Project Censored: #4 ICE Operates Secret Detention Centers and Courts

Immigration and Customs Enforcement Badge. Photo: www.ice.gov

Facts from 2011 Censored Text
1. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are holding thousands of immigrants in unlisted unmarked subfield offices and deporting them in secret court hearings.
2. Ice has created a network of secret jails across the country for holding individual immigrants in transit.
3. These unmarked offices often lack basic amenities such as showers, beds, drinking water, soap, even attorneys and legal information.
4. Immigrants can be transferred away from their attorneys at any point, and are often “lost” from their attorneys and families for weeks at a time.
5. ICE agents often impersonate civilians – Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) inspectors, insurance agents, and religious workers to arrest Immigrants that are under suspicion even though they have no criminal history.
6. Anyone entering the immigration courts in Eloy Arizona must submit a request in writing two weeks in advance their name, date of birth, Social Security number, home address, and the hearing they wish to attend.
7. Anyone with a felony or misdemeanor conviction in the last five years can be prohibited to attend hearings for security reasons.
8. The majority of these jails are under the control of local and state governments that are subcontracted with ICE.

Is this really a censored story?

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement has several fully operating facilities in which illegal immigrants are held before their deportation hearings. These ICE detention centers, are government regulated and are run much like prisons. Here is a video that gives an example of what one of these detention centers is like and how it is run.

These are the immigrant detention centers that we hear about in the media. They are government run. While searching for articles about the network of secret underground jails that are run by state and local police but subcontracted by ICE, I mostly found articles about how ICE is working on reconstructing their official detention centers and the way in which illegal immigrants are captured, processed, and deported.

This is an example of an article from the Washington Post that talks about how ICE is working on fixing all of the negative associations people have with them by improving their detention centers and the way in which they function.

The Washington Post

May 20, 2008 Tuesday

Regional Edition

Caring for Immigration Detainees

BYLINE: Julie L. Myers

SECTION: EDITORIAL COPY; Pg. A13

LENGTH: 871 words

Recent media reports, including a May 11-14 Post series, have presented a misleading view of the medical care provided to detainees at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities. Readers deserve to hear from both sides.

ICE was formed in March 2003 with a broad mission that includes immigration and customs enforcement and management of the detention and removal processes for apprehended aliens. ICE did not create the detention or detainee health-care systems but, in fact, inherited the procedures of the former Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Division of Immigration Health Services (DIHS). Over the past 2 1/2 years, ICE has examined these decades-old practices and is making substantial improvements.

As the number of people in ICE custody has risen, demand for health care and medical services has also grown significantly. Unfortunately, many reports neglected to mention ICE's efforts to improve care at detention facilities. Some, including recent New York Times reports, focused on stories that predate these efforts.

DIHS provides medical care for routine as well as life-threatening conditions, including kidney disease, high-risk pregnancy, HIV-AIDS, hypertension and diabetes. Each detainee is medically screened upon arrival. Last year, preexisting chronic conditions were diagnosed and initially treated in 34 percent of detainees. In many cases, this marks the first time that detainees, who often do not have medical insurance, learn of their own conditions. ICE detention standards call for physical exams, sick-call visits and prescription drugs as ordered by medical providers.

The Post series focused on deaths known to have occurred at ICE detention facilities. To be clear: Any death that occurs in detention is regrettable. ICE spent nearly $100 million last year for detainee health care, double the funding of just five years ago. Our efforts are producing results.

While the number of people in ICE detention has increased more than 30 percent since 2004, the first full year for which statistics under the agency are available, the mortality rate has declined every year. In 2004, the mortality rate for ICE detainees was 10.8 per 100,000. In 2007, it was 3.5 per 100,000. The number of deaths in detention has decreased, from 29 in 2004 to seven in 2007.

ICE detainees have access to mental health care provided by qualified professionals, and staff working with detainees receive ongoing training in suicide risk and prevention techniques. Psychologists and social workers have managed a daily population of more than 1,350 seriously mentally ill detainees without a single suicide being committed in the past 15 months.

ICE has increased oversight and accountability at all its detention facilities. Progress includes establishing an independent body to review detention inspections; implementing national detention standards that are comparable to or surpass industry standards in their commitment to detainee health and comfort; retaining full-time quality assurance professionals to assess compliance with those standards; and contracting independent corrections and detention experts to audit ICE facilities. Moreover, ICE detention facilities are open to those outside the agency: We routinely conduct tours for members of Congress, representatives from nongovernmental organizations and the media.

Working with the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Health Affairs, ICE is also improving operations at DIHS, which, as the designated medical authority for ICE, is responsible for detainee health care. Since DIHS came under ICE's authority last October, a number of improvements have been implemented, and others are underway, including: selecting a new DIHS director, streamlining the hiring process to address staff shortages and moving to an enhanced electronic medical records system. We are reviewing ways to improve the treatment-authorization process. All of these steps will help enhance the quality of care and DIHS responsiveness to detainee needs. As we continue working to strengthen the detainee medical health system, we will seek recommendations from our own DHS inspector general, nongovernmental organizations and Congress, among others.

A May 14 Post article and headline said that detainees are "drugged" without medical reason, implying that involuntary sedation for deportation is routine practice. Last June, ICE enacted a policy requiring a court order before any involuntary sedation could take place, except in emergency circumstances where the detainee actively poses a threat to himself or another. In January that policy was strengthened to prohibit involuntary sedation for the purpose of facilitating a removal without a court order -- no exceptions.

Readers should know that ICE does not tolerate malfeasance or malpractice. Instances of improper behavior will be immediately and vigorously investigated; if necessary, appropriate disciplinary action will be taken.

The detention of individuals in immigration removal proceedings understandably raises strong opinions and concerns among Americans. Your readers deserve a balanced view.

The writer is assistant secretary of homeland security, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

LOAD-DATE: May 20, 2008

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

DISTRIBUTION: Maryland

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The Washington Post

All Rights Reserved

This article is mainly talking about the ICE detention centers that are officially run by ICE itself. There is a whole network of other detention centers that contract with ICE, but are generally run by ex-ICE employees who are now working for a state or local government. These are the centers that need to be fixed, and are the ones that are getting away with the inhumane treatment of detained immigrants. This article from the New York Times talks about how the US government has neglected to change anything in the detention system yet.

The New York Times

July 29, 2009 Wednesday

Late Edition - Final

U.S. Rejects Changes in Detainee Rules

BYLINE: By NINA BERNSTEIN

SECTION: Section A; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 17

LENGTH: 1001 words

The Obama administration has refused to make legally enforceable rules for immigration detention, rejecting a federal court petition by former detainees and their advocates and embracing a Bush-era inspection system that relies in part on private contractors.

The decision, contained in a six-page letter received by the plaintiffs this week, disappointed and angered immigration advocacy organizations around the country. They pointed to a stream of newly available documents that underscore the government's failure to enforce minimum standards it set in 2000, including those concerning detainees' access to basic health care, telephones and lawyers, even as the number of people detained has soared to more than 400,000 a year.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the immigration detention system, a conglomeration of county jails, federal centers and privately run prisons, concluded ''that rule-making would be laborious, time-consuming and less flexible'' than the review process now in place, Jane Holl Lute, the agency's deputy secretary, said in the letter.

The department maintained that current inspections by the government, and a shift in 2008 to ''performance-based standards'' monitored by private contractors, ''provide adequately for both quality control and accountability.''

The administration's letter met a 30-day deadline set by Judge Denny Chin of Federal District Court in Manhattan. Judge Chin ruled last month that the agency's failure to respond to the plaintiffs' petition for two and a half years was unreasonable.

The government's decision ''disregards the plight of the hundreds of thousands of immigration detainees,'' said Paromita Shah, associate director of the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, one of the plaintiffs, which contends that the lack of enforceable rules is at the heart of persistent problems of mistreatment and medical neglect. ''The department has demonstrated a disturbing commitment to policies that have cost dozens of lives.''

The plaintiffs had expected better from the Obama administration, said Dan Kesselbrenner, the project's director.

But Matt Chandler, a spokesman for Homeland Security who served in the Obama campaign, put a different face on the rejection of rule-making.

''The rule-making process can take months, if not years,'' he said in an e-mailed statement, ''and the administration believes that reforming our immigration detention system needs to happen much faster than that.'' A special adviser on detention to Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, ''is engaged in a top-to-bottom review'' of the detention system, he said, and will release her recommendations soon.

In a telephone interview, the adviser, Dora Schriro, said Immigration and Customs Enforcement had made changes in recent years ''in an effort toward continuous improvement.''

''What's appreciably different about this administration is the recognition that detention and alternatives to detention are disciplines, and can and will be carried out under the most professional of standards,'' Dr. Schriro said.

But standards without teeth are doomed to fail, said lawyers for two other national immigration law organizations, one in Los Angeles and another in Chicago, echoing the plaintiffs' disappointment with the rejection of enforceable rules.

Both groups recently won the release of thousands of pages of detention inspection documents that had been kept secret. They said the documents showed that the government had routinely violated its own minimum monitoring standards and ignored findings of deficiencies for years.

The ''performance-based'' standards the Obama administration has now embraced have no penalties and are not significantly different from what failed in the past, said Karen Tumlin, a lawyer with the National Immigration Law Center in California. On Tuesday, the center issued what it called ''the first nationwide comprehensive report'' on violations of detention standards, based on records from 2004 and 2005 obtained through Freedom of Information litigation.

Dozens of more recent inspection documents, some from this year, show a similar pattern, said Chuck Roth, the director of litigation for the Chicago group, Heartland Alliance's National Immigration Justice Center. Many were posted by the government itself on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Web site after the center won a three-year federal court battle to force their release.

''The groups that ICE commonly contracts with are staffed by former ICE employees and former corrections officers who have a vested interest in pleasing ICE,'' Mr. Roth said, ''so we haven't seen them take the useful watchdog role.''

The documents include eight years of monitoring reports by the American Bar Association, which has been granted access to detention centers and detainees only on condition that its findings, shared with the government, are not made public.

Reports from two bar association visits to the Elizabeth Detention Center in Elizabeth, N.J., in January 2006 and July 2007, illustrate the weaknesses. In 2006, the team noted detainee complaints about medical neglect and threats of physical violence that were reported to guards but ignored.

A year and a half later, a return visit was cut by the center to two hours from six hours, and ''inexplicably, many of the areas that the delegation had requested to visit in advance and needed to see in order to fulfill its mission were locked'' and off limits.

The delegation was unaware that only two months earlier a 52-year-old tailor named Boubacar Bah had died after suffering a skull fracture in the jail and being locked in an isolation cell without treatment for more than 13 hours.

''This whole detention system that has been created is a human rights nightmare,'' said Mary Meg McCarthy, executive director of the National Immigrant Justice Center. ''The past administration created this, and now we need to dismantle it.''

URL: http://www.nytimes.com

LOAD-DATE: July 29, 2009

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

The media is aware of the way immigrants are being treated in these detention centers. And immigrant groups are pushing for the government to fix the way these centers are being run.

This is an interview with Jacqueline Stevens who wrote "America's Secret Ice Castles" for the Nation magazine. In this interview on Democracy Now! Stevens talks about her investigation of these ICE sponsored detention centers.