Changes to immigrant-detention system coming, official says

by Erin Kelly -
Jan. 26, 2010 12:00 AM
Republic Washington Bureau .

WASHINGTON - The head of U.S. immigration enforcement on Monday announced plans for an overhaul of the government's controversial detention system for people who face deportation.

The moves described by John T. Morton, assistant secretary of Homeland Security for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, address oversight, medical care and tracking of detainees at facilities in Arizona and across the country.


Plans include:

• Hiring 50 federal employees to oversee the largest detention facilities, which now are largely run by contractors without much government oversight, Morton said.

• Assigning regional case managers to keep tabs on detainees with significant medical problems to ensure they are getting proper care. Detainees with major problems will be housed in facilities near hospitals and medical centers, Morton said.

• In June, launching an online immigrant-detainee locator so family members can easily find their relatives when they are in custody awaiting possible deportation.
"You can look up their name and find out where they are and what the visiting hours are at that detention facility," Morton said, during a speech at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.

Under the current system, families and immigrant-rights attorneys complain they often have trouble finding out where detainees have been taken after they are arrested for immigration violations. ICE often transfers immigration detainees to centers hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles away in other states, far from their homes, according to a recent report by Human Rights Watch.

The new "detainee locator" and other initiatives are the newest details of a major overhaul announced last fall of the controversial detention system that houses about 380,000 illegal-immigration suspects a year at more than 400 sites in Arizona and throughout the nation.

The Obama administration last year vowed to reform the detention system after widespread complaints by civil-rights advocates and reports by government investigators that illegal immigrants were being detained for months or even years without any findings that they were dangers to society or flight risks.

Advocates also complained that detainees were being denied adequate medical care, sufficient recreation time, and access to attorneys, legal materials and telephones.

Civil-rights groups have long alleged that conditions at the detention centers are often cruel and inhumane.

According to ICE records, 107 detainees have died while in government custody since 2003. Many had health problems, and critics contend that in many cases they did not have access to adequate medical care.

Nine died at the contract-run detention center in Eloy, more than at any other facility in the nation. Of the nine people who died at the Eloy facility, three were from Mexico. The rest were from Fiji, Guatemala, Colombia, Ecuador, Iraq and Ghana.

The causes of death included hanging, cardiac arrest, asphyxiation, a tumor and cirrhosis.

The reform proposals have been called a positive first step by civil-rights groups, which were alarmed when the Bush administration tripled the size of the detention system in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

"Morton's plans are long overdue, welcome and promising, but the department still has a ways to go before advocates will be satisfied that our nation's immigrants caught up in detention are receiving fair and humane treatment," wrote Travis Packer, a blogger for the Immigration Policy Center.

Conservative groups that advocate reduced immigration have been skeptical of the ongoing reforms.

"The new initiatives may have been aimed at placating open borders, amnesty-advocating special-interest groups," says a legislative report posted on the Web site of the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

Morton said immigration officials are rewriting the standards for the treatment of detainees. "This is a sustained, aggressive effort to reform detention procedures," Morton said.

In Arizona, an estimated 2,500 to 3,000 adult immigrants are in detention.

About 1,500 of them are housed at the federal detention center in Eloy, and a total of about 1,200 more are housed in three facilities in Florence, including the Pinal County jail. Juveniles are held at a center in Phoenix.

Morton assured skeptics that he was serious when he announced last fall that illegal immigrants who pose no danger to America will no longer be housed in jails with dangerous criminal aliens such as drug traffickers, immigrant smugglers and international child pornographers.

Eventually, Morton said, he wants to have federal employees in charge of every detention center.

The assistant secretary said his agency is in talks with contractors about building a new detention center that won't look anything like a jail and won't have bars on the windows. It will have phones and open areas for the people staying there, he said. Morton did not say where the facility would be built.

"I'm hoping that before I leave office that we will have an immigration detention center that people who are interested can go and look at - and it won't be a jail," Morton said.

In addition, the agency is looking at alternatives to detention, including ankle bracelets that give illegal-immigration suspects much greater freedom but ensure that they don't run away before their deportation hearings.

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