DHS Immigration Detention Reforms Don’t Satisfy Critics
The Department of Homeland Security Secretary on Tuesday released a report on the immigrant detention system and announced plans to improve detention conditions
Jul 31, 202060.1K Shares1.3M Views
The Department of Homeland Security Secretary on Tuesday released a reporton the immigrant detention system and announced plans to improve detention conditions for the approximately 30,000 immigrants being held on immigration violations.
The report findsthat although many immigrants have not committed crimes, they’re held in secure facilities designed for criminals and often in far more restrictive conditions than necessary. They also often don’t have sufficient access to medical and legal assistance while in custody.
The reforms announced today by DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano and Immigration and Customs Enforcement Assistant Secretary John Morton involve primarily centralizing control of the detention facilities under ICE headquarters’ supervision; classifying immigrant detainees according to their risk level and housing them accordingly; improving detainees’ access to medical and legal services; and increasing supervision of the facilities by federal employees rather than by private contractors.
Longtime critics of the agency’s detention practices are not completely satisfied, however, noting that DHS’s proposals fail to include a way to ensure that the agency complies with improved standards, that immigrants aren’t unnecessarily locked up, and that innocent people aren’t harassed by local authorities empowered to enforce federal immigration law.
As Judy Rabinovitz, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union Immigrants’ Rights Project, put it in a statement released yesterday, “Meaningful reform of the system must focus not only on the conditions under which immigrants are being detained, but on why they are being detained in the first place — often for prolonged periods of time — when other forms of supervised release would be sufficient to address the government’s concerns, as well as the need for basic due process.”
Linton Joaquin, general counsel for the National Immigration Law Center, called the proposal “a step in the right direction” but said that “as long as these standards are not enforceable, the rights violations faced by the men and women in these systems will persist.”
Paula M. Graham
Reviewer
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