Immigrant Mothers Released From Holding Centers, but With Ankle Monitors

New York Times

By Julie Turkewitz

July 29, 2014

Immigrant Mothers Released From Holding Centers, but With Ankle Monitors 

Carmen Garcia recently recounted the events of her family’s journey from El Salvador to the United States: assaults, robberies, abandonment by smugglers.

And then she and her 12-year-old son were taken into custody by federal officers in South Texas. After Ms. Garcia and her son spent a night on the floor of a holding facility, the authorities released them and allowed them to reunite with another son in New York as long as they showed up at a local immigration office.

The two reported as instructed this month to a building in Manhattan where a tracking device was affixed to Ms. Garcia’s ankle, a measure meant to ensure that she would not disappear as she and her son face deportation proceedings.

“I asked, ‘Why are you putting this on?’ ” said Ms. Garcia, 40. “We’re not assassins. We’re not thieves. We’ve come to save our lives.”

Ms. Garcia is one of more than 55,000 adults traveling with minors, mostly mothers with children, who have been picked up along the Southwest border from October through June, up from 9,350 during the same period the year before. The federal government, however, has fewer than 800 spaces to detain families.

As a result, the White House has said that it will expand alternatives to detention, including the use of electronic ankle monitors, a decision that has set off a debate — part of a larger national discussion about whether these immigrants should be treated as lawbreakers or refugees.

Both the government and advocates for immigrants generally agree that the monitors save money, are a humane alternative to custody and in some cases are necessary to compel an immigrant to appear in court.

But advocates and federal officials differ on how often the tracking monitors should be used. Officials say they are necessary because it is often difficult to determine whether a person is a flight risk or has a criminal history in their native country. Advocates say they stigmatize many immigrants fleeing violence, most of whom have a strong incentive to appear at immigration proceedings because they are seeking asylum.

“In no way could you refer to this population as hardened criminal offenders,” said Michelle Brané, director of the migrant rights and justice program at the Women’s Refugee Commission, an advocacy group based in New York. “They are mothers with very young children who are fleeing for their lives.”

Ankle monitors have been part of the government’s arsenal as far back as 2004 to try to ensure that immigrants appear in court. Immigration and Customs Enforcement oversees the ankle bracelet program, but contracts with a private company, BI Inc., to administer it.

By early July, the company was tracking 7,440 immigrants wearing bracelets, a slight increase from 7,297 the year before. A spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Vincent Picard, said that it was “reasonable to assume” that the use of the devices would grow as more migrants are apprehended at the border.

The monitors use global positioning technology and are applied to people 18 or older, immigration officials said. Pregnant women are also excluded.

The bracelets are part of a larger tracking program that also includes telephone reporting and unannounced home visits. The program, which is aimed at people facing deportation, currently monitors about 24,000 people.

The cost of enrolling a person in the program is about $4.50 a day, according to immigration officials, compared with about $120 for detention. And nearly 100 percent of enrollees appeared for their court dates this fiscal year.

But the use of ankle bracelets has also been called uneven. A review of the program published by the Rutgers-Newark School of Law Immigrant Rights Clinic and the American Friends Service Committee in 2012 concluded that it was plagued by “overuse, and an inconsistent application,” leading to “a physical, psychological, and an economic toll on the program participants.”

Immigration officials said the electronic monitors are applied only after careful screening to assess if they are necessary to compel a person to appear in court. In most cases, they said, migrants who prove that they will show up in court will eventually have their bracelets removed.

While the surge of unaccompanied children entering the country has set off a national debate, the soaring number of detained families is also posing a challenge to the federal government.

Two centers, one in Pennsylvania and another in New Mexico, have space for fewer than 800 detainees, though the government has plans to open a third center in Texas with room for about 500 people.

Ms. Garcia said that she was not told why she had to wear the bracelet. She had lived in the United States from 1989 to 1998, but had never been arrested or deported, she said.

Her ankle monitor — about the size and shape of a generous half-sandwich — must be plugged into the wall for at least two hours each day to be recharged.

If she crosses state lines it will emit a continuous beep and deliver a message telling her to turn back to her allowed zone, a federal immigration official said.

In a bedroom at a friend’s home in Queens, Ms. Garcia sat with her leg tethered to a wall socket. She and her son Alexander fled El Salvador after she witnessed the murder of her nephew, she said, adding that the killers had threatened their lives.

Their journey lasted more than a year — Ms. Garcia worked along the way — and the only item that remains from their trek is a coffee-colored brassiere, which she called her “reliquia,” a sacred vestige from her past.

She said her bracelet was hot, itchy and unnecessary to ensure that she appears in court.

But some immigrants choose instead to view the monitors as a small price to pay to be allowed to remain free.

Patricia Meza, 31, said she had owned an Internet cafe in El Salvador. After a gang demanded that she pay $500 a month as a form of tax, she closed the business, traveling through Mexico on the top of a train with her two daughters, one of them 10 years old and the other 10 months.

After being caught near the border, they spent two nights in federal custody in Texas. Then they were allowed to stay with Ms. Meza’s mother in New York, as long as they appeared at a Manhattan immigration office.

Leaving her appointment not long ago with a tracking device strapped to her leg, Ms. Meza hugged her daughters and sipped a soda offered by a friend. “It’s just part of the process,” she said. “My life begins from here.”

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