Thread: Plan to detain more immigrants assailed

Posted on Thu, May. 31, 2007
Plan to detain more immigrants assailed
BY YAMICHE ALCINDOR
The Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center called on Congress to reject building more detention centers, saying 20,000 more beds would result in the detention of immigrant families who are not criminals but simply undocumented or have committed minor crimes.
A pending Senate measure calls for building 20,000 more beds in new detention facilities. At a news conference Thursday, FIAC executive director Cheryl Little said immigration officials often focus on the wrong people to detain -- families, rather than criminals. She fears that if the new bill becomes law, it would erode immigrants' human rights.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. immigration authorities have detained even legal immigrants who have had scuffles with the law -- arrests for drunk driving or minor crimes such as shoplifting.

Most detainees, in fact, have no criminal convictions, but simply entered the country without proper documention.

''These people are law-abiding citizens, pregnant women and victims of human trafficking,'' Little said.

Detainees are often shuffled several times between detention centers and a growing number end up in rural detention centers in Texas and Arizona, away from their South Florida families, Little said.

Once detained, most individuals -- as many as 84 percent, according to one study -- do not have access to lawyers or their families, Little said. ``So many immigrants go to sleep in fear that they will be woken up and arrested at night.''

Marlene Jaggernauth, 42, a single mother of four, said she was deported for a 6-year-old shoplifting conviction.

''I know that fear'' said Jaggernauth, who was handcuffed and arrested in 2003 in front of her four children. She said she was suffering from postpartum depression when she was shoplifting. By 2003, she had turned her life around, obtaining a bachelor's degree from Florida Atlantic University.

Nevertheless, Jaggernauth was deported to Trinidad, which she had left at age 12. She lived there for three years before FIAC lawyers succeeded in convincing the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta that she should return to her U.S.-born children in Port St. Lucie.

The ordeal threatened to ruin her family, Jaggernauth said. Her children had to go live with elderly diabetic grandparents.

''Immigration is no longer about foreigners,'' Jaggernauth said. ``It's about American families.''

In 2006, 26,500 people were held in U.S. detention facilities on any given day, FIAC said, costing taxpayers $1.2 billion, FIAC said.



http://www.miamiherald.com/416/story/124557.html

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

© 2007 Miami Herald Media Company. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.miamiherald.com

''These people are law-abiding citizens

Pleeeeeeeeeeeeese, give me a break!