Immigrant Detainee Rights are Routinely, Systematically Violated, New Report Finds

"A Broken System" is based on 18,000 Pages of Previously Confidential ICE, ABA, and UNHCR Reviews of Detention Centers


LOS ANGELES - Denied access to loved ones, lawyers and basic necessities, the fundamental rights of the men and women within the nation's immigration detention system are routinely and systematically violated, according to a new report released today by the National Immigration Law Center (NILC), the ACLU of Southern California, and the international law firm of Holland & Knight, LLP. The first nationwide comprehensive report of its kind, "A Broken System: Confidential Reports Reveal Failures in U.S. Detention Centers," sheds new light on the conditions suffered by hundreds of thousands of people housed in detention centers around the country, and offers policymakers specific recommendations to ameliorate the situation.

"Though the detainees are accused of civil immigration charges, there is nothing civil about our detention centers," said Karen Tumlin, co-author of the report and a staff attorney at NILC. "These centers, where people are detained for months and often years at a time, often fail to provide people with their fundamental rights: access to loved ones, the basic materials needed to research and prepare their cases, or even a simple explanation of their rights while within the immigrant detention system.

Added Linton Joaquin, co-author and general counsel at NILC, "The government's own standards for immigration detention are routinely violated. Such a flagrant disregard for this country's values for fairness and justice on behalf of the United States government is appalling."

Though Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) claims to conduct a formal review of each detention facility on a yearly basis, "A Broken System" shows that such reviews carry little enforcement weight, as many of the detention facilities fail to rectify problems identified by ICE's own inspectors. Even more troubling, the inadequacy of the ICE reviews is demonstrated when they are compared with independent reviews by the American Bar Association (ABA) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) of the same facilities, which often found a greater number and more severe violations in detention centers than was reported by ICE.

For instance, the ABA and UNHCR reviewers found detainees were retaliated or punished more severely than allowed for minor disciplinary infractions. ICE reviewers, on the other hand, overlooked these serious violations.

Ranjana Natarajan, a report co-author and former ACLU/SC attorney said, "At every level, federal, state and local jails and prisons have legal and binding rules they must abide. But in immigration detention, the government refuses to adopt binding rules. The result is utter disregard for basic humane conditions. Because we don't have rules, we don't have accountability."

The findings from "A Broken System" are particularly timely, as they are released in the wake of a DHS decision to reject the long-standing request of NGOs and the ABA to promulgate regulations that would require immigration detention facilities to adhere to basic standards of care.

This agency statement responds to a petition for rulemaking submitted in January 2007 by dozens of immigrant detainees and advocacy groups in the wake of public reports detailing the humanitarian crisis in the facilities.

The report highlights the importance of having independent monitors of detention centers. In the Kenosha County Detention Center, for example, a UNHCR report found that while men were allowed two daily hours of recreation, women housed in the same facility were denied recreation rights. The following year, ICE inspectors rated that same facility "acceptable," despite the fact that women were still being denied access to recreation facilities.

"A Broken System" is based on an analysis of hundreds of ICE, ABA and UNHCR detention facility review reports from 2001 through 2005. The reports, which had been withheld from the public, were obtained through discovery in litigation. Although the report is the most comprehensive analysis of its kind, the government withheld a significant number of documents it was ordered to produce. As a result, the violations outlined in the report represent only a fraction of the number of violations that actually occurred but could not be documented.

Christopher Nugent, pro bono senior counsel at Holland & Knight, said, "Though this report provides the most complete picture the public has of this massive system, it is still a sketch. We can, however, determine even more definitively that the immigration detention centers routinely violate the government's own standards for immigration detention, and based on this information we have made specific policy recommendations to encourage those with the power to change the system to do so."

The recommendations put forth by the report are based upon thousands of hours of research and analysis of the detention center reviews. Key among them is the proposal that the ICE revise its standards for immigration detention to make them judicially enforceable. The report also determines that given the gross abuses, further expansion of the immigrant detention system should be stopped, and more use should be made of humane alternatives to detention.

The findings from "A Broken System" are particularly timely, as they are released in the wake of a DHS decision to reject the long-standing request of NGOs and the ABA to promulgate regulations that would require immigration detention facilities to adhere to basic standards of care.

This agency statement responds to a petition for rulemaking submitted in January 2007 by dozens of immigrant detainees and advocacy groups in the wake of public reports detailing the humanitarian crisis in the facilities. The name of the case involved in the petition is Families for Freedom v. Napolitano, No. 08-CIV-4056 (DC).

To read "A Broken System," go to
www.nilc.org/immlawpolicy/arrestdet/A-Broken-System-2009-07.pdf

Washington Post - Careless Detention Part 3

Suicides Point To Gaps In Treatment, the third of four in a series from the Washington Post, details the psychiatric care in immigrant detention centers.

Mudey, 30, was a member of an outcast Muslim clan and, according to her political asylum application, had been tormented by dominant groups throughout her life. When she was 10, she said, an old woman cut off her genitals with a razor blade. As a teenager, she was clubbed and beaten by girls with status. When she was 19, armed men shot and killed her father and two brothers at home. At 22, five men with guns gang-raped her mother and sister, who screamed so much the men killed her. Then they attacked Mudey with a knife and bashed her head with a gun butt.

Soon after taking Risperdal at the Elizabeth detention center, she found herself in the throes of its worst side effects. Her arms and legs shook uncontrollably. Her tongue thickened and thrashed around in her mouth, which she was unable to close. She drooled constantly, vomited often and began to lactate. "I said, 'Maybe I am going mad,' " Mudey said. " 'Maybe I am going to die in here.' "

Washington Post - Careless Detention Part 2

In Custody, In Pain is the second in the Washington Post series on medical care in immigrant detention centers.

Underneath her baggy jail-issue pants, Yong Sun Harvill feels the soft lump just below her left knee. Sometimes it tingles. Sometimes it is numb. Like her cancer felt when it arrived behind the knee a few years ago.

She noticed the lump under the thin, blue cotton in August, five months after federal immigration officers, to her amazement, took her into custody to try to deport her for buying stolen jewelry more than a decade ago. The lump grows slowly. It is now three inches across. And though she keeps asking, no one has done a test to see whether her sarcoma has come back.

The thing that makes perhaps the least sense to him is that his wife is covered under a good health insurance policy that he gets through his union, the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, and she and her lawyers have asked whether she could use that policy to pay for her treatment by private doctors while she is detained. They have been told no.

Washington Post - Careless Detention Part 1

The Washington Post has a series on medical care in immigrant detention centers.
The first in the series, titled System of Neglect, is an overview of effect immigration enforcement and policies have had on detention centers.

ICE Is Detaining and Deporting Citizens

Testimony of Kara Hartzler, Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project, AZ House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security and International Law at a “Hearing on Problems with ICE Interrogation, Detention, and Removal Procedures.”
February, 2008

Good afternoon. My name is Kara Hartzler, and I am an attorney at the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project in Arizona. The Florence Project is a nonprofit organization providing free legal services to persons in Arizona who are detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also known as “ICE.” We do this by conducting legal orientation presentations to detainees before their first deportation hearing and by providing individual follow-up services for those who do not have lawyers but may be eligible to remain in the United States. In the course of my work with the Florence Project, I’ve talked to thousands of people who are in the process of being deported. I’d like to take the opportunity to tell you a few of their stories today.

About a month ago, I spoke with a man named Thomas Warziniak in Florence, Arizona on the morning of his first deportation hearing. When I asked Mr. Warziniak where he was born, he replied, “Minnesota.” He told me he was raised in the South and that he had never been out of the United States in his life. When I asked if he knew why the U.S. was trying to deport him, he said that someone had told him he had a “foreign-sounding” name. Because he was detained, he did not have access to his birth certificate, nor did he have any family or friends who could obtain a copy. He had heard it cost thirty dollars to order a copy of his birth certificate, so he was working in the prison kitchen for a dollar a day until he had the money to order one. So far, he had eight dollars, and he hoped to earn the remaining twenty-two before his next court date in several weeks.

In my experience, stories like that of Mr. Warziniak’s are no longer rare. Under immigration law, a person is a citizen of the United States by birth, naturalization, or because the person automatically acquired or derived citizenship through a parent. On average, our organization is currently seeing forty to fifty cases per month in which individuals with potentially valid claims to U.S. citizenship are being detained and even deported. Why aren’t we hearing about these cases? Because, as is often the situation, it’s happening to the most vulnerable in our society – to racial and ethnic minorities, the mentally ill, people who cannot afford to hire a lawyer, people who are homeless and have no access to documents, people with no family to help them.

In immigration court, unlike criminal proceedings, the government does not provide a lawyer for those who cannot afford one. One of our clients named Anna who suffers from psychosis and schizophrenia represented herself before the immigration judge. Anna consistently maintained three things: that she was born in France, that former president John F. Kennedy was her father, and that the Pope was also her father. Despite the obvious unreliability of the latter two statements, ICE used the former to argue that she could be deported her to France. ICE presented no evidence, apart from her statements, that she was born outside the United States, and the French consulate denied that she is a citizen of that country. Anna is still detained in Eloy, Arizona.

Sometimes persons who are born at home for religious or other reasons were never issued a birth certificate and are subsequently detained and deported. Javier was born at home in El Paso, Texas and never obtained a birth certificate. After completing probation for a misdemeanor, his probation officer informed him that she would have to report him to ICE. When Javier told her he was born in Texas, she replied, quote “I know, I’m sorry, but I have to cover my ass.”

In some cases, the detention and deportation of U.S. citizens is the result of inexcusable error. About a year ago, I met a man named Joseph who was detained in Eloy, Arizona. Joseph was born in the Sudan and had automatically derived U.S. citizenship if he could prove that his parents naturalized before his eighteenth birthday. To prove this, Joseph submitted a copy of his original birth certificate in Arabic and a translation to the judge showing that he was born on October 2, 1985. However, ICE submitted a competing translation that incorrectly interpreted the date on the certificate as “February 10, 1985,” based on the assumption that the first number in the date represented the month, rather than the day, which is not the practice in the Sudan. The judge nevertheless accepted ICE’s translation, rejected Joseph’s, and ordered him deported. When I talked to Joseph, he was disgusted and wanted to give up. I convinced him to let me try to reopen his case, and, with a new translation from an Arabic expert, the judge finally acknowledged that Joseph was a citizen. Even after the judge’s ruling, Joseph was not released for another forty days – a full year and a half after he was initially detained.

Following my conversation with Mr. Warziniak, the man born in Minnesota, I contacted a reporter who was able to find a record of his birth within several hours. After being incarcerated for over a month, Mr. Warziniak was finally released. Ironically, he is one of the lucky ones – another man I am assisting with a valid claim to U.S. citizenship has been detained for over four years. It is my observation that these cases are surprisingly, painfully common – that U.S. citizens are being detained and deported from the United States, not monthly or weekly, but on a daily basis. Based on my experience, it is conceivable that under our current system, anyone in this room could potentially be incarcerated and permanently exiled to a country in which he or she has never set foot. Until better procedural safeguards are implemented, it is likely that our country’s fervor over the issue of immigration will continue to result in these egregious injustices perpetrated against our own citizens.

Thank you for the opportunity to share my clients’ stories with this Subcommittee.