TIME
By Alex Altman
March 17, 2014
An inmate hunger strike at a Washington detention center is raising questions about immigration detention quotas and enforcement
Eleven days ago, Paulino Ruiz stopped eating.
After
nine months at Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Wash., which
houses immigration detainees awaiting deportation, Ruiz was sick of
eating a boiled potato at every
meal. He was offended by the harsh treatment meted out by guards. And
he was tired of making just $1 per day for custodial work.
Perhaps
most of all, he felt let down by the immigration policies of Barack
Obama. Ruiz, 26, came to the U.S. at age three and says he is a legal
resident of the U.S.
But when he was released from prison last year after serving time for
robbery, he was put on a path to deportation. “You can only get pushed
so far,” Ruiz explains in a phone interview with TIME from inside the
low-slung facility that sprawls across Tacoma’s
tide flats. “More people have been deported since [Obama's] been in
office than anyone else in history.”
Ruiz
chose the right time to protest. A facility-wide hunger strike started
at breakfast on March 7 at the detention center, spreading by word of
mouth, until by dinnertime
about 750 of the facility’s 1,300 detainees were declining to eat,
according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The strike
turned a spotlight on immigration detention and deportation policies
just as the White House is taking a fresh look at
the issues.
On
March 13, Obama announced he had ordered a review of his
Administration’s immigration-enforcement policies. The next day, the
President met for nearly two hours with
17 leading immigration-reform advocates at the White House. Obama told
them he has asked Jeh Johnson, the new Secretary of the Department of
Homeland Security (DHS), to conduct the review.
Two
of the enforcement policies Obama inherited are at the center of the
Tacoma hunger strike. One is the so-called “bed mandate,” an arcane
provision embedded in the
annual DHS spending bill. The other is mandatory detention, which
requires suspected immigration violators to be held indefinitely while a
deportation review is pending, often without bond.
Introduced
in 2007, the bed mandate sets a target for the number of undocumented
immigrants DHS must house to receive its annual appropriation. The
current quota is about
34,000 people. Immigration analysts say it forces law enforcement to
pursue and detain undocumented immigrants simply to meet quotas,
stripping them of discretion as they carry out their jobs. As a result,
facilities like Northwest Detention Center are crammed
with detainees who have committed minor infractions, such as traffic
violations. Their detention costs taxpayers about $160 per day, which
quickly adds up: in the 2013 fiscal year, the U.S. shelled out more than
$2 billion on immigration detention.
“It’s
neither good policy nor good use of resources,” says Muzaffar Chishti,
director of the Migration Policy Institute’s office at New York
University’s School of Law.
In
recent months, House Democrats have sought to strike the statute by
stressing its ballooning costsan appeal aimed at fiscal conservatives.
They argue that alternatives
to lengthy detention for nonviolent offenders, such as monitoring
bracelets or supervised release—would be far cheaper and equally
effective. “Neither party wants to see taxpayer money wasted,” says Rep.
Bill Foster, an Illinois Democrat who has twice co-sponsored
amendments to end the mandate. “This is something we can do on a
bipartisan basis.”
But
bipartisanship has flopped so far. In June, an amendment sponsored by
Democratic Congressman Ted Deutsch of Florida was defeated in a largely
party-line vote, with
just eight Republicans joining the vast majority of Democrats in a
failed effort to scrap the mandate. Deutsch and Foster have tried to
revive the issue without luck so far.
Republicans
say administration officials are allowing budget cuts to serve as an
excuse for lax immigration enforcement. The GOP believes Obama has a
habit of picking
and choosing which parts of federal law he wants to enforce, and
defends the mandate as a statute that compels the government to lock up
offenders or lose its funding. “This is not optional. It’s not
discretionary,” Rep. John Culberson of Texas, a Republican,
told Johnson at a hearing earlier this month. “There’s no prosecutorial
discretion on the part of a police officer or your detention folks as
to whether or not you’re going to fill 34,000 beds. You shall fill
34,000 beds.”
But
immigration reformers believe the private-prison industry is unduly
affecting the public debate. Private prison operators spend millions
lobbying lawmakers on immigration
detention and other issues that directly impact their bottom line.
Like
most detention centers, the facility in Tacoma is operated by a private
contractor, the Geo Group. That corporation’s political-action
committee has given more than
$100,000 to state, local and federal candidates so far in the 2014
cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.”It’s a wasteful
taxpayer giveaway to special interests that hurts law enforcement and is
inconsistent with the way we approach immigration
in this country,” Deutsch says.
The
protesters in Tacoma were also reacting to the policy known as
mandatory detention, which often locks up offenders indefinitely. The
policy was expanded by a pair
of laws passed in 1996 and strengthened by the Patriot Act after Sept.
11, 2001. It requires that categories of non-U.S. citizens be imprisoned
without evaluating the threat they may pose, often without giving them a
bond hearing. “You have people who might
get arrested for something minor, but aren’t allowed to fight their
case,” says Sandy Restrepo, a Washington State immigration lawyer
involved with the hunger strike. “Either they have really high bonds
set, or they’re ineligible for bond.”
Some
of these detainees are legal residents of the U.S. Brought to the U.S.
at age three from the Mexican state of Michoacan, Ruiz says he was
raised in Oregon, where
he graduated from high school. According to Ruiz, he spent years
working construction and landscaping before he was arrested in 2008 for a
drunken robbery. When he was released from prison last year, he says,
he was remanded to the custody of ICE because of
an immigration hold, and has been held without bond as he appeals his
deportation. He says he has no ties to Mexico and his entire family
lives in the U.S., including his ailing father. “I’m not a bad person,”
Ruiz says. “I just made a mistake. I took responsibility
for that. It hurts not to be able to be back with my family.”
It
is unclear whether the review Obama ordered will result changes to
either the bed quota or to the practice of mandatory detention. Earlier
this month, in testimony
before the House Homeland Security Subcommittee of the House
Appropriations Committee, DHS Secretary Johnson told lawmakers that he
interpreted the 34,000-bed mandate “to mean that we have to maintain
34,000 detention beds. Some of those beds might be empty
at any given time.” That parsing, which the GOP disputes, would allow
the Administration to detain fewer undocumented immigrants on a
day-to-day basis even if Congress declined to change the law.
But
the review ordered by Obama is unlikely to result in sweeping changes
to enforcement—not least because the President does not want to hand
Congressional Republicans
an excuse to back further away from their halfhearted interest at
rewriting U.S. immigration law. “We don’t know what the review will
mean,” Chishti says. “He’s not promising anything. My own view is it
will be modest.”
After
more than a week, the number of detainees in Tacoma who are still
skipping meals has dwindled to just a few. Andrew Munoz, a spokesman at
the Department of Homeland
Security’s Seattle office, said that ICE respected the right of
detainees to register their opinions about their treatment. “While we
continue to work with Congress to enact commonsense immigration reform,
ICE remains committed to sensible, effective immigration
enforcement that focuses on its priorities, including convicted
criminals and those apprehended at the border while attempting to
unlawfully enter the United States,” Munoz said.
Even
if DHS decides to change course, it may be too late for immigrants like
Ruiz. Suspended in limbo after a serious mistake, he finds himself
caught in the gears of
an immigration-enforcement machine that can’t often be stopped once it
is engaged. “I’ve got my whole life invested in this country,” he says.
“I feel like I deserve another opportunity.”
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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