The
Bush Cheney Republican Concentration
Camps where ICE Gestapo Rounded Up
the Undocumented
PHOENIX (By
Associated Press
)
March. 15, 2009
— America's detention system for
immigrants has mushroomed in the
last decade, a costly building boom
that was supposed to sweep up
criminals and ensure that
undocumented immigrants were quickly
shown the door. Immigrants face long
detention, few rights. Many
detainees spend months or years in
U.S. detention centers.
An Associated Press computer
analysis of every person being held
on a recent Sunday night shows most
did not have a criminal record and
many were not about to leave the
country — voluntarily or via
deportation.
An official Immigration and Customs
Enforcement database, obtained under
the Freedom of Information Act,
showed a U.S. detainee population of
exactly 32,000 on the evening of
Jan. 25.
The data show 18,690 immigrants had
no criminal conviction, not even for
illegal entry or low-level crimes
like trespassing. More than 400 of
those with no criminal record had
been incarcerated for at least a
year. A dozen had been held for
three years or more; one man from
China had been locked up for more
than five years.
Detention deadlines routinely
missed
Nearly 10,000 had been in custody longer
than 31 days — the average detention
stay ICE cites as evidence of its
effective detention management.
Especially tough bail conditions are
exacerbated by disregard or bending of
the rules regarding how long immigrants
can be detained.
Based on a 2001 ruling by the U.S.
Supreme Court, ICE has about six months
to deport or release immigrants after
their case is decided. But immigration
lawyers say that deadline is routinely
missed. In the system snapshot provided
to the AP, 950 people were in that
category.
The detainee buildup began in the mid
1990s, long before the 2001 attacks on
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Since 2003, though, Congress has doubled
to $1.7 billion the amount dedicated to
imprisoning immigrants, as furor over
"criminal aliens" intertwined with
post-9/11 fears and anti-immigrant
political rhetoric.
But the dragnet has come to include not
only terrorism suspects and cop killers,
but an honors student who was raised in
Orlando, Fla.; a convenience store clerk
who begged to go back to Canada; and a
Pentecostal minister who was forcibly
drugged by ICE agents after he asked to
contact his wife, according to court
records.
Many detainees are asylum seekers
Immigration lawyers note substantial
numbers of detainees, from 177 countries
in the data provided, are not illegal
immigrants at all. Many of the
longest-term non-criminal detainees are
asylum seekers fighting to stay here
because they fear being killed in their
home country. Others are longtime
residents who may be eligible to stay
under other criteria, or whose
applications for permanent residency
were lost or mishandled, the lawyers
say.
Still other long-term detainees include
people who can't be deported because
their home country won't accept them or
people who seemingly have been forgotten
in the behemoth system, where 58 percent
have no lawyers or anyone else
advocating on their behalf.
ICE says detention is the best way to
guarantee immigrants attend court
hearings and leave the country when
ordered.
"It's ensuring compliance, and if you
look at the stats, for folks who are in
detention, the stats are pretty darn
high," said ICE spokeswoman Cori
Bassett.
By comparison though, most criminal
suspects, even sometimes those accused
of heinous offenses, are entitled to
bail.
"We're immigrants, and it makes it seem
like it's worse than a criminal," said
Sarjina Emy, a 20-year-old former honors
student who spent nearly two years in a
Florida lockup because her parents'
asylum claim was denied when she was a
child. "I always thought America does so
much for justice. I really thought you
get a fair trial. You actually go to
court. U.S. authorities know what they
are doing. Now, I figured out it only
works for criminal citizens."
The use of detention to ensure
immigrants show up for immigration court
comes at a high cost compared to
alternatives like electronic ankle
monitoring, which can track people for
considerably less money per day.
Detention costs about $141 a night
Based on the amount budgeted for this
fiscal year, U.S. taxpayers will pay
about $141 a night — the equivalent of a
decent hotel room — for each immigrant
detained, even though paroling them on
ankle monitors — at a budgeted average
daily cost of $13 — has an almost
perfect compliance rate, according to
ICE's own stats.
For years, ICE and its predecessor, the
Immigration and Naturalization Service,
had the power to detain immigrants. With
little bed space or public clamor to
lock people up, though, millions of
foreigners quietly went about life in
the United States.
In 1996, Congress passed a pair of laws
requiring immigrants who committed
crimes be locked up for deportation,
beginning a dramatic run-up in
incarcerations. So-called "criminal
aliens" — immigrants convicted of a
crime, including some misdemeanors like
low-level drug crimes — became mandatory
detainees even if their original crime
brought no prison time.
A system that housed 6,785 immigrants in
1994 now holds nearly five times that
amount in 260 facilities across the
country, most under contract with local
governments or private companies. For
this fiscal year, ICE has enough money
budgeted for 33,400 people on any given
night.
Family rounded up in July 2007
Emy, who was raised in Orlando, Fla.,
spent 20 months in a detention center
even though she had no criminal record.
She traded her Baby Phat clothes for a
gray uniform and window-shopping at the
mall for a law library behind razor
wire.
Her only crime? Her parents, who feared
her father's political affiliations
endangered the family, brought her and
two brothers to the United States from
Bangladesh in September 2003 — when she
was 5, according to court documents.
She doesn't speak Bangla and never
imagined a future without college. No
one in her family realized her father's
work certificate from the Labor
Department didn't equate to legal
immigration status.
Family members were rounded up in July
2007, treated as fugitives on a dated
but active deportation order.
Her parents were deported first. Emy
languished in custody while continuing
her fight to stay.
'Justice is not being served'
But because the asylum application had
been filed on behalf of the entire
family, only the parents got a hearing.
Emy never saw a judge, according to Emy
and her attorney.
"Justice is not being served," she said
from a prison pay phone.
In January, a federal appeals court
denied her petition to stay in the U.S.
Fearing she'd celebrate another birthday
behind bars, Emy agreed to be deported
and left the country Feb. 18.
Immigration law "is the only United
States law where we punish the children
for the actions of their parents," said
Emy's attorney, Petia Vimitrova Knowles.
Immigration violations are considered
civil, something akin to a moving
violation in a car, so the government
can imprison immigrants without many of
the rights criminals receive: No
court-appointed attorney for indigent
defendants, no standard habeas corpus,
no protection from double jeopardy, no
guarantee of a speedy trial.
"You're locking up people without even a
hearing," said Judy Rabinovitz of the
American Civil Liberties Union's
Immigrants Rights Project. "That, to me,
is the outrage: basic due process. Since
when do we allow the government to lock
up people without even giving them a
bond hearing?"
Most immigrants are navigating a complex
legal system without an attorney.
Fifty-eight percent went through
immigration proceedings without an
attorney in fiscal year 2007, according
to the Executive Office for Immigration
Review, a branch of the U.S. Justice
Department.
But, ICE officials often argue,
immigrants largely hold the keys to
their own freedom. If they simply agree
to return to their home country, they
can go, Bassett said.
"They're making a choice they're going
to appeal, which is their right," she
said.
Winning a claim doesn't always mean
freedom
But even giving up, or winning a claim,
doesn't always spell freedom because ICE
acts as police officer, arraignment
judge, jailer and prosecutor. It has
sole jurisdiction over when a detained
immigrant is sent back after a
deportation order is issued, and can
continue to hold immigrants while it
appeals a decision that didn't go its
way.
In another telling case, Ahmad Al-Shrmany,
a 34-year-old Iraqi with no appeal
pending, begged for a year to be
deported and yet remained in detention.
He wanted to be allowed to go to his
native Iraq or his adopted Canada, where
he had been granted asylum a decade ago.
A lawyer filed a habeas corpus petition
in December that went unanswered.
"Just deport me. That's your job," he
said in a late January interview with
the AP that ICE officials tried to block
minutes before it was scheduled at a
Houston lockup.
Less than a week after the interview,
Al-Shrmany was deported to Canada, said
his lawyer, Afreen Ahmed.
Incarceration used to strong-arm
people?
Immigrant advocates say ICE prefers
incarceration for non-criminal
immigrants, even though alternatives are
available, for one major reason: to
strong-arm people.
"When you're there for weeks and weeks
or months or months, your determination
to fight your charges is reduced," said
Judy Green, a policy analyst with
Justice Strategies, a nonpartisan think
tank on incarceration issues. The goal
is "to keep intense pressure on
detainees to agree to removal and not to
fight on whatever grounds they have for
relief."
The Rev. Raymond Soeoth, a Pentecostal
minister from Indonesia who had never
been imprisoned, said his lengthy
incarceration — and the uncertainty of
how long it would last — wore on him as
he fought his immigration case and
pursued a lawsuit accusing ICE officials
of forcibly drugging him and other
detainees.
"We just wait. We cannot do anything,"
said Soeoth, who was released after more
than two years, given a special visa as
part of the government's settlement of
the drugging lawsuit.
