Thread: Rights group: Detained immigrants suffer frequent transfers

Posted on Tue, Jun. 14, 2011

Rights group: Detained immigrants suffer frequent transfers

By Michael Matza
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

The nearly 400,000 immigrants locked up each year by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement sit in county jails - from days to years - awaiting asylum hearings, deportations, or court decisions that would set them free.

The federal government generally prefers to subcontract with local jails, rather than build detention centers. But fluctuating bed space in those facilities means the immigrants often get moved around the country.

Frequent transfers "don't just move people, they push aside their rights" by making attorney-client relationships "unworkable," and family visits prohibitively "costly," says a report released today by the nonprofit advocacy group Human Rights Watch.

The report, which analyzed 12 years of data - some two million transfer records - found that half of all detainees were transferred at least twice. More than 3,200 were transferred more than 10 times. One was transferred 66 times.

The report says total transfers nearly tripled from 2005 to 2009, and "a frequent transfer pattern" was from Pennsylvania's York County Jail to facilities in Texas - a distance of more 1,600 miles.

Several Philadelphia-area immigration lawyers who have had clients at York said the scenario is familiar.

Attorney Ejaz Sabir said about two years ago he represented a Moroccan man who was arrested by ICE for overstaying his visa even though his lawful marriage to an American woman made him eligible for a green card. Because of a paperwork snafu, said Sabir, authorities were unaware of the man's legal status.

On the morning of his client's scheduled bail hearing, Sabir, who has offices in Philadelphia and Upper Darby, called the York County Jail to confirm it.

When he arrived for the 1:30 p.m. hearing, he was told, without further explanation, that his client was gone.

"It took us two days to track him down in El Paso, Texas," said Sabir. Even though Sabir could have "appeared" telephonically at his client's bail proceeding in Texas, the man's unnerved wife insisted that she and Sabir be present. In the end, said Sabir, she spent several thousand dollars on plane tickets, hotel and a rental car so that she could get her husband released on $2,400 bail. The matter was resolved, said Sabir, and the couple "are living happily now with their two children."

Steven Barsamian, a Philadelphia immigration lawyer in practice since 1976, said "there was a time when it was like musical prisoners. It was very difficult to find your client. Before you knew it, he was calling back from his home country" following a deportation.

Those problems began to ease about two years ago, said Barsamian, after ICE instituted an online detainee locator system and other reforms.

Asked to respond to Tuesday's Human Rights Watch report, ICE spokesman Harold Ort declined to comment on the frequent transfers between Pennsylvania and Texas, or why Pennsylvania is in the top 10 states for both receiving and sending transfers.

He said ICE reforms, adopted in 2009, are "designed to reduce the transfer of detainees who are represented by counsel or have other ties to a particular community. . . . By keeping detainees, as often as possible, near the place of apprehension, ICE hopes to minimize disruptions to families, legal services, and immigration proceedings."

Minimizing transfers, he noted, is in the agency's interest to "save on costs."

The report, titled "A Costly Move: Far and Frequent Transfers Impede Hearings for Immigrant Detainees in the United States," estimates that the government spent more than $366 million on the two million transfers between October 1998 and April 2010.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Contact staff writer Michael Matza at 215-854-2541, or mmatza@phillynews.com .

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/123816424.html

You get what you get when you jump my border.