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Immigration

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

Guilty by Immigration Status
By the Human Rights Immigrant Community Action Network (October 2009). This report details how the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has, over the last eight years, created an "immigration control regime" in which it is promoting the criminalization of immigration status as a means of detaining and deporting individuals for often minor offenses. With the detention of immigrants taking place in record numbers and the militarization of the U.S. border on the rise, the report also describes how DHS and other police, public officials, and agencies, routinely trumped civil rights and constitutional protections in order to question, detain, and/or jail individuals based solely on their perceived or actual immigration status. To access the report:
http://www.nnirr.org/hurricane/GuiltybyImmigrationStatus2008.pdf

Local Democracy on ICE: Why State and Local Governments Have No Business in Federal Immigration Law Enforcement
New Report from Justice Strategies (Feb 2009). 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.
http://www.justicestrategies.net/files/JS-Democracy-On-Ice.pdf

Restoring Integrity to the Immigration System
By Tom Barry. Americas Program Policy Report. May 2009. A comprehensive essay on immigrant "crimmigration." [Excerpt]: Mass Incarceration for Immigrants: The immigrant crackdown and the accompanying "crimmigration" of immigration law have led to the mass incarceration of immigrants. Throughout the country, private prison firms are hurriedly constructing new immigrant prisons for the immigrant detainees and prisoners of ICE, USMS, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). At a time when the U.S. criminal justice system is coming under new public and congressional scrutiny because of its high costs and high rates of incarceration, the federal government (in close collaboration with local governments and the private prison industry) is imprisoning unprecedented numbers of illegal and legal immigrants.
http://americas.irc-online.org/pdf/reports/0905integrity.pdf