Obama administration announces immigration detention reform

The Obama administration announced that it will “undertake a major overhaul” of  its immigration detention system. US immigration and custom enforcement or ICE, currently contracts more than 400 private facilities, state and local jails to hold undocumented immigrants, according to the ACLU.

Immigrants rights advocates have long criticized the conditions inside US detention centers, with Amnesty International charging the US earlier this year with human rights violations.

Denia, who preferred not to give her last name,  is a former detainee from Honduras.  She was held for four months at the Hutto detention center in Texas, where she stayed in a windowless cell, with her two children aged three and nine.

“The conditions were very tough when I was there. We had to wake up at five in the morning and we had to wake up the children too. Then we had to go for breakfast and they would only give us 10 minutes to eat. And if we didn´t finish, the food was left there. It was difficult for me because I had to feed my little three year old and sometimes I had no time to eat. I was also pregnant at the time”

As part of the overhaul announced today, ICE said it would centralize control over detention centers, creating a new office that would review key areas like medical conditions, detainees´ access to legal information and recreational services.

Officials also announced they would stop sending families to the T Don Hutto Residential Facility in Taylor, Texas, one of two detention centers in the US that currently holds *children with their parents.

Immigrants rights groups welcomed this initiative, but they remain critical of conditions at detention centers.  **The North Carolina based non-profit, Grassroots Leadership, has been a strong critic of children´s detention.  Campaign manager Bob Libal spoke to FSRN about the conditions at the Hutto detention centre.

“When Hutto opened in 2006 the reports of the conditions from inside were pretty appalling, there was one hour of education a day, children were dressed in prison-like garb, there were reports of threatening children from separation from their parents as a disciplinary tool…”

The Obama administration´s announcement comes on the heels of another scathing report on the US immigration detention system.

The National Center for Immigration Law, or NCIL, released a 180 page report titled  "A Broken System." NCIL says the US denies detainees access to legal information that would help them prepare their immigration cases.  The report says visits by relatives are often barred and that in some cases detainees do not have some basic rights enjoyed by the US prison population, like access to recreational facilities.

Much of the information included in the report comes from ICE itself and through confidential documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. Linton Joaquin co-authored the NCIL´s report.  He says detention centers are violating the government´s own standards.

“What we found was that ICE´s own reports indicated many violations of their standards that lasted lots of time, from report to report and were not remedied.”

The report also gathered information from visits made to detention centers by independent monitors like the American Bar Association and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.

“The ABA and the UNHCR in many cases went to the same facility that ICE did, and found many violations that ICE failed to identify.  You can sit down and track a detention center, the ICE report, the subsequent ABA report and a pattern over time of violations that were not remedied.”

More than 300,000 undocumented immigrants are held at US detention centers every year and the numbers have steadily risen over the last decade.

FSRN spoke with former Anchor Aura Bogado, who is currently researching immigration issues in Arizona.  She´s visited several detention centers.

*, **In the audio version of this story, FSRN mistakenly said Grassroots Leadership was a Texas-based non-profit. Although it runs campaigns in Texas, Grassroots Leadership is based in North Carolina. We also said the T. Don Hutto Residential Facility in Taylor, Texas is “one of two detention centers in the country that holds children.”  It is actually one of two detention centers that hold children with their parents. Children classified as unaccompanied minors are held in separate detention facilities. We have corrected the above text to reflect the clarifications.