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How has the immigration system fared one year under Obama’s presidency?

In early 2009, President Obama appointed the governor of border-state Arizona Janet Napolitano, and a supporter of comprehensive immigration reform, as the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). For many, it was a sign that the administration would tackle immigration reform as a priority. In her first week in office, Napolitano ordered a sweeping internal review of DHS, aimed at identifying key areas for reform. March 2010 marks the one year anniversary from that week. So how much has changed for immigration?

For this we turn to a new report released by the Immigration Policy Center which compares actual reform undertaken by the agency to reforms that were recommended to them by immigration policy experts, academics and community members that would instill fairness and due process.

While DHS struggles towards reform it has failed to meet some key expectations… The department has engaged thoughtfully and strategically on some issues… However, turning principles into practice has fallen short, and the practical realities for individuals caught up in the system have not necessarily changed for the better.

DHS has done well in some areas. Focus has been shifted away from from harsh worksite raids to a focus on  employers who hire undocumented workers. Welcome detention reforms have been announced particularly focused on healthcare and conditions of detention. A precedent was created whereby women who have suffered domestic violence are eligible for asylum. The Department was  efficient in responding to the earthquake in Haiti, granting Temporary Protected Status to Haitians in the U.S. and humanitarian parole to 500 orphans.

But the spirit of reform has been strangled by an “over-reliance on enforcement policies”. There has been little growth in community alternatives to detention or legally enforceable standards and people continue to face poor medicare care and substandard conditions. 2009 has seen the growth of partnerships with state and local law-enforcement that arm them with the power to enforce immigration law even though this is a federal responsibility. There has been a growth in programs that criminally prosecute those caught crossing the border, draining resources away from prosecution of serious crimes such as drug and human trafficking.

And the failures. There has been little tangible progress in the areas of due process, with the immigration court system continuing to remain overburdened, and an appeals process still compromised. The continued expansion of state and local law enforcement programs like Secure Communities and 287(g) programs have led to accusations of racial profiling and large scale prosecutions of individuals with no criminal history.

But although there are many areas where reform is desperately needed, ultimately these will be administrative measures carried by an administrative agency DHS. But the fundamental problems of the system will continue to grow until Congress works up the courage to institute just and humane immigration reform. We can only hope that the White House and Congress gives the broken immigration system the attention it deserves, so that rather than counting down another year of incomplete policies and inefficient reforms, we have a just and human immigration system that accounts for the realities on the ground.

Photo courtesy of fairimmigration.files.wordpress.com

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Posted by madhuri on March 3rd, 2010 in 287G, Blog, Deportation, Detention, Due Process, Enforcement, Fair Day in Court, Family, Human Rights, Immigration, Racial Profiling | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | No Comments »

Head of ICE John Morton speaks of promised changes for immigration detention

Guest Blogger: Maurice Belanger from National Immigration Forum reposted from ImmPolitic Blog

On January 25, John Morton, Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), gave a speech at an event hosted by the Migration Policy Institute.

The bulk of his remarks were devoted to reform of the immigration detention system.  Morton reiterated that detention reform is a personal priority for him, and that ICE will engage in a sustained effort to transform the immigration detention system, an effort that will extend beyond his tenure.  This effort was first announced in August 2009, and re-announced in October 2009.  These announcements included fact sheets and media events laying out many of the reforms that Morton repeated this week.  Given the enormous scale of this announced reform, and the lengthy timeline required, we will be monitoring and periodically reporting about progress here.

He noted that ICE currently detains as many as 32,000 people a day in a vast network of more than 300 mostly penal facilities that are for the most part county, state, federal, and private prisons that ICE contracts with.

That is the crux of the problem.

Some of the individuals ICE detains have been convicted of crimes, and the penal system is designed to incarcerate those in the criminal justice system.  However, the vast majority of those ICE has detained are being held for violations of immigration laws.  They are people who came here to work and have done so without authorization.  If they can’t show they have an avenue to stay here legally, they are being detained only until they can be removed—not because they have done anything more serious than work without permission.

What ICE needs, then, is to design a system that is appropriate to hold such people for a short period of time until their immigration cases are adjudicated and they are removed (or are found to be eligible for release).

Morton’s vision is to have a smaller network of facilities designed to hold suspected immigration violators, with appropriate medical care and transparent standards that are fully implemented.  These facilities will be managed by federal personnel.  That’s the long-range plan.  It is a long way to there from where ICE is now.

Morton did give a preview of changes to expect in the coming months.

The agency will soon have 50 new employees to monitor detention facilities.  (These same 50 positions were announced in October, but apparently have not yet been filled.)  An overdependence on contractors and a lack of federal employees to monitor them were blamed by Morton for leading to some of the problems that have caused the detention system to come under public and Congressional scrutiny in recent months.  Morton said his long-term goal is to have a federal monitor in each facility used by ICE.

By this summer, there will be an on-line detainee locator system, so the family members and representatives of detainees can figure out where they are being held.

ICE is developing a classification system so that when someone enters the system there will be an assessment to determine their danger to the community, flight risk, and medical status.  Everyone with a medical issue will have a case manager assigned to them to ensure they receive appropriate medical care.  What Morton didn’t say is whether this classification system will result in a greater identification of those who qualify for release or enrollment in an alternatives to detention program.

The agency is now in discussion with contractors about designing a facility model that will be appropriate for the population ICE detains.

Morton also noted that ICE is working with groups to revise its detention standards, but implementation of new standards will take time.  The problem with the current standards, he noted, is that they came out of the penal world, and they are not appropriate for the kind of civil system that he wants ICE to move toward.  Reading between the lines, it will be difficult to fully implement the kind of detention standards advocates want as long as immigration violators are being held in prisons.

For many persons who are now routinely detained, ICE is exploring alternatives to detention.  ICE will soon begin a pilot project with the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR, the immigration judges).  This initiative was promised by January 2010 in the October detention reform announcement.  He noted that widespread implementation of alternatives to detention (Morton said the agency has 16,000 or 17,000 slots funded) will require more resources for EOIR; the backlog of cases for immigrants in proceedings who are not detained (and thus have a lower priority for the immigration courts) is very long.  The agency is about to submit a report to Congress on alternatives to detention.  (Morton and Secretary Napolitano previously pledged to submit this report to Congress by Fall 2009.)

The Administration’s budget, to be released on February 1st, should contain more clues as to what we can expect in the near term regarding the effort to reform the detention system.  All of this will take resources, but the reforms ICE has begun to tackle are long overdue and deserve to be funded.  Given that more than 100 people have died in immigration detention since 2003, these reforms could quite literally be lifesaving.

You can view a video of the program with Assistant Secretary Morton on the Web site of C-Span.

Photo courtesy of www.ice.gov.

Posted by guest on February 1st, 2010 in Blog, Detention, Due Process, Immigration | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Immigration detention reforms urgently needed in light of “all hell breaking loose” at Varick facility in New York

Picture 1Immigration detention is once again revealing fatal flaws, reaffirming the need to not only superficially reform the system as has been promised by the Obama administration, but completely overhaul it by reducing reliance on a penal system of punishment. As a New York Times opinion piece stated,

Americans have long known that the government has been running secretive immigration prisons into which detainees have frequently disappeared…..what we did not know, until a recent article in The Times by Nina Bernstein, was how strenuously the government has tried to cover up those failings.

Yesterday, reports came in of an ongoing hunger strike at Varick Federal Detention Facility in downtown New York, counteracted by immigration agents in riot gear who used pepper sprays and beat detainees.

A Jamaican detainee in one dorm said “all hell broke loose” after about 100 inmates refused to go to the mess hall on Tuesday morning and gave guards a flier declaring they were on a hunger strike to protest detention policies and practices. The detainee, who asked that his name not be published for fear of retaliation, said a SWAT team used pepper spray and “beat up” some detainees, took many to segregation cells as punishment and transferred about 17 to immigration jails in other states.

A detention center that sees 11,000 undocumented immigrants, asylum seekers, and legal permanent residents with convictions pass through every year, Varick has been in the news recently as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced they will be shutting it down and transferring detainees to a county jail in Hudson County, Jersey. An ICE press release stated,

As part of its major overhaul of the detention system, ICE will suspend operations at the Varick Facility….a commitment to prioritizing health, safety, and uniformity among facilites.

No doubt Varick has had its share of problems. A petition sent by a 100 men from Varick talking of constant transfers to remote locations and lack of access to lawyers spurred an investigation by the New York City Bar Association which eventually led them to start a volunteer lawyers program for the facility. But many advocates and detainees alike feel that ICE has decided to shift responsibilities to other facilities rather than fix conditions at Varick, especially given the focus on misconduct in the facility in recent times. Many are worried that closing Varick would negatively impact detainees’ due process rights, including lack of access to both attorneys and families in Hudson because of the long distance from New York City and issues around visitation hours. Still others feel that the move comes to avoid all of those protests that have been happening outside of Varick lately. Activists have been protesting the deportation of Jean Montrevil, housed in Varick, that has led to traffic stops and multiple arrests outside the center. The New York Times reports,

Nancy Morawetz, a professor at the New York University School of Law and director of its Immigrant Rights Clinic, said, “There is probably no detainee at Varick Street who, despite the problems at Varick, wouldn’t prefer to be at Varick. This is really just moving away the problems where they’re not going to be seen.”

Senator Charles Schumer has written a letter urging that Varick stay open.

“They didn’t have a concept of New York — most people New York don’t have cars, whether they be lawyers or immigrant families, ” he said, noting that the agency had not consulted with him or any immigrant groups.

ICE has countered that at Hudson, detainees will have access to outdoor recreation space. But the jail is just a step up from Varick and is required to to treat immigration detainees the same as its criminal inmates, even though they have committed no crime.

The general mess around Varick is showing not only the challenges around reforming the detention system, but also the crucial need for legally enforceable standards for immigration detention, so that agencies can be held accountable, and the need for humane alternatives to immigration detention that ensures moving away from a reliance on a penal, punishment oriented system, neither of which are being addressed by the reforms. Take action now.

Photo courtesy of ICE.

Posted by madhuri on January 21st, 2010 in Blog, Detention, Due Process, Enforcement, Family, Human Rights, Immigration | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Gutierrez to unveil immigration reform while enforcement measures on the rise

hq2Tomorrow, December 15th, at 12:30 pm, Congressman Luis Gutiérrez (D-IL) will officially unveil his immigration reform bill to the U.S. House of Representatives–”Comprehensive Immigration Reform for America’s Security and Prosperity Act of 2009.”  Details of the bill are yet unknown.  However, in October and November, he spoke persuasively about protecting American and immigrant workers, providing enough visas to diminish undocumented immigration, strengthening border security, keeping families together as well as the DREAM Act and agJobs.  In his own words:

“We have waited patiently for a workable solution to our immigration crisis to be taken up by this Congress and our President. The time for waiting is over. This bill will be presented before Congress recesses for the holidays so that there is no excuse for inaction in the New Year. It is the product of months of collaboration with civil rights advocates, labor organizations, and members of Congress. It is an answer to too many years of pain –mothers separated from their children, workers exploited and undermined security at the border– all caused at the hands of a broken immigration system. This bill says ‘enough,’ and presents a solution to our broken system that we as a nation of immigrants can be proud of.”

Rep. Gutiérrez will be joined by members of many different faiths and backgrounds, including Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Black Caucus, Asian Pacific American Caucus and Progressive Caucus.

Meanwhile, enforcement measures continue to be ramped up.  Last week, 286 foreign nationals representing more than 30 different nations were arrested in a 3 day California operation coordinated  by ICE Fugitive Operations Program, involving over 400 agents and officers from ICE, the U.S. Marshals Service, as well as several other state and local agencies.  The largest enforcement surge targeting criminal aliens yet.  Assistant Secretary John Morton,  who oversees ICE, called the operation another example of the vital role multi-agency cooperation and targeted immigration enforcement play in protecting our communities.  Morton also suggested that:

“Enhancing public safety is at the core of ICE’s mission. Legal immigration is an important part of our country’s history and the American dream exists for many immigrants.  However, that dream involves playing by the rules and those who break our criminal laws will be removed from the country.  Sadly, many of the people victimized by aliens who commit crimes are other members of the immigrant community, who are following the rules.”

Although ICE claims that nearly 80% of the criminal aliens taken into custody had prior criminal records, the arrests were conducted as part of a controversial program also designed to arrest and deport immigrants without a criminal record, who may have ignored deportation orders or who have been deported and illegally reentered the United States, to fill quotas, according to a report by the Migration Policy Institute earlier this year, which states that 73% of the nearly 97,000 people arrested by ICE fugitive operations teams between the program’s inception in 2003 and early 2008 were unauthorized immigrants without criminal records.

Additionally, the report notes that the National Fugitive Operations Program (FOT) has dramatically expanded; its budget increased from $9 million in 2003 to $218 million last year. In its first five years, the program has received more than $625 million, more than any other ICE program.  Yet ICE estimated last October that 557,762 fugitive aliens remain in the United States.  Michael Wishnie, a Clinical Professor at Yale Law School reinforces this finding:

“The National Fugitive Operations Program has not delivered on its promise to find and remove dangerous fugitives. The evidence suggests that this is a case of ‘mission drift,’ in which the program has used public funding intended for one purpose for something entirely different: Apprehending non-violent non-fugitives – who constitute the easiest targets.”

Other critics focus on the fear that the FOT program, and similar initiatives, like the Criminal Alien Program, Secure Communities and the agency’s partnerships with state and local law enforcement agencies under 287(g) induce in immigrant communities by sending armed agents into neighborhoods and pulling parents away from their children.

Photo courtesy of indypressny.org

Posted by heidi on December 14th, 2009 in 287G, Blog, Deportation, Detention, Due Process, Enforcement, Family, Immigration | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | No Comments »

Growing insecurity in immigrant communities

Guest Blogger: Joan Friedland from the National Immigration Law Center

Picture 1

It was refreshing to hear the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) acknowledge something activists have been saying for years: the immigrant detention system operates like the punitive criminal incarceration system, even though the vast majority of detainees have committed no crime. Missing from their announcement, however, was a plan to keep its newly-expanded enforcement programs from increasing the number of immigrants detained in this broken system.

“Secure Communities” is DHS’s latest attempt to use local law enforcement to push people into the immigrant detention system. All local law enforcement has to do is arrest someone on a traffic or other offense – even if the arrest is based on racial profiling – and their fingerprints will be checked against immigration databases during booking.  When the fingerprint scan gets a “hit,” immigrants can end up getting carted off by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to an immigration detention center.  If they get out on bond, ICE can take them into custody, leaving their criminal cases unresolved.  It doesn’t matter if the person was innocent of a criminal charge or if the arrest was a pretext to check immigration status.

Sound scary? Consider this: ICE plans to have the program in every jail and prison in the country by 2013.

ICE isn’t lifting a finger to keep local police from using arrests on minor charges as an excuse to get immigrants into custody.  The available evidence shows that only a small percentage of immigrants caught through Secure Communities were convicted of serious crimes.  But calling all of them “criminal aliens” masks what’s really going on and lets ICE and Congress – which is allocating a whopping $200 million for Secure Communities – look tough on enforcement.

Accountability and transparency are not hallmarks of Secure Communities.  Since the program’s inception in 2008, ICE has reduced the public information about it on the agency website, adding graphics but eliminating details about enforcement priorities. ICE has given conflicting information about whether a community can opt out of the program or just use it to target people convicted of violent crimes.  And ICE doesn’t appear to be collecting the kind of data that would prevent the program from being misused.

The government’s admission that the immigrant detention system is flawed is a step in the right direction. They now need to keep this monstrous system from growing.  Secure Communities will only ensure that the opposite will happen.

Image courtesy of www.ice.gov

Posted by guest on October 15th, 2009 in Blog, Due Process, Enforcement | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Detention reforms a welcome relief…lots more to be done

Rep. Zoe Lofgren on Immigration Detention from Breakthrough on Vimeo.

A slew of newspaper articles greeted us this morning with the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) plans to reform the immigration detention system. The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the BBC and the Associated Press vied for attention with headlines that held much hope – U.S. to Revise Detention Standards, U.S. to Cut Immigration Detention, and my favorite, Ideas for Immigrant Detention Include Converting Hotels and Building Models.

So what did these ambitious plans contain? At a cost of $1.7 billion a year, the detention system is a vast network of federally run detention centers and about 300 state and county jails that detain 32,000 detainees every night or 370,000 in the year. But all these facts and figures don’t tell the real stories – of detainees transferred far from families and lawyers, of denied phone calls and visits, of 94 deaths – many questionable, and of the physical and verbal abuse that surfaces time and time again.

The reforms have emerged out of a comprehensive review conducted by Dora Schriro, the former ICE Office of Detention Policy and Planning Director, and focus on greater federal oversight, special attention to detainee medical care, and a desire to treat different types of detainees according to the level of ‘risk’ they present. As Secretary Napolitano herself pointed out, “we are taking a non system and making it into a system that will allow enforcement of our immigration laws but will also convince the American people that we are abiding by conditions of safety and security in the most cost effctive way possible.”

So proposals include presenting Congress with a plan for alternatives to detention to in the fall, placing detainees in alternative models of detention including converted hotels, nursing homes and other residential facilities, centralizing management of the detention system, and increasing oversight at facilities. Some will take more time than others, such as the implementation of an online system for families and lawyers to locate detainees or developing newer centers.

For years, advocates have been speaking of the need to distinguish between detainees, and to stop detaining those that are neither a flight risk, nor a danger to the community. We have been calling for better medical care and stopping the for profit detention system without legally enforceable standards. It’s good to see some steps in the right direction.

But there will continue to be problems. For one,  what happens to those in detention already. The NYT cites an example of a woman who needs urgent medical care in the Glades County Detention Center and has been struggling to get medical help since the last 5 months. Secondly, while we welcome the promise of alternatives to detention, we hope that this includes community based alternatives, and not all invasive models such as ankle bracelets. And thirdly, we still want to see legally enforceable standards in place, so those that default on their responsibility can be held accountable.

As a NYT editorial says,

“The Obama administration… 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.”

Posted by madhuri on October 6th, 2009 in Blog, Detention, Immigration | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments »

Where will immigration detention be tomorrow?

We just received news that tomorrow (October 6th, 2009), there will be a media advisory featuring Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Assistant Secretary John Morton announcing new immigration detention reforms. We have been waiting for the promise of reforms with bated breath – especially given that the person chosen to lead the reforms, Dora Schriro, someone who had the trust of advocacy groups and the government alike, had to leave almost as soon as she began.

What do we know so far? In its first announcement, the administration stated that “while ICE has over 32,000 detention beds at any given time, the beds are spread out over as many as 350 different facilities largely designed for penal, not civil, detention” and so reforms will allow “a move away from our present decentralized, jail-oriented approach to a system wholly designed for and based on ICE’s civil detention authorities.” Definitely a step in the right direction. But is this enough?

Firstly, Restore Fairness would like to see more community based alternatives to detention because as it stands now, thousands of detainees (440,000 this year alone) that are neither a flight risk nor a danger to the community, are detained in inhumane conditions with no access to due process. Countless reports have highlighted the gulag that the detention system has become – with detainees denied visitation, telephone calls, access to lawyers, medical care, and subject to physical and verbal abuse. And lets not forget that immigration offenses are civil offenses which means we shouldn’t be treating immigration detainees like criminals (hence the reference above to civil detention). But instead, it seems that the administration may be hinting at the expansion of detention.

Secondly, no system will be safe unless the government create legally enforceable detention standards so that those who default on their responsibilities can be held accountable. Standards that are currently in place are mainly guidelines, and are often not enough to safeguard detainees’ health and due process. The administration has already rejected a petition for enforceable standards, stating that “that rule-making would be laborious, time-consuming and less flexible” than the review process now in place.

It’s important to humanize all this legalese so to really understand what’s going on, watch the Restore Fairness video. Until then, here’s Rep. Roybal-Allard (did you know she was the first Mexican-American woman to be elected to Congress) speaking about why she has introduced a bill to ensure immigrant detainees receive fair and humane treatment while in detention.

Rep. Roybal-Allard from Breakthrough on Vimeo.

Posted by madhuri on October 5th, 2009 in Blog, Detention, Due Process, Immigration | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | No Comments »

Obama Administration Proposes Reform of Detention Centers

Photo courtesy: The Least of ThesePost 9/11, the government has taken a much tougher stance towards immigration, resulting in thousands upon thousands of detainees being held in a network of government run detention centers, county jails and privately contracted facilities across the country. An overburdened detention system has led to fatal deaths in detention and repeated violations of detention standards.

That’s why it was with welcome relief that we heard John Morton, Assistant Secretary of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, announce planned reforms in the immigration detention system. The government plans to create a new office that will design a more centralized detention system over the next few years, thereby moving detainees away from private prisons and county jails. It also agreed to stop detaining families at the deeply problematic T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility in Texas but will continue to detain families at another family detention center in Pennsylvania.

This is a good move forward but clearly it’s not enough.  Breakthrough believes that we must implement cost effective alternatives to detention instead of building newer centers and continuing to hold people indefinitely.  Building more detention centers only serves to reinforce a trend that leads to many due process and human rights violations.

Posted by madhuri on September 14th, 2009 in Blog, Detention, Immigration | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | No Comments »