Chhean was four years old when he moved to the U.S. His impoverished and traumatised parents ended up in the margins of society. "Life was hard. We were a minority in a minority.”

By Pascal Laureyn
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia, Jan 18 2018 (IPS)

Three friends are relaxing in a quiet courtyard. They speak English with a strong American accent and talk about their disadvantaged neighborhoods. Their tattoos depict a rough life on the street. One of them calls Massachusetts home, while the others grew up in Georgia.

But home is far away, on the other side of the world. They have been living in Cambodia for a number of years, against their will. They were deported by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to their country of origin, one completely unknown to them. Most have no or little knowledge of the Cambodian language, Khmer."Officially I'm Cambodian, but I don't feel that way. My home country is the U.S. but they don't want me there anymore." --Jock, 49

These American Cambodians belong to a group of more than 500 ‘deportees’ who have been sent back since 2002. They have lived the biggest part of their lives in the U.S. Their parents fled in the eighties, when Cambodia was torn apart by the genocidal Khmer Rouge and the following civil war. Between 1975 (start of the Khmer Rouge) and 1994 (end of the civil war) 158,000 Cambodians were allowed into the U.S.

“I was born in Thailand, in a refugee camp. Before I was deported, I had never visited Cambodia,” explains Chhean* (35). “I didn’t know nothing of this country. I didn’t speak Khmer. I grew in America, I am an American.”

Chhean was four years old when he moved to the U.S. His impoverished and traumatised parents ended up on the margins of society. “Life was hard. We were a minority in a minority. It was a tough time trying to survive, there was a lot of violence. I had to protect myself. That’s how I ended up in a gang.”

“I made bad choices. I was a threat to society. I can’t make no excuses, I can only blame myself.” After Chhean finished his time in prison, he was deported by ICE.

Five Years for a Fistfight

Legal residents in the U.S. who have no citizenship and get convicted for a crime can be sent back to their country of origin. No appeal is possible. The nature of the crime is not taken into account. “Immigration came to my home to detain me,” remembers Jock* (49). “I once got a conviction for a fistfight at school. I was 18. Twenty years later I get deported for a fistfight.”

Jock recounts what happened to him with disbelief. “I have spent five years in a cell, they thought I was an escape risk. Five years! For a fistfight 20 years ago! For years I have been begging them: ‘Please deport me’.” His friend Chhean was also incarcerated before his flight to Cambodia, but ‘only’ for two years.

Jock has been living in Cambodia for six years. He didn’t know the country at all. “I cried a long time when I arrived here. I thought my life was over. Someone who robs a bank is released after 15 years in prison and can start over again. I can’t.”

The deported Cambodians have trouble finding work. This country has a high rate of unemployment. They speak the local language badly and lack the necessary skills. Cambodia has an agrarian economy, but they are city boys. They are also met with distrust. They dress and behave differently. In Cambodian culture, their tattoos are considered signs of serious crimes.

“I worked the first six years in the rice fields. That is simple but hard work. I couldn’t find anything else,” says a deported Cambodian who wishes to stay anonymous. Last year, he acquired a certificate to teach English. He works in a classroom now.

“In the U.S. I worked in construction, but here it makes very little money. So I became a farmer,” explains Jock. “When I’m picking mangos, I can stop thinking.”

Chhean has familiar problems. “When I arrived here, I suffered from panic attacks. And even now I’m not adapted yet. Officially I’m Cambodian, but I don’t feel that way. My home country is the U.S. but they don’t want me there anymore. Now, Cambodia is my ‘land of opportunity’. I have to make the best of it. But I don’t plan big things for my life anymore.”

Lasting Trauma

The U.S. government wants Cambodia to take back more of its ‘lost’ children. That is required by international law when Cambodians are deported. But the government in Phnom Penh is hesitant. These citizens have no sense of the culture and can never really integrate into society. Some have serious mental illnesses, says Jock.

“I know a mental ‘deportee’ in my neighborhood. He walks all day in the middle of the street. He doesn’t realize where he is, he thinks he is still in the U.S. They shouldn’t bring those people here.”

The families that found a new home in the U.S. in the eighties brought few belongings but many war traumas. “My parents survived famine and mass murder,” says the teacher. “They don’t talk about it much. They try to forget.”

Research by the Leitner Center in New York showed that 62 percent of Cambodian refugees in California suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Fifty-two percent had severe depression. Many were in a state of shock and not able to take care of themselves or their children. They ended up in poor neighborhoods where crime was the norm.

For these specific circumstances, psychiatrists and lawyers say that refugees from Cambodia deserve special treatment. But President Donald Trump wants to increase the deportations. Some 1,900 are eligible for deportation, says ICE. In the “Kingdom of Wonder” – as Cambodians call their country – many refugees who return are confronted with alcohol and drug abuse. Many suffer from depression, and at least six deported Cambodians have committed suicide.

“I miss my three children (24, 18 and 13),” says Jock. “I call them once a week. I don’t tell them how I’m doing here. I don’t want them to worry.”

The teacher has a child in the U.S. as well. “I talk to her with Messenger. I can’t do much more. I can miss her as much as I like, it will not change a thing.”

Once deported, there is no way back. They can never visit the country where they grew up ever again. “Hell yeah! I would go back immediately if I could. Not tomorrow but today,” shouts Chhean jokingly.

His friend Jock has another view. “Once you have a criminal record in the U.S. they will never leave you in peace. I don’t want to go back. Period.”

*Last names omitted to protect the sources’ privacy.

A 16-year-old Guatemalan migrant heading to the U.S. Credit: Wilfredo Díaz/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jun 30 2014 (IPS)

Facing what some have dubbed a refugee crisis, President Barack Obama is asking for new powers that would significantly speed up the deportation process for tens of thousands of unaccompanied children recently arrived at the southern U.S. border.

In a letter to lawmakers on Monday, the president requested some two billion dollars in increased funding, particularly to “surge” law-enforcement response. He also asked that laws be changed to allow federal agents to interview and deport within a matter of days many of 52,000 unaccompanied minors that have arrived in recent months from Central America, particularly from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador."We could be sending back hundreds to thousands of children who will be in danger in their home countries." -- WOLA's Adam Isacson

While the president noted that “appropriate care” would be offered to those who have been apprehended, he also made clear that a central focus of new U.S. policy on the issue will involve stemming the sudden influx.

The U.S. will take “aggressive steps to … deter both adults and children from making this dangerous journey, increase capacity for enforcement and removal proceedings, and quickly return unlawful migrants to their home countries,” the president stated in the letter.

Indeed, the letter’s repeated use of the words “aggressive” and “deterrence” underscore not only the politics involved in the new policymaking, but also the siege-like mentality to which the president is now giving voice. The request came just hours before Obama announced that a broad attempt to overhaul the United States’ immigration system had failed, at least for this year, in the face of ardent political polarisation.

Congress is currently out of session, so the president stated that full details on his request would come after lawmakers reconvene in mid-July.

“What I don’t see here is any change in strategy – just a doubling-down on what they’ve done before. A lot of this looks like it will be aimed at helping those in charge of deporting people do their job more quickly,” Adam Isacson, a senior associate for regional security policy at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a think tank here, told IPS.

“That has some form of deterrent message, but the danger is we could be sending back hundreds to thousands of children who will be in danger in their home countries. It doesn’t appear that there will be any increase in [funding for] asylum lawyers.”

Weakening due process

Immigration advocates responded to the president’s proposal with immediate concern, warning that the move would force potentially endangered children into an untenable situation.

“Children will arrive traumatised, hungry, unable to speak the language, and yet they will be expected to articulate some fear of return if they’re to be allowed to come in to the U.S. That is grossly unfair and fails to recognise their capacities as children to negotiate these processes,” Wendy Young, the president of Kids in Need of Defense, a group that offers legal assistance in such situations, told journalists Monday.

“These children will have no access to counsel – nobody to advise them. It takes [Young’s office] hours and even days to understand the proceedings they’re facing, but to do this at the border with no assistance is simply impossible.”

Since the mid-1990s, federal officials have been unable to “fast track” deportations for migrant children from anywhere except for Mexico and Canada. The president’s proposal would now do away with this safeguard, to extend this authority to cover migrants from non-contiguous countries.

Yet advocates say nothing has changed with regard to the law’s original intent.

The president’s proposal would roll back the due process rights of the most vulnerable members of our society,” Marielena Hincapie, the executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, a legal advocacy group, said in a press call following the president’s announcement.

“If Congress were to authorise these changes, the administration would be shunting children right back to the dangers the have escaped without having the opportunity to present their case in court.”

Migrants vs refugees

At the heart of the U.S. policy debate over the ongoing influx of minors is a war of contextualisation. Are children being pulled towards the United States due to lax U.S. policy or are they being pushed out of their home countries due to an increase in violence?

How lawmakers and the broader public analyse that question influences views on whether the government should be treating the issue as a migration problem or, as some are suggesting, a refugee crisis.

“The administration clearly thinks the [motivator] is something other than violence, or they wouldn’t be proposing new changes in law. But we found that kids are fleeing violence and fleeing for their lives,” Kevin Appleby, director of migration policy at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said Monday, discussing findings by his office from November.

Appleby suggests that organised crime networks in several Central American countries have significantly increased their influence over the past half-decade.

“Children are being specifically targeted by organised crime networks … at the threat of death,” he said. “This is what is really pushing these children more.”

Last week, the United Nations Refugee Agency offered testimony to the U.S. Congress on similar findings.

“Unaccompanied children from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras have multiple reasons for leaving, but fear of violence is the tragic, common factor,” Leslie E. Velez, a U.N. protection officer, told lawmakers, according to prepared remarks.

“Shockingly, 58 percent of the children cited violence in their home countries as at least one key reason for leaving. This number varied by country: El Salvador (72%), Honduras (57%) and Guatemala (38%).”

Velez also warned that unaccompanied children expressing such fears cannot be sent back to their home countries without “access to proper asylum procedures”. (The U.N. was unable to comment on President Obama’s new proposal by deadline.)

Root causes

A relatively unaddressed question remains how the United States will work to address these root causes of the new migration flows. Recent appropriations bills in Congress have significantly increased security aid for Central America, though it is not yet clear how this will be spent.

“My fear is that you’ll see a big build-up of border security capacities in those countries, adding new weaponry and lethal skills to unreformed security forces in a very non-transparent way,” WOLA’s Isacson says.

“We’ve seen it repeatedly in the past – in an atmosphere of impunity, adding more boots on the ground can be disastrous.”

President Obama has also directed two federal agencies to come up with new recommendations for dealing with the recent influx of child migrants. Those studies are expected by the end of the summer.

Gay and transsexual immigrants who enter the U.S. detention system face high levels of sexual abuse, new research warns, at times leading them to decide to return to their home countries rather than stay to fight a legal battle.

Activists say instances of LGBT immigrants who prefer being deported rather than endure abuse in U.S. detention facilities are quite common. Credit: Bigstock

Advocates say that, although sexual assault and violence are widespread in all types of prisons, LGBT immigrants are particularly vulnerable.

“One of my clients, a transgender Mexican woman detained in a facility in New Jersey, after months of mistreatment actually ended up accepting her deportation, rather than endure her situation,” Clement Lee, a detention staff attorney at Immigration Equality, an advocacy group representing LGBT immigrants in court, told IPS.

“I told her, ‘I can win your case, but it will take several months,’ but because she was poor she could not pay to get out of detention. In the facility, people were calling her ‘maricon’, Spanish for faggot, and she seriously feared for her physical safety.”

Clement notes that his clients often come from countries that are dangerous for them. He cites instances in which transgender individuals would be raped and assailed “for violating gender norms”, or instances in which some of his gay clients have been subjected to “conversion therapies” under which community and family members attempt to change their sexual orientation.

Jamaica is the country from which most of his clients have fled, “which is surprising,” he says, “given that country’s image as a beach paradise.”

According to other immigration activists closely involved in LGBT cases, instances of LGBT immigrants who prefer being deported rather than endure abuse in U.S. detention facilities are quite common.

Karen Zwick, a managing attorney at the National Immigrant Justice Centre (NIJC), says that the decision to accept deportation may not be a rational one, because these immigrants may be underestimating the risks they would face going back to their home countries.

“They can’t see beyond the terrible situation they’re in,” she told IPS.

According to a new report, released this week by the Centre for American Progress (CAP), a progressive think tank here, as many as 34,000 immigrants are detained each day by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in over 250 detention facilities across the country.

According to the study, which is based on evidence gathered through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, detained LGBT immigrants are far more vulnerable to abuse than other immigrants.

“What we tried to do with this report is to paint a clearer picture of what is going on inside these detention centres,” Sharita Gruberg, a policy analyst at CAP and the author of the report, told IPS. “And what we’ve found is that, in some centres, guards were still using homophobic language against LGBT detainees.”

But LGBT detainees say they face far worse problems than abusive language, reporting instead physical and sexual abuse by both fellow detainees and guards.

15 times more vulnerable

Because of internal regulations, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not keep data on sexual orientation or gender identity of detainees. But the information obtained through the FOIA request suggests that LGBT detainees are “15 times more likely to be sexually assaulted than the general population”.

ICE, the agency in charge of immigration detention facilities across the United States, has also been at the centre of an investigation by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), an official watchdog, into the agency’s sexual abuse allegations.

According to a GAO report released Nov. 20, nearly 40 percent of total allegations were never acted upon “because ICE field office officials did not report them to … headquarters.”

“ICE takes the health, safety and welfare of those in our care very seriously,” an ICE official, who commented on the condition of anonymity, told IPS by e-mail. “The agency is continually working to ensure these reforms are consistently implemented at all facilities that house ICE detainees.”

The official also noted that in 2009 the agency initiated “fundamental detention reforms, including the development of new detention standards to protect vulnerable detainees.”

Yet advocates suggest an underlying problem with the way the U.S. immigration system functions.

“We know that the immigration detention system has extended vastly over the last 20 years, as we spend billions of dollars on immigration detention every year,” Harper Jean Tobin, the director of policy at the National Center for Transgender Equality, an advocacy group here, told IPS.

Tobin refers to the congressionally mandated requirement that ICE detain 34,000 immigrants at all times, also known as the “bed mandate”. According to the NIJC, this mandate “prevents ICE officers from exercising discretion and expanding more efficient alternatives to detention … that would allow individuals who pose no risk to public safety to be released back to their families.”

In the past, U.S. legislators have touched upon the issues surrounding mistreatment of detainees in immigration facilities. In 2003, Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), which sought to protect individuals against sexual abuse in confinement settings, including in immigrant detention centres.

But according to the new Centre for American Progress findings, PREA may have only partially addressed the issue of sexual abuse in detention facilities. It points out that ICE created its own standards on sexual assault in detention facilities, which are less comprehensive than those mandated by the Department of Justice in 2012.

Last June, Rep. Trey Growdy of South Carolina, the chair of the House Immigration Subcommittee, introduced the Strengthen and Fortify Enforcement Act (SAFE), which was later approved by the Judiciary Committee. Yet critics note that, if approved, this bill would not only do “nothing to resolve the legal status of 11 million undocumented immigrants” but would also “create an environment of rampant racial profiling and unconstitutional detentions.”

Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio used chain gangs and a "tent city" in his crusade against undocumented immigrants in the state. He has been sued more than 2,000 times and is now is overseen by a federal monitor. Credit:Valeria Fernandez/IPS

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Oct 29 2013 (IPS)

Saul Merlos is an undocumented migrant from El Salvador. About two years ago, he was living and working in the southern U.S. city of New Orleans.

“One day, our employers told us we were going to get paid, but instead they sent immigration,” he told IPS. “I was a witness to the raid, where they got 55 of us.”"People are disappearing on their way to drop their children off to school." -- Jennifer Rosenbaum of the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice

Merlos said the raid was violent. “I was a witness that there was a pregnant woman with her daughter, but they didn’t care,” he said. “They yelled at her, and at all of us, that this was their country and asked us what we were doing in their country. They hit some of us, and didn’t even allow me to use the restroom.”

Speaking to IPS on the sidelines of a hearing at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) Monday, Merlos added that the immigration officers did not read the workers their rights or inform them of what to expect from the detention process.

As momentum builds for U.S. immigration reform after months of political deadlock, a group of NGOs and immigration lawyers are warning that the U.S. system is currently leading to widespread violations of immigrants’ human rights.

The accusations come as the IACHR, the region’s pre-eminent rights forum, began an investigation into the issue on Monday. At that hearing, held at the 35-member Organisation of American States (OAS) headquarters in Washington, advocates questioned the rights standards used by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers (ICE).

According to the witnesses, ICE officers may have violated immigrants’ basic human rights by indefinitely separating them from their U.S. citizen children, in addition to having detained them without appropriate constitutional protections.  

Family focus

At Monday’s hearing, multiple advocacy groups alleged that ICE detention practices have failed to account for the human rights of parties involved when officers use what is known as their prosecutorial discretion. This refers to a federal agency’s authority, in immigration cases, to decide whether to begin removal proceedings against undocumented migrants.

Saul Merlos has been in the United States for 18 years, and has a 13-year old daughter who is a U.S. citizen. A favourable exercise of prosecutorial discretion would avoid him being deported Dec. 17, 2013.

“All we want is for the U.S. government to stop this because they are separating our families,” Merlos said.

The place of human rights in immigration proceedings has emerged as a key point of discussion in recent months in situations in which the children are U.S. citizens but at least one of the parents is deported because of their illegal status. Most of the time, this means that families are separated for indefinite amounts of time.

“We need to realise the serious concerns raised by the way people are being arrested and the way the U.S. government is pursuing these prosecutions.” Jennifer Rosenbaum, the legal director at the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice (NOWCRJ), an advocacy group, told IPS.

“The government’s failure to use its prosecutorial discretion has led to families being separated and to children being separated from their parents,” she said.

NOWCRJ and several other groups are calling on U.S. ICE officers to consider rights norms when detaining illegal immigrants or considering initiating removal proceedings against them. According to data presented before the IACHR this week, U.S. immigration agencies have largely failed to use their prosecutorial discretion, choosing instead to deport thousands of illegal immigrants with no regard to their family ties.

Yet others raise separate concerns about the possible implications of more lenient behaviour on the part of ICE.

“We should remember that the government isn’t actually separating families, as the parent is choosing to leave his or her child behind,” Jon Feere, a legal policy analyst at the Centre for Immigration Studies (CIS), a non-profit organisation here, told IPS.

“Moreover, it probably shouldn’t be standard U.S. policy that people can’t be deported if they have children, because there’s the question of where exactly you’re going to draw the line. If the parent has engaged in criminal activity such as identity theft, or has broken serious laws, are we saying that the American victim is not going to receive any restitution just because that immigrant has a child?”

Rights advocates, on the other hand, suggest that in the majority of related cases, immigrants are stopped and detained unconstitutionally in the first place.

“In New Orleans and other communities across the country, people are disappearing on their way to drop their children off to school,” NOWCRJ’s Rosenbaum said. “Their apprehensions involve the inappropriate use of force and no due process protections. What is even more worrying is that most of them are the victims of outright racial profiling.”

In 2012, as many as 150,000 U.S. citizen children saw at least one of their parents get deported, according to information presented Monday at the IACHR.

The U.S. delegation to the OAS was not able to respond to the panel’s allegations.

“Unfortunately, the federal government shutdown prevented us from properly preparing for today’s hearings, as officers were not able to collect any evidence and witnesses,” Lawrence J. Gumbiner, the deputy U.S. permanent representative at the U.S. mission to the OAS said. Gumbiner later declined to comment further on the human rights implications of the allegations.

Washington gridlock

The hearing comes at a critical time, as Congress recently resumed its work on a proposal that would massively overhaul the United States’ sprawling immigration system. As the House of Representatives looks more closely at the comprehensive Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernisation Act approved by the Senate last June, President Obama urged all in Washington to come together and fix the country’s “broken immigration system”.

House Republicans oppose comprehensive immigration reform, which they worry would force them to accept some provisions that they dislike, particularly a contentious “path to citizenship” for the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants currently living in the United States. Instead, House conservatives have broken apart the many issues in play in the reform push and started passing piecemeal legislation.

“One of the major concerns is that yet another comprehensive immigration bill will only bring more illegal immigration in the country,” CIS’s Feere told IPS. “Right now, many Americans simply do not trust the president to actually go through with the bill’s enforcement provisions.”

U.S. officials on Wednesday issued strict new guidelines on the use of solitary confinement for detainees being held on immigration charges, the first federal policy decision following a strengthened public debate on the country’s unprecedented dependence on “segregated housing”.

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture says solitary confinement can have detrimental and irreversible effects on individuals’ mental health. Credit: Bigstock

In a stark turnaround, immigration detainees will only be allowed to be held in solitary confinement for two weeks, with extensions requiring the consent of upper-level officials. Detention facilities will also need to engage in regular reporting on instances in which detainees were held in isolation.

“Placement of detainees in segregated housing is a serious step that requires careful consideration of alternatives,” the policy directive, released Wednesday by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), states.

“ICE shall take additional steps to ensure appropriate review and oversight of decisions to retain detainees in segregated housing for over 14 days, or placements in segregation for any length of time in the case of detainees for whom heightened concerns exists based on known special vulnerabilities and other factors related to the detainee’s health or the risk of victimization.”

The guidance is being widely applauded by rights groups and appears to offer a strong new – and federally mandated – model.

“This is huge news and sets a wonderful federal precedent,” Rich Killmer, the executive director of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, a Washington advocacy group, told IPS.

“The fact that ICE is saying that immigration detainees can only be held in solitary confinement for 14 days – that underlines such a significant contrast with prisoners in some U.S. states being held in solitary for decades. We will certainly be using this in our advocacy work, as an example of what can be done.”

Still, some are expressing apprehension that ICE did not go far enough.

“We are concerned that the new directive does not eliminate the use of extended solitary confinement,” Mary Meg McCarthy, the executive director of the National Immigrant Justice Centre, said Thursday, “and that the reporting period exceeds the 15 days which the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture has observed can have detrimental and irreversible effects on individuals’ mental health.”

300+ per day

With some 80,000 people in solitary confinement throughout the various U.S. penal systems (as of the last available estimate, in 2005), the United States is a clear global outlier in terms of its active integration of segregated housing into its prison system, particularly since the late 1980s.

Why these numbers have climbed so high is unclear, but many experts feel that isolation is in part being used to deal with the overcrowding that has stretched federal prisons beyond their margins of safety. In such a situation, prison wardens may be choosing to put some vulnerable prisoners – those with mental health problems or even those who are underage – in segregated housing on the view that they will be safer.

While the new guidance is applicable only to those detained on immigration charges, it specifically disallows such use of solitary for a prisoner’s “own good”.

“In particular, placement in administrative segregation due to a special vulnerability should be used only as a last resort and when no other viable housing options exist,” the directive states.

“A detainee’s age, physical disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, race, or religion may not provide the sole basis for a decision to place the detainee in involuntary segregation.”

ICE runs or oversees some 250 detention centres. As part of President Barack Obama’s unprecedented crackdown on immigration-related crimes, last year the agency detained nearly 430,000 people, the highest ever.

Earlier this year, a major U.S. newspaper studied the 50 largest of these centres and concluded that an average of 300 people per day were being kept in solitary confinement just in those prisons. According to official data, half of those detainees were being kept for longer than 15 days, while some were being segregated for longer than 75 days.

Analysts estimated that around two-thirds of these detainees were being segregated due to minor infractions, while the rest were seen as either a threat or vulnerable, including due to sexuality or mental illness.

The subsequent political and public response led Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to order a review of ICE policies on segregated housing, resulting in Wednesday’s revised policies.

An ICE spokesperson told IPS that the review “included collecting quantitative and qualitative data on the use of segregation throughout ICE’s detention facilities; consultation with field office management and detention site managers; extra inspections of segregation facilities; discussions with a variety of stakeholders; and collaboration among many ICE and DHS offices on process improvements.”

Strengthened monitoring

Yet the ICE decision deals with only one part of the United States’ penal system. It does not directly affect the much-larger federal Bureau of Prisons or U.S. Marshals Service (the judicial system’s enforcement arm), both of which run parallel prison systems.

In June, the Government Accountability Office, the U.S. Congress’s independent watchdog, released an excoriating report on the Bureau of Prison’s failure to conduct adequate monitoring of isolation in its jails or its impact on prisoners.

“At the federal level, the Bureau of Prisons really hasn’t done more than begin to look at its use of solitary confinement, while the U.S. Marshals Service has neither been externally reviewed nor conducted an internal assessment,” Carl Takei, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, told IPS.

“The most praiseworthy aspects of the new ICE directive are its monitoring requirements – previously, the agency had very little idea of who was in solitary on a daily basis, how long or why. This move represents a significant step forward, and we’re hoping that these guidelines will be used as an example of the monitoring that the Bureau of Prisons should be doing.”

Other models have also recently arisen within the state prison systems, several of which are already drastically cutting down their use of solitary confinement.

Part of the motivation is financial, with squeezed coffers forcing state governments to figure out how to save money. Building and operating a solitary confinement unit costs 200 to 300 percent more than otherwise, while a 2007 state estimate found that it costs twice as much per year to keep a confined prisoner.

Part of this calculation also has to do with the effect of solitary confinement on the rest of society. Researchers have found, for instance, that prisoners who have been in segregated housing have higher recidivism rates than do other prisoners.

In a sign that the issue is gaining traction, a mass hunger strike in California’s prison system to protest against what inmates describe as the inhumane use of long-term solitary confinement ended Thursday after nearly two months, when two state lawmakers promised to hold hearings on the solitary confinement policy.

A 16-year-old Guatemalan migrant heading to the U.S. Credit: Wilfredo Díaz/IPS

By Peter Costantini
SEATTLE, Washington, Jul 29 2013 (IPS)

Puzzled by the immigration debate in the United States? Remember the Maginot Line.

That formidable French system of fortifications was built in the 1930s by André Maginot, the French minister of war, to guard against invasion from the east. Unfortunately, the Nazi blitzkrieg did an end run around it and overran France in six weeks.

Poor Maginot has become shorthand for “fighting the last war”. But at least he was trying to confront an existential and imminent threat.

The dreaded invasion of “illegal aliens”, against which our own Maginots have built hundreds of miles of border walls, called out the National Guard and scrambled the drones, actually peaked in 2000 and has long since been over.

Since the onset of the Great Recession, slightly more Mexicans have gone home to Mexico than have come here, and currently net migration appears to be near zero. The total population of undocumented immigrants is down about eight percent from its 2007 peak.

And ultimately, rather than devastation, the influx has brought modest but widespread benefits to our economy and society.

This exodus began in the mid-1990s, driven by powerful push and pull forces. In Mexico, the North American Free Trade Agreement drove many poor farmers off their lands, and the Peso Crisis of 1994 slashed real wages by some 20 percent. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy’s technology-fuelled upswing raised wages even for low-income workers.

Such an economic convergence is unlikely to occur again. The ups and downs of the Mexican economy are now more tightly coupled with ours. And declining birth rates In Mexico along with increasing education and job opportunities suggest that factors pushing emigrants towards El Norte may continue to shrink in the medium to long term.

But our Maginots are still hunkered in their bunkers, demanding measures that were never cost-effective and often counter-productive against a phantom enemy.

The U.S.-Mexico border runs nearly 2,000 miles, much of it across the Sonora Desert, between a very rich country and a moderately poor one. It can never be completely secured against migration no matter how much it’s militarised. We long ago reached the point of diminishing returns for throwing money, technology and manpower at it.

Maginot-isation has made crossing more grueling and dangerous, but nearly all those willing to keep trying get across eventually. Meanwhile, an estimated 30 to 40 percent of the undocumented simply entered legally and overstayed their visas. The only things that effectively deter determined immigrants are tight job markets here or improved ones back home.

The border enforcement surge has also had some nasty unintended consequences. The resulting tripling of the cost of a coyote (guide) has provided an effective subsidy to the drug cartels that control key areas of the border and prey on migrants. Heavy enforcement in populated areas has driven more crossings out into the desert wilderness, where outrageous numbers of people continue to perish.

The fortified border has also discouraged circular migration. Since the beginning, the dominant pattern has been to travel back and forth every year or two and eventually build a better life back home. Now growing costs and dangers have led more immigrants to stay longer in the U.S. or to settle here permanently and bring their families.

After over a century of rising and falling with the economic tides of both countries, unauthorised immigration is deeply embedded in both cultures and economies. It’s illegal in the same way that speeding or parking overtime is.

You can also look at it as a kind of international trespassing, and if you trespass for a benign purpose over a long enough time, U.S. common law allows you to acquire title through “adverse possession”.

As to economic effects, most labour economists have found overall benefits to U.S.-born workers, the broader economy and fiscal balances. Even for the six percent of native workers without a high-school diploma, most research shows close to a wash between negative and positive effects.

Most tellingly, organisations that actually represent low-wage workers, from labour unions to community groups, heavily favour bringing migrants out of the shadows into legality and working in solidarity with them, which would help raise the floor of the labour market.

So let’s see: if undocumented immigrants didn’t do anything wrong and they’re contributing to U.S. society, why is a pathway to citizenship an “amnesty”, as restrictionists often call it?

Rather than debating how many more miles of Maginot Line to build, we should be focusing on how best to integrate unauthorised immigrants into our economy while raising living standards for all low-income families.

Instead of lavishing corporate welfare on Boeing, Raytheon and Corrections Corporation of America to militarise the border and jail non-criminal immigrants, we would get far more bang for the buck by sending a small fraction of that money to immigrant-sending regions in Mexico and Central America for jobs, housing, education and health care. And if we wanted to be over-the-top sensible, we could spend the rest of it on the same things here at home.

Unauthorised immigration to the U.S. is very unlikely to reach the levels of 10 to 15 years ago again. But if it picks up once more in a genuine economic recovery, immigration reform must grant enough visas to unskilled workers to meet the demands of the economy for their labour without squeezing low-wage workers already here.

That will require continuous negotiation and adjustment. A good way to enable this would be to create a public commission of immigration stakeholders from labour, business, communities and academia, such as we already have in communications, trade, banking and other areas.

To deal with the real security issues at the border, we could do worse than to listen to former Arizona State Attorney General Terry Goddard. The detailed plan he has laid out would hit transnational criminal cartels where it hurts by attacking their ability to launder money, and to move it and product across the line.

As satirist Stephen Colbert said of the “border surge” proposed by anti-immigrant politicians, “It worked in Iraq. You hardly see any Mexicans sneaking into Baghdad.”

Peter Costantini covered migration issues from 2006 through 2009 for IPS. He has also written for many publications about Mexico, Haiti, Nicaragua and international economics.

Families For Freedom protesting outside Senator Chuck Schumer's office in New York City calling for an end to deportations. Credit: Lucy Westcott/IPS

By Lucy Westcott
NEW YORK, Jun 16 2013 (IPS)

As the debate on immigration reform continues in the Senate and fractured talks persist about the future of 11 million undocumented migrants, one New York-based group took to the streets to ask their senator a question.

Stationed outside Senator Chuck Schumer’s office in midtown Manhattan Friday, Families For Freedom, an organisation fighting against the detention and deportation of immigrants, particularly parents, asked their leaders, “Obama, Schumer, would you deport your papa?”

The protest, held two days before Father’s Day, was meant to highlight the trauma deportation and detention causes by separating families when parents are held in facilities or sent home.

“We’re demanding that President Obama stop deporting fathers and that the fathers that have been deported are able to come back,” Esther Portillo-Gonzalez, spokesperson for Families for Freedom, told IPS.

“We have families from Africa, from the Caribbean, from Latin America mostly, and those are the continents that are most affected by these deportations,” she added."Everybody in this country, it doesn't matter where they come from - they're immigrants too."
-- Jeanette Martinelli

Nearly 2 million people have been deported under President Obama up to the end of last year, according to data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In 2012, Obama deported 409,849 immigrants, a record high, with 55 percent of them convicted criminals, according to ICE data.

“Many of those [who were deported] are parents and fathers, breadwinners, and a lot of the kids who are here [at the protest] today…will not be with their fathers on Father’s Day,” Portillo-Gonzales said.

The number of “criminal aliens” the United States has removed has increased dramatically over the past decade, mirroring the overall number of deported persons. According to ICE, in 2002, 71,686 criminals were deported; 10 years later, the number swelled to 225,390, an increase of 214 percent.

Marco, 23, was brought to the United States from Mexico when he was nine years old. He has felt the pain of threatened family separation but was lucky enough to see an uncle fight his deportation trial and win, letting him stay in the country instead of returning to Mexico.

“I saw my cousin suffer; she’s a little girl, she was just a newborn, and hearing that they were going to be separated…kind of broke my heart,” Marco told IPS at the protest, adding that Families for Freedom is seeking humane immigration reform.

“Ever since [I arrived], I’ve adapted to American culture. But once I [went] to college, I started realising things, especially that there’s suffering in my people, and I have to help them out,” he said.

Outside Schumer’s office, sons, daughters and a grandchild of the deported spoke through the small red cone of a makeshift megaphone, telling their stories into the shuffling rush hour throng.

One of the speakers, Alyssa, 14, is still feeling the effects of her grandfather’s removal in 2010. He is now in Panama City.

“It makes me upset, depressed, sad,” Alyssa told IPS.

Her grandmother, Jeanette Martinelli, recalled her husband’s seizure by the authorities.

“He was in a store and the cops came and started searching people and just…they picked him up. When he went to court, jurors dismissed the case, but ICE took him and that’s it,” Martinelli told IPS.

All of Martinelli’s children were born in the United States, and she is also an American citizen. The depression and trauma Alyssa has felt since her grandfather’s deportation have had wider repercussions throughout the family, Martinelli said. In addition, Martinelli’s daughter has stopped attending college because her father can no longer finance it.

A report published by Human Impact Partners on the health status of documented and undocumented migrants and their families shed light on the physical and mental tolls that detention and deportation can cause.

Higher proportions of children of undocumented parents felt fear and anxiety than those with documented parents, reporting sleeping, eating and exercising less out of fear of family separation.*

The report also said that 77 percent of undocumented parents felt feelings of racial profiling, and with less access to health insurance and medical services, they will have shorter lives and decreased health.

Around 23 percent of all deportations, or 205,000 people, from Jul. 1, 2010 to Sep. 31, 2012 were of parents with children who are U.S. citizens, according to data obtained by Colorlines.com through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

If she could speak to ICE, Martinelli would ask officials to think not only about their own families but also the history of the United States.

“We are all human beings. They have families too. Everybody in this country, it doesn’t matter where they come from – they’re immigrants too,” she said.

The children at the protest held purple and white balloons, representing parents, including their own, who have been deported from the United States and separated from their families, before releasing them into the sky, much to their delight.

“It’s not fair that they call people illegal,” Martinelli said. “Nobody is illegal.”

*An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the findings of the HIP report and said that children of undocumented parents felt higher levels of fear and anxiety than those with documented parents.