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The idyllic railway town of Leesport, Pennsylvania is much like any other historical town of the North East. This once booming industrial centre is now home to several unremarkable landmarks; a nursing home, a cemetery and a locksmith’s. However, the town is also home to Berks Family Residential Centre - a complex used to detain immigrant children and their parents while they await decisions over their immigration status - of which the majority end in deportation. The ‘prison’ is one of approximately 400 facilities that hold over 440,000 people whose futures lie in the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
These way stations between life in and outside the U.S. are mostly out of sight of the general public: in deserts and industrial warehouse districts, in sequestered valleys next to other prisons, or near noisy airports. However, such facilities are becoming more and more common on the American landscape as immigrant detention has become the fastest growing form of incarceration in this ‘nation of immigrants.’
ICE expects the population in detention centres to vastly increase, as the number of ‘illegal immigrants’ on U.S. soil now stands at anywhere between 12.5 and 17 million, and the government continues an aggressive policy of workplace raids. To accommodate such an increase in numbers the government recently awarded KBR, a subsidiary of Haliburton, a $385 million contract to support ICE facilities in an emergency. The contract provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing ICE Detention and Removal Operations Program facilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants, or support the rapid development of new programs.
However, spending on care and treatment facilities hasn’t kept pace with the growth in population - leaving in its wake a story of egregious conditions of confinement, grossly inadequate health care, physical and sexual abuse, overcrowding, discrimination, and racism.
Human Rights Abuses
According to a report released in March by Amnesty International USA (AIUSA), the government has failed to uphold international human rights standards in its detention of immigrants and asylum seekers.
The report, entitled Jailed Without Justice: Immigration Detention in the USA, showed that tens of thousands of people languish in U.S. immigration detention facilities every year without receiving a hearing to determine whether their detention is warranted. In just over a decade, the number of immigrants in detention each day tripled from 10,000 in 1996 to more than 30,000 in 2008. Amongst these detainees were undocumented immigrants, asylum seekers, survivors of torture and human trafficking, and even lawful permanent residents and some U.S. citizens. Larry Cox, executive director of AIUSA, said: ‘America should be outraged by the scale of human rights abuses occurring within its own borders.
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The United States has long been a country of immigrants, and whether they have been here for five years or five generations, their human rights are to be respected. The U.S. government must ensure that every person in immigration detention has a hearing to determine whether that detention is necessary.’ The report contends that U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents have been incorrectly subject to mandatory detention and spent months or even years behind bars before proving they are not deportable. According to AIUSA’s research, at least 117 people have been held in mandatory detention for crimes that were ultimately determined not to be deportable offences.
Under U.S. law, individuals in deportation proceedings may secure counsel - but at no expense to the government, therefore the vast majority of people in immigration detention don’t have a lawyer, and instead represent themselves. This can obviously have a significant impact on the outcome of a case, with one study concluding that represented individuals are five times more likely to be granted asylum.
Beyond the lack of legal assistance offered to those in confinement, questions have been raised over the treatment of detainees. A wide ranging 65-page report released in July 2008 by Seattle University of Law and civil rights group OneAmerica paints a frightful picture of conditions at the Northwest Detention Centre in Tacoma, with allegations ranging from overzealous strip searches and underfed detainees to delayed medical care.
The report, Voices From Detention, told how six immigrants being flown by federal authorities to Alabama last summer were denied the use of bathrooms for seven hours and forced to sit in their own excrement. Another section highlighted the case of one man - a mentally ill Cambodian - who was punched by U.S. marshals and later struggled to breathe after a hood was put on his head during the cross-country flight. The alleged incident occurred as detainees were being transferred temporarily from the detention centre in Tacoma, as sometimes is the case when authorities need to free up bed space in advance of a big workplace raid by ICE.
When probed about conditions at this centre ICE spokeswoman Lori Dankers was unapologetic, ‘People don’t like to be in detention. But there are consequences to breaking federal immigration law. When detainees appeal their cases, it lengthens their time in detention. They can at any time give up their appeal and leave the U.S.’
Many have done just that. Some lawful U.S. residents languish for so long that they choose to go back to countries where they’re at risk of being attacked or imprisoned. One man was born in Afghanistan and came to America with his family as a refugee aged seven. He was placed in deportation proceedings and held in mandatory detention because of a drug conviction in 2007. He began urinating blood not long after, and was experiencing constant fatigue, pain and discomfort. He was first seen by a doctor six weeks later and after nine months, he had yet to receive any diagnosis or treatment.
He told AIUSA that he is so frustrated that he is considering giving up his claim of citizenship and going back to Afghanistan to obtain medical care.
When people who may well be citizens of the United States are desperate enough to be deported to countries they don’t even know, there clearly is a breakdown of disturbing proportions within the U.S. system of immigration detention,’ said Sarnata Reynolds, AIUSA’s policy director for Refugee and Migrant Rights.
In February, immigrant detainees at a facility in Pecos, Texas, rioted and set fires. Far from being unique, such reports are consistent with those at detention centres nationwide.
Former detainee Luis Leon Ortega of Mexico described conditions in McHendry County Adult Correctional Facility, Illinois, ‘We weren’t allowed to have anything in our cells. Masked guards armed with large, rubberbullet guns would search our cells. They swarmed in as if they were the SWAT team. If they found even a packet of sugar, we were confined to our cells for 15 consecutive days.’ Luis was eventually transferred to five different detention centres in six months.
Such evidence proves conditions of detention in many facilities don’t meet either international human rights standards or ICE guidelines. Immigration detainees are often detained in jail facilities with barbed wire and cells, alongside criminals. Immigrants are unnecessarily exposed to inappropriate and excessive restraints including handcuffs, belly chains, and leg restraints.
Prison Deaths
In particular, the standards of medical care offered to immigrant detainees have come under intense scrutiny after a string of recent deaths.
A May 2008 investigation by The Washington Post found ‘a hidden world of flawed medical judgements, faulty administrative practises, neglectful guards, ill-trained technicians, sloppy record-keeping, lost medical files and dangerous staff shortages.’ There’s also evidence that infectious diseases, including tuberculosis, are spreading inside the centres.
Some 83 detainees have died in, or soon after, custody in the last five years - including thirteen through suicide. Actions taken - or not taken - by medical staff members may have contributed to thirty of those deaths, according to confidential internal reviews and the opinions of medical experts.
According to their analysis, most of the people who died were young. Thirty-two of the detainees were younger than 40, and only six were over 70. The deaths took place at dozens of sites across the country.
The failing of the system to offer sufficient medical care is perhaps best highlighted by the final days and eventual death of Juan Guevara-Lorano, aged 21. Guevara, an unemployed legal U.S. resident with a young son, was arrested in El Paso for transporting border-crossers further into the city. He was to be given $50 on arrival.
An entry-level emergency medical technician, with barely any training, had done Guevara’s intake screening and physical assessment at the Otero County immigration compound in New Mexico. Under ICE rules, those tasks are supposed to be done by a nurse.
After two difficult months in detention, Guevara had decided not to appeal his case. He planned to return to Mexico with his family. However, on 4 August, he had a splitting headache, giving a nine on a pain scale of ten, his medical records show. The rookie medical technician prescribed Tylenol and referred Guevara to the compound’s physician ‘due to severity of headache . . . and dizziness.’
Guevara never saw a doctor. Eight days after the first incident, he vomited in his cell. The same junior technician came to help but couldn’t insert a nasal airway tube. Guevara was taken to a hospital, where doctors found an aneurism in his brain had burst.
His pregnant wife recalled that she rushed to the hospital but ICE guards wouldn’t let her inside, until the Mexican Consulate interjected. Guevara’s mother waited five hours before they let her in. By then he was brain-dead.
Pulling back the veil
For years, ICE officials fought to keep the treatment of immigration detainees, and incidents such as the death of Juan Guevara-
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