Walter Shapiro
Columnist
America's Shameful Immigrant Jails: Will Reforms Lead to More Humane Conditions?
Posted:
08/7/09
It has long been one of the saddest aspects of America's malfunctioning immigration system – the harsh treatment of illegal immigrants and legal asylum seekers who are often housed in prisons designed for hardened, violent criminals. Whether it is investigative reporters describing detainees dying from lack of medical attention or human rights groups documenting refugees fleeing torture only to be shackled in America, the tales of neglect and abuse have continued regardless of who is in the White House or at the helm of the Department of Homeland Security.
"Despite report after report, the system up to now seems incapable of reform," said Donald Kerwin, a vice president of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. "This has been going on for 15 to 20 years. There has sometimes been the will to fix these problems, but it hasn't happened. This has been the harsh underside of our immigration system."
Without this context, it is difficult to appreciate the significance of a series of reforms in the detention system announced Thursday by John Morton, the assistant secretary of Homeland Security for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). On a day when Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed for the Supreme Court, it is difficult to bellow "Extra! Extra! Read all about it!" because a member of the sub-Cabinet is appointing 23 detention managers and establishing an Office of Detention Oversight.
But often the character of an administration is shaped not only by prime-time presidential press conferences, but also by the actions of semi-anonymous political appointees in the depths of the bureaucracy. The only tangible change that Morton announced was that ICE would be moving children and families out of the notorious T. Don Hutto penal facility in Taylor, Texas. Writing in The New Yorker last year, Margaret Talbot chillingly recounted, "Children were regularly woken up at night by guards shining lights in their cells. They were roused each morning at five-thirty. Kids were not allowed to have stuffed animals, crayons, pencils or pens in their cells."
This is not a question of whether illegal immigrants should be granted amnesty or whether America should open its gates to everyone who arrives at Kennedy Airport, claiming that their lives are in danger in their home countries. At stake instead is something that should be non-controversial – whether the roughly 32,000 people in U.S. custody waiting to have their immigration status legally reviewed should be treated humanely.
In a conference call with reporters announcing the reforms, Morton repeatedly stressed that his goal was "the creation of a system maintained by and defined by civil detention." Homeland Security has developed a haphazard system, housing detainees in about 350 prisons, local jails and privately operated detention centers like Hutto. "This shift away from a penal model is welcome if it really happens," said Eleanor Acer, the director of the refugee protection program at the advocacy group Human Rights First. But Acer added, "What is noticeably absent here is the lack of an explicit commitment to making sure that all asylum seekers have access to immigration courts."
This latticework of contracts – and the lack of alternative non-penal detention facilities – means that progress will be gradual at best. Morton talked about a "multi-year effort to reform the system." Which is why administrative changes like the creation of 23 federal detention manager positions and the establishment of an oversight office at least raise the odds that flagrant abuses in local facilities will be detected and halted. In a system as disorganized as ICE's current detention facilities, it is possible for detainees to become effectively lost for weeks in an immigration gulag.
The administrative steps announced Thursday have little direct connection to the coming congressional debate over immigration reform. But the Obama administration is keenly aware that it must never appear lax on immigration enforcement without risking political retribution. This may explain why Morton went out of his way to repeat the mantra, "This isn't about whether we're going to detain people. We're going to continue to detain people on a large scale. This is about how we detain people."
In the atmospherics of Washington, it is intriguing that Morton, rather than Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, presented the detention changes. Part of the explanation may be that a second set of proposed reforms is awaiting review by Napolitano. These are based on an internal review of the ICE detention system by Dora Schriro, who was Arizona corrections commissioner when Napolitano was governor. As Sean Smith, the assistant secretary of Homeland Security for public affairs, put it, "This was the first of what may be many potential announcements on detention based on the review conducted by Dora."
Good intentions have their limits when confronting a dysfunctional bureaucracy like immigration enforcement. In the right hands, the new adjustments in the administration of the government's detention system may provide a major impetus for reform. But without careful monitoring and a commitment from both Napolitano and the White House, sincere words and the shuffling of administrative boxes will not reverse decades of callous ineptitude.
The administration of the detention system is now on Barack Obama's watch. And something is morally awry when children awake to see the horizontal bars of a jail cell and asylum seekers enter a prison system that makes a mockery of the words on the Statue of Liberty.
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/08/07 ... o-more-hu/