New York Times (Editorial)
May 15, 2015
Of
all the malfunctioning parts in the country’s broken-down immigration
machinery, probably the most indefensible is the detention system.
This
is the vast network of jails and prisons where suspected immigration
violators are held while awaiting a hearing and possible deportation.
Immigrant detainees are
not criminal defendants or convicts serving sentences. They are locked
up merely because the government wants to make sure they show up in
immigration court.
Detention
is intended to help enforce the law, but, in practice, the system
breeds cruelty and harm, and squanders taxpayer money. It denies its
victims due process of
law, punishing them far beyond the scale of any offense. It shatters
families and traumatizes children. As a system of mass incarceration —
particularly of women and children fleeing persecution in Central
America — it is immoral.
The
director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, Sarah Saldaña,
on Wednesday announced a set of reforms to the family detention system.
Federal officials do
this from time to time after advocates and journalists expose — as they
have for years — the abuses within detention walls. Ms. Saldaña says
she wants the “optimal level of care” for detainees, and so she will
create a committee and give lawyers more working
space to meet with clients, among other things.
But
committees and cubicles won’t touch the heart of the problem. It’s time
to end mass detention, particularly of families. Shut the system down,
and replace it with
something better.
A
powerful case for ending immigration detention, along with an array of
alternatives, is made in a new report from the United States Conference
of Catholic Bishops and
the Center for Migration Studies. It traces how the system has grown
immense, from housing 85,000 detainees in 1995 to more than 440,000 in
2013. There are many reasons for this growth, including state and local
immigration crackdowns, federal dragnet programs
like Secure Communities and the flood of money from Congress to the
private prison operators that have profited so fruitfully from immigrant
criminalization. The system has gotten more sprawling and
scandal-prone, but reforms don’t stick. The notorious Hutto
family detention center in Texas, where children went to classes in
prison scrubs, stopped housing families. But the surge of families at
the border seeking refuge last year created a political crisis and led
the department to resurrect family detention, with
new centers with thousands of prison beds for mothers and children.
The
report points out that the detention system has become an enormous
funnel for the crushingly overburdened, underfunded immigration courts,
which receive a meager $300
million from Congress each year, one-sixtieth of what ICE and Customs
and Border Protection get. By the end of March, nearly 442,000 cases
were pending before immigration judges, with an average case waiting 599
days to be heard, and delays in some courts
of more than two years. This is not efficiency or due process.
Ending
mass detention would not mean allowing unauthorized immigrants to
disappear. Supervised or conditional release, ankle bracelets and other
monitoring technologies,
plus community-based support with intensive case management, can work
together to make the system more humane. But neither Congress nor the
Homeland Security Department has embraced these approaches, which would
be far cheaper than locking people up.
No
one can expect such reforms soon from Congress, which by law requires
the Department of Homeland Security to maintain, at all times, 34,000
detention beds, no matter
the need. But the problem has to be acknowledged: the inhumanity and
wasted expense of imprisoning people who could be working and providing
for their families. The American immigration system should reflect our
values. The detention system does not do that.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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