Thursday, September 29, 2011

Companies Use Immigration Crackdown to Turn a Profit - NYTimes.com

Companies Use Immigration Crackdown to Turn a Profit - NYTimes.com

Companies Use Immigration Crackdown to Turn a Profit

The men showed up in a small town in Australia’s outback early last year, offering top dollar for all available lodgings. Within days, their company, Serco, was flying in recruits from as far away as London, and busing them from trailers to work 12-hour shifts as guards in a remote camp where immigrants seeking asylum are indefinitely detained.

It was just a small part of a pattern on three continents where a handful of multinational security companies have been turning crackdowns on immigration into a growing global industry.

Especially in Britain, the United States and Australia, governments of different stripes have increasingly looked to such companies to expand detention and show voters they are enforcing tougher immigration laws.

Some of the companies are huge — one is among the largest private employers in the world — and they say they are meeting demand faster and less expensively than the public sector could.

But the ballooning of privatized detention has been accompanied by scathing inspection reports, lawsuits and the documentation of widespread abuse and neglect, sometimes lethal. Human rights groups say detention has neither worked as a deterrent nor speeded deportation, as governments contend, and some worry about the creation of a “detention-industrial complex” with a momentum of its own.

“They’re very good at the glossy brochure,” said Kaye Bernard, general secretary of the union of detention workers on the Australian territory of Christmas Island, where riots erupted this year between asylum seekers and guards. “On the ground, it’s almost laughable, the chaos and the inability to function.”

Private prisons in the United States have long stirred controversy. But while there have been conflicting studies about their costs and benefits, no systematic comparisons exist for immigration detention, say scholars like Matthew J. Gibney, a political scientist at the University of Oxford who tracks immigration systems.

Still, Mr. Gibney and others say the pitfalls of outsourcing immigration enforcement have become evident in the past 15 years. “When something goes wrong — a death, an escape — the government can blame it on a kind of market failure instead of an accountability failure,” he said.

In the United States — with almost 400,000 annual detentions in 2010, up from 280,000 in 2005 — private companies now control nearly half of all detention beds, compared with only 8 percent in state and federal prisons, according to government figures. In Britain, 7 of 11 detention centers and most short-term holding places for immigrants are run by for-profit contractors.

No country has more completely outsourced immigration enforcement, with more troubled results, than Australia. Under unusually severe mandatory detention laws, the system has been run by a succession of three publicly traded companies since 1998. All three are now major players in the international business of locking up and transporting unwanted foreigners.

The first, the Florida-based prison company GEO Group, lost its Australia contract in 2003 amid a commission’s findings that detained children were subjected to cruel treatment. An Australian government audit reported that the contract had not delivered “value-for-money.” In the United States, GEO controls 7,000 of 32,000 detention beds.

The second company, G4S, an Anglo-Danish security conglomerate with more than 600,000 employees in 125 countries, was faulted for lethal neglect and abusive use of solitary confinement in Australia. By the middle of the past decade, after refugee children had sewed their lips together during hunger strikes in camps like Woomera and Curtin, and government commissions discovered that Australian citizens and legal residents were being wrongly detained and deported, protests pushed the Liberal Party government to dismantle some aspects of the system.

But after promising to return the work to the public sector, a Labor government awarded a five-year, $370 million contract to Serco in 2009. The value of the contract has since soared beyond $756 million as detention sites quadrupled, to 24, and the number of detainees ballooned to 6,700 from 1,000.

Dangerous Problems

Over the past year, riots, fires and suicidal protests left millions of dollars in damage at Serco-run centers from Christmas Island to Villawood, outside Sydney, and self-harm by detainees rose twelvefold, government documents show. In August, a government inspection report cited dangerous overcrowding, inadequate and ill-trained staff, no crisis planning and no requirement that Serco add employees when population exceeded capacity.

At the detention center Serco runs in Villawood, immigrants spoke of long, open-ended detentions making them crazy. Alwy Fadhel, 33, an Indonesian Christian who said he needed asylum from Islamic persecution, had long black hair coming out in clumps after being held for more than three years, in and out of solitary confinement.

“We talk to ourselves,” Mr. Fadhel said. “We talk to the mirror; we talk to the wall.”

Naomi Leong, a shy 9-year-old, was born in the detention camp. For more than three years, at a cost of about $380,000, she and her mother were held behind its barbed wire. Psychiatrists said Naomi was growing up mute, banging her head against the walls while her mother, Virginia Leong, a Malaysian citizen accused of trying to use a false passport, sank into depression.

Naomi and her mother became a cause célèbre in protests against the mandatory detention system, leading to their release in 2005 on rare humanitarian visas. They are now citizens.

“I come here to give little bit of hope to the people,” Ms. Leong said during a recent visit to Villawood, where posters display the governing principles of Serco, beginning with “We foster an entrepreneurial culture.”

Free-Market Solutions

Companies often say that losing a contract is the ultimate accountability.

“We are acutely aware of our responsibilities and are committed to the humane, fair and decent treatment of all those in our care,” a Serco spokesman said in an e-mail. “We will continue to work with our customers around the world and seek to improve the services we provide for them.”

But lost detention contracts are rare and easily replaced in this fast-growing business. Serco’s $10 billion portfolio includes many other businesses, from air traffic control and visa processing in the United States, to nuclear weapons maintenance, video surveillance and welfare-to-work programs in Britain, where it also operates several prisons and two “immigration removal centers.”

“If one area or territory slows down, we can move where the growth is,” Christopher Hyman, Serco’s chief executive, told investors last year, after reporting a 35 percent increase in profits. This spring, Serco reported a 13 percent profit rise.

Its rival G4S delivers cash to banks on most continents, runs airport security in 80 countries and has 1,500 employees in immigration enforcement in Britain, the Netherlands and the United States, where its services include escorting illegal border-crossers back to Mexico for the Department of Homeland Security.

Nick Buckles, the chief executive of G4S, would not discuss the company. But last year he told analysts how its “justice” business in the Netherlands blossomed in one week after the 2002 assassination of a politician with an anti-immigrant and law-and-order agenda.

“There’s nothing like a political crisis to stimulate a bit of change,” Mr. Buckles said.

In Britain last fall, the company came under criminal investigation in the asphyxiation of an Angolan man who died as three G4S escorts held him down on a British Airways flight. Soon afterward, British immigration authorities announced that the company had lost its bid to renew a $48 million deportation escort contract because it was underbid by a competitor.

Even so, G4S has more than $1.1 billion in government contracts in Britain, a spokesman said, only about $126 million from the immigration authority. It quickly replaced the lost revenue with contracts to build, lease and run more police jails and prisons.

In 2007, Western Australia’s Human Rights Commission found that G4S drivers had ignored the cries of detainees locked in a scorching van, leaving them so dehydrated that one drank his own urine. The company was ordered to pay $500,000 for inhumane treatment, but three of the five victims already had been deported. Immigration officials, relying on company misinformation, had dismissed their complaints without investigation, the commission found.

There was a public outcry when an Aboriginal man died in another G4S van in similar circumstances the next year. A coroner ruled in 2009 that G4S, the drivers and the government shared the blame. The company was later awarded a $70 million, five-year prisoner transport contract in another state, Victoria, without competition.

G4S pleaded guilty to negligence in the van death this year, and was fined $285,000. Mr. Buckles, its chief executive, alluded to the case at a meeting with analysts in March, reassuring them.

“There is only two or three major players, typically sometimes only two people bidding,” Mr. Buckles said. “In time, we will become a winner in that market because there’s a lot of outsourcing opportunities and not many competitors.”

In August, when GEO, the Florida prison company, posted a 40 percent rise in second-quarter profits, its executives in Boca Raton spoke of new immigration business on both sides of the Atlantic.

John M. Hurley, a GEO executive for North American operations, cited “the continued growth in the criminal alien population,” larger facilities, and longer federal contracts, some up to 20 years.

At the company’s Reeves County Detention Center in Texas, immigrant inmates rioted in 2009 and 2010 after several detainees died in solitary confinement. GEO executives declined to comment. But speaking to shareholders, they credited much of the quarter’s $10 million increase in international revenue to the expansion of a detention center in Britain, where immigration was a hot issue in the 2010 election.

A Policy Backfires

“Britain is no longer a soft touch,” Damian Green, the immigration minister, said in August 2010 when he visited the center, near Heathrow Airport, reopening wings that had burned in 2006 during detainee riots under a different private operator.

The riots started the day the chief inspector of prisons released a blistering report about abuses there, including excessive waits for deportation. Months after Mr. Green’s appearance, an independent monitoring board complained that at the expanded center — now Europe’s largest, with 610 detainees — at least 35 men had been waiting more than a year to be deported, including one locked up for three years and seven months at a cost of at least $237,000.

The camp that Serco took over in the Australian outback, the Curtin Immigration Detention Center, had also been shut down amid riots and hunger strikes in 2002. But it was reopened last year to handle a surge of asylum seekers arriving by boat even as the government imposed a moratorium on processing their claims. Refurbished for 300 men, the camp sits on an old air force base and held more than 1,500 detainees in huts and tents behind an electrified fence. Serco guards likened the compound to a free-range chicken farm.

On March 28, a 19-year-old Afghan from a group persecuted by the Taliban hanged himself after 10 months’ detention — the system’s fifth suicide in seven months. A dozen guards, short of sleep and training, found themselves battling hundreds of grieving, angry detainees for the teenager’s body.

“We have lost control,” said Richard Harding, who served for a decade as Western Australia’s chief prison inspector. He is no enemy of privatization, and his praise for a Serco-run prison is posted on the company’s Web site. But he said Curtin today was emblematic of “a flawed arrangement that’s going to go wrong no matter who’s running it.”

“These big global companies, in relation to specific activities, are more powerful than the governments they’re dealing with,” he added.

Matt Siegel contributed reporting from Sydney, Australia.


Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Private prison company's growth went hand-in-hand with political influence | Minnesota Independent

Private prison company's growth went hand-in-hand with political influence | Minnesota Independent

By Jon Collins
Monday, September 26, 2011 at 8:00 am

It’s been almost two years since the privately-run prison in Appleton has held prisoners. But in early 2012, the prison’s owner, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), expects to fill Appleton’s Prairie Correctional Facility and another facility in Colorado with 3,256 inmates from California.

In the last ten years, the revenue of CCA, the country’s biggest private prison company, has almost doubled, according to their annual reports. Critics say that CCA’s success, and even the likely reopening of the prison in Appleton, stems from their use of lobbying and campaign donations to push through tougher crime laws and increase detainment of illegal immigrants.

“Prison privatization contracts are designed by policy makers. It’s important for these companies to have a political strategy to increase their market share,” Paul Ashton, author of a recent report on private prisons for the Justice Policy Institute, said in a conference call Wednesday. Private prison companies “game the system,” he said, by pushing to increase market share, which in the private prison business means putting more people in prison.

Political influence generates business gains
For two decades, CCA was a member of a group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) — a nationwide organization made up of corporations and state legislators. At an ALEC meeting in December 2009, where CCA employees were present, according to an original report by Beau Hodai of In These Times and a subsequent story by NPR, the group crafted the model legislation that would later become Arizona’s SB1070 and a host of other similar bills across the country.

Source: U.S. Department of Justice

CCA and other private prison company executives saw immigration detainees as a significant new source of revenue, as Hodai reported. Although CCA denied pushing the Arizona bill, and has since given up membership in ALEC, lobbyists from the private prison industry flooded the Arizona State Capitol and donations streamed to the bill’s supporters, ensuring its passage.

Even without Arizona-style laws in place in most states, the number of inmates held in private prisons for federal crimes, including immigration-related crimes, has continued to rise. For federal prisoners with more than a one-year sentence, immigration crimes now rank third behind drug and gun charges. In the last decade, the number of people held in federal private prisons more than doubled, according toU.S. Department of Justice statistics (PDF) from December 2010.

Private prison industry efforts to influence policy at the federal level continue. In 2011, CCA has already employed 35 federal lobbyists, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The bills CCA has lobbied on this year include a number of appropriations related to Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detentions, which made up 12 percent of the company’s revenue last year, according to CCA’s 2010 annual report.

In last month’s quarterly statement, the company announced a quarterly revenue increase of 5.6 percent, which the company largely attributed to new federal contracts.

CCA didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment, but in other statements they have denied that they try to influence the political process.

Paul Ashton told The Minnesota Independent that many of the legislative policies CCA was close to as a longtime member of ALEC, for instance the “three-strikes-you’re-out” rule, benefit the company’s bottom line.

“In order for a private prison company to make money, there has to be people in prison,” Ashton said. “In order for them to have an increasing share of the market and in order for them to increase their revenue, there have to be more people in their facility, they have to stay their longer, and they have to come back.”

Business booms for CCA in cash-strapped California
In the wake of the Arizona-style bills, the private prison industry hasn’t gotten complacent. State contracts like the one expected between California and CCA to house prisoners in the Appleton facility, account for about half of CCA’s steadily growing business, with California making up about a quarter of that.

Source: Justice Policy Institute

California, which will provide the 3,256 inmates that will likely fill Minnesota and Colorado prisons, is another state that has been targeted by the private prison industry. (The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has announced its intent to award the contract, but a spokesman is unsure when it will be awarded due to a statewide prison reorganization happening now; the company is confident the award’s on track, according to a recent quarterly filing.)

Between 2003-2010, CCA’s PAC gave more than half a million dollars to California political campaigns, according to the Justice Policy Institute report, with the vast majority coming to 75 separate candidates between 2008 and 2010, according to data compiled by the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

CCA’s California investment looks to have paid off. CCA ”continued to receive additional inmates from the state of California throughout 2009 and 2010 as they have turned to the private sector to help alleviate their overcrowded correctional system,” according to CCA’s 2010 annual report.

In 2008, California accounted for 6 percent of the company’s total revenue. By 2010, the state accounted for 13 percent of the company’s revenue, or $214 million (although full contract costs to the state are reported to be more than $700 million).

Similar attempts at prison privatizations are occurring in Florida, where CCA employed an army of 17 lobbyists and donated $438,494 to state political campaigns between 2003-2011, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics. Industry rivals Geo Group and a subsidiary donated $822,415 in just the 2010 election cycle, with large chunks of cash going to the Republican Party of Florida, although the industry plays both sides of the aisle.

Steve Owen, CCA’s director of marketing and communications, told our sister site, The Florida Independent last year that opposition to private prisons was usually stirred up by labor unions or ideology.

“Given tightening budgets and limited resources during these challenging economic times, legislators and other officials are increasingly turning to correctional partnerships, enabling them to protect critical priorities like education and health care while delivering safe, quality correctional and rehabilitation services,” Owen said.

A recent study (PDF) by the Arizona Department of Corrections found that private prisons don’t really save states money, as the New York Times reported.

Because of lobbying reporting, it’s also most difficult to track the industry’s lobbying expenditures at the state level.

“They can be a lot more influential on the state level than they can on the federal level, because campaign contributions mean a lot more at the state level than at the federal level,” Ashton said. “Federal candidates tend to bring in money anyway, whereas CCA or GEO [a rival company] giving $25,000 to the Republican Party in Florida can have a huge impact on how the parties spend money on their candidates, as a result it gives a closer tie to the industry.”

One thousand seven hundred fifty miles from L.A. to Appleton
CCA and other private prison companies are doing very well. In 2010, CCA saw total revenue of $1.67 billion, according to CCA’s annual report. But there is a human cost to the industry too.

Amy Gottlieb of the American Friends Service Committee told the Minnesota Independent that prisoners transferred to other states often face both emotional and legal hurdles.

“Ultimately, we have thousands and thousands and thousands of people around the country who are being locked up, held away from their families, in the immigration context are often unrepresented by council,” Gottlieb said. “People are profiting off of that.”

According to CCA’s website, one of the benefits of out-of-state inmate management is that the company will “[a]dhere to state-specific policies and procedures, as well as hundreds of standards set by the American Correctional Association and our company.”

But the fact that prisoners, including detained immigrants in some federal facilities, are being held in the less accountable private facilities is of concern to advocates like Gottlieb.

“We have seen over and over again that the private prison lobby is extremely powerful and they have deep connections to a lot of politicians and get a lot of federal contracts,” Gottlieb said. “That creates very serious concerns when what we are really talking about here are human rights and human rights violations.”

(Yana Kunichoff also contributed to this report.)

This report was produced as part of a collaborative investigative effort to expose the influence of corporate money on the political process by members of The Media Consortium, in partnership with the We the People Campaign. To read more stories from this series, visit CampaignCash.org or follow #CampaignCash on Twitter. Sign up for our Campaign Cash email newsletter by clicking here.

Judge Won't Block Key Parts Of Alabama Immigration Law : NPR

Judge Won't Block Key Parts Of Alabama Immigration Law : NPR

Judge Won't Block Key Parts Of Ala. Immigration Law

Demonstrators in Birmingham pray during a protest of Alabama's new immigration law, on June 25. Churches said the law made it a crime for them to carry out their Christian duty to feed, clothe and shelter the needy.
EnlargeJay Reeves/AP

Demonstrators in Birmingham pray during a protest of Alabama's new immigration law, on June 25. Churches said the law made it a crime for them to carry out their Christian duty to feed, clothe and shelter the needy.

text size A A A
September 28, 2011

A federal judge refused Wednesday to block key parts of a closely watched Alabama law that is considered the strictest state effort to clamp down on illegal immigration, including a measure that requires immigration status checks of public school students.

U.S. District Judge Sharon Blackburn, appointed by Republican President George H.W. Bush, wrote in her 115-page opinion that some parts of the law are in conflict with federal statutes, but others aren't.

She said federal law doesn't prohibit checking students or suspects pulled over by police. She also refused to stop provisions that allow police to hold suspected illegal immigrants without bond; bar state courts from enforcing contracts involving illegal immigrants; make it a felony for an illegal immigrant to do business with the state; and make it a misdemeanor for an illegal resident not to have immigration papers.

An appeal is all but certain; the state attorney general's office said it was reviewing the decision before commenting.

An order the judge previously issued temporarily blocking the entire law expires Thursday, but it was unclear when the state might begin enforcing the sections of the law that Blackburn allowed. Neither Gov. Robert Bentley nor Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange had any immediate comment.

Blackburn's order temporarily blocked four parts of the law until she can issue a final ruling. Those measures would:

— Make it a crime for an illegal immigrant to solicit work.

— Make it a crime to transport or harbor an illegal immigrant.

— Allow discrimination lawsuits against companies that dismiss legal workers while hiring illegal immigrants.

— Forbid businesses from taking tax deductions for wages paid to workers who are in the country illegally.

Blackburn heard arguments from opponents including the Obama administration, immigrant-support groups and civil libertarians before it was supposed to take effect Sept. 1. The Justice Department contended the state law encroaches on the federal government's duty to enforce immigration law, and other opponents argued it violated basic rights to free speech and travel.

She put the entire law on hold last month, but didn't rule on whether it was constitutional, saying she needed more time.

Even though the law didn't take effect as planned at the beginning of the month, NPR's Debbie Elliott tells All Things Considered host Michele Norris that there is "anecdotal evidence that farm workers and construction workers who could have been here illegally are fleeing."

She says the state's agricultural administration has been critical of the law, "recently even asking who's going to rebuild Tuscaloosa, the city recently ravaged by deadly tornadoes, when we are losing people we need to keep this state running."

Elliott says the legal battle over Alabama's law is being watched closely in part because it is considered the toughest in a batch of laws being passed by states governed mostly by conservatives.

"State lawmakers argue that the federal government has somehow abdicated its ability to enforce the nation's immigration laws, so they had to step in here," she says.

Similar, less restrictive laws have been passed in Arizona, Utah, Indiana and Georgia, and federal judges already have blocked all or parts of those.

Immigration became a hot issue in Alabama over the past decade as the state's Hispanic population grew by 145 percent to about 185,600. While the group still represents only about 4 percent of the population, some counties in north Alabama have large Spanish-speaking communities and schools where most of the students are Hispanic.

Alabama Republicans have long sought to clamp down on illegal immigration and passed the law earlier this year after gaining control of the Legislature for the first time since Reconstruction. Republican Gov. Bentley signed it, saying it was vital to protect the jobs of legal residents.

"Alabama's sponsors say this is about protecting jobs for Alabamans and making sure that tight public resources aren't being spent on those who break the law to come into this country," Elliott says. "But the Obama administration argues that these state attempts to regulate immigration overstep federal authority and could interfere, in fact, with foreign policy."

Both supporters and critics say it is the nation's toughest law partly because of a section that would require public schools to verify the citizenship status of students and report statistics to the state. Illegal immigrants wouldn't be barred from attending public schools, but opponents contend the law is designed to decrease enrollment by creating a climate of fear.

In a statement on behalf of 150 United Methodist pastors who signed a letter opposing the law, the Revs. Matt Lacey and R.G. Lyons said church leaders were "pleased to see some of the harsh and far-reaching elements of the law have been struck down."

"We feel that many of these elements, written by members of the State House and Senate who campaign on Christianity, are not representative of the message of Christ who welcomed the stranger despite country of origin or status," they said.

Material from The Associated Press was used in this report.

Dignity Not Detention

Dignity Not Detention

Endorse the Campaign

The U.S. is the world’s leading jailer. Over the last 30 years, harsh sentencing laws and the progressive erosion of social programs has caused the prison population to increase by 500%. Today, more than 2.3 million people are behind bars in this country, and the vast majority are people of color.

Among those locked up as part of the explosion of the prison system are thousands of non-citizens, who have been targeted for deportation and are seeking the right to remain in the U.S. Throughout this process, they are imprisoned by the government and subjected to extreme physical and mental suffering, without any of the standard legal protections that are the hallmarks of true democracies.

This cruel and unjust practice is a relatively recent policy development. The drastic expansion in immigration detention -- from about 70,000 people detained annually to about 400,000 – has taken place in just the last 15 years. In 1996, in violation of international law, the U.S. passed legislation mandating the detention of broad categories of non-citizens. Mandatory detention allows the government to lock up non-citizens, including legal permanent residents who have lived in the U.S their entire lives, asylum seekers, torture survivors, single mothers, the sick and the elderly, without authorization from a judge. In the wake of 9/11, anti-immigrant hysteria led to an expansion of both mandatory detention laws and of the harsh enforcement programs – such as Secure Communities, 287g, and the Criminal Alien Program – that pull people into mandatory detention, separating families and sowing fear in communities across the country.

Conditions in immigration detention are notoriously inhumane. Human rights violations are rampant, including poor medical care, physical and verbal abuse, interference with religious practice, and the use of solitary confinement, among others. At least 121 people have died in immigration detention since 2003. Facilities are often located hundreds of miles from urban centers, and individuals are regularly sent to facilities several states away from where they are originally detained, making family visitation and access to counsel nearly impossible.

Detention Watch Network asks you to join us in the Dignity Not Detention campaign to repeal mandatory detention, so that we can restore due process in immigration law and policy, and start reducing the number of people behind bars in the United States.

Demands

  • We demand that Congress repeal all laws mandating the detention of non-citizens.
  • We demand that the Obama Administration put an end to all policies and programs that use the criminal justice system to target people for detention and deportation.
  • We demand that the Obama Administration work to bring the U.S. into compliance with its obligations under international human rights law, which prohibits arbitrary detention.

By endorsing the campaign, your organization acknowledges its support for the Dignity not Detention Campaign Statement and demands. Endorsing organizations will be publicly acknowledged as part of the campaign. Please note, endorsements are for organizations only.

To add your name to the endorsement list, please send an email with your organization and contact information to acarrion@detentionwatchnetwork.org.


NJAID Press Conference on Mandatory Detention & Essex County's IGSA w/IC...


Chia-Chia Wang of the American Friends Service Committee commences the conference.

Human Rights Advocates Denounce Expansion of Flawed Immigration Detention System in Essex: Calling for Community Oversight, Government Accountability, a Rollback of New Contract with ICE and an End to Mandatory Detention

Newark, NJ -- New Jersey Advocates for Immigrant Detainees* (NJAID) held a press conference calling for a rollback of the newly signed contract between Essex County and Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) and added government accountability for the immigrant detention system in Essex County. The press conference comes at the 15th anniversary of the signing of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, a law that dramatically expanded the use of mandatory detention for immigrants and led to massive deportations, tearing families and communities apart. ...

You can read the rest of the release here:http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=253442474699864

*The NJ Advocates for Immigrant Detainees is a coalition of the American Civil Liberties Union- New Jersey; American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) Immigrant Rights Program; Casa de Esperanza; Casa Freehold; the Episcopal Immigration Network; IRATE & First Friends; Lutheran Office of Governmental Ministry in NJ; NJ Association on Correction; NJ Forum for Human Rights; Pax Christi NJ; Middlesex County Coalition for Immigrant Rights; Monmouth County Coalition for Immigrant Rights; People's Organization for Progress, Bergen County Branch; the Reformed Church of Highland Park; Sisters of St. Joseph of Chestnut Hill; Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Montclair

__________________________________________


You can still show your support by signing the petition to the Essex County Freeholders &/or attending the October 9th Rally & March from Peter Francisco Park/Newark Penn Station to ECCF & back!

Sign the petition at http://www.change.org/petitions/oppose-expansion-of-immigration-detention-at-... , forward the petition to your friends and family, attend an upcoming Essex County Freeholder meeting in person and ask them to explain their vote http://www.essex-countynj.org/freeholders/site/index.php?section=meetings , & attend the protest rally and march on in Newark October 9th Redefining Cruel & Unusual Indefinite Immigration Detention for-Profit Amid Toxic Waste in Essex County beginning at 1:30 pm at Peter Francisco Park Newark, NJ (right outside Newark Penn Station) Marching to and from: Essex County Correctional Facility & Delaney Hall 356 Doremus Ave, Newark, NJhttp://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=236419679741397

Video via @ThousandKites: Call for Stories about People Impacted by US Culture of Incarceration « Detention Watch Network: Monitoring & Challenging Immigration Detention, Immigration Enforcement & Deportation

Video via @ThousandKites: Call for Stories about People Impacted by US Culture of Incarceration « Detention Watch Network: Monitoring & Challenging Immigration Detention, Immigration Enforcement & Deportation

SEPTEMBER 27, 2011

via Nick Szuberla of Thousand Kites:

We are asking New Mexicans (and folks in other states) to share their story about how their own life or the life of a loved one is impacted by America’s culture of incarceration.

Share your story, poem, words of encouragement, obstacles you have overcome and the reality of the effects of incarceration.

By sharing our stories and building a stronger community, we will be able to give our loved ones inside the support they need when they return.

  • Help tweet: Live in #NM? Share your story about the justice system and be broadcast on the radio! bit.ly/plv8Pj #cjreform #incarceration

This Prison Justice campaign initiative is a partnership between Media Literacy Project,Thousand Kites, La Plazita Institute, El Centro de Igualdad y Derechos and Young Women United.

Monday, September 26, 2011

Let's use a scalpel with detention bill - Houston Chronicle

Let's use a scalpel with detention bill - Houston Chronicle

Published 09:10 p.m., Friday, September 23, 2011

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  •  / HC
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The U.S. House Judiciary Committee recently passed legislation to clarify the authority of immigration officials to detain criminal aliens who have been ordered removed from the United States. This well-intentioned bill, known as the Keep Our Communities Safe Act (H.R. 1932), is designed to protect communities from the relatively small number of violent individuals who are in the country unlawfully. Unfortunately, the bill uses a sledgehammer to do a job best suited for a scalpel. It authorizes indefinite detention of noncitizens who cannot be removed because no country will accept them, while denying those detained an opportunity for meaningful review of their detention. In so doing, the bill guts the most fundamental requirements of due process.

Proponents of the House bill say it is necessary to respond to a 2001 U.S. Supreme Court decision in which the majority ruled that if a noncitizen is ordered removed, that person may be held pending his or her actual removal from the country for a period of up to six months. After that period, the government must release the individual, subject to conditions, unless it can establish that removal is likely in the reasonably foreseeable future or that the individual is "specially dangerous." Absent either of these conditions, the court ruled, continued detention would raise serious due process concerns.

Why does it take so long to remove noncitizens? Ninety-eight percent of the time, it doesn't. But in a very small number of cases delays occur when the noncitizen's home country does not have diplomatic relations with the United States or refuses to issue necessary travel papers in a timely manner. Roughly a third of these cases involve Cubans.

Since the high court's decision, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has released more than 12,000 aliens. A small percentage of those released were later detained for criminal violations. A couple of individuals released by ICE were later found guilty of high-profile violent crimes. Even though this very real problem was addressed by ICE internal policy, there should be no objection if the House Judiciary Committee simply put the regulation into law. Unfortunately, the bill approved by the committee casts a dangerously wide net that could result in long detentions even for immigrants who did not commit a crime or who are simply fleeing political persecution at home.

Further, the bill ignores existing due process and community safety protections. CurrentDepartment of Homeland Security (DHS) regulations already permit the continued detention of removable aliens that are determined to be "specially dangerous." This authority to compel prolonged detention is appropriately balanced by the requirement that DHS demonstrate the reasons for its determinations before an immigration judge.

The Judiciary Committee's bill would replace this balanced approach with one that grants the extraordinary power to decide which immigrants should be subject to prolonged detention to low-level, unelected officials within DHS - without any review by an immigration judge or other neutral party. In addition, the bill would severely limit immigrants' ability to challenge the determinations made by DHS in federal court, as they would be required to bring such claims in federal court in Washington, D.C., irrespective of where they are being held. Being from the heartland of America, I do not think one should have to go to Washington to seek justice. Given the generally limited resources of immigrants, including their lack of access to counsel, this provision in particular creates an enormous barrier to ensuring a fair and equitable process. In short, the bill would turn the DHS into both jailer and judge. This result is anathema to a nation born in protest of arbitrary government detention and in pursuit of individual liberty.

While I commend the Judiciary Committee for seeking to clarify how and when dangerous aliens may be detained, I believe there is a better approach. In 2009, I was pleased to join a bipartisan group of experts to study the immigration detention system under the auspices of The Constitution Project. We ultimately released a series of recommendations that addressed concerns about both the increasing reliance on and excessive length of immigration detentions and the safety threat posed by some criminal aliens.

As we approached our work, my colleagues and I looked to the U.S. Constitution for guidance. It states, "No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law." No person, no exceptions. If America stands for anything in the world (and it does), it is that our government cannot detain individuals without providing an opportunity for meaningful, independent review. This right, which belongs to the innocent and guilty alike, should also extend to the noncitizen awaiting removal to his home country.

Hutchinson, a former Republican congressman from Arkansas and undersecretary of the Department of Homeland Security, is now serving as a member of The Constitution Project's Liberty & Security Committee.