/ARTS WEEKLY/BOOKS: U.S. Immigration Jails Have Long History of Abuse

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

William Fisher

NEW YORK, Oct 11 2004 (IPS) - “Long before Abu Ghraib, and even before Sep. 11, detainee in America’s immigration prisons were being stripped, beaten, and sexually abused.”

This is the view of author Mark Dow, whose book, ‘American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons’, paints a chilling picture of the highly secretive prison system run by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS). CIS was formerly known as the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS), and is now part of the Department of Homeland Security.

Dow, a journalist and former teacher at the INS detention centre in Miami, has spent years interviewing inmates, guards and officials at that and many other INS/CIS centres. He charges that detainees “are being routinely deprived of the most basic civil rights.”

Dow writes, “In its new home at the DHS, the secretive immigration prison world is likely to be pulled even further from public scrutiny.”

“That high levels of government are aware of the situation is clear,” he adds. “FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) whistle-blower agent Colleen Rowley expressed concern over the pressure from FBI offices to round up Arabs in order to fill the detention centres.”

Since 9/11, U.S. immigration policy has become far more stringent, targeting Arab, Muslim and South Asian foreign nationals, according to Dow. “Attorney General John Ashcroft has repeatedly used the term ‘terrorist’ to describe detainees, “when he was certainly in a position to know that they were not terrorists,” he writes.

In fact, Dow adds, most had overstayed their visas, which could get them deported, but which is not a crime.

Dow points out that immigration law is not part of the U.S. criminal justice system – which gives the INS virtually unlimited scope to hold people indefinitely, without charge, without access to attorneys and without public disclosure.

‘American Gulag’, published by University of California Press, describes a chamber of horrors that followed the 9/11 tragedy and the sweeping round-up of Arabs and Muslims.

A Palestinian man is transferred from jail to jail to keep him from contacting the media. INS officials tell him that a condition of his release is that he cannot speak to reporters about his case. If he does, they will lock him up again.

An Egyptian man is confined for two months before being allowed to call a lawyer. He is given no soap or towels for a week and is interrogated. Correctional officers stomp on his bare feet, according to the man.

A Pakistani in the import-export business overstays his five-year renewable visa. Three weeks after 9/11, 25 FBI agents come to his home. With minimal investigation, Dow writes, the ‘case’ “evaporated”; the man’s most serious breach of the law was altering the no-work line of his Social Security card.

When the FBI finishes interviewing him, he is told, “We have no problem with you. Now it’s up to the INS if they want to take you or not.”

The INS arrests him. They tell his wife she could expect a call from her husband in four to six hours, and that he would probably be freed on bail and might even get a ‘green card’ (permanent residency).

Instead, bail was never set. Dow writes: “For the first two months, (he) was moved each week to a new cell, handcuffed and shackled to be moved those few feet. After three weeks, he was allowed to make his first legal phone call. He was kept inside his cell for 24 hours day.”

The man was transferred first to Manhattan and then to Brooklyn. When he arrived in Brooklyn, Dow alleges, “seven or eight correctional officers threw him out of the van, dragged him across the floor, and then threw him against a wall … with their full power.”

The man was charged with altering his social security card, pled guilty and was sentenced to time served. He was deported to Pakistan in mid-April 2002, after four months and two days in custody, during which he was denied access to legal help and to his family for weeks.

Dow concludes that the administration of U.S. President George W Bush has “exploited our national trauma to extend law enforcement authority, as the long-standing biases within the Justice Department against Muslims and Arabs became politically correct.”

None of this, he adds, “has anything to do with immigration … It’s simply the result of excessive authority and an obsession with secrecy.”

Almost as disturbing is the veil of secrecy surrounding the detention centres, Dow writes.

In his investigations, he says, he was often prevented from interviewing prisoners, accessing medical records, and looking at immigration guidelines.

Dow concluded that the “INS answers to no one. It eschews formal regulations. There are no monitors or independent watchdogs. Most of what we know about these prisons comes from a handful of journalists, working tirelessly to make public what the INS tries to hide.”

According to the book, the immigration agency today holds some 23,000 people in detention on a given day and detains about 200,000 annually. Prisoners are held in the INS’s service processing centres, in local jails, facilities owned and operated by private companies and others run by the Bureau of Prisons, including federal penitentiaries.

“Wherever they are held,” Dow writes, “INS prisoners are ‘administrative detainees’; they are not serving a sentence … immigration detainees can be held for days, months, or years.”

“Detainees who came (to the United States) from Cuba during the 1980 ‘Mariel boatlift’ are still in detention, despite a U.S. Supreme Court ruling against indefinite detention,” the book adds. The reason given by INS is that Cuba has refused to take them back.

The post-9/11 immigration crackdown did not go unnoticed by private prison suppliers, adds Dow.

For example, “The chairman of the Houston-based Cornell Companies spoke candidly in a conference call with other investors: ‘It can only be good, with the focus on people that are illegal and also of Middle Eastern descent’,” he said.

“In the U.S. there are over 900,000 undocumented individuals of Middle Eastern descent,” added the chairman. That’s half of our entire (U.S.) prison population … The federal business is the best business for us … and the events of Sep. 11 (are) increasing that level of business.”