Thread: Detention Questions

NEWS
Detention Questions
By David Alire Garcia

Published: April 18, 2007



Examination of incarcerated immigrants under way.


As hundreds of immigrants spend what may be their final days in the United States behind bars, the living conditions in New Mexico’s main immigrant detention facility are coming under fire.

“Right now, people are being denied health care, the place is filthy and the food is so bad there have been hunger strikes to protest it,” Santa Fe lawyer Brandt Milstein tells SFR.

Milstein, a cooperating attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico, has been coordinating a team of local lawyers investigating the conditions at downtown Albuquerque’s Regional Correctional Center (RCC).



Local attorneys and activists are keeping an eye on the conditions at Albuquerque’s RCC, where illegal immigrants are detained.
In response to questions from SFR, Christine Parker, a spokeswoman for Cornell Companies, the for-profit operator of RCC, issued a statement that highlighted the company’s efforts, but did not respond directly to Milstein’s allegations:

“Cornell strives to operate excellent facilities,” the statement begins. “We appreciate all concerns expressed by our inmates and their families, and we work to address them as efficiently as possible.”

Milstein says he has visited the 970-bed facility, home to more than 700 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees in addition to other local and federal inmates. He met detainees with staph infections as well as ringworm. “That’s indicative of how bad conditions are in there,” Milstein says.

While similar complaints have led to lawsuits elsewhere—most recently at an immigration detention facility in San Diego, Calif., earlier this year—Milstein says, “We are not prepared to announced any lawsuit as of now.”

Marcela Díaz, the director of Santa Fe-based immigration rights group Somos Un Pueblo Unido, says she’s also heard concerns.

“We’ve heard from family members that there’s an overall lack of information about immigration hearings or if family members are still detained or if they’ve already been deported,” Díaz says.

Díaz says Somos also has heard “complaints from people that they don’t know how to send money to family members there to buy food or toiletries.”

According to Parker, there is a 24/7 system, JPay, that allows families to deposit money for detainees.

Immigration detention standards have come under fire before. A January report from the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, which audited five immigration facilities in the US, found significant violations in numerous areas, according to Tom Jawetz, director of the ACLU National Prison Project.

Regarding the RCC, Jawetz says medical care and overcrowding are two concerns.

Before ICE opened the nationwide network of immigration detention facilities, non-Mexican undocumented immigrants arrested by federal agents usually were released with orders to appear before a federal immigration judge. Most never made their court dates.

The new policy emphasizes detention and, as a result, there are more facilities like RCC.

“We’ve got more [immigrants] detained here in Albuquerque than we ever have before,” Pamela Kennedy, an Albuquerque immigration lawyer, says. She says immigrants arrested in recent ICE raids in Santa Fe were taken to RCC, but so are many others.

Both the national and New Mexico offices of the American Bar Association also have been actively looking into allegations of substandard conditions at RCC, according to Kennedy.

She has her own list of complaints.

“Nobody can find people; they get transferred all over the country,” she says. “You don’t know who’s in there, you don’t know what they’re being charged with.”

© Copyright 2000–2007 by the Santa Fe Reporter



http://sfreporter.com/articles/publish/ ... stions.php

“Right now, people are being denied health care, the place is filthy and the food is so bad there have been hunger strikes to protest it,” Santa Fe lawyer Brandt Milstein tells SFR.

Give me a break. I'm sure some of these people had experienced a lot worse before coming to the United States.

What did Milstein expect, a holiday spa