|| LIRS || Advocacy Update -- March 2007

Advocacy Update
March 2007

U.S. Immigration Detention System Gets Failing Grades
By Matt Wilch, LIRS Senior Counsel for Policy and Advocacy

Dominica is a Colombian asylum seeker detained with her two children at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, Texas. Nelly is nine years old and Alice is three. At night they all sleep together in the bottom bunk of their jail cell because they are afraid. Nelly says, “If you are not good, they will take you away from your mom.”

Dominica is almost seven months pregnant. The doctor has told her for months that her baby is underweight. He has told her she needs to eat more. But she says she can’t. “The food doesn’t work here. I cannot eat it.”

Dominica requested parole over two months ago. She still has not received a response to her request. She is afraid that she will have her baby in jail.

This story, excerpted from the opening page of Locking Up Family Values: The Detention of Immigrant Families, is typical of countless tales of detained families. The report, released by LIRS and the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children on February 22, gives the public and policymakers an opportunity to hear the stories of families like Dominica’s and get a picture of the harsh conditions they experience in U.S. immigration detention.
With the opening of Hutto, family detention has become a systemwide practice, and as many as 600 parents and children can be in detention on any given day. These families are held in prisonlike settings, deprived of the right to live as a family unit, denied adequate medical and mental health care, and subject to a discipline regime that undermines the health of children and families.

Written by Emily Butera, policy advocate for LIRS, and Michelle Brané, who directs the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children’s detention and asylum program, the report recommends extensive systemic reforms, including the following:

Discontinue family detention in penal institutions, and close the Hutto facility.
Set a clear policy preference for releasing families from detention through bond, parole or alternatives to detention.
Apply detention only when absolutely necessary, and only in homelike settings.
Provide legal orientation to those in family detention.

Two other recent studies also give the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) failing grades for its ever-expanding detention system that holds over 230,000 people in any given year. In an audit of five facilities, the DHS Office of Inspector General reported inadequate access to telephones, legal materials and medical care. Moreover, it found that DHS’s system for monitoring standards is insufficient. And the bipartisan congressional U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom recently issued a report card to DHS enforcement officials, noting 12 categories in which DHS has failed to protect asylum seekers from improper detention and deportation. The report card was a follow-up to reform recommendations made in a 2005 study by the commission.

LIRS’s work on Locking Up Family Values is another step on our ongoing journey toward a more just, humane and welcoming immigration system in the United States.