion.

The report was conducted by Justice Strategies, a New York-based nonprofit research group that is "dedicated to more humane and cost-effective approaches to criminal justice and immigration law enforcement."

Aarti Shahani, the report's lead author, said, "We make the same underlying criticism [as the MPI study], but we are looking particularly at the fusion of federal immigration and local justice."

Shahani and her co-author, Judith Greene, who heads Justice Strategies, said the report is the result of an investigation of the so-called 287(g) program, which authorizes police, traffic cops and correction officers to arrest immigrants without cause.

Implemented under President George W. Bush, ICE justified 287(g) as a public safety program designed to get "illegal criminal aliens" off the streets. The new report reveals a different reality.

To begin with, Shahani said, there are 63 localities in the U.S.(the closest one to New York is in Hudson County, N.J.) where ICE has deputized officers, and 61% of the localities have crime rates that are lower than the national average.

"The statute is being applied to corn vendors and people with broken taillights," said Shahani who added that police already have the legal power they need to arrest anyone suspected of a crime.

It is precisely when they don't have reasonable suspicion of a crime that the 287(g) is applied, Shahani said.

It is very telling that ICE had given the largest and most powerful 287(g) contract to the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz. This is a man well known for blatantly racist actions like ordering indiscriminate street "sweeps" of Latinos without any evidence of criminal activity.

Yet ICE deputized 160 of Arpaio's men, adding them to the 200 officers deputized nationwide. It was the first time local enforcement officers were given the power to conduct searches, make street arrests, conduct investigations and issue detainersin jail.

"Sheriff Joe" happily summarized the added value of the 287(g) program like this: "When we stop a car for probable cause, [now we can take] the other passengers, too."

To top it all, the 287(g) program is, as Shahani put it, "a huge drain of tax dollars." It doesn't provide funds for implementation, and shifts massive immigrant detention costs to local governments, straining already crowded jails.

DESPITE ITS grandiose crimefighter pretensions, the 287(g) program's main target has been day laborers and traffic violators. These are the "criminal illegal aliens" routinely arrested by deputized officers without probable cause.

"The program is under scrutiny, and ICE needs to be held responsible for its failure to supervise and direct all local partners that has led to rampant abuse," Shahani said. "There is a real opportunity for it to be reined in or terminated."

The sooner the better.

Wednesday, February 25th 2009

The image of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as an efficient institution carrying on a heroic struggle for national security has been tarnished.

A couple of weeks ago, a study by the Migration Policy Institute revealed that 73% of the people arrested since early 2008 in much ballyhooed ICE raids had no criminal records. Yet the flashy paramilitary operations were billed by the Homeland Security Department as carefully planned dragnets for dangerous "immigrant fugitives."

The truth, though, came out in the study: Raids do little to enhance national security or solve the immigration crisis.

Now, a report released today, "Local Democracy on ICE," arrives at a similar conclusion.

The report was conducted by Justice Strategies, a New York-based nonprofit research group that is "dedicated to more humane and cost-effective approaches to criminal justice and immigration law enforcement."

Aarti Shahani, the report's lead author, said, "We make the same underlying criticism [as the MPI study], but we are looking particularly at the fusion of federal immigration and local justice."

Shahani and her co-author, Judith Greene, who heads Justice Strategies, said the report is the result of an investigation of the so-called 287(g) program, which authorizes police, traffic cops and correction officers to arrest immigrants without cause.

Implemented under President George W. Bush, ICE justified 287(g) as a public safety program designed to get "illegal criminal aliens" off the streets. The new report reveals a different reality.

To begin with, Shahani said, there are 63 localities in the U.S.(the closest one to New York is in Hudson County, N.J.) where ICE has deputized officers, and 61% of the localities have crime rates that are lower than the national average.

"The statute is being applied to corn vendors and people with broken taillights," said Shahani who added that police already have the legal power they need to arrest anyone suspected of a crime.

It is precisely when they don't have reasonable suspicion of a crime that the 287(g) is applied, Shahani said.

It is very telling that ICE had given the largest and most powerful 287(g) contract to the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz. This is a man well known for blatantly racist actions like ordering indiscriminate street "sweeps" of Latinos without any evidence of criminal activity.

Yet ICE deputized 160 of Arpaio's men, adding them to the 200 officers deputized nationwide. It was the first time local enforcement officers were given the power to conduct searches, make street arrests, conduct investigations and issue detainersin jail.

"Sheriff Joe" happily summarized the added value of the 287(g) program like this: "When we stop a car for probable cause, [now we can take] the other passengers, too."

To top it all, the 287(g) program is, as Shahani put it, "a huge drain of tax dollars." It doesn't provide funds for implementation, and shifts massive immigrant detention costs to local governments, straining already crowded jails.

DESPITE ITS grandiose crimefighter pretensions, the 287(g) program's main target has been day laborers and traffic violators. These are the "criminal illegal aliens" routinely arrested by deputized officers without probable cause.

"The program is under scrutiny, and ICE needs to be held responsible for its failure to supervise and direct all local partners that has led to rampant abuse," Shahani said. "There is a real opportunity for it to be reined in or terminated."

The sooner the better.

--------------
Phoenix New Times
VINNIE'S BOO-BOO
Stephen Lemons
February 26, 2009


"WTF?!" That's what this ticked-off Toucan thought when he saw that local Immigration and Customs Enforcement flack Vinnie Picard was quoted in the paper of record as saying, "Arizona's 287(g) program is working as intended," and that there are no "firsthand" complaints of racial-profiling lodged with the Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is a part.

Had Vinnie been smokin' the good ganja? Does the guy read the papers? Or does he just use them to roll himself a fat doobie?

Even if Picard never got around to perusing the ACLU's big lawsuit against Sheriff Joe Arpaio alleging all kinds of civil rights abuses, complaints regarding Arpaio's 287(g)-men — you know, the 160 MCSO deputies "cross-trained" by the feds as ICE agents — are as plentiful as frickin' poppies in Afghanistan these days.

The Bird figures you'd have to be doing your best King Oedipus impersonation to not see evidence that Arpaio's abusing his 287(g) powers. Maybe Vinnie never got his invite to Joe's 200 Mexican March earlier this month, where Arpaio segregated a passel of undocumented immigrants in their own separate Tent City, with its own electrified fence, marching them past a gantlet of shutterbugs from the Fourth Estate.

Though all of those poor saps were wearing striped shirts reading "UNSENTENCED" — meaning they were awaiting trial — they probably all had ICE holds on them, as Arpaio had identified them as illegal immigrants.

Why, that stunt has pissed off folks far and wide, from legislators in Mexico to the New York Times, which denounced the barbaric photo op and called on DHS to rein in Maricopa County's Bull Connor.

Arpaio's sick media event even awoke a sleeping giant, the U.S. Congress, in the form of House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers of Michigan and three other ranking Dems on the committee, who wrote a stern letter to Barack Obama's new attorney general, Eric Holder, and DHS chief, Janet Napolitano, telling them to get busy and investigate Arpaio's wrinkled ass.

But Picard must've missed all that, 'cause here he was spouting the party line, saying all was hunky-dory in Denmark — despite that rotten flounder smell. This feathered fiend decided to give the flack a call to give him a hard time about his bout with foot-in-mouth disease. But Picard's lips had been permanently sealed by his superiors on the issue of the 287(g) program, and he was referring all calls to one of his betters in D.C.

Picard did make clear, however, that this was a new policy, one that came after his statements to the local daily. So this peeved parakeet phoned ICE headquarters in D.C. The call was not returned.

ICE is sure sensitive all of a sudden. Aren't these the badasses who go around breaking up families, throwing dishwashers and day laborers in jail, treating moms and dads like they're thieves and killers? Big, tough hombres, eh? So tough, that at least under Arpaio's command, his 287(g) thugs wear black ski masks while they're pulling over little old ladies and gardeners for traffic violations.

Really, this heron's heart goes out to Picard and all the government flacks forced to rationalize the vile stuff ICE does on a regular basis in the name of immigration enforcement. The ones who should go down — whose careers should rightfully be ruined and who should be butt-kicked out of government service — are a-holes like Arizona ICE pooh-bah Matthew Allen, whose lips have been KrazyGlued to Joe Arpaio's keister since he scored the job early last year. And, of course, Allen's bosses in D.C.

In other words, Picard is just a PR flunky, albeit a polite one for the local press to deal with. The real evil in ICE is further up the food chain.

ICE ON FIRE

Thing is, even without Arpaio as its albatross, ICE is besieged nationwide with bad news, tales of misdeeds, and study after study arguing that the 287(g) program should be tossed like a used Tiparillo.

Examples of ICE eff-ups are popping up daily, in newspapers from sea to shining sea. Recently, the Baltimore Sun reported that the immigrant advocacy group CASA de Maryland obtained through the Freedom of Information Act a copy of an internal ICE document detailing an investigation into an ICE raid on a Baltimore 7-Eleven in 2007.

The ICE report contradicted statements from some ICE officers that they'd just happened to be grabbing a cup o' Joe at the 7-Eleven when they lucked upon a group of day laborers.

"The evidence revealed that the Fugitive Operations officers were ordered to seek additional arrests that day due to managerial pressure to produce statistics for Operation Return to Sender," said the ICE doc.

See, Operation Return to Sender is the name of a massive ICE dragnet that's stated intention is to collar criminal aliens, gangbangers, and such. Not the schmucks waiting for handyman work at the corner convenience store. The fact that ICE agents were pressured to essentially go out and grab every Mexican they could lay their hands on runs counter to ICE's propaganda on the subject.

On the other side of the country, the Los Angeles Times reports that an immigration judge recently tossed the case against alleged undocumented worker Gregorio Perez Cruz, pinched in an ICE raid of a Van Nuys, California company. ICE's goons failed to advise Cruz of his rights and deprived him of food and water for 18 hours while they interrogated him, forcing him to sleep on a concrete floor.

At least Cruz survived his detention. Lately, ICE's been having almost as many problems as Joe when it comes to prisoner deaths.

According to the Washington Post, ICE was forced to stop detentions at a county jail in northern Virginia after Guido Newbrough, a 48-year-old German immigrant who came to this country when he was 6 years old, died from "massive organ failure brought on by an untreated bacterial infection." This, after his jailers allegedly ignored his repeated requests for medical care.

At the beginning of February, the Associated Press ran a piece about how the widow of a Chinese immigrant is suing ICE for a death at a Rhode Island facility it contracts with.

"Hiu Lui 'Jason' Ng, a 34-year-old computer engineer accused of overstaying his visa, died of liver cancer in August," states the item, "weeks after being taken to the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls [Rhode Island]. His cancer went undiagnosed until days before he died."

The Bird could go on and on and on. But ICE has more problems than just the dead stacking up like cordwood. Both ICE and its vaunted 287(g) program are under barrage from various think tanks for xenophobic, ineffective, and inhumane practices.

The Pew Hispanic Center just published a study pointing out that, in 2007, "Latinos accounted for 40 percent of all sentenced federal offenders, more than triple their share of the total adult U.S. population." The reason? Immigration convictions are up 24 percent, and 80 percent of those convicted are Hispanic.

Of non-citizen Hispanics convicted federally, 81 percent were found guilty of entering unlawfully or residing in the United States without authorization — both of which are nonviolent, civil offenses.

A report by the Migration Policy Institute in D.C. found ICE and the DHS obsessed with meeting statistical goals and going after the low-hanging fruit of undocumented workers, rather than setting their sights on actual bad guys in the country illegally. The New York Times called the MPI study "largely a portrait of dysfunction."

MPI offered 36 ideas for cleaning up the mess but stopped short of the wholesale gutting of the 287(g) program. Leave that to the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Law School, which just issued a report so scathing in its assessment of ICE's 287(g) program that it ultimately concludes that the best thing to do would be to call the priest and the pallbearers and bury the damn thing.

"The program, as illustrated through this policy paper, is too problematic, too costly, and too difficult to properly operate," asserts the take-no-prisoners policy review. "The existence of such a program . . . where a federal agency abdicates its authority to inadequately trained, less knowledgeable agents, indicates fundamental issues with the current federal immigration law enforcement scheme."

The UNC-CH assessment faults the ICE program for its lack of oversight, its abrogation of federal and state laws — as well as the U.S. Constitution, its unfunded mandates, and the unlawful detention of lawful residents and U.S. citizens by 287(g)-trained officers.

Interestingly, the UNC-CH team, which labored a year to produce the report, never once mentions Sheriff Joe Arpaio or Arizona. Rather, the group focused on the use of the 287(g) program by eight law enforcement entities in North Carolina. But its conclusions parallel those of this plumed penman when it comes to the use of 287(g) here in Sand Land.

It points out that the 287(g) program "was originally intended to target and remove undocumented immigrants convicted of [in ICE's own words] 'violent crimes, human smuggling, gang/organized crime activity, sexual-related offenses, narcotics smuggling, and money laundering.'"

But the Memoranda of Agreement that define how each local police force or sheriff's office is to use its federal 287(g) authority "are in actuality being used to purge towns and cities of 'unwelcome' immigrants . . . thereby having detrimental effects on North Carolina's communities."

The UNC-CH report doesn't use the term "ethnic cleansing," but 287(g) is a de facto tool for it. Where immigrants were once in desperate need in Arizona's housing industry, they've been a draw in North Carolina for a different reason — agriculture.

The infusion of Central American workers into communities made up mostly of whites and blacks has led to a rise in anti-Hispanic sentiment. Johnston County Sheriff Steve Bizzell stated last year that immigrants are "breeding like rabbits," are "trashy," and "rob, rape, and murder American citizens."

Another N.C. sheriff, Terry Johnson of Alamance County, lamented all the "foreign-born illegal, criminal immigrants" who had come to settle in his county. He further offered up, "In Mexico, there's nothing wrong with having sex with a 12-, 13-year-old-girl . . . They do a lot of drinking down in Mexico."

Both Bizzell and Johnson, like Arpaio, see themselves as responding to the masses by weeding out illegals. And they ain't the only ones. The 287(g) program has empowered like-minded bigots and opportunists all across the country.

But beyond propping up local tyrants and prejudiced politicians, the 287(g) program is an abject failure in the eyes of Judith Greene, co-author of a report on 287(g) by the think tank Justice Strategies. Set to drop this week, the report, "Local Democracy on ICE," reveals how local governments are getting stiffed as tax dollars are diverted from traditional police functions to running after waiters and maids without proper ID. She told this tweeter that, ultimately, it's citizenry that foots the bill for 287(g) shenanigans, though ICE pays for training and throws localities a bone here and there.

"There is a growing consensus that the 287(g) program needs to be ended," she explained to The Bird from her home in Brooklyn, saying that from a strict cost-benefit analysis, the program's a bust.

This avian's in complete agreement. Sure, ICE can point to scads of domestic workers booted from the country. But has that made us any safer from real criminals? Of course not.

RAGE AGAINST ARPAIO

The Bird argues that those congregating in Phoenix this Saturday for the anti-Arpaio/anti-287(g) march beginning at 9 a.m. at Steele Indian School Park need to keep in mind that Arpaio's a symptom, but he ain't the whole disease.

Indeed, sources tell The Bird that ICE may attempt to fake out those on the left and in the pro-immigrant community by suspending Joe Arpaio's 287(g) agreement and, perhaps, even offer a few lip-service reforms, while keeping the 287(g) program in place. That's not good enough.

As the UNC-CH study suggests, the 287(g) program needs to be killed off deader than Heath Ledger. President Obama has ordered the closing of Gitmo within a year (see this week's cover story, starting on page 15). He should act even quicker to put an end to this country's shameful treatment of non-criminal aliens, and offer them a path to legalization.

Until this is done, activists need to raise a ruckus as if George W. Bush were still in office. Even more so. It's easy to protest demonized enemies like W. It's another thing altogether to take on politicians you helped elect.

This beak-bearer was encouraged to learn that Rage Against the Machine's radical frontman, Zack de la Rocha, has endorsed the anti-Joe action this Saturday and has promised to put foot to concrete himself. De la Rocha's statement reminds this raven of the days when actors and intellectuals marched in civil rights protests in the '60s.

"To witness what is happening in Arizona and remain neutral is to be implicated in human rights violations that are occurring right here on U.S. soil against migrants," de la Rocha said in a statement released by the L.A.-based National Day Laborer Organizing Network.

Just don't forget that even if Phoenix is the Selma, Alabama, of today's immigrant rights struggle, 287(g) isn't just bad for Cactus Country. It's bad all-around. Yeah, we need to topple Arpaio. But we also need to cut off the source of his federal power, so there are no more little Arpaios emboldened by 287(g) elsewhere.

-------
Copies of the report can be found at:
http://www.justicestrategies.net/files/JS-Democracy-On-Ice.pdf

Posted by lois at 11:08 AM | Comments (0)

February 22, 2009

Enforcement Gone Bad

Editorial- NY Times
Enforcement Gone Bad
Published: February 21, 2009

The failures of the immigration system are many and severe, but the main problem is not that the country is catching too few undocumented immigrants. It is catching too many. Since the early 1990s, you could write the federal government’s immigration strategy on a cardboard sign: Deport Them All.

A report last week from the Pew Hispanic Center laid bare some striking results of that campaign. It found that Latinos now make up 40 percent of those sentenced in federal courts, even though they are only about 13 percent of the adult population. They accounted for one-third of federal prison inmates in 2007.

The numbers might suggest we are besieged by immigrant criminals. But of all the noncitizen Latinos sentenced last year, the vast majority — 81 percent — were convicted for unlawfully entering or remaining in the country, neither of which is a criminal offense.

The country is filling the federal courts and prisons with nonviolent offenders. It is diverting immense law-enforcement resources from pursuing serious criminals — violent thugs, financial scammers — to an immense, self-defeating campaign to hunt down ... workers.

The Pew report follows news this month that even as a federal program to hunt immigrant fugitives saw its budget soar — to $218 million last year from $9 million in 2003 — its mission went astray. According to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, of the 72,000 people arrested through last February, 73 percent had no criminal record. Border Patrol agents in California and Maryland, meanwhile, tell of pressure to arrest workers at day-labor corners and convenience stores to meet quotas.

The country needs to control its borders. It needs to rebuild an effective immigration system and thwart employers who cheat it. It needs to bring the undocumented forward and make citizen taxpayers of them.

For all the billions spent on fences, raids, patrols and prisons, the number of illegal immigrants has steadily grown to about 12 million last year from four million in 1992. So has the need to overhaul the many parts of a festering, broken system: to clear out backlogs in legal immigration, to rescue families from limbo, to throw sunlight on the shadow economy, to deter unlawful hiring, to replace chaos with lawfulness and order. All those priorities have languished in the deportation era.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/opinion/22sun3.html?ref=opinion

Posted by lois at 12:24 PM | Comments (0)

February 18, 2009

Pew Study Finds Sharp Rise in Latino Federal Prisoners

Study Shows Sharp Rise in Latino Federal Convicts
By SOLOMON MOORE
Published: February 18, 2009
NY Times

Latino convicts now represent the largest ethnic population in the federal prison system, accounting for 40 percent of all those convicted of federal crimes, according to a study released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank.

In 2007, Latinos, who make up 13 percent of the United States population, accounted for one third of all federal prison inmates, a result the study attributed to the sharp rise in illegal immigration and the increased enforcement of immigration laws.

Nearly half of all Latino offenders, or about 48 percent, were convicted of immigration crimes, while drug offenses were the second-most prevalent charge, according to the report.

As the annual number of federal offenders more than doubled from 1991 to 2007, the number of Latino offenders sentenced in a given year nearly quadrupled, to 29,281 from 7,924.

Of Latino federal offenders, 72 percent are not United States citizens and most were sentenced in courts from one of the four states that border Mexico. Undocumented federal prisoners are usually deported to their home countries after serving their sentences.

“The immigration system has essentially become criminalized at a huge cost to the criminal justice system, to courts, to judges, to prisons and prosecutors,” said Lucas Guttentag, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union. “And the government has diverted the resources of the criminal justice system from violent crimes, financial skullduggery and other areas that have been the traditional area of the Justice Department.”

Last month, The New York Times reported that federal immigration prosecutions had increased over the last five years, doubling in the last fiscal year to more than 70,000 cases. Meanwhile, other categories of federal prosecutions, including gun trafficking, public corruption, organized crime and white-collar crime, have declined over the same period.

The federal justice system accounts for 200,000, or 8.6 percent, of the 2.3 million inmates in federal and state prisons and city and county jails. Nineteen percent of state prisoners and 16 percent of jail inmates were Latinos, the Pew study found. African-Americans, who make up about 12 percent of the national population, make up 39 percent of state prisoners and jail inmates.

Deborah Williams, an assistant federal defender in Phoenix, said that the large number of Latinos in the federal system, particularly those who are not citizens and have limited English proficiency, had dramatically changed federal prison culture.

“I have Anglo and Native American clients who tell me about being the only non-Spanish speaker in their pod,” Ms. Williams said. “Ten years ago, it just wasn’t that way. Everything is changing in there, including the language, the television shows they watch, and a lot of times the guards don’t speak the language. How do you safely guard people who may not understand your orders?”

A spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons, Tracy Billingsley, declined immediate comment on the Pew report.

Mark Hugo Lopez, a co-author of the study, which relied on United States Sentencing Commission statistics, said, “It’s hard to understand whether we’re seeing a policy change or just a growth in the total number of immigrants coming to this country.”

The number of undocumented immigrants in the country increased to 11.9 million last year, from 3.9 million in 1992.

Under federal programs like Operation Gatekeeper, which hired thousands of immigration enforcement officials along the southwest border, and Operation Streamline, which instituted a “zero tolerance policy” for illegal border crossings in the same region, immigration crimes have skyrocketed.

The large number of immigration crimes and low-level drug offenses account for the relatively light sentences that Latinos typically receive — about 46 months, compared with 62 months for white inmates and 91 months for African-American prisoners, according to the study.
graph at this URL-
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/us/19immig.html?_r=1

Posted by lois at 04:56 PM | Comments (0)

February 16, 2009

Texas-New Mexico Border Series Immigrant Inmates Caught in Outsourcing Labyrinth

Americas Program Report
Texas-New Mexico Border Series
Immigrant Inmates Caught in Outsourcing Labyrinth

Tom Barry | February 16, 2009

Imprisoned immigrants in the large prison complex outside the small West Texas town of Pecos have rioted twice over the past few months complaining about inadequate medical care. Their complaints, sparked by the death of a sick inmate in solitary confinement, echo a chorus of similar complaints around the country about medical care in immigrant prisons.

Medical care, like most aspects of imprisonment in America, is outsourced at the Reeves County Detention Center. As a result, imprisoned immigrants don't know who exactly is imprisoning them, who is responsible for their medical care, and who they should petition when they have grievances.

Throughout America but particularly along the Southwest border, hundreds of thousands of immigrants, both legal and illegal, find themselves at the center of a booming prisoner outsourcing business. The imprisonment of immigrants is enriching a handful of private prison corporations and correctional healthcare firms while providing a stream of revenues to county governments in rural America.

Back in the mid-1980s the Reeves County government decided that its best hope for economic development was building a "speculative prison." At the time, this remote county, which occupies the northern reaches of the Chihuahua Desert, was reeling economically.

Cotton farmers and cattle ranchers abandoned their homesteads as ground water levels dropped and drilling costs increased. The oil boom that started in the 1950s went bust in the 1980s as oil reserves dwindled. The closure of the area's large sulfur mine and a food processing company in the early 1990s left hundreds more unemployed.

Seeking to take advantage of its remote location and the large number of unemployed, the county entered into the incipient business of outsourcing prisoners in 1986.

By bidding down the costs of providing prison beds and employing prison guards, Reeves County has over the past couple of decades expanded the initial 300-bed prison to the current 3,763-bed prison complex. The Reeves County Detention Center is now the center of the county's economic life.

The county, where one of every three residents lives below the poverty line, is projecting $67.2 million of revenues to come streaming into county coffers in 2009 from the immigrant prison business. Nearly 500 residents find employment in the immigrant prison, which pays guards $14.95 an hour.

Prison outsourcing is all about expenses, revenues, and profits. In other words, prisoner providers—in this case, mainly the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP)—seek to do business with public and private prisons that have the lowest costs and hence lowest per-diem bed costs. The more prisoners that occupy the beds of the Reeves County Detention Center, the higher the revenues that come from the per-diem payments, and the higher the profit.

The bottom line of the prisoner outsourcing business is essentially the same as any other business, namely the sum of revenues and expenses. But in the case of Reeves County Detention Center, as with scores of other immigrant prisons, the prison business is somewhat more complicated—involving a labyrinth of federal agencies, local governments, private contractors and subcontractors, public bonds, and private investors.
The Reeves County Labyrinth

Not having enough room in federally-owned prisons and unwilling to build new ones, the Bureau of Prisons, like most federal detention agencies, outsources an increasing number of its charges and most all of its immigrant detainees. BOP outsources virtually all of its low-security "criminal alien residents" to county/private prisons in the Southwest.

Anticipating an ever-increasing demand for what the prison industry calls "beds," Reeves County has issued a series of project revenue bonds to finance the construction and maintenance of its ever-expanding prison. Convinced that the boom in the prison business will endure, private investors buy these bonds, thereby providing the $90 million the county needed for its prison project.

Reeves County functions as a kind of front man for the private prison industry. Being a government, it can issue revenue bonds that attract investors because the bond income (from a portion of the per-diem payments from the federal government) is not subject to income tax. Because the prison is a public facility, all capital and operating expenditures are also exempt from sales and property taxes.

The federal, state, and local governments lose all these tax revenues. But being tax-exempt keeps costs low, and makes the Reeves County Detention Center an attractive proposition for both the federal government and the private prison industry.

Although Reeves County initially ran the prison itself, it now contracts with GEO Group, the world's second largest prison corporation, to manage and operate the prison. For three years, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) also ran the prison for the county.

GEO Group has no investment in the prison, portions of which were destroyed by fire during the recent riots. It receives a large annual management fee—$4.75 million in 2008—from the county as well an annual administrative fee—$1.25 million in 2008—to cover the payroll costs of its 12-member management team, including the warden with his $125,000 salary.

The immigrant inmates, who are technically under federal government custody and held in a government-owned prison, see only the private face of America's prison industry. That's GEO Group, which runs the prison and hires and supervises the hundreds of prison guards who are paid by the county. The premier spot in the prison's parking lot is reserved for "GEO Executive," and the warden and all the other top management are GEO officials that answer to corporate headquarters in Boca Raton, Florida.

GEO Group, which represents the "20-year evolution of Wackenhut Corrections," says it is a "global leader in the delivery of diversified government outsourced services." Founded with the slogan, " G lobal E xpertise in O utsourcing," GEO Group is a transnational corporation that specializes in providing security and prison "services" to governments around the world.

Working closely with GEO at the Reeves County Detention Center is Physicians Network Association (PNA), which is a private firm that says it specializes in "correctional healthcare." PNA is responsible for the healthcare at the Reeves immigrant prison and at nine other prisons run by GEO, including five others in Texas. PNA was contracted by the county before the GEO operations and management contract. In GEO's contract with the county, healthcare services are explicitly left as county responsibilities. But the county has subcontracted out medical services to PNA, which receives a $5.85 per-diem fee from the county.
Private-Public Complex

The BOP and other federal agencies could, of course, build and operate their own prisons. However, since the early 1980s the federal government has increasingly outsourced its inmates, especially immigrants.

The launching of the "drug war" that resulted in mass imprisonment of drug users and low-level street distributors set the stage for this new era of prisoner outsourcing. Faced with the rising number of convicted prisoners and the rise of illegal immigration, public prisons and detention centers became overcrowded. But there was little political will either at the federal or local level to use tax money to build new prisons.

Conveniently, the rise of the political right in the late 1970s and especially during the Reagan administration brought with it a new widely shared ideological conviction that favored government downsizing and privatization. In 1983, faced with increasing numbers of detained immigrants, the Immigration & Naturalization Service (INS), with the blessing of President Reagan, began outsourcing immigrants.

While INS took the first step toward outsourcing federal detainees to private prisons, the U.S. Marshals Service and the Bureau of Prisons eventually followed. At first, most of this outsourcing went directly to private firms. CCA and Wackenhut got their start in the prison business as outsourcers of detained immigrants for the INS in 1983-85.

Over the last couple of decades, county governments have joined the prisoner outsourcing bandwagon, commonly in collaboration with the private prison industry. CCA, GEO, and other private prison firms have seized on the opportunity of public financing to build and maintain the prisons they operate.

Today, there are scores of counties that have followed the example of Reeves County, building new prisons with project revenue bonds to house outsourced prisoners from federal agencies and state governments. These generally poor and rural counties now constitute a central component of America's prison outsourcing industry.

What started out as a privatization of a core responsibility of government has over the past 25 years evolved into a prison complex in which private investors and corporations are dominant but in which local government has a new and expanding role.

As seen in Reeves County, the prison business is a complex labyrinth that is run for profit by corporations such as GEO. Yet the booming private prison industry in Pecos and elsewhere is fundamentally dependent on the government for a steady supply of prisoners, for ever-increasing per-diems, and even for the capital to build and maintain the private prison labyrinth.

When the Bureau of Prisons signed the most recent contract with Reeves County to provide as many as 3,763 prison beds for "criminal alien residents," it was GEO Group, not the county, which announced the new contract. In its January 2007 media release to business publications, GEO Group boasted that it believed "that the Reeves County Detention Complex (the 'Complex') is the largest detention/correctional facility under private management in the world."

It's a part of a yet larger complex that is immensely profitable. At a time when most other industries are retracting, the private prison industry continues to boom. GEO Group experienced another record year in 2008, as its net income rose more than 14%.

Key to the prison complex's lustrous bottom line are the outsourced immigrant inmates of Reeves County. Even as they rioted to demand decent healthcare, these outsourced immigrants were a major source of profits for the private/public prison complex.

Tom Barry directs the TransBorder Project of the Americas Program (www.americaspolicy.org) at the Center for International Policy in Washington, DC. He blogs at http://borderlinesblog.blogspot.com/.

To reprint this article, please contact americas@ciponline.org. The opinions expressed here are the author's and do not necessarily represent the views of the CIP Americas Program or the Center for International Policy.
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5871

Posted by lois at 04:49 PM | Comments (0)

Rapid Repat for California prisons

From the Los Angeles Times
Opinion
Rapid Repat for California prisons
The state could save money and reduce the number of inmates by taking part in a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement program.
By Julie Myers Wood
Julie Myers Wood was the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement from January 2006 to November 2008.

February 16, 2009

The tentative federal court ruling last week that California must release thousands of inmates in its correctional system comes as more bad news for a state trying to enforce the law and control its budget. One partial solution may lie in a federal program.

Under the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling, California must develop a comprehensive plan to reduce the state prison population by as many as 57,000 people over the course of two to three years, unless the state reaches an agreement with the inmates who are the plaintiffs in the case. Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown's office has announced that the state will appeal the decision if it becomes final. In the meantime, the state should reconsider joining a program that is saving millions of dollars each year in states including Arizona and New York, and soon many others.

This innovative cost-cutting measure is Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Removal of Eligible Parolees Accepted for Transfer program, known as Rapid Repat. On top of significant savings related to housing inmates, this program has the added benefit of reducing California's criminal alien -- legal and illegal -- prison population and would be a logical part of any comprehensive plan to reduce the prison population.

The program provides for conditional early release of qualifying non- violent criminal aliens on the condition that they voluntarily agree to deportation. Under this program, immigrants are not treated differently from U.S. citizens, as far as early release is concerned. The state must already have (or put in place) a parole structure that permits early release for eligible U.S. citizen criminals. Immigrants who have committed violent, serious felonies are not eligible.

If an immigrant participates but then comes back into the United States illegally, the individual first serves the remainder of his or her state sentence. After that, ICE will present the case to the U.S. attorney's office for federal prosecution for illegal reentry after removal, subjecting the individual to a potentially lengthy federal prison term.

The success of Rapid Repat in other states demonstrates its potential in California. New York has used a version of this program since 1995, saving the state more than $120 million. Arizona joined the program in late 2005 and has saved more than $18 million. In the last year, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island and Georgia have begun participating. Rapid Repat also saves federal taxpayers significant money by reducing federal detention and court time, and leveraging limited federal detention resources.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-wood16-2009feb16,0,6259374.story

Posted by lois at 02:59 PM | Comments (0)

February 13, 2009

Excellent article " The New Political Economy of Immigration"

The New Political Economy of Immigration

By Tom Barry

This article is from the January/February 2009 issue of Dollars & Sense: The Magazine of Economic Justice available at http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2009/0109barry.html

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 drastically altered the traditional political economy of immigration. The millions of undocumented immigrants—those who crossed the border illegally or overstayed their visas—who were living and working in the United States were no longer simply regarded as a shadow population or as surplus cheap labor. In the public and policy debate, immigrants were increasingly defined as threats to the nation’s security. Categorizing immigrants as national security threats gave the government’s flailing immigration law-enforcement and border- control operations a new unifying logic that has propelled the immigrant crackdown forward.

Responsibility for immigration law-enforcement and border control passed from the Justice Department to the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In Congress Democrats and Republicans alike readily supported a vast expansion of the country’s immigration control apparatus—doubling the number of Border Patrol agents and authorizing a tripling of immigrant prison beds.

Today, after the shift in the immigration debate, the $15 billion-plus DHS budget for immigration affairs has fueled an immigrant-crackdown economy that has greatly boosted the already-bloated prison industry. Even now, with the economy imploding, immigrants are currently behind one of the country’s most profitable industries: they are the nation’s fastest growing sector of the U.S. prison population.

Across the country new prisons are hurriedly being constructed to house the hundreds of thousands of immigrants caught each year. State and local governments are vying with each other to attract new immigrant prisons as the foundation of their rural “economic development” plans.

While DHS is driving immigrants from their jobs and homes, U.S. firms in the business of providing prison beds are raking in record profits from the immigrant crackdown. Although only one piece of the broader story of immigration, it’s all a part of the new political economy of immigration.
Dangerous People

In the new national security context, undocumented immigrants are not just outlaws: They are “dangerous people” who threaten the homeland.

The two DHS agencies involved in immigration enforcement—Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Enforcement (CBP)—have seen their funds increased disproportionately over the last several years, doubling in size while total DHS funding has increased by just a third. The funding for these two agencies is set to rise 19.1% in 2009 while the overall DHS budget will increase by only 6.8%. Hunting down immigrants has become a top DHS priority. As, DHS says its mission is “to prevent terrorist attacks against the nation and to protect our nation from dangerous people.”

Immigrants caught up in DHS dragnets, worksite enforcement raids, and border patrols were the “metrics of success” that DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff pointed to in his July 18, 2008 congressional testimony. He used the dramatically increased number of immigrant apprehensions and “removals” as metrics to show that DHS is succeeding in its goal to “secure the homeland and protect the American people.”

While the increased numbers of immigrants being arrested, imprisoned, and deported certainly demonstrate that DHS is busy, they don’t demonstrate that DHS is stopping terrorism. Never in its congressional testimonies or media releases does DHS present evidence that show how the number of immigrants captured improves national security.

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 (2004–2006) 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.”
Enforcing the “Rule of Law”

Rather than addressing immigration as the complex socioeconomic issue that it is, Homeland Security has reduced immigration policy to a system of crime and punishment. Applying the simplistic law-and-order logic propagated by restrictionists, DHS regards undocumented immigrants not as workers, community members, and parents but as criminals.

Following the lead of the anti-immigration institutes and right-wing think tanks, Chertoff came to Homeland Security with a new interpretation of the department’s immigration law enforcement and border control operations: Commitment to a strict enforcement regime to protect the country against foreign terrorists, and to reassert the “rule of law.”

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, the restrictionist camp found that their messaging about the “illegality” and “criminality” of undocumented immigrants took on a new resonance. They proceeded to upscale their “what don’t you understand about illegal?” message, to a more conceptual framing of undocumented immigration. Undocumented immigrants now represented a threat to the “rule of law” inside a nation that had just come under foreign attack by foreign outlaws.

Their new language about immigration policy started popping up everywhere, from the pronouncements of immigrant-rights groups to the Democratic Party platform. Instead of promising an “earned path to citizenship,” as it has in the past, the party stated that undocumented immigrants will be required to “get right with the law.”

Looking ahead, Janet Napolitano, President Obama’s nominee to replace Chertoff, while no anti-immigration hardliner, still seems poised to adopt the same law-and-order logic. As a lawyer, former federal prosecutor, and a governor who has insisted on more border control and stood behind a tough employer-sanctions law, Napolitano can be expected to follow the lead of Chertoff and the Democratic Party in insisting that current immigration laws be strictly enforced “to reassert the rule of law.”

Immigrants Mean Business

Political imperatives—protecting the homeland and enforcing the “rule of law”—have over the past eight years countervailed against the economic forces that have historically led in setting immigration policy. Although the immigrant labor market persists, the increased risks for both employer and worker, along with the recessionary economy, appear to be exercising downward pressure on both supply and demand.

But even in the flagging economy, the immigrant crackdown has invigorated other market forces. Eager to cash in on immigrant detention, private prison firms and local governments are rushing to supply Homeland Security and the Justice Department with the prisons needed to house the hundreds of thousands of immigrants captured by ICE and Border Patrol agents.

In the prison industry, bed is a euphemism for a place behind bars. Even President Bush talked the prison-bed language when discussing immigration policy. When visiting the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas in 2006 to promote the immigrant crackdown, the president said: “Beds are our number one priority.”

The number of beds for detained immigrants in DHS centers has increased by more than a third since 2002. There are now 32,000 beds available for the revolving population of immigrants on the path to deportation, and another 1,000 are scheduled to come on line in 2009. This doesn’t include beds for immigrants in Homeland Security custody that are provided by county, state, and the federal Bureau of Prisons.

At the insistence of such immigration restrictionists as Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.), the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 contained an authorization for an additional 40,000 beds to accommodate immigrants under U.S. government custody.

At the onset of the immigration crackdown two years ago, ICE dubbed its promise to find a detention center or prison bed for all arrested immigrants “Operation Reservation Guaranteed.” The Justice Department has a similar initiative to ensure that the U.S. Marshals Service has beds available for detainees—about 180,000 a year, of whom more than 30% are held on immigration charges.

Most of the prison beds contracted by ICE and DOJ’s Office of Federal Detention Trustee are with local governments; ICE has more than 300 intergovernmental agreements with county and city governments to hold immigrants, while DOJ has some 1200 such agreements. In many cases, particularly with contracts for hundreds of prison beds, the local government then subcontracts with a private prison company to operate the facility.

Prison beds translate into per diem payments from the federal government that are well above the hotel room rates in the remote rural communities where most of these immigrant prisons are located. With these per diems running from $70 to $95 for each immigrant imprisoned, local governments and private firms are hurrying to expand existing facilities or to create new ones.
Depending on Immigrants

The uptick in immigrant detention that saved the industry in 2000 (see sidebar) turned into a mighty upswing in demand for immigrant prison beds after Sept. 11 and the ensuing immigrant crackdown. The Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) has reported record profits for the last few years, largely on the strength of increasing demand from its ICE and USMS “customers.”

Forty percent of total CCA revenue comes from three federal contractors: Bureau of Prisons, U.S. Marshals Service, and ICE. In its 2007 Security and Exchange Commission filing, CCA stated: “We are dependent on government appropriations.” CCA Chairman William Andrews warned investors that the company’s high returns could be threatened by a change in the policy environment: “The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts…or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws.”

But to understand just how well the prison business is faring and how immigrants are key to prison profits, you can listen in on the prison firms’ quarterly conference call with major Wall Street investment firms of November 2008.

Corrections Corporation of America boasted that it enjoyed a $33.6 million increase in the third quarter over last year, while earnings rose 15% during the same period. Formerly known as Wackenhut, GEO Group, the nation’s second largest prison company, saw its earnings jump 29% over 2007. Cornell Companies, another private prison firm that imprisons immigrants, reported a 9% increase in net revenues in the third quarter.

Private prison companies aren’t worried that the Democratic Party sweep will mean fewer beds. GEO Group’s chairman George Zoley on Nov. 3 assured investors: “These federal initiatives to target, detain and deport criminal aliens throughout the country will continue to drive the need for immigration detention beds over the next several years and these initiatives have been fully funded by Congress on a bipartisan basis.”

Addressing investor fears that recent decreases in undocumented immigration inflows might dampen company returns, CCA CEO and board chairman John Ferguson said, “So even though we have seen the border crossings and apprehensions decline in the last couple of years, we are really talking about dealing with a population well north of 12 million illegal immigrants residing in the United States.”

The CCA chief assured investors that the company’s dependence on detained immigrants is not a factor of policy but rather of law enforcement. “The Federal Bureau of Prisons, U.S. Marshals Service, Immigration and Custom Enforcement are carrying out statutory obligations for their responsibility….We should continue to see their utilization of the private sector to meet their statutory obligations and requirements.”

The prison executives even intimate that the economic crisis will fatten their business. When asked by an investment company representative about a Ü possible downturn in detained immigrants, James Hyman, president of Cornell Companies, said, “We do not believe we will see a decline in the need for detention beds particularly in an economy with rising unemployment among American workers.”

Immigrant Prisons as Economic Development

Hundreds of local governments are also attempting to take advantage of this rising demand for immigrant prison beds by opening their jails to immigrants under ICE and DOJ custody and by building new jails to meet the anticipated increased demand.

Financial considerations weigh heavily for cash-strapped county commissions and sheriff departments. As Sheriff Roger Mulch told Jefferson County (Illinois) commissioners in late February 2008, “ICE, during the last three months, has been hot to do business with us.” Each locality negotiates independently with ICE and USMS to set the per diem rates, and as the demand from the feds for local jail beds increases, county sheriff departments are negotiating ever-higher rates.

Along the U.S.-Mexico border, particularly in Texas, prisons are a booming industry. Near the border town of Del Rio, the county’s Val Verde Correctional Facility, which is owned and run by GEO Group, had only 180 beds eight years ago. Today, after undergoing its second 600-bed expansion, the maximum-security jail can fit 1,425 prisoners.

In Texas’ Willacy County, the county government opened the country’s largest immigrant detention center in 2006, and is currently pursuing a federal contract to host one of three new family detention centers for immigrants.

County Commissioner Ernie Chapa, explaining how the county government financially depends on jailing immigrants, said: “We would love to have 2,500 [illegal immigrants] but we know that’s not going to be ... If we get 2,200 to 2,300, we’d be very happy.”

Joining in the celebration of the opening of the new jail for immigrants, Willacy County Judge Simone Salinas said, “We are proud to have been able to bring on these new detention beds in record time, which will result in improved border security not only for county residents but also our nation.”

“You talk about economic development, this is it,” Salinas told a reporter, noting the county’s initial cut is $2.25 a day per occupied bed.

A year later, a new agreement with ICE for another thousand beds was greeted enthusiastically by some officials in what is one of the poorest counties in the nation. The new county judge Eliseo Barnhart said the expansion of the immigrant detention center run by CCA will “bring jobs that are needed in Willacy County and it means income, which we desperately need.”

“It’s almost like a futures market. You have private prison companies gambling on expansion of the immigrant detention system, and basically prison speculators who are convincing communities to do this,” Bob Libal, director of Grassroots Leadership in Austin and an organizer with South Texans Opposing Private Prisons, told the Denver Post. “It’s a sick market, but a market nonetheless,” Libal said.

New Political Economy of Immigration

What started off as a war against terrorism has devolved into a war against immigrants. The current “enforcement-only” approach to immigration policy has created a morass of new problems, including a host of human rights and financial issues associated with the annual detention and removal of immigrants. The immigrant crackdown has given rise to an unregulated complex of jails, detention centers, and prisons that create profit from the immigrant crackdown.

At the outset of a new administration and new era, the political economy of immigration is decidedly anti-immigrant. Political and economic factors have combined to create a harsh environment for undocumented immigrants, present and future. Immigration reform may not be a top priority, but the Obama administration and new Congress would do well to begin to address the challenge of reshaping the political economy of immigration.

First steps could include a more careful articulation of the intersection of immigration, rule of law, and national security. Napolitano should explain that the real threat to the rule of law is not having an immigration policy that provides a legal pathway to integration for the 11 million immigrants already within the United States.

What’s more, she would do well to disarticulate the links established by the Bush administration between immigrants and terrorists. At the same time, closer links must be made between immigration policy and economic policy, guarding against labor exploitation while considering domestic economic need.

Instead of a policy based on a calm assessment of the costs and benefits of immigrant labor to the U.S. economy, current immigration policy has been hijacked by the politics of fear, resentment, scapegoating, and nativism. The “enforcement only” immigration policy has fostered a national immigrant prison complex that feeds on ever-increasing numbers of arrested immigrants. As County Commissioner Ernie Chapa said, “Any time the numbers are high, it’s good for the county because it brings more income.”
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Immigrant Detention in the United States By the Numbers

* Immigrants caught by DHS in 2007: 960,756
* ICE detentions that year: 311,169
* Rise in detentions since 2006: 21%
* DHS 2009 budget for Border Security & Immigration Enforcement: $12.14 billion
* Change from 2008: up 19%
* Change since Bush took office: up more than 150%
* Money for ICE “custody operations”: $1.8 billion
* Number of new “beds” this will provide: 1,000
* Total number of 2009 ICE beds: 33,400
* Average per diem for immigrant detention to private prison firms in 2007: $87.99

Sources: “Immigration Enforcement Actions: 2007,” Annual Report Department of the Homeland Security Office of Immigration Statistics, December 2008; “DHS Announces $12.14 Billion for Border Security & Immigration Efforts,” Department of Homeland Security, January 2008; Leslie Berestein “Detention Dollars” The San Diego Union Tribune May 2008; “Summary: 2009 Homeland Security Appropriations” Committee on Appropriations, September 2008.

Detention Profiteers

There may be a new boom in immigrant detention, but captive immigrants as good business is a concept that dates back two decades. Immigrants were the industry’s first prisoners.

It all began in 1983 when a klatch of wealthy Tennessee Republicans decided private prisons were just what the country needed to solve the problems of prison riots, overcrowding, and increasing costs. They formed the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), with the mission to “provide in partnership with government meaningful public service,” and succeeded in persuading the Reagan administration to help launch prison privatization by having the Immigration and Naturalization Service (ICE’s legacy agency) issue CCA a contract to keep immigrants locked up in Houston.

Wackenhut Corrections (recently renamed GEO Group), a private security services firm, branched into the private prison industry when it entered a contract in 1987 to operate an INS immigrant detention center in Colorado.

Using their experience in immigrant detention, CCA and Wackenhut soon began successfully soliciting states and counties to enter into private prison pacts, while winning dozens of new contracts with the federal government. However, the initial enthusiasm of governments at all levels faded with increasing abuse scandals at CCA and Wackenhut prisons, leading some states to cancel contracts and pull prisoners out.

But immigrant detention once again saved the day for CCA, Wackenhut, and other teetering private prison firms. The 1996 immigration law that broadened the guidelines for deporting undocumented and legal immigrants started to kick in, resulting in a rising federal demand for more immigrant detention beds that the private prison industry was happy to supply.
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Tom Barry, a senior analyst at the Center for International Policy, directs the TransBorder Project of the Americas Policy Program.
SOURCES: “Immigration Enforcement: The Rhetoric, The Reality,” TRAC Immigration, 2007; “Corrections Corp. of America Q3 2008 Earnings Call Transcript,” Seeking Alpha, November 2008; “The GEO Group, Inc. Q3 2008 (Qtr End 9/28/08) Earnings Call Transcript,” Seeking Alpha, November 2008; “Cornell Companies Inc. Q3 2008 Earnings Call Transcript,” Seeking Alpha, November 2008; “Mulch: Jail May Soon House Immigrants”, Register News February 2008; “Willacy County Goes $50 Million More In Debt to Expand MTC’s Tent City,” Texas Prison Bid’ness Blog, August 2007; “Federal detention center in Willacy to expand,” The Monitor, July 2007; “Inmate count continues to climb at detention center,” Brownsville Herald, April 2008.

http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2009/0109barry.html

Posted by lois at 03:15 PM | Comments (0)

February 06, 2009

Arpaio’s America

Arpaio’s America
Editorial: NY Times including a picture on the editorial page of the shackled men
Published: February 5, 2009

It has come to this: In Phoenix on Wednesday, more than 200 men in shackles and prison stripes were marched under armed guard past a gantlet of TV cameras to a tent prison encircled by an electric fence. They were inmates being sent to await deportation in a new immigrant detention camp minutes from the center of America’s fifth-largest city.

The judge, jury and exhibitioner of this degrading spectacle was the Maricopa County sheriff, Joe Arpaio, the publicity-obsessed star of a Fox reality show and the self-appointed scourge of illegal immigrants. Though he frequently and proudly insists that he answers to no one, except at election time, the sheriff is not an isolated rogue. As a participant in the federal policing program called 287(g), he is an official partner of the United States government in its warped crackdown on illegal immigration.

The immigration enforcement regime left by the Bush Administration is out of control. It is up to President Obama and the new secretary of homeland security, Janet Napolitano, to rein it in and clean it up. This applies not just to off-the-rails deputies like Sheriff Arpaio, but to the federal enforcement agencies themselves.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol have been shown in recent news accounts to be botching their jobs. Border Patrol agents in California have accused supervisors of setting arrest quotas for undocumented immigrants, and a recent Migration Policy Institute study showed that a much-touted campaign of raids against criminal fugitives was a failure. It netted mostly the maids and laborers who are no reasonable person’s idea of a national threat.

The burden of action is particularly high on Ms. Napolitano, who as Arizona’s governor handled Sheriff Arpaio with a gingerly caution that looked to some of his critics and victims as calculated and timid.

Ms. Napolitano, who is known as a serious and moderate voice on immigration, recently directed her agency to review its enforcement efforts, including looking at ways to expand the 287(g) program. Sheriff Arpaio is a powerful argument for doing just the opposite.

Now that she has left Arizona politics behind, Ms. Napolitano is free to prove this is not Arpaio’s America, where the mob rules and immigrants are subject to ritual humiliation. The country should expect no less.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/opinion/06fri2.html?ref=opinion

Posted by lois at 04:38 PM | Comments (0)

February 03, 2009

Despite Vow, Target of Immigrant Raids Shifted

Despite Vow, Target of Immigrant Raids Shifted
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: February 3, 2009
NY Times

The raids on homes around the country were billed as carefully planned hunts for dangerous immigrant fugitives, and given catchy names like Operation Return to Sender.

And they garnered bigger increases in money and staff from Congress than any other program run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, even as complaints grew that teams of armed agents were entering homes indiscriminately.

But in fact, beginning in 2006, the program was no longer what was being advertised. Federal immigration officials had repeatedly told Congress that among more than half a million immigrants with outstanding deportation orders, they would concentrate on rounding up the most threatening — criminals and terrorism suspects.

Instead, newly available documents show, the agency changed the rules, and the program increasingly went after easier targets. A vast majority of those arrested had no criminal record, and many had no deportation orders against them, either.

Internal directives by immigration officials in 2006 raised arrest quotas for each team in the National Fugitive Operations Program, eliminated a requirement that 75 percent of those arrested be criminals, and then allowed the teams to include nonfugitives in their count.

In the next year, fugitives with criminal records dropped to 9 percent of those arrested, and nonfugitives picked up by chance — without a deportation order — rose to 40 percent. Many were sent to detention centers far from their homes, and deported.

The impact of the internal directives, obtained by a professor and students at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law through a Freedom of Information lawsuit and shared with The New York Times, shows the power of administrative memos to significantly alter immigration enforcement policy without any legislative change.

The memos also help explain the pattern of arrests documented in a report, criticizing the fugitive operations program, to be released on Wednesday by the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington.

Analyzing more than five years of arrest data supplied to the institute last year by Julie Myers, who was then chief of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the report found that over all, as the program spent a total of $625 million, nearly three-quarters of the 96,000 people it apprehended had no criminal convictions.

Without consulting Congress, the report concluded, the program shifted to picking up “the easiest targets, not the most dangerous fugitives.”

It noted, however, that the most recent figures available indicate an increase in arrests of those with a criminal background last year, though it was unclear whether that resulted from a policy change.

The increased public attention comes as the new secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, has ordered a review of the fugitive teams operation, which was set up in 2002 to find and deport noncitizens with outstanding orders of deportation, then rapidly expanded after 2003 with the mission of focusing on the most dangerous criminals.

Peter L. Markowitz, who teaches immigration law at Cardozo and directs its immigration legal clinic, said the memos obtained in its lawsuit reflected the Bush administration’s effort to appear tough on immigration enforcement during the unsuccessful push to pass comprehensive immigration legislation in 2006, and amid rising anger over illegal immigration.

“It looks like what happened here is that the law enforcement strategy was hijacked by the political agenda of the administration,” he said.

Kelly A. Nantel, a spokeswoman for the immigration agency, defended the program. “For the first time in history, we continue to reduce the number of immigration fugitive cases,” she said, noting that the number of noncitizens at large with outstanding deportation orders, which peaked at 634,000 in the 2007 fiscal year, is now down to about 554,000. “These results speak for themselves and they are consistent with Congress’s mandate: locate and remove immigration absconders.”

Ms. Nantel said the number of fugitives with criminal backgrounds arrested in the 2008 fiscal year rose to 5,652, or 16 percent of 34,000 arrests, and nonfugitives fell to 8,062, or 23 percent.

Many Americans have welcomed roundups of what the agency calls “ordinary status violators” — noncitizens who have no outstanding order of deportation, but are suspected of being in the country unlawfully, either because they overstayed a visa or entered without one.

But Michael Wishnie, one of the authors of the report, who teaches law at Yale, said that random arrests of low-level violators in residential raids not only raised a new set of legal and humanitarian issues, including allegations of entering private homes without warrants or consent and separating children from their caretakers, but was “dramatically different from how ICE has sold this program to Congress.”

“If we just want to arrest undocumented people,” he said, “we can do it much more cheaply.”

Congressional financing for the fugitive operations program rose to $218 million in the 2008 fiscal year, from $9 million in 2003, as the number of seven-member teams multiplied to 104 from 8.

In Congressional briefings and public statements since 2003, agency officials have repeatedly said that given the vast number of immigrants with outstanding deportation orders, the program will focus its resources on the roughly 20 percent with a criminal background.

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo dated Jan. 22, 2004, underscored that commitment: “Effective immediately, no less than 75 percent of all fugitive operations targets will be those classified as criminal aliens” — noncitizens with a criminal record as well as an order of deportation. It added that “collateral apprehensions” — immigration violators encountered by chance during an operation — would not be counted in that percentage.

But on Jan. 31, 2006, a new memo changed the rules. The directive, from John P. Torres, acting director of the agency, raised each team’s “target goal” to 1,000 a year, from 125.

And it removed the requirement that at least 75 percent of those sought out for arrest be criminals. Instead, it told the teams to prioritize cases according to the threat posed by the fugitive, with noncriminals in the lowest of five categories. And it repeated that “collateral apprehensions will not count” toward the 1,000 arrest quota.

But that standard, too, was dropped nine months later. A new memo from Mr. Torres said “nonfugitive arrests may now be included” to reach the required 1,000 arrests. On average, however, it said at least half of those arrested by each team should be fugitives. It also promised to “ensure the maximum availability of detention space for fugitive arrest operations.”

One result was an increase in noncriminals held in immigration detention. Another, the Migration Policy Institute report concluded, was that the percentage of criminal fugitives arrested plummeted, to 9 percent in the year that ended Sept. 30, 2007, from 39 percent in the 2004 fiscal year.

That same year, 15,646, or 51 percent of those arrested, had an outstanding deportation order, but no criminal record, and 12,084, or 40 percent, were termed “ordinary status violators” who did not fit any of the program’s priority categories.

The report said the program relied on a database riddled with errors, and that many deportation orders were issued without the subject in court, sometimes because of faulty addresses.

The looser rules were reflected in sweeps like one conducted in New Haven in June 2007. During the raid, lawyers at Yale’s immigration law center said, agents who found no one home at an address specified in a deportation order simply knocked on other doors until one opened, pushed their way in, and arrested residents who acknowledged that they lacked legal status.

Of the 32 arrested and scattered to jails around New England, only 5 had outstanding deportation orders, and only 1 or 2 had criminal records.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/04/us/04raids.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all

Posted by lois at 11:54 PM | Comments (0)

Call for Papers: The International Prison Privatization Experience: A Transatlantic and Transpacific Dialogue, Houston, TX, August 6-8, 2009

The International Prison Privatization Experience: A Transatlantic and Transpacific Dialogue, Houston, TX, August 6-8, 2009

Call for Papers

The Barbara Jordan Institute for Policy Research, the BJ-ML School of Public Affairs Administration of Justice Department, and Justice Strategies will convene the first international conference on prison privatization. The conference will highlight the inimical impact these prisons are having on women, minorities, and the poor. Scholars will explore alternative economic development strategies to sustain rural communities before they turn to prisons—private or public.

Papers should investigate comparative aspects of prison privatization and grassroots initiatives geared toward reducing prison privatization. Proposals should also examine critical issues such as race, gender and crime and the impact on families’ and prisoners’ communities. Papers should fit into one of the following categories:

Session 1: Financial and Social Costs of an Increasing Use of Imprisonment

Session 2: Commodification of Prisoners and Human Rights

Session 3: Constitutional Implications of Private Prisons

Session 4: The Commercialization of Justice

Session 5: Interjurisdictional Issues and Common Concerns

Session 6: Demystifying Prison Privatization

Session 7: Privatized Detention of Immigrants

For more information contact:

Prof. Byron E. Price, the Conference Chair at 713-313-4809. Please send proposals, preferably as a Word or pdf attachment, to pricebe@tsu.edu by April 1st of 2009.

Committee members:

Byron E. Price, Texas Southern University—Houston, TX
Helen Taylor Greene, Texas Southern University, Houston, TX
Judy Greene, Justice Strategies—Brooklyn, NY
Elycia Daniel, Texas Southern University—Houston, TX

Posted by lois at 05:55 PM | Comments (0)

February 02, 2009

The Big Business of Family Detention

The Big Business of Family Detention

It's not just alleged terrorists who are suffering from our inhumane treatment of detainees. It's also children.
Courtney E. Martin | February 2, 2009 |
American Prospect web only

When President Barack Obama made it his first act in office to shut down Guantánamo Bay prison, he effectively ended one shameful chapter in our country's embarrassingly large book of human-rights abuses. It was not so much redemption as a reminder that this country has a long, long way to go when it comes to detention, due process, and the Geneva Convention. It's not just alleged terrorists that are suffering from our inhumane treatment. It's also children.

The United States is currently holding 30,000 immigrants in detention while they await hearings. The country operates three family immigrant detention centers, the most notorious of which is the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, Texas, a former prison currently under the private management of Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). The 600-bed center detains families who are awaiting asylum or immigration hearings, a major departure from past federal policy. Pre-September 11, families charged with immigration violations (which are not criminal violations) or who came to the country asking for asylum were generally allowed to live independently as long as they agreed to attend a hearing.

The transition from "catch and release" to "catch and detain" has been riddled with controversy. Immigrant detention became a boom business under the Bush administration, which supplied the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency's (ICE) $1 billion-plus detention budget. Private contractors get $200 a head per day for family detention and lobbied hard for the policy shift: Mother Jones reports that "in 2004, when Congress passed legislation authorizing ICE to triple the number of immigrant detention beds, CCA's lobbying expenditures reached $3 million; since then, it has spent an additional $7 million on lobbyists."

The bottom line is not just economic, however. Children and families have suffered inexcusable indignities under this new policy, which treats them like convicted criminals instead of asylum-seekers and potential citizens. Despite the fact that myriad human rights and community groups -- such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Immigration Studies -- have condemned the practice of detaining children in prison-like environments, ICE is seeking to open three new family detention centers, doubling its capacity. As of this writing, ICE still hasn't released the names of the winning contractors and/or locations, but the announcement is expected to be made sometime this year with the new facilities scheduled to open in 2010.

Imagine this: 7- and 8-year-old children dressed in hospital scrubs, savoring the last few minutes of their one hour of recreation time a day before they are brought back to their family cells, the heavy metal door closing them in for another painfully boring stint. No toys allowed. This nightmare was a reality for too many children when Hutto first opened in 2006. The Women's Refugee Commission, a New York-based nonprofit that conducted a study in collaboration with the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, found that "immigration detention facilities for families in this country may be re-traumatizing families and their children, many of whom are seeking asylum from persecution in their home countries." The commission reports that on a visit to the facility, one child slipped a note into the hand of an outside visitor that said, "Help us and ask us questions."

Thanks to lawsuits against CCA, children can now wear pajamas, play, and attend classes during the day, and pregnant women are receiving some neonatal care, but the spirit of incarceration continues. Immigration officials claim that family detention is necessary in order to prevent immigrants and asylum-seekers from fleeing the country. However, even ICE admits that alternatives -- like its own pilot program in 2004 where specialists were assigned a limited caseload of detainees whom they monitored using home visits and telephone calls -- have a 94 percent appearance rate overall.

Family detention centers may provide a meager 6 percent reduction in flight risk, but this country pays a far bigger price in lost integrity. We lock up children and their families -- many of whom have suffered economic deprivation, exploitation, and oftentimes, domestic and sexual abuse -- before they've even had a hearing as to their immigration status.

Renee Feltz, a multimedia investigative journalist based in New York City who co-runs a project on the business of immigrant detention, reports that waiting in such unbearable conditions often brings immigrants -- especially women with children -- to their knees. "Many of the people we talked to are so miserable in these facilities that they will eventually agree to being deported even if they think they have a legitimate claim to asylum," Feltz says. "They just want to get out as fast as possible."

In this way, one of the first lessons we teach potential new citizens about America is one of cruel, Orwellian hypocrisy. You must earn your freedom, if at all, via imprisonment. Dignity comes only by bearing undignified conditions. The last administration's obsession with family values is glaringly absent from this Civics 101 course. We welcome children who have heard tall tales of the abundance and liberty of America with rehabbed cells and 10 minutes to wolf down an inadequate lunch of cheap starches on a prison tray.

First and foremost, immigrant family detention must stop. On Jan. 21, Grassroots Leadership, a Southern community organizing group, launched a campaign with this goal, calling it 100 Actions in 100 Days. Given the new administration, hope for immigration reform, and a renewed focus on addressing corporate corruption, it's an opportune time to reactivate the country around this issue.

But there's an even bigger picture here that we must not lose sight of. Immigrant detention, on the whole, is riddled with corruption, inefficiencies, and indignities. Comprehensive immigration reform is a vital component of our country's next few years of healing and reform.

And an even bigger picture still: We live in a society that has bought blindly into the privatization and proliferation of our prisons. It's not so surprising that we force immigrant children to live in cells and wear hospital garb when you consider the national tendency toward incarceration, racism, and xenophobia.

We've got a lot to heal. Let's start by abolishing family detention centers immediately.

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_big_business_of_family_deten
tion

Posted by lois at 10:30 PM | Comments (0)

January 28, 2009

VA: Death in another ICE jail

"The parallels with detainee accounts of Mr. Newbrough’s treatment are striking to Jeff Winder, an organizer for the grass-roots Virginia group People United, who was contacted by several inmates at Piedmont who also spoke to a reporter. The latest death has heightened the group’s opposition to plans by private developers and city officials to build another immigration detention center in Farmville, with 1,000 to 2,500 beds."

“ICE has no obligation to send detainees there after the next detainee dies,” Mr. Winder said. “Farmville could be left with the reputation as a place where detainees die of medical neglect.”

January 28, 2009
Another Jail Death, and Mounting Questions
By NINA BERNSTEIN
New York Times

He lived 42 of his 48 years in the United States, and had the words “Raised American” tattooed on his shoulder. But Guido R. Newbrough was born German, and he died in November as an immigration detainee of a Virginia jail, his heart devastated by an overwhelming bacterial infection.

His family and fellow detainees say the infection went untreated, despite his mounting pleas for medical care in the 10 days before his death. Instead, after his calls for help grew insistent, detainees said, guards at the Piedmont Regional Jail in Farmville, Va., threw him to the floor, dragged him away as he cried out in pain, and locked him in an isolation cell.

"The parallels with detainee accounts of Mr. Newbrough’s treatment are striking to Jeff Winder, an organizer for the grass-roots Virginia group People United, who was contacted by several inmates at Piedmont who also spoke to a reporter. The latest death has heightened the group’s opposition to plans by private developers and city officials to build another immigration detention center in Farmville, with 1,000 to 2,500 beds."

“ICE has no obligation to send detainees there after the next detainee dies,” Mr. Winder said. “Farmville could be left with the reputation as a place where detainees die of medical neglect.”

January 28, 2009
Another Jail Death, and Mounting Questions
By NINA BERNSTEIN
New York Times

He lived 42 of his 48 years in the United States, and had the words “Raised American” tattooed on his shoulder. But Guido R. Newbrough was born German, and he died in November as an immigration detainee of a Virginia jail, his heart devastated by an overwhelming bacterial infection.

His family and fellow detainees say the infection went untreated, despite his mounting pleas for medical care in the 10 days before his death. Instead, after his calls for help grew insistent, detainees said, guards at the Piedmont Regional Jail in Farmville, Va., threw him to the floor, dragged him away as he cried out in pain, and locked him in an isolation cell.

Mr. Newbrough, a construction worker who had served jail time for molesting a girlfriend’s young daughter, was found unresponsive in the cell several days later, on Nov. 27, and died at a hospital the next day without regaining consciousness. An autopsy report last week cited a virulent staph infection as an underlying cause of his death from endocarditis, an infection of the heart valves that is typically cured with antibiotics.

Accounts of Mr. Newbrough’s last days echo other cases of deaths in immigration custody, including one at the same jail in December 2006, which prompted a review by immigration officials that found the medical unit so lacking that they concluded, “Detainee health care is in jeopardy.”

But Immigration and Customs Enforcement never released those findings, even when asked about allegations of neglect in that death, of Abdoulai Sall, 50, a Guinea-born mechanic with no criminal record whose kidneys failed over several weeks. Instead, officials defended care in that case and other deaths as Congress and the news media questioned medical practices in the patchwork of county jails, private prisons and federal detention centers under contract to hold noncitizens while the government tries to deport them.

The 2006 report — and a set of talking points the agency produced for its press officers to use when discussing deaths in detention — were only recently obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union through a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act; the group provided copies to The New York Times, which first reported Mr. Sall’s death.

“This facility has failed on multiple levels to perform basic supervision and provide for the safety and welfare of ICE detainees,” the six-page report concluded shortly after he died. “The medical health care unit does not meet minimum ICE standards.”

The report said the jail had failed to respond adequately as Mr. Sall grew sicker, and that even when he was found unconscious on the floor, employees “stood around for approximately one minute” before trying to revive him. The jail’s superintendent, who said he never saw the report, adamantly denied those conclusions this week.

But Tom Jawetz, a lawyer with the civil liberties union’s National Prison Project, said the new death at the same jail underscored the lack of accountability in immigration detention nationwide.

“Piedmont is a facility that was understaffed and underresponsive to clear medical needs,” Mr. Jawetz said. “The reports of Mr. Newbrough’s death raise serious questions about whether those failures were ever remedied.”

Asked Monday what measures it had taken after Mr. Sall’s death, the immigration agency promised a response but did not provide one. Kelly A. Nantel, a spokeswoman, said earlier that an investigation of Mr. Newbrough’s death was under way.

The 780-bed Piedmont jail, run by governments of six Virginia counties, typically houses about 300 immigration detainees, and is now down to fewer than 150. But Ms. Nantel denied rumors that the agency was pulling them out, as it did last month at a detention center in Central Falls, R.I., where a Chinese computer engineer’s extensive cancer and fractured spine went undiagnosed until shortly before his death on Aug. 6.

In that case, investigators for the federal immigration agency found that the engineer, Hiu Lui Ng, had been denied proper medical treatment, and dragged from his cell to a van as he screamed in pain six days before his death.

The parallels with detainee accounts of Mr. Newbrough’s treatment are striking to Jeff Winder, an organizer for the grass-roots Virginia group People United, who was contacted by several inmates at Piedmont who also spoke to a reporter. The latest death has heightened the group’s opposition to plans by private developers and city officials to build another immigration detention center in Farmville, with 1,000 to 2,500 beds.

“ICE has no obligation to send detainees there after the next detainee dies,” Mr. Winder said. “Farmville could be left with the reputation as a place where detainees die of medical neglect.”

Ernest L. Toney, the jail superintendent, denied accounts that Mr. Newbrough had been mistreated, saying, “That is not our protocol here.” He referred all other questions about his death to the federal immigration agency.

But Dr. Homer D. Venters, an expert in detention health care who learned about the case from Mr. Newbrough’s family and reviewed the autopsy, said available evidence showed violations of detention standards that let the detainee’s treatable local infections rage out of control. Dr. Venters, a public health fellow at New York University, was critical of the medical care in immigration detention when he testified last year at a Congressional subcommittee hearing, and is on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement advisory group.

“First, Mr. Newbrough’s medical complaints were apparently ignored,” he wrote in a preliminary analysis of the case for Mr. Newbrough’s parents. “Second, Mr. Newbrough was placed in a disciplinary setting while ill and despite having voiced medical complaints. Third, Mr. Newbrough was not adequately (if at all) medically monitored” in the isolation cell.

During those last days, Dr. Venters added in an interview, even guards should have noticed that Mr. Newbrough was in critical condition as the bacteria colonizing his heart broke loose, creating abscesses in his brain, liver and kidneys. “When endocarditis is not treated, it kills people,” he said. With modern hospital care, the death rate is 25 percent or less.

“We were sitting here, powerless,” said Mr. Newbrough’s stepfather, Jack Newbrough, 70, a former Air Force sergeant who met Guido’s mother, Heidi, and Guido, then 2, when he was stationed in their native Germany. “I am just so disappointed in my country, this homeland security system they got set up.”

Mrs. Newbrough, 65, said her son, who had an estranged wife and three American-born children, had quit drinking after serving 11 months for molestation and, on probation, moved back to his childhood home in Manassas, Va., from a trailer park in Stafford. A 1999 article about life in the park, in the first issue of Tina Brown’s Talk magazine, featured him prominently — under the rubric “Dialing America.”

“Nobody knew he wasn’t American,” his mother said. “Even he didn’t know. He found out the day they picked him up here.”

His arrest last February, immigration records show, was a result of Operation Coldplay, which combs probation records to find past sex offenders whose immigration status makes them deportable. Mr. Newbrough had taken what is known as an Alford plea to charges of “indecent liberties with a minor,” and aggravated sexual battery in 2002 — denying his guilt, but acknowledging that prosecutors had evidence that could cause a jury to convict him of molesting his girlfriend’s 4-year-old.

Mr. Newbrough, who spoke no German, would have automatically become a citizen if his American-born stepfather had formally adopted him when he was a child, or if his mother had been naturalized while he was a minor, rather than just four years ago.

While Mr. Newbrough waited at Piedmont for nine months, an immigration lawyer argued that he had derived citizenship from his stepfather. An immigration judge disagreed. The appeal was pending in mid-November when Mr. Newbrough began to complain in phone calls of terrible back pain and stomach aches, his family said. When they urged him to tell the medical staff, they said, he replied: “ ‘I did. They just don’t care.’ ”

Several detainees interviewed by telephone last week said that in the two weeks before Thanksgiving, Mr. Newbrough’s back pain grew so bad that he began sobbing through the night, and some in the 90-man unit took turns making him hot compresses. By the Sunday before Thanksgiving, he was desperate, two detainees said, and banged at the door of the unit’s lunchroom, yelling for help. They said by the time guards responded, he was seated at a table.

“They told him to get up, and he said he couldn’t get up because he was in a lot of pain,” said Salvador Alberto Rivas, who identified himself as Mr. Newbrough’s bunk mate, awaiting deportation to El Salvador. “Because of the pain, he started crying, and he was trying to tell them he had put in requests for medical and didn’t get any. And then one of the guards threw him to the floor.”

“They drag him by his leg, in front of about 30 people,” said another detainee, who gave his name only as Jose for fear of retaliation, adding that many witnesses had since been transferred to other jails or deported.

“We didn’t know that he was dying,” added Jose, who wrote about the case in a letter published online by a Spanish weekly. “They took him to the hole. He was yelling for help in the hole, too.”

That information, he said, came from a detainee in the isolation section at the same time, but since deported, who was so upset by Mr. Newbrough’s death that he left his name and alien registration number — Rene Cordoba Palma, No. 088424581 — in case anyone wanted his testimony.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/us/28detain.html?_r=1

Posted by lois at 10:13 AM | Comments (0)

January 22, 2009

MA: Gov. Patrick pushes for a state takeover of county jails, but at least one sheriff isn’t giving up his turf so easily

Of course, even where the jails are supposedly controlled by the state as in Hampden County, the sheriff still has free reign. In Hampden County, (sheriff) Ashe has found a way to both build a new jail for women AND move jail-like programs into the community...all under the guise of knowing what is best for the community and those in cages.

Patrick pushes for a state takeover of county jails, but at least one sheriff isn’t giving up his turf so easily
By Bruce Mohl
Commonwealth Magazine
Winter 2009

Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson is headed for a high-noon showdown with Gov. Deval Patrick. The Patrick administration is trying to rein in Hodgson and the state’s other elected sheriffs in an effort to consolidate control over an overcrowded state and county corrections system that oversees more than 25,000 inmates and has a combined budget of $1 billion. Patrick wants more coordination between the officials who run state prisons and the sheriffs, who run county jails and houses of correction. And his aides want the sheriffs to stop dabbling in law enforcement and start taking a more prominent role in preparing inmates for life outside prison.

Hodgson, a tough-talking Republican with an entrepreneurial flair, wants no part of Patrick’s consolidation effort. He says it makes no sense to turn sheriffs into an appendage of the stifling state bureaucracy.

“They’re trying to redefine the mission of the sheriff,” Hodgson says outside the governor’s office after a meeting in November. “This whole homogenizing of things is not in the best interest of taxpayers.”

The showdown, when it comes, will be in the Legislature and will revolve around money. The governor’s aides are playing financial hardball with Hodgson and a handful of other sheriffs, threatening to cut off all state aid unless they take off their cowboy hats and become team players.

“We’ll fund the sheriffs adequately, as long as everyone comes into the fold with the same terms and obligations,” says Kevin Burke, the governor’s secretary of public safety. “We are all part of the whole. Sheriffs and state corrections have got to work together to be efficient.”

Most of the county sheriffs say they will come into the fold, in part because they have little choice. “We have one foot in bankruptcy and the other on a banana peel,” says Plymouth County Sheriff Joseph McDonald Jr., a Republican who is facing a $10 million deficit this year. Norfolk County Sheriff Michael Bellotti, a Democrat who is facing a $6 million deficit, says there’s nothing wrong with working cooperatively with the state on corrections issues. “I don’t see any bogeyman in the details,” he says.

Suffolk County Sheriff Andrea Cabral, a Democrat, is grappling with a $25 million deficit. She says the sheriffs need more secure state funding, but she is waiting to see the details of any legislation that emerges before taking a stand.

Hodgson, facing a $6 million shortfall, is openly defiant. He calls the Patrick administration’s budgetary brinkmanship an idle threat because it will only lead to a public safety crisis. He says the consolidation of state control over county corrections is bad public policy that will result in waste and inefficiency.

“They aren’t looking at this from a public policy perspective,” says Hodgson on a telephone call from Washington, where he was holding meetings with Homeland Security officials and the Portuguese ambassador to the United States. “They’re saying, ‘How can we gobble up more control and money to take care of our state problems?’”

Constant budget shortfalls

The state’s 14 sheriffs may not be well known outside their counties, but they are politically powerful. Elected to six-year terms, they collectively employ several thousand workers, oversee more than 14,000 prisoners, and control a combined budget of $556 million. Their primary job is to lock up people from their counties who are awaiting trial or who have been sentenced to jail terms of less than two-and-a-half years.

Seven of the sheriffs — those in Berkshire, Essex, Franklin, Hampden, Hampshire, Middlesex, and Worcester counties — are already financial wards of the state. They stopped being county operations in the late 1990s, after Middlesex County went into bankruptcy. Like district attorneys, they are elected officials who seek funding from the Legislature every year. Their employees work for the state and participate in the state’s health plan and pension system.
A cell at the Ash Street
Jail in New Bedford.

The seven remaining sheriffs — those in Barnstable, Bristol, Dukes, Nantucket, Norfolk, Plymouth, and Suffolk Dukes counties — are part of what’s left of county government, relying on a hodgepodge of funding from the state, assessments on municipalities in each county, and excise taxes collected on county real estate transactions. All the funding is thrown into a pot and then appropriated by the County Government Finance Review Board, a Beacon Hill entity that includes officials from the administration, the Revenue Department, and the state auditor’s office.

The last few years have been rocky ones financially for the county sheriffs. With the real estate market tanking, and state and county appropriations failing to keep pace, sheriffs have been facing budget shortfalls year after year. Last year, Norfolk County Sheriff Bellotti said several vendors stopped making deliveries to him because of his inability to pay bills. He had to borrow supplies, including toilet paper, from better-off sheriffs. All of the county sheriffs have been relying on late-in-the-year supplemental appropriations from the state to make ends meet.

Leslie Kirwan, the governor’s secretary of administration and finance, says the best way to stabilize the county sheriffs financially is to make them state sheriffs, giving each of them their own line item in the budget and transferring their employees to the state payroll. Her plan would disband the County Government Finance Review Board and transfer the revenue it receives from the deeds excise tax to the state’s general fund. Municipalities would no longer have to financially support their county sheriffs, saving them about $10 million, she says.

The approach would allow state officials to monitor sheriff spending more closely, since all expenditures would show up on the state’s computer system. It would also put all 14 sheriffs on the same financial footing. Kirwan said Patrick has been clear about that: “He doesn’t want to have a hybrid situation,” she says.

Kirwan thought she had the county sheriffs’ support for a conversion bill last year, but it died, causing some hard feelings. The Patrick administration is now working with the sheriffs on a new version of that bill, but Kirwan’s patience is running thin. If a bill doesn’t pass this year, she says, the Patrick administration will seek to cut off all state funding to the county sheriffs. With the exception of Dukes County, which has no jail and relies entirely on local funds, state aid currently accounts for about two-thirds of each county sheriff’s budget.

Most of the county sheriffs are pledging to cooperate, but they insist that their budget problems are largely of the state’s own making. They say the state constantly underfunds them, and then when it bails them out at the end of the year, it doesn’t roll that money into the following year’s appropriation. “Every year it’s back to the future,” says one sheriff’s aide.

Hodgson has actually seen his state aid decline over the years. In fiscal 2001, his state aid amounted to $37.4 million. This year it’s down to $30.1 million, a drop of nearly 20 percent, even though his inmate population has increased more than 40 percent over that period.

“It’s all about control,” Hodgson says of the administration’s budget maneuvering. He says he and the other county sheriffs have asked why they can’t get a line item in the state budget while remaining county sheriffs. He quotes Kirwan’s general counsel, David Sullivan, as saying: “If we’re going to give you the money, we want more control.”

Renting beds to the feds

Seven sheriffs moonlight as federal innkeepers, renting space in their jails and prisons to the federal government. It started as a way to fill a few empty beds and bring in some extra cash, but it has mushroomed into a booming $33 million side business. The sheriffs were holding 1,200 federal inmates in November, two-thirds of them people who have been swept up in the federal government’s crackdown on illegal immigration.

“It’s the crack cocaine of county corrections,” says Sheriff James DiPaolo of Middlesex County, a Democrat whose space constraints have prevented him from holding illegal immigrants. “It’s quick money and it can be addictive.”

It is also controversial. State and county correctional facilities in Massachusetts are already overcrowded, yet many sheriffs are adding to the problem by squeezing federal detainees into their facilities. State officials grumble that some sheriffs th.
en complain about overcrowding and ask the state for more money.
Immigration detainees can spend months or years in custody awaiting deportation or fighting to stay in the country. Most of the immigration detainees haven’t committed a crime, but five sheriffs lock them up with people who have been charged with or convicted of crimes.

In a report issued in December, the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts said federal immigration detainees are being crammed into sheriff cells, receiving inadequate medical care, and being deprived of their civil rights. The ACLU said the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is failing to supervise local sheriffs properly.

The sheriffs deny that immigration detainees are being treated poorly, but they make no secret of the reason they are holding them. “I need the money,” says Norfolk County Sheriff Bellotti, who earned $2 million last year holding illegal immigrants. His facilities are operating at 194 percent of design capacity, according to figures compiled by the state Department of Correction.

Frank Cousins, the Republican sheriff of Essex County, whose facilities are operating at 255 percent of capacity, says he uses his $2 million in federal revenues to pay the cost of utilities. Plymouth County Sheriff McDonald, who made $15.6 million last year holding federal prisoners and illegal immigrants for the federal government, says he is aggressively marketing his facility to land more federal business.

Hodgson is perhaps the most aggressive innkeeper of all. When he first became sheriff in the late 1990s, he closed a gym set aside for inmate exercise, giving the bleachers to a nearby community and the scoreboard to a boys and girls club. He then converted the gym into a makeshift jail for illegal immigrants detained by the federal government, eventually turning enough profit on that operation to build a separate facility that he essentially leases to the feds. His federal business brought in $6 million last year but he says it cost only $3 million to run, leaving an operating profit of $3 million that was used to pay for other sheriff operations.

The sheriffs dabble in law enforcement as well. The Barnstable and Plymouth County sheriffs, for example, do all of the crime scene investigations for their local communities. Many sheriffs run emergency dispatch systems and regional lockups and deploy K-9 units, mobile command centers, and even mounted patrol units. Middlesex Sheriff DiPaolo staffs a marine unit, complete with a boat paid for with a federal grant.

Plymouth County Sheriff McDonald says the law enforcement initiatives of sheriffs are a form of county regionalization, a top priority of the Patrick administration. He says sheriffs help relieve the financial burden of cities and towns. “Cutting funding for county sheriffs is cutting local aid,” he says.

But some sheriff spending has attracted criticism. Hodgson, for example, recently proposed a contract with his corrections officers featuring a 5 percent wage increase for each of the next three years. He said the increase was warranted because his officers earn less than any others in Massachusetts, but state officials, who must give approval for contract offerings, rejected it as excessive. “To put out ‘fives’ in an environment like this, when people are struggling just to hang on to their jobs,” Kirwan says, shaking her head. “For one, it’s unaffordable. Two, it’s inappropriate.”

Kirwan and her legal counsel also say Hodgson’s relentless appeals of a court judgment were a waste of money. In 2001, Hodgson was sued by five corrections officers who claimed the sheriff suspended them in retaliation for their union activities; he claimed they violated work rules by engaging in non-corrections activities on the job. He says two of the officers left a jail door open, putting everyone in the facility at risk.

A US District Court judge ruled against Hodgson, ordering him to pay the officers nearly $18,000 in back pay, plus their legal expenses. Hodgson appealed to the US Court of Appeals, where he lost again. Hodgson then appealed to the US Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case last month. In all, the sheriff spent more than $500,000 on legal fees and owes the corrections officers and their attorneys another $300,000.

“This is not about me being stubborn,” Hodgson says. “I have to look at the ramifications for the future if we can’t invoke our own work rules.”

But Kirwan calls Hodgson’s appeal “frivolous.” Philip Beauregard, the attorney representing the corrections officers, says the lawsuit exemplifies the free-spending ways of sheriffs. “By any standard, it is outrageous and absurd, but he gets away with it,” he says.

Bulging at the seams

At an early November meeting with the governor, several sheriffs said Patrick assured them he had no “grand scheme” to bring them under the control of the state Department of Correction, but he was looking for operating efficiencies.

What he meant by “efficiencies” is unclear, but there have been some hints. A consultant hired by the state to review long-range capital needs for corrections asked for feedback from the sheriffs on a proposal to have state prison facilities expand their clientele to include inmates with sentences longer than a year, instead of longer than two-and-a-half years. The flipside to that recommendation was a proposal to have most state inmates transferred to sheriff facilities within 12 to 18 months of their release to prepare them for community re-entry. To free up jail space at the county level, the consultant suggested that sheriffs get rid of their federal inmates and immigration detainees.

The consultant’s report is not completed yet, but the queries to the sheriffs offer some clues on what corrections consolidation might look like. State officials say they want the Department of Correction and the sheriffs to work as a team to address two of the corrections system’s major problems: overcrowding and recidivism.

Prisons in Massachusetts are bulging at the seams. State officials say their facilities, built to hold 7,900 inmates, were operating at 144 percent of capacity during the third quarter of 2008, holding 11,400 prisoners. Facilities run by sheriffs, designed for 8,700 prisoners, were operating at 161 percent of capacity, holding nearly 14,000 during the same time period.

Some facilities are more of a problem than others. The state’s maximum security prison in Shirley, which holds inmates that pose a serious threat to themselves, other inmates, or staff, is preparing to add a second prisoner in each cell. But union officials who represent corrections officers say double-bunking will lead to increased violence.

The state’s Framingham facilities for women are also badly overcrowded, in part because most sheriffs don’t have jail space for women. The state prison for women in Framingham was designed to hold 388 inmates, but it held an average of 479 women during the third quarter. The Framingham unit where women are held while they await trial is the most overcrowded corrections facility in the state. It was designed to hold 64 women but held nearly four times that number on average during the third quarter. (To reduce overcrowding there, the consultant hired by the state suggested sheriffs hold most women awaiting trial at their facilities.)

The state’s prison overcrowding problem is accentuated by a 40 percent recidivism rate, which means four of every 10 released inmates end up back in prison within three years.

Harold Clarke, the state’s corrections commissioner, says inmates who leave prison the same way they come in are far more likely to return. He wants the state to spend far more money preparing inmates for reintegration into society by addressing their literacy, vocational training, medical, and drug addiction “deficits.”

“This is not coddling offenders,” he says. “This is the best public safety we can do.”

Clarke also wants to “step down” inmates nearing release to facilities run by sheriffs, who would oversee the prisoner’s return to society. Clarke is running a pilot step-down project now with Hampden County Sheriff Michael Ashe Jr., but mandatory sentences and prison rules limit how many inmates can participate and what they can do. Only three inmates are currently participating.

Jay Ashe, the sheriff’s brother and the Hampden County jail superintendent, says he favors legislation that would give corrections officials more flexibility in reintegrating prisoners into local communities as their sentences come to an end. Some prisoners, he says, should work during the day and stay at a pre-release center overnight. Other prisoners could work and live in the community and check in with prison officials on a daily basis. “It’s not being soft on crime,” he says. “The worst thing we can do is open the jail door and just let them out.”

Reaction from sheriffs has been mixed. Many are enthusiastic about the step-down proposal but nervous about being held responsible for an inmate who goes missing while on a program outside the prison. Hodgson says he is opposed to releasing inmates unsupervised into the community. He says they often return with drugs that they sell to other inmates. “I’m not interested in work release,” he says.

‘Close to the end’ for Norfolk County?

Gov. Patrick consolidated control over the state’s educational establishment, and now he’s trying to do the same thing with transportation. Corrections may be next on his list, but administration officials are talking only in general terms about it at this point.

From a policy standpoint, the administration is beginning to argue that better top-to-bottom coordination of corrections will reduce overcrowding and, possibly, recidivism. But officials haven’t yet identified any significant savings that would result, an argument that would carry significant weight in the current economic environment.

Politically, county corrections is a minefield. The governor is dealing with 14 elected officials, and each one defines his or her job differently. They also wield considerable power in the Legislature, and most county officials will probably oppose any attempt to transfer a county sheriff’s operation to the state payroll.

Francis O’Brien, chairman of the Norfolk County commissioners, says the loss of Sheriff Bellotti’s operation to the state would remove roughly 400 of the county’s 520 employees and leave the remaining operations — an engineering department, a golf course, an agricultural school, the Registry of Deeds, and particularly the county’s pension system — in a precarious situation. “It will be close to the end if we lose the sheriff,” he says.

Sen. James Timilty, who represents Bristol County and is the Senate chairman of the Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security, is a huge fan of Sheriff Hodgson (“He’s one of the closest things to a private sector entity in government”) and a skeptic when it comes to giving the state more control over the sheriffs.

“There’s a lot of people who don’t like county government because of the historical problems with it, but that’s largely gone,” he says. “This is not the time to kill regional government. In fact, it’s the time to look at it as the regional answer.”

Among the county sheriffs, most are so desperate for money that they will jump at the chance to get a line item in the state budget. The exceptions are Hodgson, Nantucket County Sheriff Richard Bretschneider (who doesn’t run a jail and receives almost no state money), and possibly Suffolk County Sheriff Cabral.

Plymouth County Sheriff McDonald says the pressure he is feeling is enormous. “The bottom line message is: You’re coming over to the state willingly or we’re going to bankrupt you and take you over,” he says. He hopes acceptable legislation passes soon, but he says everyone is jittery. “It takes many people to pass legislation, but only one to derail it.”

© 2007 MassINC

Posted by lois at 04:56 PM | Comments (0)

January 21, 2009

Report Faults Treatment of Women Held at Immigration Centers in AZ

Report Faults Treatment of Women Held at Immigration Centers
By DAN FROSCH
Published: January 20, 2009

Some 300 women held at immigration detention centers in Arizona face dangerous delays in health care and widespread mistreatment, according to a new study by the University of Arizona, the latest report to criticize conditions at such centers throughout the United States.

The study, which federal immigration officials criticized as narrow and unsubstantiated, was conducted from August 2007 to August 2008 by the Southwest Institute of Research on Women and the James E. Rogers College of Law, both at the University of Arizona. It was released Jan. 13.

Researchers examined the conditions facing women in the process of deportation proceedings at three federal immigration centers in Arizona. An estimated 3,000 women are being held nationwide.

The study concluded that immigration authorities were too aggressive in detaining the women, who rarely posed a flight risk, and that as a result, they experienced severe hardships, including a lack of prenatal care, treatment for cancer, ovarian cysts and other serious medical conditions, and, in some cases, being mixed in with federal prisoners.

Katrina S. Kane, who directs Arizona detention and removal operations for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, dismissed the study as unsubstantiated accounts from a limited number of detainees and their advocates.

“Reports such as this, while alleging to be unbiased, do great harm to the public’s understanding of the complex issues involved in immigration law enforcement,” Ms. Kane said.

The director of border research for the institute on women, Nina Rabin, an immigration lawyer who led the study, countered that interviews with detainees, former detainees and their lawyers corroborated a pattern of endemic mistreatment.

And Ms. Rabin said she had spoken with immigrant advocacy groups around the United States, many of whom stated that mistreatment of women at the centers was not unusual.

“We were pretty shocked to learn about all the ways in which life is made endlessly difficult for these women,” Ms. Rabin said, especially those who were pregnant or had recently given birth.

The immigration department has been under increasing pressure to improve conditions at its detention centers. The federal Government Accountability Office and the inspector general’s office at the Department of Homeland Security have each released reports in the last three years criticizing standards at such centers, many of which are operated by private contractors.

Last September, the immigration department announced plans to improve conditions at its detention centers, but the new rules will not fully take effect until 2010. Meanwhile, Congress has been weighing whether to impose its own requirements on the department after a New York Times article on immigrants who died in federal custody.

The three centers that the study focused on are not run by the immigration department but by the Pinal County Sheriff’s Department and the Corrections Corporation of America.

“We strictly enforce all national ICE standards,” Ms. Kane said, “and if we find those standards are not being met and we feel the deficiencies are not being corrected, we locate our detainees to other facilities.”

In one of several cases documented in the study, a woman being held at the Central Arizona Detention Center in Florence who experienced excruciating abdominal pain for months after she had been forced to undergo female genital mutilation in West Africa was told by the center’s staff to “exercise and watch her diet,” her lawyer at the time, Raha Jorjani, said. After nearly six months, the woman, who had been convicted of a nonviolent crime, was taken to a hospital where an ultrasound revealed a cyst the size of a five-month-old fetus, Ms. Jorjani said.

Immigration officials then suddenly released the woman with no money or health insurance to treat the cyst, Ms. Jorjani said.

“That she had to remain in detention at all during this period is egregious,” Ms. Jorjani said. “She shouldn’t have had to get that sick for immigration to consider her request for release.”

Ms. Kane, the department spokeswoman, said that this was the first the agency had heard of the case and that it took accusations of mistreatment seriously.

In one case the study described, an illegal immigrant identified as Ana, who had come to the United States from Mexico as a baby and served a brief stint in jail for using a fake credit card, was being held at the Central Arizona Detention Center.

Although Ana was six months pregnant and had an ovarian cyst, she was ordered to use a top bunk and denied a sonogram and prenatal vitamins during the five weeks she was held, the study said.

Three women also told a local immigrant rights group that they had suffered miscarriages while in detention in the last three years, according to the study.

Ms. Kane said that while her department could not corroborate any of the report’s accusations, it had found that a detainee’s contention that she had not received treatment for cervical cancer had proved false.
A version of this article appeared in print on January 21, 2009, on page A23 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/21/us/21immig.html?ref=us

Posted by lois at 08:48 PM | Comments (0)

January 19, 2009

ICE to terminate agreement to house detainees at Wyatt RI Detention Facility

ICE to terminate agreement to house detainees at Wyatt
Detention Facility
January 15, 2009
http://www.ice.gov/pi/nr/0901/090115washington.htm

WASHINGTON, DC - Today, U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) has notified the Central Falls Detention
Facility Corporation of the agency's intention to terminate the
agreement to house detainees at the Donald Wyatt Detention
Facility in Rhode Island. ICE will terminate the agreement
effective 60 days from Friday, January 16, 2009. Due to an
investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of
Mr. Hiu Lui Ng at Wyatt, ICE took precautions and promptly
ceased sending additional detainees to the Wyatt contract
facility and quickly relocated the remaining 153 ICE detainees
from the facility in December 2008.

The investigation, which was completed on January 12, 2009,
revealed a consistent lack of communication regarding Mr. Ng's
healthcare needs between medical and security personnel at
Wyatt. The investigation also revealed that there were
instances of non-compliance by Wyatt contract personnel with
the ICE National Detention Standards and multiple failures to
adhere to the facility's rules and policy. As part of the
investigation, ICE reviewed the policies and procedures used by
Wyatt to evaluate the health care needs of Mr. Ng and to
provide him with access to health care. ICE further reviewed
the procedures used to distribute medication to detainees and
the use of wheelchairs to assist in the transportation of
detainees, including Mr. Ng.

ICE's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) found that
contract personnel at Wyatt failed to provide Mr. Ng a
wheelchair on a number of occasions, resulting in Mr. Ng
effectively being denied access to his counsel as well as to a
medical appointment. ICE OPR also found that the facility
guards and medical staff failed to adhere to the facility's use
of force policy.

ICE strives to maintain safe, secure and humane detention
conditions and quality health care. We make every effort to
enforce all existing standards and whenever possible, to
improve upon them. ICE requires that all facilities housing
detainees meet our National Detention Standards, which meet or
exceed industry standards. When we find that our standards are
not being met by contract facilities, we take immediate action
to ensure the safety and well being of all ICE detainees.

-- ICE --

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was established
in March 2003 as the largest investigative arm of the
Department of Homeland Security. ICE is comprised of five
integrated divisions that form a 21st century law enforcement
agency with broad responsibilities for a number of key homeland
security priorities.

Posted by lois at 11:15 PM | Comments (0)

ICE: Secure Communities: A Comprehensive Plan to Identify and Remove Criminal Aliens

Secure Communities: A Comprehensive Plan to Identify and
Remove Criminal Aliens
November 19, 2008
http://www.ice.gov/pi/news/factsheets/secure_communities.htm

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the largest
investigative agency in the Department of Homeland Security
(DHS), is improving community safety by transforming the way
the federal government cooperates with state and local law
enforcement agencies to identify, detain and remove all
criminal aliens held in custody. Secure Communities: A
Comprehensive Plan to Identify and Remove Criminal Aliens will
change immigration enforcement by using technology to share
information between law enforcement agencies and by applying
risk-based methodologies to focus resources on assisting
communities remove high-risk criminal aliens.

Although ICE has made considerable progress over the past
several years in identifying and removing criminal aliens
through its Criminal Alien Program (CAP), a fundamental change
in ICE’s current approach is required to reach the goal of
identifying and removing all aliens convicted of a crime. ICE
currently screens all inmates referred to ICE who claim to be
foreign-born at all federal and state prisons. In addition, any
law enforcement agency can query the immigration status of an
individual they encounter through ICE’s Law Enforcement Support
Center (LESC). CAP officers routinely visit or are dispatched
to local jails requesting assistance and have contributed to
the increased success of identifying and removing criminal
aliens in custody.

In FY 2008, ICE identified and charged more than 221,000 aliens
in jails for immigration violations – more than triple the
number charged just two years ago. Leveraging integration
technology that shares law enforcement data between federal,
state and local law enforcement agencies, ICE is now able to
expand coverage nationwide in a cost effective manner.
Interoperability between the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s
(FBI’s) Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System
(IAFIS) and DHS’ Automated Biometric Identification System
(IDENT) will help ICE and local law enforcement officers
positively identify criminal aliens in prisons and jails.

Given that a nationwide jail/prison reporting system does not
exist to determine the total number of criminal aliens in the
United States, ICE extrapolated from various sources and
estimates that about 300,000 to 450,000 criminal aliens who are
potentially removable are detained each year at federal, state,
and local prisons and jails. Criminal aliens who are
potentially removable include illegal aliens in the United
States who are convicted of any crime and lawful permanent
residents (such as holders of a U.S. Permanent Resident Card)
who are convicted of a removable offense as defined by the
Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).
Strategic Goals for Secure Communities

ICE has delineated four key strategic goals for the Secure
Communities plan:

* Strategic Goal 1 – Identify and process all criminal
aliens amenable for removal while in federal, state, and
local custody;
* Strategic Goal 2 – Enhance current detention strategies
to ensure no removable alien is released into the community
due to a lack of detention space or an appropriate
alternative to detention;
* Strategic Goal 3 – Implement removal initiatives that
shorten the time aliens remain in ICE custody prior to
removal, thereby maximizing the use of detention resources
and reducing cost; and
* Strategic Goal 4 – Maximize cost effectiveness and
long-term success through deterrence and reduced
recidivism.

The following three levels are illustrative of the plan’s
risk-based approach. These levels will be used to allocate
appropriate resources to identifying and determining the
immigration status of aliens arrested for a crime that pose the
greatest risk to the public.

* Level 1 – Individuals who have been convicted of major
drug offenses and violent offenses such as murder,
manslaughter, rape, robbery, and kidnapping;
* Level 2 – Individuals who have been convicted of minor
drug offenses and mainly property offenses such as
burglary, larceny, fraud, and money laundering; and
* Level 3 – Individuals who have been convicted of other
offenses.

Ensuring the identification and expedited removal of so many
criminal aliens on an ongoing basis will require a sustained
effort. The cornerstone of the plan is to increase state and
local partnerships to ensure time sensitive screening of all
foreign-born detainees and identification of criminal aliens.
ICE is assessing technology solutions to seamlessly integrate
local booking data so that ICE can determine eligibility for
removal and quickly prioritize each case to initiate the
appropriate level of response.

The plan brings together the expertise and commitment from all
parts of ICE, the interagency community, and state and local
law enforcement agencies. ICE’s partners within DHS include
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Customs and
Border Protection (CBP), and the United States Visitor and
Immigrant Status Indicator Technology (US-VISIT) Program. ICE’s
federal interagency partners include the Bureau of Prisons
(BOP), Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR), U.S.
Attorneys, Department of State (DOS), Department of Justice
(DOJ), U.S. Marshals Service (USMS), and FBI’s Criminal Justice
Information Services Division (CJIS). Ongoing success will
require enhancements to the nation’s immigration strategy and
providing even greater disincentives for recidivists.
Overview of ICE’s Criminal Alien Program

The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) established
the Institutional Removal Program (IRP) in 1988 as a result of
the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986. IRCA
required the INS to initiate deportation proceedings for all
criminal aliens, at federal, state, and local prisons as
expeditiously as possible after the date of conviction. At the
INS, the Office of Investigations (OI) and Detention and
Removal Operations (DRO) jointly managed the IRP, which covered
about 30 federal institutions and a limited number of state
institutions. INS/OI also had responsibility for the Alien
Criminal Apprehension Program (ACAP). The ACAP was responsible
for the identification, processing, prosecution, and removal of
all criminal aliens in institutions not participating in the
IRP.

When ICE was established in 2003, the agency recognized that
additional effort and resources were needed to address the
criminal alien problem at federal, state, and local jails and
prisons. In June 2007, DRO assumed complete responsibility and
oversight of both IRP and ACAP and combined both programs into
the Criminal Alien Program (CAP). ICE adopted a risk-based
approach to address the criminal alien population in U.S. jails
and prisons and deployed CAP teams to institutions whose
inmates posed the greatest threat to the community if released.
CAP began utilizing video teleconference (VTC) equipment to
expand its reach into more jails and prisons. In June 2006, DRO
formed the Detention Enforcement and Processing Offenders by
Remote Technology (DEPORT) Center in Chicago, IL. Today the
DEPORT Center screens and processes criminal aliens at 87 BOP
facilities. CAP also works closely with the United States
Attorney’s Office to prosecute aggressively criminal aliens who
have reentered the United States after having been previously
removed thereby creating a deterrent to illegal reentry by
previously removed criminal aliens.

CAP teams focus on identifying, detaining, and removing
criminal aliens and in FY 2008 the teams issued charging
documents on more than 221,000 removable aliens in federal,
state, and local custody. Many of these aliens are still
serving sentences. In FY 2008, ICE removed 350,000 aliens,
nearly 110,000 with criminal histories. In FY 2007, ICE removed
approximately 278,000 aliens, about 95,000 with criminal
histories.

In order to ensure that current CAP resources are deployed
effectively, ICE conducted a risk assessment of federal, state,
and local prisons and jails. The risk assessment provides
valuable information for determining which facilities house the
most removable aliens and which represent institutions of
highest risk. The assessment classified all facilities into
four tiers, with Tier 1 representing the highest risk to
national security and public safety and Tier 4 representing the
lowest risk. In rank order, ICE is moving toward 100 percent
screening of foreign-born individuals in each facility.
Currently, all Tier 1 and Tier 2 facilities have 100 percent
screening, including all BOP institutions and state prisons. In
order to achieve screening at all remaining facilities, an
infusion of new partnerships, technology, process improvements,
and resources will be necessary.

To address the high-risk BOP correctional institutions, ICE
established the DEPORT Center in Chicago. DEPORT supports the
screening, interviewing and removal processing of all criminal
aliens incarcerated in BOP facilities nationwide, often using
video teleconferencing. Since its inception, DEPORT has
screened over 33,000 cases, issued more than 17,000 charging
documents to begin removal proceedings, and lodged more than
11,000 detainers. The success of DEPORT is a combination of
shared databases including BOP Sentry - a real-time computer
system updated 24 hours a day by BOP staff in field offices.
Staffers enter and update inmate information from the time the
inmate is sentenced until he/she is released from federal
custody.
Resource Overview for Secure Communities

The total costs estimated to remove all Level 1, 2, and 3
convicted criminal aliens each year in all federal, state, and
local prisons ranges from roughly $2 billion to $3 billion.
This cost range assumes that aliens incarcerated in local jails
have an average length of time in custody of three to six
months. The costs are high level estimates that will be revised
regularly as the plan is implemented based on detailed business
requirements, inputs from ICE partners, and updates to criminal
alien population figures. ICE estimates that it may take up to
two years to develop an automated process to search and
prioritize leads from Interoperability based on the levels of
criminality. Until such time, ICE will develop strategies for
implementing the gradual rollout of Interoperability using a
more manual searching process. Cost estimates therefore will
need to be modified as implementation begins, and resources may
need to shift to fill the gap between start-up and full
implementation.
Level One Implementation

ICE plans to phase-in the implementation of this initiative,
starting with Level 1 criminal aliens. The total Level 1 costs,
including systems and infrastructure, are estimated to be
between approximately $930 million and $1.1 billion. ICE
anticipates an implementation timeline of 3.5 years to remove
all removable Level 1 criminal aliens to ensure program
efficiency and effectiveness. Congress provided $200 million in
the FY 2008 Appropriations bill to begin implementing this plan
and an addition $150 million for FY’s 2009 and 2010.
Identifying criminal aliens in the past

The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) established
the Institutional Removal Program (IRP) in 1988, which only
covered approximately 30 federal institutions and a limited
number of state facilities. INS also had responsibility for the
Alien Criminal Apprehension Program (ACAP). Under ACAP, INS
officers were responsible for identifying, processing,
prosecuting, and removing criminal aliens in institutions not
participating in the IRP.

In FY2003, there were only two signed 287(g) agreements to
train and authorize local officers to enforce immigration law.
The way it works now

In June 2006, ICE formed the Detention Enforcement and
Processing Offenders by Remote Technology (DEPORT) Center in
Chicago. Today ICE screens and processes criminal aliens at all
Bureau of Prisons (BOP) facilities. In addition, ICE began
using video teleconference (VTC) equipment to expand its reach
into more jails and prisons.

Criminal Alien Program (CAP) teams respond to local law
enforcement agencies’ requests to determine the alienage of
individuals arrested for crimes and other immigration violators
as resources permit. Under CAP, ICE identified and issued
charging documents on more than 221,000 incarcerated criminal
aliens in FY 2008. CAP teams identified more than 164,000
incarcerated criminal aliens in FY 2007 and 67,000 in FY 2006.

ICE conducts screenings of all inmates who claim to be
foreign-born at all federal and state prisons. In addition, any
law enforcement agency can query the immigration status of an
individual they encounter through ICE’s Law Enforcement Support
Center (LESC). CAP officers routinely visit or are dispatched
to local jails requesting assistance and have contributed to
the increased success of identifying and removing criminal
aliens in custody.

ICE 287(g) program has provided more than 40 local law
enforcement agencies with access to DHS databases at their
detention centers where trained officers can review the
immigration information, determine alienage, and initiate
removal proceedings. There are a total of 67 jail, task force,
or combined 287(g) agreements nationwide credited for
identifying more than 75,000 individuals for possible
immigration violations. Most local law enforcement agencies
notify ICE of a foreign-born detainee; then an ICE officer must
conduct an interview to determine the alienage of the suspect
and initiate removal proceedings, if appropriate.
Key Enhancements in Secure Communities

* ICE will continue working with its partners to distribute
integration technology that links local law enforcement
agencies to both FBI and DHS biometric databases.
* Currently, as part of the routine booking process, local
officers submit an arrested person’s fingerprints through
FBI databases to access that individual’s criminal history.
With interoperability, those fingerprints are also
automatically checked against DHS databases to access
immigration history information.
* The automated process notifies ICE when fingerprints
match those of an immigration violator. ICE officers
conduct follow-up interviews and take appropriate action.
* ICE will identify removable criminal aliens and
prioritize their removal based on the threat they pose to
the community.
* ICE will continue working with local, state and federal
detention centers and the Department of Justice Executive
Office of Immigration Review (EOIR) to increase the number
of facilities that use video teleconferencing technology.
* Working with ICE, U.S. Attorney’s Offices will seek to
prosecute more criminal aliens who illegally re-enter the
country. This initiative is aimed at deterring recidivism.
* ICE will streamline processes for Detention and Removal
Operations including the expanded use of the Alternatives
to Detention Program (ATD) and by more efficiently
obtaining removal orders and travel documents before
criminal aliens are released from local custody.
* ICE will continue and expand the use of its Rapid REPAT
(Removal of Eligible Parolees Accepted for Transfer)
program whereby criminal aliens serving state sentences
receive early parole in exchange for assisting in their
removal from the United States. The programs are restricted
to criminal aliens who have not been convicted of serious
felonies and who have no history of violence. The program
has proven successful in New York and Arizona thus far and
ICE seeks to establish Rapid REPAT programs in four
additional states by the end of FY 2008.
* ICE will provide 24/7 nationwide operational coverage for
the Criminal Alien Program by assigning additional
personnel in field offices, standing up command centers in
priority areas, and expanding use of video teleconferencing
to remotely interview and process suspected aliens.
* ICE will seek to increase local law enforcement
partnerships through 287(g) cross-designation that allows
trained officers to interview and initiate removal
proceedings of aliens processed through their detention
facilities.

Posted by lois at 11:11 PM | Comments (0)

January 16, 2009

U.S. Issues Scathing Report on Immigrant Who Died in Detention

January 16, 2009
U.S. Issues Scathing Report on Immigrant Who Died in Detention
By NINA BERNSTEIN
NY Times
Federal immigration officials investigating the death of a New York computer engineer from China who died in their custody last summer said Thursday that supervisors at a Rhode Island detention center had denied the ailing man appropriate medical treatment on multiple occasions and that employees had dragged him from his cell to a van as he screamed in pain.

As they disclosed their findings, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials ordered an end to their contract with the center, the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, R.I., a locally owned jail where the engineer, Hiu Lui Ng, spent his final month after a year in immigration detention. They said they had asked that the United States attorney in Boston review the case for possible criminal prosecution.

The federal investigation began last summer, soon after The New York Times reported on the death of Mr. Ng, 34. His extensive cancer and fractured spine had gone undiagnosed, despite his pleas for help, until shortly before he died in custody on Aug. 6.

Kelly Nantel, a spokeswoman for the federal agency, said the investigation showed that supervisors at the Wyatt detention center had in effect prevented Mr. Ng from meeting with his lawyer by refusing him the use of a wheelchair when he was too ill and in too much pain to walk.

The 33-page investigation report also found that the guards and medical staff, acting on orders of the warden, violated the jail’s policy on the use of force when Mr. Ng was dragged to a van for a trip to Hartford, where his lawyers say he was pressured to withdraw all his appeals and accept deportation.

The jail’s overhead surveillance video cameras captured everything. But another, hand-held camcorder turned on and off 13 times at a signal from the captain in charge, according to the report, created another version of the episode, apparently in an effort to document that Mr. Ng was faking his illness and refusing to go to the hospital for a CT scan.

Investigators interviewed 158 people in the course of their inquiry, but the surveillance videotapes clearly told them most of what they needed to know. At one point, they wrote, the captain cursed Mr. Ng, calling him an idiot, and ordered him to “stop whining.”

Mr. Ng kept saying that he could not walk, begged for a wheelchair, and “continued to scream,” the report said, as he was pulled under his armpits from his bed, and to another part of the jail to be shackled.

John J. McConnell Jr., the lawyer representing Mr. Ng’s family in a planned lawsuit against the jail and the federal immigration agency, called the report “damning” but added that the investigating agency shared the blame because Mr. Ng “should not have been detained in the first place.”

“The people involved in that torturous treatment,” he said, “should be ashamed of themselves.”

Dante Bellini, a spokesman for Wyatt, called the results of the investigation “disappointing.” Last month, citing its investigation, the immigration agency removed all of its detainees from Wyatt.

“We will continue to look at ways to reverse this,” Mr. Bellini said. “We will continue to look at all our options and filling our beds. But we will steadfastly maintain that we had nothing to do with the detainee’s death.”

Last week, Wyatt announced that it was punishing seven employees in connection with the case, with penalties ranging from termination to reprimand. “We took stern and appropriate action,” Mr. Bellini said.

Mr. Ng, who had no criminal record, overstayed a visa years ago and had been applying for a green card through his wife, a United States citizen, when he was taken into detention in July 2007 and shuttled through jails and detention centers in three New England states.

One of the most harrowing parts of the federal report is its detailed description of the videos made as Mr. Ng was forcibly taken from his cell to a van.

The tape from the hand-held camcorder begins with the captain’s instructing Mr. Ng that “he needed to move on his own,” telling him he would not be given a wheelchair and repeatedly ordering him to stand up.

“Mr. Ng was visibly crying and appeared to have difficulty standing,” the report said, adding that the captain then appeared to signal the officer holding the camcorder to stop recording.

“Mr. Ng asked captain to believe him that he could not move his legs,” the report went on. As he struggled to put on his shoes, apparently in pain, the captain urged him to hurry up. When Mr. Ng told a nurse that he wanted to go to the hospital to take the medical test to determine the cause of his pain and disability, but needed a wheelchair, she was dismissive: “She stated that he could go; he was just refusing to go.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/16/us/16detain.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=detention%20center&st=cse

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January 14, 2009

THE PEOPLE’S AGENDA: VIRGINIA PEOPLE’S ASSEMBLY

THE PEOPLE’S AGENDA

Adopted unanimously Jan. 10, 2009, by the VIRGINIA PEOPLE’S ASSEMBLY

In this time of deepening economic crisis, the working people of Virginia are looking to the government to protect our interests. Instead, it is the Big Banks and Corporations that are receiving bail-outs, while we are faced with more layoffs, more cutbacks and more attacks on our standard of living. Obviously, the rich and powerful have their representatives. The working people need ours.

On Jan. 10, 2009, nearly 100 representatives from dozens of organizations and communities throughout Virginia met in Richmond to found a People’s Assembly to protect and promote the interests of working-class people and communities of color. After much discussion and listening to each other’s concerns, the delegates unanimously adopted this People’s Agenda which we are presenting to the Virginia General Assembly. Our first demands are the following:

Don’t Balance the Budget on the Backs of Virginia’s Workers!

We demand a Moratorium on Cutbacks, Layoffs, Evictions & Foreclosures!

We know there are alternatives to cutting the state budget. Virginia’s 6% corporate tax rate is the 7th lowest in the country and hasn’t been raised in more than 30 years. Raise it! Reinstate parole for Virginia prisoners so the state’s prison population can be reduced. Close the barbaric and unnecessary Red Onion SuperMax prison. No more state money to promote slavery-defending Confederate traitors. Bring home Virginia members of the National Guard and Reserves now stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition, we demand the following:

LABOR

No layoffs of public employees — Remove all legal restrictions to the right to collective bargaining and the right to organize (HJ-60) — Pass a living wage bill — Create permanent, sustainable employment for all Virginians willing and able to work; promote “green” jobs — Equal pay and pay equity for women and people of color — Provide economic protection for retirees — Promote equal opportunity in all facets of state government — Support passage of the federal Employee Free Choice Act — Support repeal of the federal Taft-Hartley Act — Support the repeal of the federal NAFTA and CAFTA trade treaties

BLACK COMMUNITY

Remove barriers to effective support of the development and sustenance of neighborhood, community-based initiatives that will effect youth development, continuing education and/or job skills — Promote training and apprenticeships and small business and nonprofit organizational development to meet the needs of the community — ake Juneteenth an “Emancipation Day” state holiday; form a state-level Juneteenth Commission to coordinate cultural and educational programs — Increase procurement contracts to minority-owned businesses — For every dollar spent on Confederate culture commemoration, a matching dollar should be spent to fund Black culture and achievement commemoration, especially in regards to science, math and history

IMMIGRANT RIGHTS

Declare a moratorium on anti-immigrant raids, deportations and foreclosures — Respect the right of residents to remain with their families — Prohibit local enforcement of the Delegation of Immigration Authority Section 287(g) Immigration and Nationality Act — Prohibit public funding for the implementation of UNJUST migratory laws — Prohibit the use of abstract and nonspecific legal terminology like “reasonable suspicion” and “probable cause” that allow racial profiling and indiscriminate arrests — Prohibit police from using individual interpretation of laws for their own implementation — Stop linking illegal immigration and terrorism — Respect the human rights of immigrant detainees and prevent inhumane treatment — Prohibit detention centers like the planned Farmville Detention Center — Enforce and expand labor & wage protection laws — Allow in-state tuition for undocumented Virginia residents — Allow people to obtain a driver’s license or identification without presenting a Social Security number, to prevent arrests, criminal records and deportations — Allow all Virginia residents to benefit from social programs -- health, education and other social services; no denial because of lack of a Social Security number — Prohibit public service workers from denouncing people because of their migratory status — Prohibit the use of the term “illegal alien” and any official use of discriminatory terms or concepts against people of color or immigrants

EDUCATION

Restructure public education to focus on critical thinking and practical life skills along with promotion of both higher education and vocational training, rather than test-taking skills to the exclusion of all others — Include worker and labor history in public education — Include partnerships with local initiatives in the standard curriculum for skills building and self-sufficiency — Build in vocational learning connected to local employment industries starting in middle school — Improve accuracy of the history and social studies curricula — Improve relevancy of civics in public schools curriculum by providing hands-on engagement with local government and school board processes from kindergarten through 12th grades

HEALTH CARE

Support universal health care — Promote real access to health care — Protect access to safe abortions and birth-control — Stop the privatization of health care services — No cutbacks in Medicare — No cutbacks in the WIC program — Provide for realistic explanation of patients’ legal medical rights — Stop stigmas based on morals related to health care — Stop the closing of the Commonwealth Center for Children and Adolescents — Legalize needle exchange — Provide condoms in prisons — Make “queer bashing” a hate crime — While paying proper attention to child welfare, allow people to freely parent and give birth in any method they prefer, including those in prison and on welfare

PRISONER ADVOCACY

Pass the Prisoner Literacy and Rehabilitation with “EARNED” Sentence Credit Allowance for Virginia state prisoners under the non-parole sentencing law who seek an “earned” second chance in society — Parole Board Oversight Committee to ensure fair and responsible parole for 9,000 prisoners remain incarcerated 13 years after parole abolishment. Remove barriers to medical care in prisons and jails — Recognize the right of prisoners to education — Revamp state law to allow for the speedy restoration of civil rights of convicted felons — Close the Red Onion SuperMax prison — Reform drug crime laws — Raise the pay for public defenders assigned to indigent defendants.
VPA Real Prison Reform Representatives:
Janet (Queen Nzinga) Taylor: OneRastaQueen@hotmail.com
Cassandra (Imani) Shaw: Shawthesavvy1@aol.com
Lillie (Ms. K) Branch-Kennedy: RIHD23075@aol.com

STUDENTS

Make academic programs and faculty/staff wages the first financial priorities — Protect and expand tuition financial aid programs — Ensure academic diversity through equal support for academic programs — Ensure job security and fair pay for faculty and staff — Create a more democratic system of oversight at the state level and in universities — Promote college and university expansion that takes into account the needs of the host communities

ANTI-WAR

Bring Virginia GIs and National Guard members home now — Support veterans when they get home — End the “poverty draft” and fund alternatives to military service; fund “green” civilian corps with same benefits as military service — Divest state funds from Israel until it complies with UN resolutions — Mandate truth and full disclosure in recruiting — Forbid military recruiters from entering public schools — Make higher education affordable

OTHER

Raise the state corporate tax rate — Repeal the Dillon Law — Redraw Virginia’s voting districts so they are equitable and not based on race — Promote ecology and environmental conservation and protection; increase spending on state parks — Cancel the Wise County power plant — Stop coal extraction while meeting the economic needs of the people of Appalachia — Ensure available, affordable housing — Make Virginia friendlier to small businesses.

VIRGINIA PEOPLE’S ASSEMBLY
PO Box 38441, Richmond, VA 23231
Web: www.RichmondJwJ.org

Posted by lois at 12:01 PM | Comments (0)

December 27, 2008

Leaning on Jail, City of Immigrants Fills Cells With Its Own

Maps
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/12/26/us/1227_DETAIN.html
http://www.detentionwatchnetwork.org/dwnmap

December 27, 2008
Leaning on Jail, City of Immigrants Fills Cells With Its Own
By NINA BERNSTEIN- NY Times

CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. — Few in this threadbare little mill town gave much thought to the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility, the maximum-security jail beside the public ball fields at the edge of town. Even when it expanded and added barbed wire, Wyatt was just the backdrop for Little League games, its name stitched on the caps of the team it sponsored.

Then people began to disappear: the leader of a prayer group at St. Matthew’s Roman Catholic Church; the father of a second grader at the public charter school; a woman who mopped floors in a Providence courthouse.

After days of searching, their families found them locked up inside Wyatt — only blocks from home, but in a separate world.

In this mostly Latino city, hardly anyone had realized that in addition to detaining the accused drug dealers and mobsters everyone heard about, the jail held hundreds of people charged with no crime — people caught in the nation’s crackdown on illegal immigration. Fewer still knew that Wyatt was a portal into an expanding network of other jails, bigger and more remote, all propelling detainees toward deportation with little chance to protest.

If anything, the people of Central Falls saw Wyatt as the economic engine that city fathers had promised, a steady source of jobs and federal money to pay for services like police and fire protection. Even that, it turns out, was an illusion.

Wyatt offers a rare look into the fastest-growing, least-examined type of incarceration in America, an industry that detains half a million people a year, up from a few thousand just 15 years ago. The system operates without the rules that protect criminal suspects, and has grown up with little oversight, often in the backyards of communities desperate for any source of money and work.

Last spring, The New York Times set out to examine this small city of 19,000 and its big detention center as a microcosm of the nation’s new relationship with immigration detention, which is now sweeping up not just recent border-jumpers and convicted felons but foreign-born residents with strong ties to places like Central Falls. Wyatt, nationally accredited, clean and modern, seemed like one of the better jails in the system, a patchwork of county lockups, private prisons and federal detention centers where government investigations and the news media have recently documented substandard, sometimes lethal, conditions.

But last summer, a detainee died in Wyatt’s custody. Immigration authorities investigating the death removed all immigration detainees this month — along with the $101.76 a day the federal government paid the jail for each one. In Central Falls, where many families have members without papers, a state campaign against illegal immigrants spread fear that also took a toll: People went into hiding and businesses lost Latino customers in droves. Slowly, the city awoke to its role in the detention system, and to the pitfalls of the bargain it had struck.

In a sinking economy, immigration detention is a rare growth industry. Congress has doubled annual spending on it in the last four years, to $2.4 billion approved in October as part of $5.9 billion allotted for immigration enforcement through next September — even more than the Bush administration had requested.

Seeking a slice of that bounty, communities like Farmville, Va., and Pahrump, Nev., are signing up with developers of new detention centers. Jails from New England to New Mexico have already made the crackdown pay off — for the private companies that dominate the industry, for some investors and, at least in theory, for places like Central Falls, a city so strapped that the state pays for its schools.

Here, a specially created municipal corporation built the jail in the early 1990s to hold federal inmates, and last year more than doubled its size. As the City Council president, William Benson Jr., put it, “The more inmates they have, the more money we get.”

Yet in a community whose 1.3 square miles are said to be too small for secrets — “If you sneeze on Washington Street, someone on Pine Street says, ‘Gesundheit,’ ” Mr. Benson said — city officials, overwhelmingly non-Latino, seemed uninformed about who those inmates were. “Nobody knows exactly who’s down there,” he said. “I hear some are Arab terrorists.”

The mystery is in some ways understandable. Though immigration detainees made up one-third of the daily population and a majority of the 4,200 men and women who moved through Wyatt’s 722 beds in a year, most were from other states, and those from Rhode Island did not remain long: Immigration and Customs Enforcement typically transferred them within a week.

Some were legal immigrants who had served time for serious crimes. But increasingly they were the kind of people who in the past would not have been arrested — people without papers, similar to some of the people who play, cheer and live in Wyatt’s shadow. Sometimes the same people.

Anthony Ventetuolo Jr., one of Wyatt’s developers and now the jail’s chief executive, said that who the inmates were made no difference to the jail, which was run like a business, under strict standards. “I’m not interested in getting involved in the politics of immigration,” he said. “All we do is detain people that our clients tell us to detain.”

Swallowed by the System

Over 10 years, Maynor Canté, 26, hardly glanced at the jail he passed as he hurried between home, two jobs and St. Matthew’s Church, where he led a prayer group.

He was 15 when he left Guatemala in 1997, sneaking across the Mexican border to join seven older siblings, legal residents who had spent years scraping new lives out of the industrial ruins of Rhode Island’s Blackstone Valley. Caught in Texas, the teenager was quickly let go pending a hearing, like so many arrested under the “catch and release” policy that prevailed while the nation’s boom times demanded cheap immigrant labor. When he failed to show up in court, a deportation order was issued.

A decade later, Mr. Canté spoke near-fluent English, and had spent thousands of dollars trying to legalize his status. Mornings, he cleaned a factory for $8 an hour. Evenings, he worked at his nephew’s new clothing shop on Dexter Street, one of several Latino businesses that had revived a bleak stretch of vacant storefronts.

Then, early one morning in October 2007 when he headed out the door for his cleaning job, five immigration agents hustled him into a van. That night, as frightened relatives tried to find him, he was delivered to Wyatt in chains.

Inside, a plaque declares that the detention center’s mission is “to protect the public from people who pose a threat to society.” One corridor, waxed to an immaculate shine, leads to a darkened control room where correction officers watch a dozen video monitors fed by 200 cameras. A guard can scan an entire unit housing 72 detainees in two- to four-man cells; zooming in on a card game, he can see that one player is holding hearts.

The jail was built for inmates awaiting trial on federal charges — drug possession, child pornography, political corruption. But to help pay off $106 million borrowed for its recent expansion and refinancing, Wyatt was now counting on prisoners like Mr. Canté: administrative detainees not charged with a crime, but held while the government tries to deport them.

Now he found himself slated for deportation without a hearing — or even any way to make a phone call.

“I was scared,” he said, recalling how he prayed the rosary and stared out the tiny window of his cell to watch a freight train pass at 6 a.m.

Outside, his sister Emma, 33, was distraught. Since their mother’s death in 2006, she had felt more responsible for protecting Mr. Canté, a big-shouldered man who was still her little brother. “Three days passed and we didn’t know where he was,” she said.

On the fourth day, after calls to many jails, a high school friend located Mr. Canté, and members of his prayer circle flocked to Wyatt. His priest, the Rev. Otoniel J. Gomez, had never visited the jail in the eight years since he was sent to Central Falls from Colombia. He spoke to his weeping parishioner through a thick plexiglass barrier.

“I thought, ‘This is like a horror movie, talking with a criminal,’ ” he said.

Yet the priest soon realized that Mr. Canté was lucky. “Most of these people didn’t have any relatives or friends near them,” Father Gomez said, “not even a lawyer.”

The official list of free legal help was largely a dead end. Wyatt’s expensive inmate telephone service was often useless, because it took days to set up an account, and it could not be used to call cellphones. Desperate, other detainees passed Mr. Canté phone numbers on scraps of paper, begging him to ask his visitors to call and tell where they were.

Out of Sight, Out of Reach

Plucked from communities from Maine to New York, some had already been transferred through several jails; many would soon be moved again, as the federal immigration agency improvised to make space for detainees from new roundups.

“It’s like having a room with five bathtubs and water coming in and out of each one to maintain an equilibrium,” explained Todd Thurlow, acting deputy director of the Boston field office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which contracts for about 1,000 beds in dozens of jails across New England.

Wyatt had a reputation as one of the most professionally run. But for newcomers without help, it could be rough.

One complaint, echoed by former jail employees, was that detainees in pain from illness or injury often went without adequate treatment. Other detainees spoke of going hungry, like Edgar Bocce, 25, a Guatemalan cleaner who said two muscular inmates took away his first dinner tray — rice, beans and spaghetti — while guards did nothing. Spartan meals could be supplemented with food from the jail’s commissary, but only if relatives sent money, or detainees stayed long enough to earn some; on the cleaning crew that kept the jail so spotless, starting pay was 40 cents a day.

Though officials said detainees were housed according to their history of violence, only one unit was dedicated to immigration detainees, and the rest were mixed in with criminal suspects and convicts.

Perhaps the greatest frustration, inmates said, was their inability to make sense of what was happening to them.

“Why am I here in jail?” asked one, a Central Falls mechanic who had been seized at immigration headquarters in Providence when he went to check why his green card application was taking so long. Wyatt guards had no answers. “They tell me, ‘Sorry, guys, but we’re not Immigration.’ ”

Mr. Canté’s sisters borrowed money and hired him a lawyer. But a day after the lawyer’s first visit, their brother was gone — transferred to a Boston jail. That week, he was shackled and bused with 60 other men to detention in York, Pa., then put on a government plane with 300 chained immigrants.

He ended up one of 2,000 detainees packed into a windowless tent city that had sprung up only a year earlier in Raymondville, Tex. — the nation’s largest immigration prison camp, run for profit and still growing.

For weeks after his lawyer reopened his case for a hearing in Boston, she could not locate him. He was on the verge of deportation by the time she managed to persuade the government to fly him back from Texas, two days before last Christmas.

Mr. Canté finally appeared before an immigration judge on Jan. 2, after three months in the detention maze. Because his case fell under the more lenient laws in force before 1997, he not only was released on bond, but allowed to work until his immigration hearing in December 2009. He is now trying to pay back thousands of dollars in loans and legal fees.

A Market for Inmates

Mr. Canté, whose time in detention cost federal taxpayers about $10,000, was part of what many call an “immigrant gold rush” that turned the private prison industry from bust to boom.

Across the country, starting in Texas in the 1980s, prison companies built jail cells on speculation as they rushed to cash in on the war on drugs. They overbuilt; abuse scandals and escapes soured many states on private prisons, and by the late 1990s, as competition for inmates increased, the companies’ stock was suffering.

Yet given the lure of easy financing and big fees for constructing deals, developers of prison space did not hold back on growth. Instead, big companies like the Corrections Corporation of America, the GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut) and the Cornell Companies added more beds and lobbied harder at the source of the most lucrative inmates, the federal government.

The payoff came after 9/11 in an accelerating stream of new detainees: foreigners swept up by the nation’s rising furor over illegal immigration.

Central Falls was similar, in its poverty, to more remote communities that had hitched their hopes to jails. Set in the river valley where America’s industrial revolution was born, its textile mills had hired large immigrant families — French Canadians and Poles, followed by Syrians and Portuguese — and squeezed them into triple-decker tenements. Even after the work moved away, the mills’ cheap housing continued to draw immigrants, mostly from Latin America.

The city was nearly bankrupt in 1990 when developers made a proposition: Build a profit-making jail for two or three hundred nonviolent federal detainees, and guarantee a steady stream of money and jobs for Central Falls.

But the deal that emerged, like many elsewhere, proved better at paying private investors than generating public revenue. The municipal corporation borrowed $30 million through a state bond issue to build Wyatt, and hired the Cornell company to run it. Six years later, the municipal body borrowed $38 million to refinance, buying back most of the bonds at a premium that gave the original bondholders a lump-sum return of 28.5 percent on their investment in addition to 9 percent annual interest.

And from its opening party in November 1993, Wyatt ran into the same problem as its competitors: finding enough inmates. For a time it imported murderers and rapists by the busload from North Carolina’s crowded prisons. When city residents objected, they learned that Central Falls had no control over who was housed at Wyatt and would get no money unless it was full.

At best, Wyatt paid Central Falls $2 to $3 a day for each detainee — less than $400,000 in the good years — to offset its use of city services. At times when the flow of inmates faltered, payments slowed to a trickle. Yet, following the strange logic of prison growth, Cornell and Wyatt officials were soon pushing to refinance yet again and expand.

Thomas Lazieh, the mayor who had championed the deal that built Wyatt, defended it as the best the city could get. His successor, Lee Matthews, took a darker view and sued to stop the expansion. “The city was sold a bill of goods,” he said.

Wyatt doubled in size anyway, with the backing of the current mayor, Charles D. Moreau. Convinced that it could wrest more revenue from the jail as immigration enforcement boomed, the municipal corporation took full control in August 2007. The budget it approved late that year included $6,000 a month for a Washington lobbyist to seek more detainees at higher rates.

A Recession, and Raids

By then, as in many parts of the country, people in Rhode Island were looking at Latino immigrants as prime suspects in a dismal economy. A polarizing immigration debate had converged with a huge state budget deficit and high unemployment. As this year began, resentment flared.

The catalyst was an ordinary New Year’s feature in The Providence Journal about the first baby born in Rhode Island in 2008. Mother and newborn were still in the hospital when federal agents, spurred by the publicity, raided their apartment in Providence and took away the father on immigration violations. Afterward, the police said, the mother discovered that a roommate from Guatemala had hanged himself behind his locked bedroom door, apparently during the raid.

The baby’s father, initially held in secret at Wyatt, was eventually deported. A Guatemalan landscaper with two misdemeanor convictions, he had been ordered to leave the country in August 2007, but stayed, his lawyer said, because his fiancée, a United States citizen, was pregnant with their second child.

To some, the case illustrated how illegal immigrants, who make up less than 4 percent of Rhode Island’s population, drained public services.

“Rhode Island taxpayers are the real victims!” declared Alice Losasso of West Warwick, in a letter to The Journal. “I’m tired of paying for interpreters so that immigrants can take their driver’s test in whatever language they speak. I’m tired of finding that their girlfriends and children are on welfare.”

Her words echoed a major theme of the governor, Donald L. Carcieri, a Republican. In March, he issued an executive order directing the State Police to help federal authorities round up illegal immigrants, saying that they depressed wages and strained services.

Public approval for that order reached 75 percent in one poll after an illegal immigrant from Guatemala was charged with carjacking and raping a woman outside a mall. He had been arrested twice before by the Providence police, and already had an outstanding order of deportation. The governor appeared on the Bill O’Reilly program to accuse the Providence mayor of sheltering criminals.

In Central Falls, the crackdown sowed panic. At the public charter school two blocks from Wyatt, parents, already afraid to be photographed at school events, were now reluctant to drive to meetings, said Sarah Friedman, a founder of the school.

An 8-year-old girl, one of the school’s high-scoring students, stopped speaking in class when her father disappeared into detention, the girl’s mother said. Without his income, mother and daughter, United States citizens, were almost evicted from their apartment.

At Central Falls High School, some students stopped coming to class because their families had gone into hiding, said Margie Cruz, a school-home liaison: “The child was born here, the child is legal. But the family has to hide because the father will be deported.

“I’ve seen students stopped for a traffic violation and the whole family got deported,” she added. “Children that were here for years. I watched them grow up.”

One longtime Little League mother said she used to worry that child molesters could be watching from the jail windows. Now, she said, she worried that her sister’s children would end up inside — the niece who had just graduated from high school with no path to legal status; the nephew who had been taught that local Quakers hid fugitive slaves, and asked his aunt to hide him if his parents were detained.

They were part of a generation of Central Falls teenagers born abroad who were coming of age as outlaws in their own town. Some had already lost relatives, like the 14-year-old whose older brother had made a left turn on red and ended up in a detention odyssey that led to deportation.

“My mother’s afraid the same thing that happened to my brother could happen to me, because I play soccer, I’m out there,” he said.

A few blocks from Wyatt, Police Chief Joseph P. Moran III praised the jail as “a great neighbor — it keeps things under control.” But he went on to tell about the difficulty of investigating the killing of a Dominican cabdriver, because witnesses had not come forward for fear of deportation. He talked of the blurring line between police work and immigration enforcement.

One domestic violence call by a husband illustrated the new reality. After a routine computer check, both he and his wife were taken into police custody, and her 8-month-old baby was handed to a friend. The man had an outstanding bench warrant; his wife had a deportation warrant issued by immigration authorities — something not included in the police database a few years ago.

“We work hand in hand with ICE,” Chief Moran said. At the same time, he added: “I have friends from Honduras, Ecuador. My kids went to school here. It makes it very, very difficult.”

Profit and Loss

For defenders of the jail, the bottom line has always been the bottom line: Wyatt’s growth meant more federal money for the city.

“They’re going to detain them somewhere,” said the manager of Mr. Williams True Styles Barbershop, on the struggling Dexter Street commercial strip. “It’s a billion-dollar business. Unless we’re going to free them, what difference does it make?”

But at least in Central Falls, the incarceration economy was not delivering on its promise.

In late June, Mayor Moreau, a big man with a florid face and a police siren in his car, offered up a budget that laid off firefighters — and told angry city employees to get used to it.

“We’re at the end of the financial rope for Central Falls,” he told the City Council, citing more than 200 boarded-up homes, foreclosures at the rate of 25 a week, and cuts in state and federal aid that required a 4 percent property tax increase and an 8 percent spending cut in the new $17.4 million budget.

Outside, past the defunct factory where Hasbro once made G. I. Joe, beyond the rusty hulk of the downsized Sylvania plant, the summer twilight gleamed on Wyatt’s new facade.

What had happened to the windfall of money and jobs it had offered?

The jail’s annual revenue had almost doubled in a year, to $21 million, mainly from increasing immigration detention. But the city budget projected revenue of only $525,000 from Wyatt, which is exempt from taxes.

That was not even enough to cover its share of city services, according to an estimate by the city’s finance department. It was certainly nothing like the $2 million a year that Mr. Benson, the City Council president, had mentioned to a reporter in April. The mayor, he said, predicted the city would get that much in profits formerly reaped by the Cornell Companies, now that the local board had taken over. Neither the mayor nor the board members, unpaid mayoral appointees, would talk about Wyatt.

As for jobs, only 10 of about 200 Wyatt employees lived in Central Falls. The jail’s board was even declining to make the $1,500 donations to local groups it once supported, like a scholarship fund and youth football.

Mr. Ventetuolo, the Wyatt chief executive, would not say how much had been saved by dispensing with Cornell’s for-profit services, maintaining that it had all gone toward keeping prices low for the federal government. Wyatt was still in transition, he said, striving to fill new beds to meet soaring payments to bondholders, now up to $8.4 million yearly from $2.7 million under the terms of the latest refinancing.

Yet Mr. Ventetuolo’s consulting company had won a raise, to $230,000 from $156,000. And as the number of detainees increased, so did revenue from surcharges on their collect calls to relatives, under a contract with Global Tel Link that gave Wyatt a cut of about $564,000 a year. That arrangement had survived a state ban on phone surcharges at prisons, thanks to lobbying that gave Wyatt a loophole.

Other large fees went to lawyers and financiers, as Mr. Matthews, the former mayor, pointed out. “There just happens to be a lot of money made by folks other than the people of the City of Central Falls,” he said.

Out in the Open

City officials in Central Falls — mostly descendants of earlier immigrants — were mindful that they presided over a community at least 60 percent Latino, where fear of the immigration crackdown was widespread.

At the same time, the city had built its hopes for economic stability on a jail that was helping to make that crackdown possible. The combination created a local immigration politics that sometimes verged on denial.

But last summer, Wyatt itself was suddenly caught in the glare of the state’s crackdown.

On the evening of July 15, a dozen State Police officers and 50 immigration agents swept into six courthouses across the state. They arrested 31 cleaners on suspicion of immigration violations, people paid $7.40 an hour to vacuum floors and scrub toilets in Rhode Island’s halls of justice. All worked for two large state contractors, one owned by the brother of a state legislator allied with Governor Carcieri.

In the uproar that followed, experiences that had been private in cases like Mr. Canté’s were put on public display: the difficulty of locating those in custody; the distress of relatives, many of them legal residents or citizens; the absence of basic legal protections familiar to anyone who watches “Law & Order.” Advocates eventually located most of the cleaners. Four were at Wyatt, including a 29-year-old single mother detained in its new women’s unit.

Two days after the raids, as city officials raised the Colombian flag over City Hall to honor that nation’s Independence Day, Mayor Moreau criticized the roundup, and chided Governor Carcieri for spending law enforcement resources on it.

“We have better things to do,” he said, “than chasing the lady that cleans the attorney general’s office.”

A reporter asked how he squared that criticism with Wyatt’s role in holding illegal immigrants, including the cleaning woman locked up there.

“One has nothing to do with the other,” he retorted. “It has nothing to do with the City of Central Falls.”

Soon, a case that drew national attention made that distinction harder to maintain.

On Aug. 6, Hiu Lui Ng, 34, a Chinese computer engineer from New York who had overstayed a visa, died in Wyatt’s custody after a year in various detention centers and months in pain.

The Times reported a week later that despite his repeated pleas for help, his fractured spine and extensive cancer had gone undiagnosed until shortly before his death. Officials at Wyatt, where he spent his last month, said he had received plenty of medical attention, and immigration authorities started an internal investigation. But local pastors and Latino advocacy groups gathered outside Wyatt on Aug. 15 to demand an independent inquiry.

A guard who watched the demonstration, who asked that his name not be published for fear of losing his job, voiced the ambivalence toward Wyatt that seems to shape the attitudes of many in Central Falls.

He spoke with sympathy of “good, hard-working people” detained there, and with distaste of the rookie guards — a result of low pay and high turnover — “who talk to people with no respect, like they’re dogs.”

But he added: “Immigration and all that, that has nothing to do with us. We’re just the prison.”

Even in the Latino population, the new awareness of Wyatt stirred little resistance.

“If the Spanish were all registered to vote they could take the city in one election,” observed Councilman Benson. “A lot of them don’t vote because they don’t trust the government, and a lot of them are illegal, so they can’t.”

In contrast, Mr. Canté, who finally had proper papers, said he felt like part of Central Falls for the first time.

“In all these years I’ve been here illegally, everywhere I went, everything I used to do, I used to feel like a reject,” he said. “Now I feel like I’ve been accepted for the community. I don’t feel afraid anymore. I feel, like, free.”

Just how closely Central Falls was entwined in the business of locking up people like Mr. Canté became more obvious this month, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, citing their continuing investigation into Mr. Ng’s death, abruptly removed all immigration detainees from Wyatt, scattering them to other jails in New England, Texas and Louisiana.

With Wyatt’s solvency, if not its survival, uncertain, the mayor lobbied the state’s Congressional delegation to get back a share of the growing market in immigration detainees. Meanwhile, jail officials hunted for deals like the one they narrowly lost last spring, to house 80 Vermont inmates judged criminally insane for crimes like murder and rape.

Mr. Lazieh, the former mayor who first championed Wyatt, called the government’s immigration policies immoral, arguing that “the system has gone overboard — we’ve turned to criminalizing all immigrants.”

But he had no regrets about his city’s part. “If it’s not in Central Falls,” he said, “then this facility would be someplace else.”

more links at this URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/us/27detain.html?_r=1&hp

Posted by lois at 12:52 PM | Comments (0)

December 12, 2008

ACLU Massachusetts: Detention and Deportation in the Age of ICE: Immigrants and Human Rights in Massachusetts

Detention and Deportation in the Age of ICE:
Immigrants and Human Rights in Massachusetts
ACLU Massachusetts http://www.aclum.org/ice/
Introduction

EVERY DAY IN MASSACHUSETTS, approximately 800 immigrants and asylum-seekers are in detention in county jails around the state waiting to be deported or fighting a legal battle to stay in the country. None of those persons are serving sentences for having committed a crime. They have not been judged by a jury of their peers. Instead, they are “civil detainees” held because they have overstayed a visa, are awaiting a decision on asylum, or are otherwise subject to deportation. Yet they spend months, and sometimes years, in cells side-by-side with sentenced criminals, not knowing when they will be allowed to leave.

When it was created in 2003, the federal immigration agency known as ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) quickly created a new strategic plan -- aptly named Operation Endgame -- which calls for the removal of all deportable persons by the year 2012. This plan involves aggressive enforcement coupled with a heavy reliance on detention, and has resulted in record numbers of deportations -- 349,041 persons in Fiscal Year 2008 alone. To keep up with the increased numbers of arrests, ICE created a network of approximately 400 jails and detention facilities around the country where it now holds over 30,000 persons on any given day.

Despite having a vibrant and diverse working immigrant population, Massachusetts has become subject to these national trends. In New England, ICE deported 3,836 people last year. Families and communities in Massachusetts are feeling the effects of roundups of immigrants, from the devastating raid in New Bedford in 2007 where 361 persons were arrested at once, to the smaller, but unrelenting arrests of immigrants in Boston, Lowell, Springfield and other immigrant-heavy communities. Fear is rampant. Small businesses catering to immigrant populations are shutting their doors; immigrant parents are taking their children out of schools; families are staying inside their homes; and the state is now facing a gap in its census because immigrant families are too scared to answer questions about their households.

In Massachusetts, the federal government has contracted with seven county jails and one state facility to house immigrants detained in the region. These facilities, which already are overcrowded at up to two and a half times their capacity, receive funding from the federal government at a rate of between $80 and $90 a day plus guard hours, but little or no guidance or oversight about how to handle civil immigration detainees.

ICE’s heavy-handed approach to federal immigration enforcement, together with its hands-off approach to supervising local facilities leads to dangerous consequences for the thousands of persons inside immigration detention.

Beginning in 2007, the ACLU of Massachusetts took on a state-wide project to document human rights issues for immigrants in detention. We spoke with 40 detained persons and dozens of advocates and lawyers and secured the release of hundreds of pages of government documents. What we found raises serious concerns about human rights and due process violations for immigrants detained in Massachusetts

I. Due Process Concerns

ICE’s new enforcement strategy involves an aggressive use of unchecked federal powers to move persons between jails and detention centers around the country and detain them for long periods of time.

A. ICE Abuses its Unchecked Power to Move Persons Around the Country

Because immigration detainees are federal detainees, ICE has almost unlimited power to detain them in any facility in the country and to move them from one facility to another without justification or advance notice. ICE takes full advantage of this power, transferring detainees on a daily basis all over the country. In 2007, ICE spent more than $10 million to transfer nearly 19,400 detained persons. In New England, ICE arrests twice as many people as the region can hold; this means that half of those arrested are taken quickly to detention centers in places as far as Texas and Louisiana.

In Massachusetts, ICE appears to use its power to transfer persons in order to silence complaints about detention conditions or inhumane treatment. This report documents five instances in which persons were transferred to a different jail shortly after complaining about an incident. Detained immigrants expressed reluctance to speak out about problems because of a fear of being moved far away from their families, communities and lawyers. This fear came from the experience of seeing others moved after they had spoken out.

In addition, despite its multi-million dollar budget for daily transfers, ICE has no real-time tracking system to monitor the location of its detainees. In the New England region, relatives or lawyers of detained persons who have been moved call the ICE New England headquarters for information on the location of their loved one or client and can wait for days for an answer because ICE computers do not have an up-to-date location.

B. Abuses Take Place During the Deportation Process

The persons who spoke with us about their experience reported that ICE agents used threats, coercion and physical force during the deportation process. Some reported that they were threatened with forced sedation if they did not cooperate; others reported that they were forcefully removed from their cells and put onto vans and planes. Some also reported being forced to sign or put thumb prints on papers that they could not read or understand.

Some detained immigrants reported that they were not told in advance of the date that they would be deported. This meant that they could not prepare luggage and personal items to take with them and could not prepare for family members or friends in the receiving country to meet them at the airport, instead traveling only with the items they had with them at the jail. This is a particularly difficult situation because ICE may drop off immigrants in a city that is nowhere near the city of the immigrant’s final destination.

C. ICE Detains Immigrants for Excessive Periods of Time

Immigrants detained in Massachusetts spend many months and sometimes years in jail while they wait for their cases to be decided. At the time of our interviews, the 40 persons with whom we spoke had spent between one month and five years -- on average over 11 months -- in detention. Of those, 3 had spent over two years in detention; 10 had spent over one year; and 6 had been detained for approximately 6 months.

Long periods of detention occur for two principal reasons. First, even though the law allows the government a presumptive period of no longer than 6 months to keep a person in detention after final adjudication of the immigration case, ICE does not have an adequate mechanism to track the length of individuals’ detention. Detained persons themselves must remind ICE officials, and sometimes resort to filing habeas corpus petitions in federal court when their 6 months have elapsed.

Second, although regulations call for periodic reviews of custody, these reviews are lacking in due process: the burden is on the detained individual to prove that he or she has a reason to be released; the decision-maker is the agency itself; and the detained person often does not receive an opportunity to present evidence because he or she is not given advance notice that a custody review will take place.

Lengthy detentions, together with harsh conditions inside local jails, deter persons from continuing to fight their cases in court, even though they may have legal relief from deportation. Immigrants face the impossible choice of going through the legal process and spending many months in jail, or giving up and allowing the government to deport them without a final adjudication.

II. Inadequate Conditions of Confinement

ICE combines a heavy-handed approach to enforcement with a hands-off approach to the daily responsibilities of detention. It outsources detention to local facilities but provides little or no supervision of conditions and does not have an adequate system for learning about problems.

A. Massachusetts County Jails are Overcrowded

The 800 detained immigrants in Massachusetts contribute to the crisis of overcrowding facing every county jail in the state. In some facilities, detained immigrants sleep side by side with inmates in cells meant to hold one person that currently hold two or three. In other facilities, they sleep in crowded makeshift dormitories or on mattresses in “boats” on the floor. This leads to crowded conditions in the cells, dormitories, cafeterias and recreation areas. It also strains the facilities’ medical resources, resulting in long wait times to see a doctor -- one of the most commonly heard complaints.

B. Detained Persons Face Harsh Treatment by Corrections Officers

Detained immigrants reported that some corrections officers are rude, and single them out from the US citizens in their custody for harsh treatment. This involved daily yelling, denying access to bathrooms and services, using profanity and racially and ethnically charged language against persons in custody, and sometimes being physically abusive. This, coupled with the ICE’s unchecked power to transfer persons, means that guard abuse can be covered up. This report documents one case in which a detained immigrant was moved to Vermont after a guard picked him up by the neck and slammed him against a wall. ICE agents told him that he had been sent to Vermont “to cool things off.”

C. Detained Persons Report a Variety of Dangerous and Difficult Daily Conditions

The persons with whom we spoke reported a litany of difficulties inside jails that made daily life harsh and punitive. These included being held in the same unit or the same cell with violent criminals; having to submit to strip searches and cell searches; unhealthy food and dirty water; a lack of access to bathrooms; difficulties in receiving visits from lawyers and family members; a phone system that makes it excessively expensive to call loved ones; no access to a legal library; no access to an outside recreation area; no access to educational services and no access to newspapers or reading materials. These harsh realities of jail life, together with the fact that detained immigrants do not have a set date of release and do not know how long they will be in jail lead to an environment in which depression, stress and anxiety are very high.

III. Inadequate Medical Care

Because the Department of Homeland Security’s sub-agency, the Division of Immigrant Health Services (DIHS), controls any non-routine care given to detained immigrants, the agency’s power over sick detainees is tremendous. This report documents two cases in which DIHS delayed or denied care based on the belief that the ill persons would soon be deported or released, and a third case in which DIHS refused to fix a broken finger because the fracture had occurred days prior to the person’s arrest, forcing him to stay in detention for months with a finger that became increasingly deformed and painful.

As a law enforcement agency, the Department of Homeland Security has a clear conflict of interest when it acts as a healthcare provider. In determining whether to deny or approve care, DIHS’s standard is not to provide necessary medical attention, but to keep the immigrant healthy enough to be deported.

Government documents obtained by the ACLU of Massachusetts show that DIHS considers its relationship to the detained person one of doctor-patient. However, as we found, DIHS staff never have any contact with the patient. If DIHS denies the care that local facility doctors have requested, there is no appeal process. In fact, there is no standardized process even for notification of the decision to the detained person.

In addition, despite ICE’s discretion to release immigrants with electronic monitoring or on personal recognizance, there is no standardized process by which a detained person can ask for release based on a medical condition.

ICE also fails to ensure continuity of care when it moves persons from one facility to another. Despite existing forms and regulations mandating that a detained person’s medical record and a supply of prescription medication travel with him, the report documents cases in which this repeatedly did not happen. As a result, detained persons can go for days without their necessary medication when they are transferred.

IV. Failure to Supervise Local Facilities

ICE does not train or prepare local facilities to deal with the population of civil immigration detainees and does not ensure that facilities meet ICE’s own standards. Government documents obtained by the ACLU of Massachusetts show that ICE’s yearly reviews of detention facilities often are empty gestures and do not address existing problems. The reviews ask about policy, not practice, and do not involve any input from detained persons. They are carried out with ample advance notice and give the facilities an opportunity to fix problems during the inspection period. In addition, there are no consistent standards for judging a facility’s compliance with ICE standards and no consequences for facilities that fail to meet any of the standards.

ICE’s failure to supervise local jails means that the federal agency has no adequate mechanism for learning about problems with conditions. ICE does not maintain a daily presence in the jails, and ICE agents who visit on a weekly or monthly basis deal principally with immigration issues, not conditions issues.

Conclusion

The law allows the federal government to detain immigrants in deportation proceedings for one purpose only: to carry out their deportation. Immigration detention, as a form of civil detention, is not meant to be punitive or retaliatory. Yet ICE uses detention as an important tool in its law enforcement belt, subjecting immigrants to lengthy periods of detention, moving them around the country when they speak out about abuses, denying needed medical care, and allowing inadequate conditions and harsh treatment in local facilities to go unchecked. In doing so, ICE makes it excessively difficult for immigrants to seek legal avenues to stay in the country, and many choose deportation even when legal avenues to stay in the country are available.

Such an unchecked system of vast federal powers opens the door to abuse and violations of basic human rights. In its zeal to deport all deportable persons, ICE has trampled on fundamental rights guaranteed to all -- citizens and non-citizens alike.

Posted by lois at 09:32 PM | Comments (0)

November 28, 2008

Private Prison Profits Soar Through Prisoners in the Immigration System

Private Prison Profits Soar Through Bipartisan Pork

by Dave Bennion

Published November 26, 2008 @ 08:00AM PST

Tom Barry at Border Lines, a blog I just added to my feed list, discusses the commodification of prisoners in the immigration system.

Keep in mind that most immigration violations are civil, not criminal, violations. Even crossing the border without a visa is only a misdemeanor.

To understand how well the prison business is faring and how immigrants are key to prison profits, you can listen in on the prison firms’ quarterly conference calls with major Wall Street investment firms. In early November, the country’s prison corporations reported soaring profits.

Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the country’s oldest and largest prison corporation, boasted that it enjoyed a $33.6 million increase in the third quarter over last year, while earnings rose 15%. Formerly known as Wackenhut, GEO Group, the nation’s second largest prison company, saw its earnings jump 29% over 2007. Another private prison firm that imprisons immigrants is Cornell Companies, and it reported a 9% increase in net revenues in the third quarter.

This at a time when the rest of the economy is tanking. And these profits come straight from taxpayers' pockets, when we are already bailing out the financial industry.

Private prisons have been booming over the past eight years. From 2000 to 2005, the number of private prisons increased from 16% of all prisons to 23%. All of the increase in federal prisons has been in prisons owned or operated by private firms.

Immigrants are the fastest growing sector of the federal detainees and prisoners, and there’s hundreds of millions of dollars to be made by enterprising businesses and governments. The annual ICE budget for “detention and removal” is $1.2 billion.

In addition, the Justice Department’s Office for the Detention Trustee has hundreds of contracts with local governments and private prison firms that provide beds for immigrants. Both ICE and OFDT have special offices that oversee the outsourcing of its immigrant prisoners. OFDT even boasts of its “enterprise” system of detention.

Private prison companies aren’t worried that the Democratic Party sweep will mean that fewer immigrants are sent their way because of party promises of enacting comprehensive immigration reform. GEO Group’s chairman George Zoley on Nov. 3 assured investors: “These federal initiatives to target, detain and deport criminal aliens throughout the country will continue to drive the need for immigration detention beds over the next several years and these initiatives have been fully funded by Congress on a bipartisan basis.”

Not only has the DHS crackdown on illegal immigrants have bipartisan support in Congress, it was the Democratic Congress, say private prison chiefs, that increased the 2009 budget for the crackdown. “The President only asked for a program funding of $800 million,” noted Zoley, “It was the Democratic chairman [Homeland Security subcommittee] … that added another $200 million to this program.”

That would be Senator Byrd of West Virginia. Is this what we can look forward to from "more and better Democrats"?

Democrats should not be fattening profits of private prison operators on the backs of immigrants. End corporate subsidies to immigration jails!

http://immigration.change.org/blog/view/private_prison_profits_soar_through_
bipartisan_pork

Posted by lois at 03:43 PM | Comments (0)

October 19, 2008

VA: Richmond Investors Plan to Cash in on Immigrant Detainees

Richmond Investors Plan to Cash in on Immigrant Detainees
by Jeff Winder

Changing immigration enforcement policy has left federal authorities struggling to cope with rapidly rising numbers of detainees. A controversial partnership in Farmville, VA proposes to address the crisis with a 1,040 bed, for-profit immigrant detention center.

During 2008, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has conducted raids of historic proportions, arresting hundreds of undocumented workers at a time in Iowa, California, Mississippi and most recently, South Carolina. Virginia has not been immune to this trend. 2008 saw a sharp increase in ICE activity with raids in Amelia, Harrisonburg, northern Virginia and the high-profile arrest of 33 construction workers at the nearly completed Richmond federal courthouse.

ICE, a federal agency hastily created under the Department of Homeland Security in the wake of September 11th, is floundering as they try to cope with this influx, creating dangerous conditions for those detained. Recent investigations by the Washington Post and New York Times thoroughly document a pattern of medical neglect in ICE detention that has resulted in dozens of preventable deaths.

A partnership between ICE, the city of Farmville, VA and a private company proposes to address this crisis with a new 1,000-plus bed immigrant detention center in the small, southside Virginia town. Immigration Centers of America - Farmville (ICA) plans to break ground on October 15th and be operational by June of 2009.

Information about ICA and their qualifications to run a detention facility has been withheld from the public. The company, owned by two real estate developers and the CEO of a company that sells industrial mixers to bakeries, does not have a web site.

According to the Virginia Corporation Commission website, they first filed in June of 2007. This was just one month before the first of two grants was requested from the Virginia Tobacco Indemnification and Community Revitalization Commission, a state-administered fund whose stated purpose is "to make payments to farmers to compensate for the decline of tobacco quotas and to promote economic growth and development in tobacco-dependent communities." The fund awarded the projects two grants totaling nearly $600,000 to pay for water, sewer, roads, parking lots and fencing.

Spokesperson Tim Pfohl said the grants were awarded based on a formula that projects how quickly a community will "recapture" the grant monies in the form of tax revenues. When questioned on the qualifications of ICA to manage this facility, he said, "Our job is not to weigh their ability to do the job. That is for the federal folks to figure out. We accept the receipt of a federal contract as proof of their qualifications."

But during an October 2nd interview, ICE spokesperson Richard Rocha denied that there is any commitment yet by the federal government to house prisoners at the Farmville facility. "We have only signed a transportation agreement with Farmville so far. We have not committed to using any facility if it was built. We are, however, working with the city to ensure that any facility built would be to ICE standards." When asked about the qualifications of ICA to run the facility, Rocha said, "It would be premature to talk about staffing or process, but our only contract is with the city of Farmville. You will have to talk to the town manager."

Gerald Spates, Farmville town manager, had this to say about ICA, "Well, I'll grant you, they are new at this, but they have been trying to get this project going for five years. The key is in the highly qualified personnel that they will bring in." He suggested contacting ICA directly but also agreed to respond to a series of question about the background of ICA, the roster of upper-level employees that they plan to bring in and the financial arrangements by October 7th. He failed to provide any of this information and has not returned phone calls since then.

An unidentified spokesperson at the offices of ICA declined to answer any questions and said that all information about the plans would have to come from Gerald Spates. A call to real estate developer and partner in ICA Warren Coleman resulted in this statement, "We have a policy of not giving any information about this project. All of that has to come from ICE."

"We've been hearing horror stories about detainees being put into prison with other criminals when all they have done is be here without documentation. Our goal is to keep them safe," Spates continued, "But I want to be honest with you. We do stand to gain financially from this."

During a public meeting in Farmville, ICA spokesperson Ken Newsome projected that at 85% capacity the facility will generate $322,000 annually in fees for the City in addition to an estimated $450,000 in tax revenue for Farmville and Prince Edward County. According to the Washington Post, if the facility does run at the projected capacity, ICA stands to gross $20 million in federal tax dollars annually.

Privately-run immigrant detention centers of this type have been plagued by scandal, lawsuits and controversy. The private-prison watchdog group Grassroots Leadership, has documented a pattern of abuses. They cite examples including a center in Elizabeth New Jersey that was shut down temporarily when immigrants were awarded $2.5 million in damages after an investigation showed that poorly trained guards served rotting food and physically and mentally abused prisoners. ICE turned the facility over to Correctional Corporation of America (CCA), despite this group also having a documented history of abuses in its facilities. In March of last year, nearly 1,000 immigrant prisoners in the 1,500 bed facility run by CCA in Lumpkin, GA, went on a hunger strike protesting conditions including lack of medical care.

Private companies like ICA profit from inefficiency in the immigrant detention system. A recent article by the Washington Post documents immigrants languishing in ICE custody for months even after signing a voluntary deportation order. This means more days of space "purchased" from companies like ICA at taxpayer expense.

The demand for these spaces is at an all-time high with the recent increase in ICE raids and all indications are that it will continue to rise. Under the Secure Communities plan, ICE will be expanding enforcement efforts and initiating deportation proceedings against any noncitizen, documented or not, who is arrested.

Viable alternatives to immigrant incarceration do exist at a fraction of the cost. With their Appearance Assistance Program, the Vera Institute for Justice achieved a 93% appearance rate in court including final appearances at a cost of $12 a day. ICA's $63 dollar per day rate is at the low end of the range of per diem charges in the region where Alexandria tops the list at $113 daily.

Shenandoah Valley community organizer Patrick Lincoln questions the role of corporate lobbyists in setting immigration policy, "The criminalization of immigrants is about feeding a profit driven prison system. It's no coincidence that alarm about immigration has mirrored a national decrease in crime, a slow-down in the growth of the prison system and a shrinking in the profits of companies like the Corrections Corporation of America."

Community activists express concerns about the impact plans for the prison are having on the immigrant community in Virginia. Prince William County (PWC) is the most noteworthy in a series of new state and local level laws that target immigrants. Despite vigorous community opposition, the PWC board of supervisors unanimously passed a resolution that denies social services to immigrants and increase powers of local law enforcement officers to inquire into immigration status. This trend, along with the increase in ICE raids has helped to create a climate of fear among immigrants and resulted in many families leaving the area.

"For a lot of the people I have talked to this new prison is the last straw," said community activist Sue Frankel-Streit, speaking of her involvement with the Louisa Pan-American Friendship Committee. The Louisa County group was started by Latin-American immigrants who met at an English class. They work to dispel myths about immigration by hosting dinners at local churches where immigrants and citizens can get to know each other. "Knowing that a 1,000 bed immigrant prison is opening just 40 miles from here is causing people to think maybe it is time to leave this country. It disgusts me that we treat people this way."

"We are seeing people who have already been hurt by our economic policies victimized again," said Teresa Stanley of the advocacy group Sowers of Justice. "These people are only trying to work to support their families. They contribute hundreds of millions to the Virginia economy and they are being locked up so that corporations can reap a profit." This was a reference to a study released this year by the Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis which found the annual tax contribution of undocumented workers in Virginia to be over $400 million.

As an increasingly popular immigrant destination and home to some of the most repressive local immigrant ordinances in the country, Virginia is often in the national spotlight. "We want this facility to be a model that other localities can use," said Spates. For better or worse, it does appear that the fate of this facility will be an indication of how communities will respond to immigration during the years to come.
http://www.thepeopleunited.org/immigrantJustice.php?id=7

Posted by lois at 01:24 PM | Comments (0)

October 09, 2008

Northern VA-Profit-making venture for huge immigrant "detention center"

Southern Exposure
Wednesday, October 08, 2008
As immigrations sweeps overwhelm detention systems, some private companies look to benefit
This week’s large-scale immigration raid at Columbia Farms, a chicken processing plant near Greenville, S.C, where more than 300 were arrested, is just the latest in a stepped-up federal enforcement effort that has resulted in the deportation of thousands of illegal workers in recent months, reports the L.A. Times.

The disruption to families and communities remains a huge issue. Alternet reports this week that Northern Virginia is one of the places where the immigration debate has been the most heated. With aggressive local policies such as ones requiring law enforcement to inquire about the immigration status of people who are arrested, the Latino population in the city of Manassas and Prince William County has plummeted.

Other deportation problems are on the rise as ICE detention centers are overwhelmed by the large new numbers of illegals being arrested. Immigrants are often detained by ICE for months longer than they should because of a detention and deportation system beset by waste and dysfunction, reports the Washington Post.

According to the Washington Post:

Federal officials regularly misplace files or fail to bring detainees to court hearings, resulting in needless additional jail time at taxpayer expense.

During recent court proceedings before an immigration judge, in more than half the cases the government was missing detainee files, did not know where detainees were being held or failed to bring a detainee to a facility with proper videoconferencing equipment.
...
Legal advocates say the system is rife with errors as it grows more clogged. In records gathered this summer by the District-based CAIR Coalition, which provides legal services to immigrants in Virginia jails, government prosecutors came to court without detainees' files in 60 of 162 cases. In 81 cases, ICE failed to bring the detainee to his or her mandatory court hearing.

Handwritten letters from detainees seeking help from immigrant advocacy groups, obtained by The Washington Post, relate tales of lost and inaccurate records and detainees' inability to get even the simplest information about their case status.
...

For detainees, hiring a lawyer is the best way to avoid falling through the cracks. But for those who cannot afford one, ICE is not obligated to provide legal counsel. With little chance of contacting an ICE case officer, advocates say, detainees are often left in jail for months, awaiting a flight or bus ride to their native countries.

With more sweeps, space is becoming a large issue. The larger detention population may in fact begin to feed the expansion of for-profit detention facilities, much in the same way the jump in the U.S. prison population fed the private-prison boom of the last decade.

The Washington Post reports that ICE officials are now making plans to create the largest immigration detention facility in the mid-Atlantic region in Farmville, Virginia. The $21 million project will also be a profit-making venture for many private individuals who plan to reap massive benefits.

As the Washington Post reported:

The 1,040-bed facility will be unique not only because it will dwarf many of Virginia's jails but also because it is a private venture aimed at capitalizing on the massive influx of detainees into the [ICE] system over the past year. A small group of Richmond investors looks to reap millions of dollars in profit by building what has been described as the "mid-Atlantic hub" for ICE operations in a town just three hours south of the nation's capital.
...
Although ICE has not guaranteed that even a single detainee will be sent to the facility, the investors plan to break ground Oct. 15 and believe they will have the facility filled to 85 percent of capacity a year from now as part of a contract between the town and ICE. There is room to expand the detention center to 2,500 beds.

The facility is being built and run by a private subcontractor, and it will be a huge boon for the private investors, who have secured as part of the ICE contract a rate of almost $63 per detainee per day -- that means that if the estimated 322,000 detainee days are achieved each year, the company could gross $20 million in federal tax dollars annually, according to the Washington Post.

Labels: ICE raids, immigration, virginia
posted by Desiree Evans at 8:38 PM |
http://southernstudies.org/facingsouth/2008/10/as-immigrations-sweeps-overwh
elm.asp

Posted by lois at 03:11 PM | Comments (0)

August 24, 2008

Judges Vetted by White House More Likely to Reject Asylum Bids

August 24, 2008
Vetted Judges More Likely to Reject Asylum Bids
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
NY Times

WASHINGTON — Immigrants seeking asylum in the United States have been disproportionately rejected by judges whom the Bush administration chose using a conservative political litmus test, according to an analysis of Justice Department data.

The analysis suggests that the effects of a patronage-style selection process for immigration judges — used for three years before it was abandoned as illegal — are still being felt by scores of immigrants whose fates are determined by the judges installed in that period.

The data focuses on 16 judges who were vetted for political affiliation before being hired and have since ruled on at least 100 cases each.

Comparison of their records to others in the same cities shows that as a group they ruled against asylum-seekers significantly more often than colleagues who were appointed, as the law requires, under politically neutral rules.

Critics of the politicization of the immigration bench say it is not enough that in 2007 the department stopped using illegal hiring procedures. The fact that many of the politically selected judges remain in power, they say, continues to undermine the perceived fairness of hearings for immigrants fighting deportation.

The immigration court “is now the seat of individuals who were appointed illegally, and that means that in the minds of many people the court symbolizes illegality,” said Bruce Einhorn, a Pepperdine University law professor who was an immigration judge from 1990 until he retired last year.

Peter A. Carr, a Justice Department spokesman, wrote in an e-mailed response to questions, “The fact that the process was flawed does not mean that the immigration judges selected through that process are unfit to serve.”

The Bush administration has been accused by Democrats and other critics of improperly bringing politics into the business of federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, the General Services Administration and, most notably, the Justice Department, which has been reeling under accusations that officials sought to politicize the apparatus of law enforcement.

This summer, the department’s inspector general released two scathing reports confirming that for several years administration officials illegally took political affiliation into account when hiring recent law school graduates, summer associates, some assistant prosecutors and immigration judges.

The report covering the selection of immigration judges primarily blamed Kyle Sampson, a former top aide to the attorney general, and two former White House liaisons to the department, Monica M. Goodling and Jan Williams, for the practice.

When vetting applicants, for example, Ms. Goodling asked them questions about their political beliefs and researched their campaign contributions. She also conducted Internet searches of their names and words like “asylum,” “immigrant” and “border,” as well as partisan terms, like abortion, Iraq, gay and the names of political figures, to determine their views, the report said. But it presented no evidence that her efforts were connected to any official policy goal of restricting asylum.

The White House has said it never ordered political hiring of civil servants.

The Justice Department employs more than 200 immigration judges in more than 50 courts around the country. They conduct hearings for noncitizens asking not to be deported, including asylum-seekers who say they fear religious or political persecution.

Although called “judges,” the hearing examiners are not confirmed by the Senate for life; they are covered by federal civil-service laws, which stipulate that they must be hired on the basis of merit under politically neutral criteria. But in early 2004, political appointees took control of hiring the judges away from career professionals and essentially began treating the positions — which carry salaries of $104,300 to $158,500 — as patronage jobs. They screened out liberals and Democrats, while steering openings to White House-vetted “Bush loyalists” and other job-seekers vouched for by Republican political appointees.

Among the judges selected were a member of the 2000 Bush-Cheney Florida recount team, people who worked for Republican lawmakers and a former Republican state official in Illinois backed by Karl Rove, at the time the White House political adviser.

In 2007, after the Civil Division questioned the legality of the process, the administration changed back to a nonpolitical selection method handled by career professionals.

But in the interim 31 immigration judges had been appointed by the flawed process. The Justice Department did not challenge a list of those judges submitted by The New York Times.

Of that group, 28 remain judges, two left during a probationary period, and one was recently promoted by Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey to the Board of Immigration Appeals, the panel that hears appeals of rulings.

The inspector general’s report did not evaluate how the politically selected judges have used their power. The additional data comes from Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research group at Syracuse University that has analyzed Justice Department records from the 2002 fiscal year to 2007 and profiled immigration judges.

Of the 31 politically selected judges, 16 compiled enough of a record to allow statistical analysis. Nine rejected applicants at a significantly higher rate than other local colleagues, while three were more lenient. Four others decided cases in line with the local averages, an analysis by The Times showed.

And when asylum denial rates of all judges across the nation were ranked in comparison to their local peers, 8 of the 16 scored above the 70th percentile — meaning they have been among the judges least likely to grant asylum.

Together, these 16 judges handled 5,031 cases and had a combined denial rate of 66.3 percent — 6.6 percentage points greater than their collective peers. This translates into an extra 157 asylum cases that resulted in denial.

In Houston, for example, Judge Chris Brisack denied asylum in 90.7 percent of his cases, while other judges in that city averaged a 79.1 percent denial rate. Judge Brisack, a former Republican county chairman who also works in the oil business, did not return a call.

Garry Malphrus, the judge later elevated to the Board of Immigration Appeals, denied asylum 66.9 percent of the time, compared with an average denial rate of 58.3 percent among other judges at his court in Arlington, Va. Judge Malphrus, a former associate director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, did not return a call.

The highest gap belonged to Judge Earle Wilson. He worked first in Miami, where he denied 88.1 percent of asylum requests — 9.8 percentage points higher than the local average. He then moved to Orlando, where his denial rate was 80.3 percent — 29.2 percentage points higher than peers.

Judge Wilson, who previously worked in the Office of Immigration Litigation at the Justice Department, said he was not allowed to give interviews.

Still, there were exceptions. Three of the politically selected judges granted asylum significantly more frequently than peers. Most notably, Judge Glen Bower of Chicago denied only 16 percent of asylum requests — 47 percentage points lower than the city average. Judge Bower, the applicant backed by Mr. Rove, did not return a call.

The analysis excluded judges for whom insufficient data was available to produce meaningful results.

Charles H. Kuck, the president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said all the judges, regardless of their qualifications, should reapply for their jobs alongside other applicants.

“Any judge who was appointed through a process that was not impartial should step down and go through the process again to make sure they should be reappointed,” Mr. Kuck said.

But Glenn Fine, the Justice Department inspector general, said at a July 30 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on his investigation that “it would be difficult if not impossible” to decide whether a sitting judge was qualified.

Mr. Fine also noted that the judges could not be fired because they were now protected by civil-service statutes — the same laws violated when they were selected.

At that hearing, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, expressed frustration about the lack of remedies.

“The so-called ‘loyal Bushies’ that they stuffed into these positions will also have gotten away with it and will be there essentially indefinitely, protected by civil-service protections that they don’t deserve,” Mr. Whitehouse said.

Stephen H. Legomsky, an immigration law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, said the attorney general should reassign the judges to nonadjudicatory positions at the same pay, which would not violate civil-service rules.

Dana Marks, an immigration judge in San Francisco and the president of the judges’ union, said her organization opposed reassigning its new members.

“We are confident that many of the people hired under this process are excellent judges,” said Judge Marks, who was appointed in 1987, “and should not be penalized for having been hired under a process that they had no control over at the time, that some of them may not even have known was irregular or inappropriate.”

Temporarily reducing the number of judges might exacerbate an already crushing caseload.

Already, several immigration lawyers said they were considering invoking constitutional due-process rights to ask for new hearings for clients turned down by the politically selected judges, although people who have already been deported would most likely be ineligible for that.

Several law professors said they doubted such a potentially disruptive request would prevail. But regardless, they said, the recent disclosures have further tarnished the image of the immigration courts.

Last year, an academic study of 140,000 decisions over four years found sharp differences in the outcome of cases involving immigrants of the same nationality, even among judges in the same city.

The authors of the study, called “Refugee Roulette,” concluded that the facts of a case may be less important in determining whether someone is deported than which judge hears the case.

Nina Bernstein and Robert Gebeloff contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/washington/24judges.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 11:55 AM | Comments (0)

August 19, 2008

Cancer-Stricken 34-Year-Old Chinese Computer Engineer Dies After Being Denied Care in Private US Immigration Prison

Cancer-Stricken 34-Year-Old Chinese Computer Engineer Dies After Being Denied Care in Private US Immigration Prison

Democracy Now 8-19-08. You can listen to the interview or read the transcript at this URL.
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/8/19/35_year_old_immigrant_detainee_dies
Earlier this month, a thirty-four-year-old Chinese computer engineer, Hiu Lui Ng, who overstayed his visa, died in a Rhode Island immigration detention center. He had cancer in his liver, lung and bones, and a fractured spine. Despite repeated complaints of severe pain, Mr. Ng was refused independent medical evaluation by immigration officials. Before Mr. Ng died on August 6th, he told his sister that the nurses at the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Center in Rhode Island had told him to “stop faking” his illness. We speak to immigration attorney Joshua Bardavid, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) and Renee Feltz, co-creator of the site BusinessOfDetention.com.

Democracy Now 8-19-08. You can listen to the interview or read the transcript at this URL.
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/8/19/35_year_old_immigrant_detainee_dies
Earlier this month, a thirty-four-year-old Chinese computer engineer, Hiu Lui Ng, who overstayed his visa, died in a Rhode Island immigration detention center. He had cancer in his liver, lung and bones, and a fractured spine. Despite repeated complaints of severe pain, Mr. Ng was refused independent medical evaluation by immigration officials. Before Mr. Ng died on August 6th, he told his sister that the nurses at the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Center in Rhode Island had told him to “stop faking” his illness. We speak to immigration attorney Joshua Bardavid, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) and Renee Feltz, co-creator of the site BusinessOfDetention.com.

Guests:
Joshua Bardavid, immigration attorney in New York. He is representing Hiu Lui Ng’s family.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, Democratic Congress member from California. She serves as Chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law.
Renee Feltz, investigative journalist based in New York City and creator with Stokely Baksh of the award-winning multimedia investigative project BusinessOfDetention.com. Part of this project featured on MotherJones.com, and another part will be featured in an upcoming issue of NACLA.

http://www.businessofdetention.com/
The nation's largest private prison company has partnered with the federal government to detain close to
1 million undocumented people in the past 5 years until they are deported. In the process, Corrections Corporation of America has made record profits. Critics suggest the CCA cuts corners on its detention contracts in order to increase its revenue at expense of humane conditions. Thanks to political connections and lobby spending, it dominates the industry of immigrant detention. CCA now has close to 10,000 new beds under development in anticipation of continued demand.

Posted by lois at 08:02 PM | Comments (0)

August 14, 2008

Ill and in Pain, Detainee Dies in U.S. Hands

August 13, 2008
Ill and in Pain, Detainee Dies in U.S. Hands
By NINA BERNSTEIN
NY Times

He was 17 when he came to New York from Hong Kong in 1992 with his parents and younger sister, eyeing the skyline like any newcomer. Fifteen years later, Hiu Lui Ng was a New Yorker: a computer engineer with a job in the Empire State Building, a house in Queens, a wife who is a United States citizen and two American-born sons.

But when Mr. Ng, who had overstayed a visa years earlier, went to immigration headquarters in Manhattan last summer for his final interview for a green card, he was swept into immigration detention and shuttled through jails and detention centers in three New England states.

In April, Mr. Ng began complaining of excruciating back pain. By mid-July, he could no longer walk or stand. And last Wednesday, two days after his 34th birthday, he died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a Rhode Island hospital, his spine fractured and his body riddled with cancer that had gone undiagnosed and untreated for months.

On Tuesday, with an autopsy by the Rhode Island medical examiner under way, his lawyers demanded a criminal investigation in a letter to federal and state prosecutors in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont, and the Department of Homeland Security, which runs the detention system.

Mr. Ng’s death follows a succession of cases that have drawn Congressional scrutiny to complaints of inadequate medical care, human rights violations and a lack of oversight in immigration detention, a rapidly growing network of publicly and privately run jails where the government held more than 300,000 people in the last year while deciding whether to deport them.

In federal court affidavits, Mr. Ng’s lawyers contend that when he complained of severe pain that did not respond to analgesics, and grew too weak to walk or even stand to call his family from a detention pay phone, officials accused him of faking his condition. They denied him a wheelchair and refused pleas for an independent medical evaluation.

Instead, the affidavits say, guards at the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, R.I., dragged him from his bed on July 30, carried him in shackles to a car, bruising his arms and legs, and drove him two hours to a federal lockup in Hartford, where an immigration officer pressured him to withdraw all pending appeals of his case and accept deportation.

“For this desperately sick, vulnerable person, this was torture,” said Theodore N. Cox, one of Mr. Ng’s lawyers, adding that they want to see a videotape of the transport made by guards.

Immigration and detention officials would not discuss the case, saying the matter was under internal investigation. But in response to a relative of Mr. Ng’s who had begged that he be checked for a spinal injury or fractures, the Wyatt detention center’s director of nursing, Ben Candelaria, replied in a July 16 e-mail message that Mr. Ng was receiving appropriate care for “chronic back pain.” He added, “We treat each and every detainee in our custody with the same high level of quality, professional care possible.”

Officials have given no explanation why they took Mr. Ng to Hartford and back on the same day. But the lawyers say the grueling July 30 trip appeared to be an effort to prove that Mr. Ng was faking illness, and possibly to thwart the habeas corpus petition they had filed in Rhode Island the day before, seeking his release for medical treatment.

The federal judge who heard that petition on July 31 did not make a ruling, but in an unusual move insisted that Mr. Ng get the care he needed. On Aug. 1, Mr. Ng was taken to a hospital, where doctors found he had terminal cancer and a fractured spine. He died five days later.

The accounts of Mr. Ng’s treatment echo other cases that have prompted legislation, now before the House Judiciary Committee, to set mandatory standards for care in immigration detention.

In March, the federal government admitted medical negligence in the death of Francisco Castaneda, 36, a Salvadoran whose cancer went undiagnosed in a California detention center as he was repeatedly denied a biopsy on a painful penile lesion. In May, The New York Times chronicled the death of Boubacar Bah, 52, a Guinean tailor who suffered a skull fracture and brain hemorrhages in the Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey; records show he was left in an isolation cell without treatment for more than 13 hours.

When Mr. Ng died last week, he had spent half his life in the United States, his sister, Wendy Zhao, said in a tearful interview.

Born in China, he entered the United States legally on a tourist visa. Mr. Ng stayed on after it expired and applied for political asylum. He was granted a work permit while his application was pending, and though asylum was eventually denied, immigration authorities did not seek his deportation for many years.

Meanwhile, his sister said, Mr. Ng (pronounced Eng), who was known as Jason, graduated from high school in Long Island City, Queens, worked his way through community technical college, passed Microsoft training courses and won a contract to provide computer services to a company with offices in the Empire State Building.

In 2001, a notice ordering him to appear in immigration court was mistakenly sent to a nonexistent address, records show. When Mr. Ng did not show up at the hearing, the judge ordered him deported. By then, however, he was getting married, and on a separate track, his wife petitioned Citizenship and Immigration Services for a green card for him — a process that took more than five years. Heeding bad legal advice, the couple showed up for his green card interview on July 19, 2007, only to find enforcement agents waiting to arrest Mr. Ng on the old deportation order.

Over the next year, while his family struggled to pay for new lawyers to wage a complicated and expensive legal battle, Mr. Ng was held in jails under contract to the federal immigration authorities: Wyatt; the House of Correction in Greenfield, Mass.; and the Franklin County Jail in St. Albans, Vt.

Mr. Ng seemed healthy until April, his sister said, when he began to complain of severe back pain and skin so itchy he could not sleep. He was then in the Vermont jail, a 20-bed detention center with no medical staff run by the county sheriff’s office. Seeking care, he asked to be transferred back to Wyatt, a 700-bed center with its own medical staff, owned and operated by a municipal corporation.

In a letter to his sister, Mr. Ng recounted arriving there on July 3, spending the first three days in pain in a dark isolation cell. Later he was assigned an upper bunk and required to climb up and down at least three times a day for head counts, causing terrible pain. His brother-in-law B. Zhao appealed for help in e-mail messages to the warden, Wayne Salisbury, on July 11 and 16.

“I was really heartbroken when I first saw him,” Mr. Zhao wrote Mr. Salisbury after a visit. “After almost two weeks of suffering with unbearable back pain and unable to get any sleep, he was so weak and looked horrible.”

The nursing director replied that Mr. Ng had been granted a bottom bunk and was receiving painkillers and muscle relaxants prescribed by a detention center doctor.

But his condition continued to deteriorate. Once a robust man who stood nearly six feet and weighed 200 pounds, his relatives said, Mr. Ng looked like a shrunken and jaundiced 80-year-old.

“He said, ‘I told the nursing department, I’m in pain, but they don’t believe me,’ ” his sister recalled. “ ‘They tell me, stop faking.’ ”

Soon, according to court papers, he had to rely on other detainees to help him reach the toilet, bring him food and call his family; he no longer received painkillers, because he could not stand in line to collect them. On July 26, Andy Wong, a lawyer associated with Mr. Cox, came to see the detainee, but had to leave without talking to him, he said, because Mr. Ng was too weak to walk to the visiting area, and a wheelchair was denied.

On July 30, according to an affidavit by Mr. Wong, he was contacted by Larry Smith, a deportation officer in Hartford, who told him on a speakerphone, with Mr. Ng present, that he wanted to resolve the case, either by deporting Mr. Ng, or “releasing him to the streets.” Officer Smith said that no exam by an outside doctor would be allowed, and that Mr. Ng would not be given a wheelchair.

Mr. Ng told his lawyer he was ready to give up, the affidavit said, “because he could no longer withstand the suffering inside the facility,” but Officer Smith insisted that Mr. Ng would first have to withdraw all his appeals.

The account of his treatment clearly disturbed the federal judge, William E. Smith of United States District Court in Providence, who instructed the government’s lawyer the next day to have the warden get Mr. Ng to the hospital for an M.R.I.

The results were grim: cancer in his liver, lungs and bones, and a fractured spine. “ ‘I don’t have much time to live,’ ” his sister said he told her in a call from Rhode Island Hospital in Providence.

She said the doctor warned that if the family came to visit, immigration authorities might transfer her brother. Three days passed before the warden approved a family visit, she said, after demanding their Social Security numbers. Late in the afternoon of Aug. 5, as Mr. Ng lay on a gurney, hours away from death and still under guard, she and his wife held up his sons, 3 and 1.

“Brother, don’t worry, don’t be afraid,” Ms. Zhao said, repeating her last words to him. “They are not going to send you back to the facility again. Brother, you are free now.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/13/nyregion/13detain.html?sq=Franklin%20County&st=cse&adxnnl=1&scp=1&adxnnlx=1218726056-09uyeANA+wSJ8gjazxhbGw

Posted by lois at 11:03 AM | Comments (0)

August 02, 2008

NY Times Editorial: "'The Jungle,' Again. A story from the upside-down world of immigraiton and labor."

August 1, 2008
Editorial, NY Times
‘The Jungle,’ Again

A story from the upside-down world of immigration and labor.

A slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, develops an ugly reputation for abusing animals and workers. Reports of dirty, dangerous conditions at the Agriprocessors kosher meatpacking plant accumulate for years, told by workers, union organizers, immigrant advocates and government investigators. A videotape by an animal-rights group shows workers pulling the windpipes out of living cows. A woman with a deformed hand tells a reporter of cutting meat for 12 hours a day, six days a week, for wages that labor experts call the lowest in the industry. This year, federal investigators amass evidence of rampant illegal hiring at the plant, which has been called “a kosher ‘Jungle.’ ”

The conditions at the Agriprocessors plant cry out for the cautious and deliberative application of justice.

In May, the government swoops in and arrests ... the workers, hundreds of them, for having false identity papers. The raid’s catch is so huge that the detainees are bused from little Postville to the National Cattle Congress fairgrounds in Waterloo. The defendants, mostly immigrants from Guatemala, are not charged with the usual administrative violations, but with “aggravated identity theft,” a serious crime.

They are offered a deal: They can admit their guilt to lesser charges, waive their rights, including the right to a hearing before an immigration judge, spend five months in prison, then be deported. Or, they can spend six months or more in jail without bail while awaiting a trial date, face a minimum two-year prison sentence and be deported anyway.

Nearly 300 people agree to the five months, after being hustled through mass hearings, with one lawyer for 17 people, each having about 30 minutes of consultation per client. The plea deal is a brutal legal vise, but the immigrants accept it as the quickest way back to their spouses and children, hundreds of whom are cowering in a Catholic church, afraid to leave and not knowing how they will survive. The workers are scattered to federal lockups around the country. Many families still do not know where they are. The plant’s owners walk freely.

This is enforcement run amok. As Julia Preston reported in The Times, the once-silent workers of Agriprocessors now tell of a host of abusive practices, of rampant injuries and of exhausted children as young as 13 wielding knives on the killing floor. A young man said in an affidavit that he started at 16, in 17-hour shifts, six days a week. “I was very sad, and I felt like I was a slave.”

Instead of receiving merciful treatment as defendants who also are victims, the workers have been branded as the kind of predator who steals identities to empty bank accounts. Accounts from Postville suggest that that’s not remotely what they were. “Most of the clients we interviewed did not even know what a Social Security number was or what purpose it served,” said Erik Camayd-Freixas, a Spanish-language interpreter for many of the workers. “This worker simply had the papers filled out for him at the plant, since he could not read or write Spanish, let alone English.”

The harsh prosecution at Postville is an odd and cruel shift for the Bush administration, which for years had voiced compassion for exploited workers and insisted that immigration had to be fixed comprehensively or not at all.

Now it has abandoned mercy and proportionality. It has devised new and harsher traps, as in Postville, to prosecute the weak and the poor. It has increased the fear and desperation of workers who are irresistible to bottom-feeding businesses precisely because they are fearful and desperate. By treating illegal low-wage workers as a de facto criminal class, the government is trying to inflate the menace they pose to a level that justifies its rabid efforts to capture and punish them. That is a fraudulent exercise, and a national disgrace.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/01/opinion/01fri1.html?scp=5&sq=Julia%20Preston&st=cse

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

July 24, 2008

Why Texas Still Holds 'Em--- the boom in locking immigrants up

Why Texas Still Holds 'Em
Forget oil and gold. In the Lone Star state, the boomtown business is locking up immigrants."
Mother Jones
Stephanie Mencimer"
July 21" , 2008"

In 1997, with the private prison business booming, the Corrections Corporation of America picked a 64-acre plot near Austin, Texas, for its newest lockup. A medium-security prison, it was named after the company's cofounder and designed for some 500 federal inmates. But the anticipated stream of prisoners never arrived: By the time the T. Don Hutto Correctional Center opened, a glut of private prison beds, along with cca's own poor track record, had left the company nearly bankrupt. Its stock, which once traded at around $45 a share, bottomed out at 18 cents. Several of its facilities were shuttered or sat empty for years, including the Hutto prison, which cca moved to close in 2004.

But Hutto, like cca itself, has risen from the ashes thanks to a sudden source of new business: the Bush administration's crackdown on immigrants. Historically, Mexicans caught illegally entering the country have been dumped back across the border, while immigrants and asylum seekers from other countries were processed and released to await their court dates. (Only those with criminal records were detained.) Most of those released, though, failed to appear for court hearings and removal proceedings, and the government didn't have the resources to go looking for them. So in 2006, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ice) agency ended its traditional "catch and release" policy and instead started incarcerating non-Mexican immigrants—anyone from a Salvadoran migrant to an Iraqi family seeking political asylum—pending their deportation or asylum hearings. Over the two years since, the agency has increased its use of detention facilities by more than half; it now holds some 30,000 people on any given day.

In this new population—and in ice's $1 billion-plus detention budget—cca saw opportunity. In 2004, when Congress passed legislation authorizing ice to triple the number of immigrant detention beds, cca's lobbying expenditures reached $3 million; since then, it has spent an additional $7 million on lobbyists. Among them was Philip Perry, Vice President Dick Cheney's son-in-law, who later became general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, ice's parent organization, which has awarded cca millions in contracts; one of them, in 2006, allowed the company to reopen the old Hutto prison, now christened a "residential facility" housing immigrant families, including small children.

cca isn't the only firm lining up for ice contracts: There's so much money to be made warehousing immigrants that in 2006, Cornell Companies, a private prison firm, sent the state of Oklahoma an eviction notice for more than 800 state inmates housed in its facility in Hinton. The company was negotiating with ice to take in immigrants for more than the roughly $45 per diem that Oklahoma paid.

State and local governments are also getting in on the action. In 2006, Willacy County, Texas, floated millions in bonds and, in 90 days, built a tent city for immigrants that it leases to ice for $78 a day per detainee. (A room at the local Best Western Executive Inn costs $65.) Run by the Utah-based Management and Training Corporation, a private prison management company, the camp houses up to 2,000 immigrants in a razor-wire-ringed compound holding 10 Kevlar tents of the sort used by troops in Iraq. Detainees have reported problems with heat and air conditioning, as well as maggot-infested food. The county has since approved another $50 million to add space for 1,000 more detainees.

Elsewhere, detention centers have been sued for providing inadequate health care, food services, and education. The aclu of Texas recently settled a lawsuit with ice over the conditions at Hutto for 26 children ages 1 to 17. According to the aclu, they were kept in cells 11 or 12 hours a day, forced to wear prison garb, fed "unrecognizable substances, mostly starches," and denied toys, bathroom privacy, and access to medical care.

According to the Washington Post, more than 80 people have died in ice detention, in many cases because of poor health care. The most famous case is that of Francisco Castaneda, a Salvadoran detained in San Diego for eight months. The government denied his request for a penile biopsy while in detention, arguing that it was an "elective outpatient procedure." He was eventually found to have cancer. His penis was amputated, but the malignancy spread, and he died last year.

On average, ice pays $95 a day per immigrant that it detains, yet research indicates that other, far cheaper, methods can work almost as well in making sure immigrants show up in court. Back in the late 1990s, the agency asked the nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice to run a pilot project under which people facing deportation got intensive supervision and connections to social service agencies. More than 90 percent appeared for their hearings—partly, the institute said, thanks to better information about the process. Intensive supervision costs an average of $14 per detainee per day, according to congressional testimony by Julie Myers, assistant secretary of Homeland Security. Yet in fiscal 2007, ice spent only about $44 million on alternative programs, compared with roughly $1.2 billion on detention—and legislation sponsored last year by representatives Heath Schuler (D-N.C.) and Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) in the House would authorize the agency to develop another 8,000 detention beds, which must be provided by private contractors such as cca "whenever possible."

cca, meanwhile, is contributing to the detention boom in its own small way: Last year, after inspecting the Hutto center's personnel records, ice officials arrested 10 workers—illegal immigrants themselves.

NEXT: Prison Guards Go Soft

Stephanie Mencimer covers legal affairs and domestic policy in Mother Jones' Washington bureau.

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/07/slammed-texas-hold-em.html
This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.

© 2008" /> The Foundation for National Progress

Posted by lois at 06:30 PM | Comments (0)

July 20, 2008

RI: Dozens of undocumented people who clean coutrhouses are arrested in ICE raid

Dozens arrested in raids at courthouses
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
BY KAREN LEE ZINER and FELICE J. FREYER
Journal Staff Writers

PROVIDENCE — Federal immigration agents and state police raided six Rhode Island courthouses yesterday, arresting dozens of people employed by two contractors hired by the state. The detainees are all believed to be maintenance workers.

The raid led to a noisy demonstration by at least 100 people outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office at 200 Dyer St. last night. Police officers arrived as the crowd grew; at one point the police pushed a line of demonstrators across the parking lot.

Some in the crowd were relatives of the arrestees. Others included clergy and at least one state representative, Grace Diaz, and members of immigrant advocacy groups.

Leonardo Tornes said his sister, Francesca Tornes, an undocumented worker from Mexico, was arrested at the Kent County Courthouse.

“She has two children — one and five years old,” he said through an interpreter. “A friend who worked with her called, and said they have taken everyone,” he said.

Immigration panel weighs outcomes of Carcieri's order

Craig N. Berke, spokesman for the Rhode Island judiciary, said the raids occurred simultaneously at 5 p.m. at all six Rhode Island courthouses. He said a “substantial” percentage of employees of two contractors hired by the state were taken into custody.

Berke declined to name the contractors, however relatives of some of the detainees identified one company as the Tri-State Enterprises employment agency on North Main Street.

Berke said those who were arrested “are not state employees. They are not employees of the judiciary.” He said “dozens” of people were arrested but he did not have an exact count.

“The investigation was initiated by the judiciary,” Berke said. “In early June, we forwarded evidence to the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Rhode Island State Police. The judiciary has been cooperating with that investigation on a daily basis since then.” Berke declined to say what the evidence was.

“I also know that there was at least one courthouse –– I’m not sure if there was more than one –– in which no employees of the vendor were taken into custody,” Berke said. “They were screened but not taken into custody.”

In the two Providence courthouses, the workers were just starting their shift at 5 p.m. and would have normally stayed till 9 or 10 p.m. In the other courthouses, the workers come in earlier and are normally done by 6 p.m.

Asked who will clean the courthouses today, Berke said, “They’ll be cleaned. Not every employee of the vendor was taken into custody today. And we also have daytime maintenance staff who will have to do double duty” today.

Berke said that as of last night the two contractors were still employed by the judiciary.

The courthouses that were raided are: the Garrahy Judicial Complex and the Licht Judicial Complex, both in Providence; the McGrath Judicial Complex in Wakefield; the Murray Judicial Complex in Newport; Kent County Courthouse in Warwick, and the Rhode Island Traffic Tribunal in Cranston.

Paula Grenier, an ICE spokeswoman in Boston, said an enforcement action had been carried out “as a result of a joint investigation by federal and state authorities.” Grenier said the action “is part of an ongoing criminal investigation.” She would not confirm that the courthouses were raided, or say how many people were detained.

The raids occurred during the first meeting of a governor’s advisory panel, charged with monitoring any “unintended consequences” of Governor Carcieri’s executive order cracking down on illegal immigration. The order issued in March requires that state police be deputized with certain immigration enforcement powers.

News of yesterday’s raids spread rapidly as courthouse workers phoned relatives, friends and community leaders. Demonstrators assembled outside the ICE building in Providence at about 8 p.m. As police arrived, the group divided and people rushed to doors at the front and rear of the building.

Juan Garcia, organizer for Immigrants in Action at St. Teresa Church in Olneyville, said his cell phone began buzzing at 4:45 p.m. as he was driving t