Thread: Policies and profit drive dangerous detention of LGBT immigrants

On any single day, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spends $5 million to keep 30,000 immigrants in private prisons and local jails—not as punishment for any crime, but to ensure they show up for civil immigration court.

With the current court backlog, some are held for months, at a cost of around $2 billion a year. The system reached it massive size not because so many facing deportation could not be effectively

monitored another way, but because ofarbitrary policies set by Congress and the Department of Homeland Security.

Unlike any other federal or state agency, ICE has a little-known Congressional mandate to “maintain” no less than 34,000 detention beds, regardless of actual needs.

Although DHS has recently adopted the position that they are not required to fill all beds at all times, ICE Director Sarah Saldaña testified in April that she is continually “working to use them.”

ICE contracts promised localities and for-profit prison firms their own local bed quota, and ICE continues to keep almost all of those beds filled.

ICE is working hard to fill those beds even while investigation after investigation shows that facilities lack real oversight and are riddled with problems like sexual abuse and medical neglect.

A transgender woman named Marichuy Leal Gamino recently told a House briefing how, after fleeing attacks on her life in Mexico, she was tormented daily in an ICE men’s detention center and told to “deal with it” after being raped,

before being released months later. Among those harmed most are children, parents, people with disabilities or serious illnesses, and asylum-seekers fleeing torture and persecution.

Many in the latter group are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender immigrants fleeing countries where they can be arrested, tortured, raped, or even killed simply for who they are.

The fact that these same groups are often abused in U.S. custody has driven growing calls, from Catholic bishops and LGBT advocates alike, to end immigration detention as we know it.

While ICE acknowledges it has considerable discretion, it is not using that discretion wisely.

A recent Freedom of Information Act request by the Center for American Progress found that even when ICE’s own screening system recommended LGBT immigrants not be detained, ICE officials detained them anyway 68 percent of

the time. This is despite federal data showing that LGBT people are 3-10 times more likely to be raped behind bars.

Time and again, ICE’s response seems to be to rearrange detention rather than reform or rethink it.

The agency’s latest “reform” is to pick out a group of transgender immigrants from across the country—those who face the highest incidence of rape—and round them up in a few detention centers.

Worse yet, ICE appears to have picked an infamous and remote for-profit prison to start this experiment—the Adelanto Detention Center, hours from Los Angeles and already under fire for medical neglect and detainee deaths.

The real solution is to dramatically scale back the use of detention centers. Ultimately, that means repealing the senseless bed quota. But ICE can start immediately by releasing families, children, LGBT people, and those with

disabilities and serious medical conditions. Following calls by members of Congress, LGBT advocates sent a letter to the president Monday calling for those steps and opposing the Adelanto move. Whether ICE will listen remains to be seen.


Policies and profit drive dangerous detention of LGBT immigrants | TheHill

The detainees need prompt hearings and deportation. There's no excuse for the United States not to process illegal aliens in an expeditious manner. For Congress to have failed to establish adequate court systems so fast processing and deportation can be accomplished is absolutely inexcusable. We do not want this type of abusive profit-centered detention of any person in the United States, our own citizens or others.

This is just another sickening example of how far our inept irresponsible unaccountable renegade government has traversed from the rule of law and the universal law of decency. The right to a speedy trial also means the right to a speedy deportation hearing.

Now find a judge and get these people the hell out of here.