RIGHTS-US: Detained Immigrants Suffer in Local Jails

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Sep 9 1998 (IPS) - More than 60 percent of illegal or undocumented immigrants detained by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) were housed in local jails where conditions and treatment of inmates fell short of international standards, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Wednesday.

In many cases, immigrants, including asylum seekers, were mixed with convicted criminals in these facilities and sometimes had been subjected to physical abuse and mistreatment, HRW said in an 84-page report called ‘Locked Away.’

“The INS is shipping off immigrants to local jails where they don’t belong,” said Kenneth Roth, HRW’s executive director. “This practice violates basic international standards and must stop.”

In response, the INS welcomed the new report, emphasising that much of the problem was due to “the explosive growth” in the number of immigrant detainees – a “direct result, ” it said, “of our enhanced enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws.”

INS Commissioner Doris Meissner stressed in a statement that her agency was “deeply committed to providing a safe, secure and humane environment for all detainees, regardless of where they are being held.”

“Ideally,” she said, “we would like to house all detainees in INS-run facilities because they are the ones over which we have the greatest control of conditions. This is not a viable option, however, given the growth in demand for bed space and budgetary constraints we face.”

The report, the product of 18 months’ work, including interviews with more than 200 detainees in 14 jails across the country, detailed poor conditions and mistreatment to which the immigrants had been subjected. In was compiled after interviews with INS officials, jail staff, immigration judges, and attorneys, as well as hundreds of letters received from detainees by HRW.

“Let me inform you that I was violently beaten today…at 10:30 this morning,” reads one letter from a Congolese immigrant detained in a Virginia jail. “(The officer) hit my head into the wall many times and threw me forcefully on the floor…here it is normal for officers to beat detainees without reason.”

The INS can order the detention of would-be immigrants for several different reasons. Many are arrested at their port of entry into the United States for improper documentation; while others have been picked up by the U.S. Border Patrol or by INS agents after raids on workplaces. Still others have been convicted for felony crimes in the United States and are awaiting deportation to their homelands as required by US law.

Currently there are about 16,000 INS detainees scattered around the country, only 40 percent of whom are being held in INS holding facilities. The rest are transferred to local jails or privately- owned facilities used by local jurisdictions.

Of these, almost 60 percent face deportation for criminal offenses, and another 35 percent or more had been picked up for lack of documentation. The report’s author, Jennifer Bailey, told IPS she estimated the percentage of asylum-seekers at between five and seven percent. The INS itself does not differentiate between asylum-seekers and other non-criminal immigrants in detention.

International refugee law provides that asylum seekers, who often have special legal and psychological needs, should be given special treatment and detained only under the most exceptional circumstances. In no circumstances, according to HRW, should they be locked up in local jails.

These jails often made money by holding detainees for the INS, which paid them an average of 58 dollars a day. Costs are often substantially less, with some jails failing even to provide detainees with underwear or shoes. In some jurisdictions, local taxes actually were reduced because of the profit made by the county jail from holding immigrants.

HRW found that the INS generally had failed to provide oversight or insist on humane conditions and treatment in the local jails which it contracts to hold detainees. Once committed to such facilities, detainees received only infrequent contact with the INS, even though the agency remains their legal responsibility, the report said.

Abuses ranged from lack of adequate medical care, decent food, and privacy to the imposition of disciplinary sanctions applied to the general criminal population. “We don’t treat INS detainees any diffeerently than we do the regular inmates,” notes one local sheriff in New Orleans quoted in the report.

More serious abuses also were reported. In one case, now under investigation, INS detainees held in the Jackson County jail in Florida alleged that they were administered electric shocks in July 1998.

In another case, nine guards pleaded guilty or were convicted earlier this year for physically abusing INS detainees held in Union County Jail in New Jersey, while INS detainees in jails in California,Louisiana, and New Hampshire have held hunger strikes to protest alleged mistreatment.

HRW also found that INS often transferred detainees to local jails based on their cost and bed space, as opposed to the immigrants’ needs to remain in close proximity to their families or lawyers. The result is that some detainees taken into custody at their workplace in New York City, for example, were sent to jails in Louisiana more than 1500 kms away.

In many cases, detainees had been transferred from one jail to another without warning or justification. “Many detainees interviewed by (HRW) were confused, frustrated, or scared by their situation,” the report noted, adding that prolonged detention and sudden transfers were exacting “severe emotional distress.”

Some detainees cannot be deported because they are stateless, or because neither their own country nor any other will accept them. Their confinement amounts to an “open-ended criminal sentence,” according to HRW.

The report noted that the INS had begun to implement new detention standards for its holding facilities but called for much greater scrutiny by the agency of conditions in non-INS facilities.

For its part, the INS defended the practice of housing criminal immigrants with the local jail population and insisted that it requires all local facilities in which immigrants are detained to meet state and local standards. “If a facility does not meet our standards and does not take necessary corrective action, we will not use it,” Meissner said.