Friday, February 22, 2013

via @EndIsolation: ICE’s Public Advocate Releases Agency Newsletter, Supports Expanded Detention Visitation « Detention Watch Network: Monitoring & Challenging Immigration Detention, Immigration Enforcement & Deportation

via @EndIsolation: ICE’s Public Advocate Releases Agency Newsletter, Supports Expanded Detention Visitation « Detention Watch Network: Monitoring & Challenging Immigration Detention, Immigration Enforcement & Deportation

via @EndIsolation: ICE’s Public Advocate Releases Agency Newsletter, Supports Expanded Detention Visitation

February 21, 2013
Reposted from Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (CIVIC)
CIVIC-hand
February 20, 2013 – Washington, D.C. – The Office of the Public Advocate at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in commemoration of its one-year anniversary, released its agency-wide newsletter supporting the expansion of low-cost community visitation services to people in immigration detention.
The letter highlights the work of Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (CIVIC), the national network of immigration detention visitation programs, explaining that “ICE is committed to working with community visitation programs affiliated with CIVIC.”
“Although we are concerned that immigration enforcement continues to be a central aspect of the comprehensive immigration reform debate, we are pleased to see that the Office of the Public Advocate is willing to work with us to ensure that people are at least given access to family and community visitation while they are in immigration detention,” said Christina Fialho, co-founder/executive director of CIVIC.
The agency newsletter explains that community visitation programs are important and beneficial to men and women in immigration detention, facility staff, and ICE as a whole: “Community volunteers such as those with CIVIC are often the only consistent community connection for men and women in ICE custody because many people in immigration detention do not have family members nearby.” In line with the agency’s budgetary constraints, the letter specifically underscored that visitation programs “provide the government with a cost-effective solution to expanding services to persons held in immigration detention.”
According to Fialho, who also is a California-based attorney, there is no legally protected right to receive visits while in immigration detention. People in immigration detention are given minimal access to family and community visitation, and the degree of access is dependent upon the rules of the particular jail or for-profit prison. For example, at the West County Detention Facility in California, immigrants who are detained have to request a visit with a loved one by filling out a form with the jail lieutenant on duty and then placing a phone call that costs $3.55 for the first minute and .55¢ for each additional minute to inform their loved one of the scheduled visit. Many cannot afford to place phone calls, and as a result, cannot receive visits either.
“We commend ICE for taking this first step to help end the isolation of men and women in their custody,” said Fialho.
To learn more about the right to visitation, download CIVIC’s Right to Visitation: Fact Sheet.
To read ICE’s newsletter, click here.

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Florida Atlantic University: Don't Give Stadium Naming Rights to Prison Operator

Florida Atlantic University: Don't Give Stadium Naming Rights to Prison Operator

How Immigration Reform Could Expand Incarceration of Immigrants | National Prison Divestment Campaign

How Immigration Reform Could Expand Incarceration of Immigrants | National Prison Divestment Campaign

How Immigration Reform Could Expand Incarceration of Immigrants

by Enlace
by Seth Freed – Color Lines
Wednesday, February 6 2013, 9:47 AM EST
A woman being held at an ICE detention facility. Photo: Getty Images/John Moore
A woman being held at an ICE detention facility. Photo: Getty Images/John Moore
The House made its first formal foray into immigration reform yesterday at a lengthy Judiciary Committee hearing in which Republicans struck a familiar chord. Despite record-setting deportation levels in recent years, Republican members of the committee were in broad agreement that they want even more enforcement before they could sign onto the comprehensive reform ideas laid out by Senate negotiators and President Obama.
“There is not in my opinion very much enforcement going on at all in the interior of the country,” said Judiciary Committee Chair Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican.
The heightened enforcement that Goodlatte and others seek raises a thorny question for the immigration reform process: Will it address the dire concerns many have about the ways in which immigrants are detained while awaiting deportation?

Immigration reform advocates around the country are raising concerns about the sprawling complex of prisons and detention centers, run often by private corporations, that are used to lock up non-citizens. Today, a group of senators led by Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy will release a strongly worded letter to colleagues calling for greater protections for immigrants inside those detention centers.
“Our laws mandate detention or deportation for many people, denying them access to a hearing before a judge, without guaranteeing legal counsel for those who cannot afford it,” the senators wrote, according to the Huffington Post. “Immigration enforcement measures frequently target minority and immigrant communities through impermissible racial profiling that instills fear and distrust of law enforcement and makes communities less safe. Our system is not fair. It is unnecessarily punitive and disproportionate.”
The tone at yesterday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing suggests Republicans in that chamber would disagree. The ideas swirling there would instead expand policies that tightly entwine the criminal justice and immigration systems. Though a large-scale legalization of undocumented immigrants would seem on its face to render detention facilities obsolete, efforts are already underway to keep them growing.
Detention Reform or Detention Expansion
In recent years, the Obama administration has detained and deported immigrants at a record-setting pace. Though the administration purports to target serious criminal offenders, critics say immigration laws paint “serious” in exceptionally broad strokes. The bulk of the 1.5 million people deported in the last four years were charged with minor violations, and many of these people would still find themselves subject to deportation even if they’re on track to legal status or have a green card.
And for immigrants pegged with a long list of convictions, detention before deportation is mandatory. Laws passed in the 1990’s took the power away from ICE agents and immigration judges to review the particulars of cases, release detainees or stop their deportation. Approximately two-thirds of the 400,000 detainees last year were held on a mandatory basis in one of the more than 300 facilities that dot the American landscape, without the possibility of release, according to the advocacy group Detention Watch Network.
Advocates hope that an immigration reform bill will begin to replace punitive lock up with alternative, community-based measures to keep track of non-citizens in deportation proceedings. Last week, President Obama nodded in that direction. The White House’s guiding principles for immigration reform note that the president’s proposal “allows DHS to better focus its detention resources on public safety and national security threats by expanding alternatives to detention and reducing overall detention costs.”
In 2012, the federal government spent over $2 billion on detention operations, a nearly 150 percent increase from just seven years ago. And the two leading private detention companies, Corrections Corporation of America and Geo Group, together netted about $425 million in revenues from their ICE contracts. The industry spends millions lobbying Congress.
Republicans yesterday made clear that they’re not interested in cuts.
Rep. Randy Forbes, a Virginia Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, asked San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro, who testified at the hearing, if the U.S. should be allowed to summarily deport people with gang affiliations “before they committed another criminal act.” In 2005, Rep. Forbes introduced the Alien Gang Removal Act, which would have led to the mandatory detention and deportation of anyone the government labeled a member of a gang, even if they’ve never been convicted of a crime. Similar language made it’s way into a comprehensive immigration reform bill considered by the Senate in 2006.
Belinda Escobosa Helzer, an attorney with the ACLU of Southern California, says that laws like these cast an overbroad net that encourages racial profiling. “What we’ve seen in practice in California is that a lot of youth of color are being documented as gang members because of where they live, who they went to school with, who they were walking with,” she said, not because they’ve committed a crime.
A provision like the one Forbes suggests would add to an already long list of exclusions Congress could build into a reform bill.
Civil liberties and immigrant rights groups, meanwhile, are advocating for reduced reliance on detention facilities in the immigration enforcement process and restored discretion to judges.
“It’s absolutely crucial Congress include a rollback of mandatory detention laws in any new immigration legislation,” said Emily Tucker, the advocacy director at Detention Watch Network, in a statement Tuesday.
The collateral effects of detention have only recently come into view. A 2011 Colorlines.com investigation revealed that the detention of parents regularly leaves children stuck in foster care or in other precarious situations.
“Because of the deportations that have taken place over the last few years there are anywhere from 5,000 to 6,000 children who have been placed in foster care because their parents have been deported. The children were citizens,” Rep. Karen Bass, a California Democratic and member of the House Judiciary Committee, said at the hearing yesterday, citing the findings of the Colorlines.com investigation.
Filling Federal Prisons
Democratic congressional staffers and Beltway advocates say they’re most concerned that in exchange for backing the legalization of undocumented immigrants, Republicans will demand an expansion of a program called Operation Streamline, which began in 2005 in counties along the U.S.-Mexico border to prosecute and incarcerate people crossing the border.
Advocates of the program say incarceration deters immigrants from crossing and contributes to the reported 40-year low in new migration over the border. There’s little evidence to support this claim, but Sen. John McCain, the leading GOP immigration reformer, and other border Republicans have nonetheless listed additional investments in Streamline as a key component of their border security demands in recent years.
Though congressional staffers and advocates say the demand has yet to appear on the table in the current round of Beltway trading, many expect it will.
Prosecutions for immigration-related offenses rose by 50 percent in just the last five years, and the federal Bureau of Prisons is building new facilities to make room. In the 1990’s the BOP began contracting out the operation of federal prisons to hold so called “criminal aliens,” who include people convicted of violations like reentry and of other crimes. Geo Group and Corrections Corporation of America now operate all 13 of the facilities that hold a cumulative 24,000 inmates. The companies took in over $460 million in revenue from federal contracts in 2011, the Huffington Post reports.
Advocates, journalists and the BOP’s own researchers have documented diminished quality and widespread abuse and neglect of inmates in private facilities and many are concerned that immigration reform could facilitate greater opportunities for these companies. Already, expansion looks likely.
In July the government put out a call for a 14th privately run facility—a 1,000 bed prison with a $25 million price tag. And a report released in September by the Government Accountability Office revealed that the BOP projects the addition of 1,500 more inmates to these facilities every year, increasing the population of the prisons by 50 percent by the end of the decade.
In a move that will help keep the prisons full, less than a month ago, California Rep. Darrell Issa, a Republican on the Judiciary Committee, introduced legislation to add long mandatory minimums to sentencing rules for reentry and other immigration related offenses. In one case, his bill sets a sentencing range between 10 and 20 years for people coming back to the country. If passed, either on its own or as part of a comprehensive immigration reform bill, it would drive up the time these inmates spend behind bars.

Original Article

Sunday, February 17, 2013

ACLU Obtains Emails That Prove ICE Officials Set Deportation Quotas - COLORLINES

ACLU Obtains Emails That Prove ICE Officials Set Deportation Quotas - COLORLINES

ACLU Obtains Emails That Prove ICE Officials Set Deportation Quotas




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A set of e-mails obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina show U.S. immigration officials developed strategies to increase the number of deportations so they could surpass the previous year’s record deportation numbers.
Federal immigration authorities have claimed to target people who pose a threat to public safety but these email show officials targeted immigrants convicted of minor crimes.
 “These recently reported documents suggest that ICE’s ‘targeted’ approach may have less to do with public safety or a focus on serious crimes, and more to do with the agency’s laser focus on meeting deportation levels,” said Seth Freed Wessler, Colorlines.com’s investigative reporter.
Wessler says the documents provide evidence to support what advocates have long argued: immigration enforcement as it’s currently practiced looks more like a dragnet than a harpoon.
USA Today analyzed the emails and point to some of the strategies used to increase the number of deportations:
Among those new tactics - detailed in interviews and internal e-mails - were trolling state driver’s license records for information about foreign-born applicants, dispatching U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to traffic safety checkpoints conducted by police departments, and processing more illegal immigrants who had been booked into jails for low-level offenses. Records show ICE officials in Washington approved some of those steps.
 …
 In April, officials told field office heads to map plans to increase removals, then instructed at least one field office that supervises enforcement throughout Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina to go ahead with efforts to mine DMV records and step up their efforts to deport people who had been booked into county jails, among other measures.
ICE spokeswoman Gillian Christensen told USA Today in a statement that “ICE does not have quotas.” She said the agency sets “annual performance goals” that “reflect the agency’s commitment to using the limited resources provided by Congress.”
Immigration advocates say this news doesn’t come as a surprise.
“The revelations about the Obama Administration’s deportation quotas are shocking, but not a suprise” said Arturo Carmona, Executive Director of Presente.org. “Anyone who knows the hard working people that the Administration is calling ‘criminals,’ who are being jailed by the thousands and deported by the millions, knows that government officials have such internal quotas. Other officials do an injustice to us all when they repeat false claims that there is some sort of legal mandate to deport 400,000 people a year. There’s not. And now everybody can see the ‘bonuses,’ deceit and dirty politics behind the immigrant tragedy.”
Chris Newman, Legal Director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network says the findings are offensive.
“Setting immigration policy by a deportation quota runs counter to every talking point the Obama administration has used in the past five years. It has endangered public safety. It offends both constitutional values and has led to grave civil rights violations,” Newman said.
“It’s the exact reason why the first step in immigration reform must be a suspension of deportations,” Newman went on to say.

Saturday, February 16, 2013

via @Grassroots_News: ICE Official that Pushed Deportation Quota Now Works for Private Prison Corporation GEO Group « Detention Watch Network: Monitoring & Challenging Immigration Detention, Immigration Enforcement & Deportation

via @Grassroots_News: ICE Official that Pushed Deportation Quota Now Works for Private Prison Corporation GEO Group « Detention Watch Network: Monitoring & Challenging Immigration Detention, Immigration Enforcement & Deportation

via @Grassroots_News: ICE Official that Pushed Deportation Quota Now Works for Private Prison Corporation GEO Group

February 16, 2013
Written by Bob Libal and Reposted from Grassroots Leadership
David Venturella
[Yesterday's] USA Today carried a disturbing article highlighting Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s effort to increase the number of deportations through aggressive enforcement mechanisms.
Internal emails at the agency showed that ICE agents “were trolling state driver’s license records for information about foreign-born applicants, dispatching U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to traffic safety checkpoints conducted by police departments, and processing more illegal immigrants who had been booked into jails for low-level offenses.”
The former official whose emails are heavily quoted in the article is David Venturella, former assistant director at ICE.  Guess where Mr. Venturella ended up after his term at ICE?  Mr. Venturella is now the Executive Vice President for Corporate Development at GEO Group, according to his LinkedIn profile.  GEO Group is a private prison corporation that heavily depends on federal immigration contracts to ensure a steady profit stream and employees a stream of heavily connected lobbyists in DC.
GEO knows that immigration reform that moves away from mass detention and crimanalization of migrants would be really bad for business.  Business Insider reported on February 2nd that in 2011, GEO Group CEO George Zoley told investors:
“At the federal level, initiatives related to border enforcement and immigration detention with an emphasis on criminal alien populations as well as the consolidation of existing detainee populations have continued to create demand for larger-scale, cost efficient facilities.”
Undoubtedly, Mr. Venturella’s history at ICE is proving valuable for his new company.

Latin American Herald Tribune - Pro-Immigrant Center Rejects Deportation Quotas

Latin American Herald Tribune - Pro-Immigrant Center Rejects Deportation Quotas

Pro-Immigrant Center Rejects Deportation Quotas

CHICAGO – Heartland Alliance’s National Immigrant Justice Center rejected Friday practices attributed to immigration authorities to increase the number of deportees.

The Chicago-based NIJC reacted to a story in USA Today citing internal memos and e-mails of Immigration and Customs Enforcement showing that agents were pressured into boosting their quotas of detentions and deportations.

The documents say that ICE agents are sent to review state driver’s license records in order to gather information about foreign applicants, particularly in cases where they were refused.

At the same time, ICE agents are stationed at local police checkpoints to detect drivers without licenses, and those who are undocumented can be charged with minor crimes.

“The e-mails and memos published today show that the deportation and detention quotas that have driven this country’s immigration policies for the past several years are ineffective and divert law enforcement resources from activities that would better protect public safety,” the NIJC’s Royce Bernstein Murray said in a statement.

“Furthermore, they have overwhelmed our country’s justice system and put people on a fast-track to deportation without the opportunity to speak to a lawyer or even see a judge,” he said.

The NIJC said that despite the government giving its word that it exercises procedural discretion and focuses on the most serious cases of public safety, “we now have documented evidence to the contrary.” EFE

Patriot Act does not protect immigrant civil liberties

Patriot Act does not protect immigrant civil liberties


Opinion

Patriot Act does not protect immigrant civil liberties

Posted on by Nina Golshan
Since 9/11, there have been momentous changes in how the United States operates. Government officials and authorities have had to deal with a more complex array of problems and some security changes. From the large-scale to the everyday, these adjustments have been hard to swallow.
The noise made by civil liberties organizations over the Patriot Act, which loosened restrictions on law enforcement’s ability to gather intelligence, brought attention to possible constitutional violations in the name of safety. The Department of Homeland Security has defended the Patriot Act as they thought necessary — for the sake of security, some sacrifices must be made. Another controversial policy of this kind focuses specifically on New York City and the Tri-State area.
In mid-2011, after an ongoing investigation, the Associated Press released documents obtained from the New York Police Department detailing a secret intelligence unit intended to stop future terrorist attacks before they strike. This Demographics Unit, which consists of members of the NYPD and ex-CIA operatives, was and still is conducting arbitrary, covert surveillance on Muslims — sitting in on Islamic society meetings, infiltrating thousands of mosques and planting informants in Muslim Student Associations in universities across the region. Lists of thousands of Islamic organizations, including names, dates, pictures, maps, personal backgrounds are in the released documents, and going through the documents is slightly disturbing at best.
The most alarming of the NYPD’s actions is the blatant racial profiling. Listed in dozens of released confidential NYPD documents are specific directions to look into anyone of Middle Eastern or South Asian descent. In one report, when scoping out specific businesses or locations, officers were told first and foremost to “determine the ethnicity of the owner.”
Most confusing, though, is the operation’s continuation despite the lack of results. According to Assistant Chief Thomas Galati, there has not been a lead in over six years of practice. Galati made statements of this kind during a June 2012 deposition. Why, then, has the policy survived?
The NYPD had consistently denied these reports until recently, when New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg endorsed the procedures, claiming it was in the interest of all Americans.
While national security is of paramount importance, it should not come at the cost of citizens’ constitutional rights. Officials say there was no breach of a person’s right to free speech, assembly, privacy or religion, but the investigation has shown that many people who are subject to surveillance live in fear; they fear living and speaking freely, which are fears that constitutional amendments were designed to erase. In attempting to protect the nation from terrorism, government officials have gone against the very foundation of our nation and violated the same principles set in place to protect from unprovoked assault.
Immigrants, first-, second- and third-generation Americans, people who have committed themselves to becoming part of this country, are being persecuted because of where they come from and what they believe in. Americans should not tolerate such an attack on our principles.
Nina Golshan is a contributing columnist. Email her at opinion@nyunews.com.