Also see below:     
Immigrant Detention Blues    [

    Home-Grown Gitmo
    By William Fisher
    t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor

    Friday 09 February 2007

    The Bush administration's penchant for privatizing virtually all government operations has combined with the current furor over border security to create another perfect storm - this time for suspected illegal immigrants.

    These thousands of people held in detention under the aegis of the US Department of Homeland Security - increasingly in privately-owned jails - are failing to receive timely medical treatment and adequate food, being subjected to frequent sexual harassment, and having their access to lawyers, relatives and immigration authorities improperly limited.

    These are among the findings of the DHS inspector general, based on an audit of the US-owned and operated Krome Service Processing Center in Miami, a facility in San Diego operated by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), and local jails and prisons in Berks County, Pennsylvania, and Hudson and Passaic counties, New Jersey.

    But critics of the agency called the report disappointing, contending that it watered down recommendations and ignored the most serious allegations of abuse collected since June 2004, which they said included physical beatings, medical neglect, food shortages and mixing of illegal immigrants in administrative custody with criminals.

    Mark Dow, author of "American Gulag: Inside America's Immigration Prisons," a scathing expose of detention facilities, goes further. He says the Inspector General's report "has helped ensure that, for now, the mistreatment will continue."

    The reason, he says, is the IG's recommendation that the DHS agency responsible for the detention of immigrants, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), police itself.

    "That is telling the agency responsible for the mistreatment of its prisoners, and whose own inspections are deficient, 'ensure that periodic oversight and inspection procedures are in place to address compliance with the Detention Standards.' The [IG's] report neglects to mention that ICE has refused to promulgate its detention standards as regulations because they would then be, at least theoretically, legally enforceable," he says.

    He adds: "The bottom line is that 'auditing' without truly independent enforcement is meaningless."

    In response to the IG's report, more than a dozen national organizations have filed a petition with the DHS to create enforceable regulations governing detention standards. If the federal government agrees to the request, DHS will promulgate binding standards for the safety, health, and conditions for thousands of detainees around the country.

    These advocates, who include the American Friends Service Committee Immigrant Rights Program, the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the Seton Hall University Law Center for Social Justice, believe DHS regulations governing detention standards will ensure effective protection of detainees' human rights. Their petition "highlights our unconscionable detention system. The reality is that county governments vie for lucrative contracts with the federal government to warehouse non-citizens without any binding standards of care."

    Among the most significant issues raised in the IG's report was that detainees face significant hurdles when attempting to make complaints about their conditions of confinement. It further points to the current ineffectiveness of ICE's own annual inspections of detention facilities. "The report exposes gaping holes in the protection of detainee rights. We cannot trust the jail officials to address detainees' concerns, and we cannot trust ICE to effectively review the jails' practices."

    Since 9/11, many of the detention centers for immigrants have been privatized and are being run by such companies as CCA and Florida-based Wackenhut. According to Corporate Watch, in 1999 the feds farmed out less than three percent of beds - but seven years later, the number had reached almost one in five.

    The boom in privatized prisons began shortly after the 2001 terrorist attacks, when the Department of Justice rounded up thousands of "Middle Eastern-looking" immigrants and detained many of them for months, abusing many, treating them as criminals, and denying them access to lawyers.

    A 2003 report by the DHS Inspector General forcefully condemned the treatment of immigrants inside various jails in its report, "The September 11 Detainees: A Review of the Treatment of Aliens Held on Immigration Charges in Connection With the Investigation of the September 11 Attacks." Infractions included routine abuse of basic prisoner rights, mental and physical abuse, denial of health care and medical treatment, prison overcrowding, and a lack of working showers and toilets.

    None of those held were ever charged with a terror-related crime. Some were deported for immigration violations.

    Privatized detention facilities have grown apace amid the clamor for a crackdown on alleged undocumented immigrants. Contracts for these new jails flowed to the private prison industry despite many previous allegations of mismanagement and scandal.

    Detainee advocates accuse prison companies of cutting corners in training guards and in providing basic services. The government has done little to regulate prison administration, but has sanctioned exploitive labor practices and rip-off telephone costs for inmates.

    For example, a former detainee in a CCA facility in San Diego testified that "The guards would scream and shout at us as if we were little kids. If we would ask them to stop, they would threaten to lock us down for a few days, which would happen constantly. Three people being locked in a two-man cell, in a 12 x 7 room. This happened a lot; sometimes as punishment for the actions of one or two inmates, the other 105-115 detainees would suffer."

    Often, he added, "detainees would be missing money on their accounts, which I was recently told by a detainee who keeps in contact with me was being stolen by the staff, according to [an] OIG investigation. We would get underserved during meal times. When we complained to the unit manager she would say that we were given the right amounts, which in my opinion was the appropriate portion for a ten or eleven year old. Some of the guards and staff would curse at us. They would purposely lower the televisions so we couldn't hear them, just to mess with us. During our free time, they would take their time turning on the phones so we wouldn't be able to call our families. Just to be cruel."

    CCA's revenues have increased substantially since 9/11. The company calculates that its expenditure of $28.89 per inmate per day allows it to make a daily profit of $50.26 per inmate.

    The Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) continues to award lucrative contracts to CCA and its competitors. CCA runs the 300-bed Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey and the 1,216-bed San Diego Correctional Facility, as well as having landed new prison contracts with the Kentucky Department of Corrections, the state of Kansas, and the Florida Department of Management Services.

    Wackenhut has also shared in the private prison boom. Before 2001, Wackenhut, like CCA, had been at the center of serious inmate-abuse scandals: Guards were caught having sex with underage inmates, there were routine reports of extreme mistreatment of inmates, and there was even a disproportionately high level of deaths in their facilities.

    After a CBS Television report exposed the repeated rape of a 14-year-old girl at a Wackenhut juvenile jail and two guards were found guilty, its CEO said, "It's a tough business. The people in prison are not Sunday-school children." Still more worrying was Wackenhut's record with inmate-on-inmate killings. In 1998-1999 alone, Wackenhut's New Mexico facilities had a death rate of one murder for every 400 prisoners. For the same period in all US prisons, the rate was about one in 22,000.

    Wackenhut's most public response was to change its name to the GEO Group. It continues to win lucrative government contracts.

    The corrections industry has routinely argued that privatizing prisons dramatically lowers costs. But a 1996 US General Accounting Office report concluded there was no clear evidence supporting this contention.

    Prison companies do have certain advantages over other corporations: They are able to save large amounts of money on labor practices that would be illegal under any other circumstances. Inmate jobs in all prisons pay a pittance, but immigrant prisons are even worse. Because DHS guidelines mandate that non-citizen prisoners cannot earn more than $1 per day, the company gets janitors, maintenance workers, cleaners, launderers, kitchen staff, sewers and grounds keepers at almost no cost.

    Author Mark Dow says, "It isn't politically popular to speak up for alien inmates, but Congress has a responsibility to establish independent oversight of the ICE detention system. Congress should hold hearings on ICE detention - with meaningful follow-up." It should "Create a statutory-based ombudsman's office or independent oversight body outside the Department of Homeland Security. It must have subpoena power as well as authorization to make unannounced inspections of all facilities holding ICE detainees."

    "Eventually, the very nature of our immigration detention system must be reexamined. We take it as a given that a visa violator, or an asylum seeker, or a thirty-year lawful resident who has paid taxes but committed a non-violent misdemeanor decades ago, should be strip-searched, dressed in a prison jumpsuit, and denied contact with her children."

    Or, as summed up by Mary Shaw of Amnesty International USA, "While the US immigration system has always had its faults, it has become much worse since the attacks of 9/11. Many of the people who enter this country are fleeing persecution in other countries. They come here to seek asylum. We must not confuse these victims seeking refuge with those who would enter this country to do us harm. The US has every right to protect its borders. However, immigration policies must not make it harder for victims of human rights violations to find protection in the United States. We need to honor our country's commitment to protecting the persecuted."

    The toxic brew here is a smorgasbord of a prison system without regulations or meaningful oversight, a Congress that has been AWOL on its abuses, a mainstream press that, with a few exceptions, has been silent, a multi-million dollar private prison industry, an administration eager to use it, and a prisoner population with no votes.

    With those ingredients, don't expect to hear much about America's most secretive prison system any time soon.

---

    William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the Middle East and in many other parts of the world for the US State Department and USAID for the past thirty years. He began his work life as a journalist for newspapers and for the Associated Press in Florida. Go to The World According to Bill Fisher for more.

 

---

    Go to Original

    Immigrant Detention Blues
    By Diana Welch
    The Austin Chronicle

    Friday 02 February 2007

    In October 2001, the Ibrahim family, Palestinians seeking asylum from life under Israeli occupation, entered the U.S. legally. The family's requests for asylum, in which members described repeated beatings at the hands of Israeli officials and health complications from gas attacks in occupied territories, were denied. According to their lawyer, John Wheat Gibson, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents invaded the family's house after midnight on the night of Nov. 3, 2006, and arrested everyone inside. The entire family remains imprisoned today.

    Salaheddin Ibrahim is currently separated from his family in a prison in Haskell, Texas. Hanan, his pregnant wife, shares a cell at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, Texas, with her 5-year-old daughter, while her 7- and 12-year-old daughters are together in a separate cell. Her 15-year-old son is alone in another. The Ibrahims' 3-year-old daughter, who was born since their arrival in the U.S. and is therefore an American citizen, is living with Salaheddin's brother, Ahmad Ibrahim, in the Dallas area. Ahmad says the family has been told they are to be deported, but they don't know when or to where. Applications to get them Jordanian papers have been denied, and ICE, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security, is apparently contacting the Israeli embassy - the country from which the family was seeking asylum in the first place - for papers. As it stands now, the family will remain in custody until its members are deported. "I just can't understand the jailing of 5- and 7-year-olds," Ahmad said over the phone as his 3-year-old niece's voice jabbered in the background. "They have done nothing wrong."

    The Ibrahims are just one of the families being held in a 512-bed prison in Taylor, just northeast of Austin in Williamson County. There's no way of verifying exactly how many families are being held there, as Corrections Corporation of America, the private prison company that ICE pays more than $2.8 million a month to run the facility, is restricted by ICE from commenting on the population. According to ICE Enforcement Officer Nina Pruneda, a population breakdown cannot be released to the public due to - you guessed it - "reasons of homeland security."

    This much is known: As a result of 1996 immigration-law amendments that mandated the detention of certain immigrants and asylum seekers, ICE now detains more than 200,000 people annually at more than 300 sites, most of which are county jails. Immigration detainees make up the fastest-growing group of people incarcerated in the U.S. and, according to many critics of the burgeoning private detention industry, one of the fastest-growing ways to make a buck.

    The agreement between ICE, CCA, and Williamson Co. is as follows: ICE pays CCA $2.8 million per month for up to 512 prisoners (plus $19.23 per hour for off-site guard services, $125,000 per month for medical care, and contraceptives, immunizations, and off-site medical care billed at additional cost). On top of that, ICE pays $79 per day extra per head plus $8 for medical care. Meanwhile, as part of its Intergovernmental Service Agreement with CCA, the county collects $1 per prisoner (child or adult) on a monthly basis - a total of up to $500 a month, in theory. A growing grassroots movement has been staging vigils and protests to try to shut down what it calls the Hutto prison camp; they were focused on this month because the county's contract with CCA was set to expire Jan. 31 (though in April 2006, Williamson Co. commissioners approved the prison contract with ICE "indefinitely unless terminated in writing" with 120 days notice).

    As word of the incarceration of "noncriminal alien families" (ICE's term) spreads, the number of outraged citizens grows. "We just didn't know about it," said Williamson Co. resident Jane Van Praag. "When we heard what was going on and did a little research, it turned out that what sounded pretty bad was really bad." Van Praag drafted a letter to the Williamson County Commissioners Court, which she read aloud to the commissioners at a recent meeting, asking that they not renew their contract with the Tennessee-based CCA. In her letter, she pointed to Congress' mandate (in the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Bill) that the DHS exhaust all other alternatives to detention, such as the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program. "I urge the Commissioners Court to hold ICE accountable and request that ICE prove it is complying with what Congress intended," Van Praag implored the Commissioners Court. "We need to know if ICE has exhausted all of the alternatives to detaining these children and families before you renew this contract."

    Led by Texans United for Families, an umbrella organization made up of advocacy groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, Grassroots Leadership Initiative, League of United Latin American Citizens, and Texas Civil Rights Project, a relatively small group of people is working to ensure that the plight of families in the T. Don Hutto prison is not forgotten. TUFF organized a third vigil on Jan. 25 at the facility, to encourage the court to heed their demands. Twenty-five people, including Van Praag, ACLU members, and neighbors who live directly across the railroad tracks from the facility, gathered with lit candles and signs demanding an end to the imprisonment of children. "We have gone to the [court]; we have presented them with all the information that we have," said Jay J. Castro Sr., one of TUFF's most vocal organizers. "If they still choose to renew the contract, we will not give up. Our outrage will only grow stronger."

    Indeed on Jan. 30, the Commissioners Court decided to renew the contract with CCA for another two years, revising it to allow for termination at any time and adding that CCA "shall provide education in accordance with all state and federal education standards and guidelines to any child housed at the facility." The Commissioners Court also pointed out that, during this first year of the contract, CCA has made improvements and changes in "order to better accommodate the families during their stay while awaiting the outcome of their immigration hearings or return to their home countries," including a contract with Lone Star Circle of Care for ob-gyn care and a menu that reflects "cultural and medical needs and diets."

    "As a result of the protests and related media attention, the conditions in the facility have changed," says ACLU's Rebecca Bernhardt, who has toured the facility. "We know that the education, in particular, has received a major overhaul. Children are now receiving four hours of education a day, instead of just one hour." But Bernhardt is quick to point out that while these recent changes are good, they're not enough. "It's the lipstick on the pig problem," she says. "No matter how humane they make Hutto, the question still remains: Is it acceptable for the United States to imprison children, criminal or non? No, it's not. These families shouldn't be in prison."