Detention Watch Network deplores anti-immigrant hearing

For Immediate Release

March 28, 2012

Contact: Emily Tucker, 202-393-1044, Ext 223, etucker@detentionwatchnetwork.org

    Silky Shah, 347-243-8743, sshah@detentionwatchnetwork.org

Washington, D.C. – While nearly 400,000 immigrants are incarcerated each year in an expanding archipelago of punitive and life-threatening detention centers, Congress continues to deny the moral and human rights crisis caused by mass detention. Wednesday afternoon Congressman Lamar Smith (R-TX) will convene a hearing of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Policy and Enforcement to continue his callous assault on immigrants and immigrant communities. The pretext for the hearing is the recent announcement by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that it will implement a revised version of its internal guidelines on the treatment of immigrants detained in ICE facilities. Detention Watch Network (DWN) condemns this latest round of anti-immigrant showboating by the Republicans and calls upon Congress to repeal mandatory detention, which is the root cause of mass immigrant incarceration.

“ICE’s new guidelines are intended to help address well-documented civil and human rights abuses that continue to occur daily in immigration detention, abuses that Smith apparently finds laughable,” said Andrea Black, Executive Director of DWN. “The very title of Wednesday’s hearing, ‘Holiday on ICE,’ mocks the seriousness of the suffering that immigrants in detention experience and mischaracterizes ICE’s new guidelines as mandating cushy resort-like conditions for those in detention.”

Far from being “hospitality guidelines,” as Congressmen Smith has called them, the 2011 Performance Based National Detention Standards (PBNDS) fall short of providing the necessary protection for immigrants held by ICE. In 2009, after a scathing government report outlined the inhumane conditions and rampant fiscal waste in detention, the Obama Administration promised to address these problems in the only way possible: by moving away from locking up immigrants and towards new models of custody and supervision that reflect the “civil” nature of immigration proceedings. So far that has not happened. If anything, ICE’s latest standards represent the abandonment of that goal. In the 2011 PBNDS, like the 2000 and 2008 versions, ICE continues to rely on penal standards rather than re-envision a truly civil system. As a result, immigrants will continue to be held behind bars, often hundreds of miles from their families, with minimal if any access to legal services, vulnerable to the same substandard medical care and abuses that have prevailed in detention to date. Most important, the PBNDS are not enforceable or even legally binding, and there is no independent oversight of facilities to ensure compliance.

But Congressman Smith and the Republicans have chosen to grandstand and lambast the new guidelines as coddling immigrants and increasing detention costs, rather than looking for real solutions to address the detention crisis head-on.

“If Lamar Smith is concerned about taxpayers footing the bill for detention, he should consider dedicating his energies to the repeal of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), the legislation he helped pass 16 years ago, which has been almost single-handedly responsible for the tripling of the number of people in detention,” said Black. “As a result of IIRIRA’s draconian mandatory detention provisions, the government needlessly incarcerates thousands of immigrants every year to the tune of $122 per person per day.”

Detention Watch Network calls on Congress to pass legislation to reduce the unnecessary, inhumane, and wasteful detention of immigrants. Until Congress acts, the Obama Administration must renew its commitment to urgent reform of the detention system by closing the most egregious detention facilities, by aggressively working with non-governmental organizations to promote community-based supervision programs for those in proceedings, and by pushing for legal regulation and third party oversight of the remaining detention centers.