Immigration and Customs Enforcement Regularly Detains Children for Months at a Time

 

Written by Walter Ewing 

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is notoriously tight-lipped when it comes to their internal operations. The agency rarely discloses basic details about where their immigration detention centers are located, how many people are detained, or what the cost is to keep these facilities operational. As one of the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration enforcement arms, this lack of transparency often makes it difficult to hold the agency accountable on their detention and treatment of immigrants.

Yet in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, ICE has done something it rarely does: publicly release information about how it operates. The information was handed over to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center—which made the FOIA request—and has been analyzed by the National Immigrant Justice Center. 

The data provides a revealing snapshot of the immigrant-detention business in the United States: 


Immigrant Detention Centers by the Numbers

Immigrants are detained in over 1,000 facilities that include not only Bureau of Prisons facilities, but also county jails, hospitals, and even hotels. For instance, thousands of people—including children—have been booked into the Quality Suites San Diego since 2016. The average daily number of detainees at the hotel in 2017 was 22 people, all of whom were classified as “non-criminal” with “no ICE threat level.” 

Within these facilities, a record 39,322 people are being held daily in 2018. This is the second year in a row that ICE has surpassed its previously record-setting detainee population. 


ICE Regularly Detains Children, Adults Classified as “Non-Criminal” 

Children are frequently detained, sometimes for months at a time. Often, they are held not in Office of Refugee Resettlement children’s shelters or even family detention centers—they are housed in juvenile jails under contracts with ICE. At the three facilities where children are held for more than 72 hours, length of detention ranges from 100 to 240 days. 

On average, 51 percent of the daily detained population is classified as “non-criminal”—and 51 percent were also classified as “no threat.” Only 23 percent qualified as Level 1 threats, which encompasses a mix of nonviolent offenses and serious crimes. 


Most Detainees Are Held in Privately Operated Prisons

Private prisons dominate the immigration-detention industry. Roughly 71 percent of the daily detained population was held in private prisons owned by companies such as Core Civic (formerly known as the Corrections Corporation of America). 

Many of these contracts with private, for-profit prison companies were made between local governments and the federal government. As of 2017, more than 15,000 people were held daily in private prisons or jails throughout the country. 


ICE’s Detention Standards Are Unclear

ICE has three different sets of standards governing the detention of adults, yet only 65 percent of the agency’s adult detention facilities are contractually bound to observe any of them. 

Some detention facilities make cryptic reference to abiding by “minimum service standards” or “local standards.” Perhaps this is on account of a 2014 Government Accountability Office report, which found ICE sometimes obtains a facility’s agreement to be inspected using a newer set of standards without actually incorporating the new standards into the contract. 

ICE claims that it inspects all facilities under one of its three sets of standards, regardless of the contract. Yet some facilities have passed inspection despite the deaths of multiple detainees, including some from medical neglect. 

The fact that so much prodding was necessary for ICE to release even this much information about its operations is an indication of the degree to which the agency lacks transparency or accountability. ICE officers—like their immigration-enforcement counterparts at U.S. Customs and Border Protection—are accustomed to acting behind a veil of secrecy. As this new disturbing information reveals, we must continue to push past that veil and hold ICE accountable for what happens within their detention centers.

Source: www.immigrationimpact.com 

http://inmigracionyvisas.com/a3781-Immigration-and-Customs-Enforcement-Regularly-Detains-Children.html 

When Detention Is a Death Sentence

 

Written by Tory Johnson 

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is pursuing a massive increase in resources for immigrant detention centers, a fundamentally flawed network of largely privatized and remote facilities used to hold immigrants. Yet this already unwieldy system has a concerning history of abuses and substandard conditions, which would likely only worsen with the proposed expansion.

The country has been reminded of these fatal flaws multiple times in the last few months, as more people die while in the supposed care of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) .

Just last month, Luis Ramirez-Marcano, 59, died while in ICE custody. Ramirez-Marcano, a Cuban national, had been detained at the Krome Detention Center in Florida since January. He is the third person to die under ICE’s watch since Oct. 1, the start of fiscal year 2018. 

Three weeks prior, 33-year-old Yulio Castro-Garrido, also of Cuba, died in ICE custody after being detained in the Stewart facility in Lumpkin, Ga. While records show Castro-Garrido died of pneumonia, his family is investigating the circumstances surrounding his death. 

In December, 64-year-old Kamyar Samimi died of a heart attack while in ICE custody. Samimi, who was from Iran but lived in the United States for over 40 years, had been detained in Aurora, Co., for only two weeks. His death is being investigated as well. 

All three of these ICE detention facilities—Krome in Florida, Stewart in Georgia, and Aurora in Colorado have a concerning history of documented or alleged abuses. Moreover, ICE has contracts with private companies for some or all operations at each facility. Sadly, these conditions are a trend throughout U.S. immigration detention, which includes some 600 facilities used to detain 38,000 people every day, on average. 

Any loss of human life is a tragedy, but it is also outrageous when neglect contributes to a death. Sadly, the poor to appalling state of immigrant detention has been shown to contribute to detainee deaths. DHS and its component agencies, including ICE, have a record going back more than a decade of people dying while in their custody—179 people since 2003. In some cases, the abysmal medical care provided at facilities was cited as a major contributing factor in the person’s death. 

With detention expansion being a central part of the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement agenda, there is even greater need to understand the reality within immigrant detention—and how it impacts those outside. 

As Frank Suarez-Garrido, the younger brother of Ramirez-Marcano, said, “It is just so unfair that [Luis] went [to detention] in full health, full of dreams, full of everything that an immigrant has to be better in this country and he just came out as a dead body.” 

A rapid expansion of detention would not only require an influx of allocated tax dollars, it would only exacerbate the grave problems already evident in such facilities. To do so would endanger the lives of thousands of people and contradict the fundamental values of our country.

Source: www.immigrationimpact.com 

http://inmigracionyvisas.com/a3774-When-Detention-Is-a-Death-Sentence.html