ICE paints bleak picture of detention system
Abuses continue despite agency's documentation
By SUSAN CARROLL, HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Updated 12:02 a.m., Monday, October 10, 2011
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FontImmigration and Customs Enforcement officials have continued to use troubled detention facilities despite documenting flagrant violations of their own detention standards, including poor medical care and mistreatment of detainees, new internal records show.
Two years ago, top ICE officials announced plans to create a "truly civil" detention system and improve oversight of the sprawling network of detention centers, private prisons and state and local jails that house hundreds of thousands of detainees annually.
Since then, ICE officials say they have taken unprecedented steps to improve detainee care, including creating an aggressive inspection and monitoring system designed to hold accountable the private contractors and local governments that run detention facilities.
However, more than 1,000 pages of internal reports from ICE's Office of Detention Oversight, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, paint an often bleak picture of the inside of the nation's immigration detention system, with detainees in some facilities lacking access to quality medical care or even clean underwear.
At Houston's contract detention center, ICE inspectors have quietly documented dozens of deficiencies in internal reports over the past few years, with problems involving medical care, the use of excessive force and "abusive treatment" of detainees, the reports show. Yet the agency has posted only positive inspection reports prepared by private contractors who toured the Houston facility on its website, not its own internal reports.
David Shapiro, a staff attorney with the ACLU National Prison Project, said ICE's internal inspection records raise questions about the agency's ability to oversee its sprawling detention network, calling its progress on detention reform over the past two years "halting."
"There were some positive reforms," Shapiro said. "But really, in terms of substantive improvements in conditions, a lot of them have just failed to materialize. Detainees are still held in facilities that really are indistinguishable from prisons and jails … and a lot of times, the conditions are really quite atrocious."
Some progress
ICE officials announced plans in fall 2009 to overhaul their detention system with the goal of making it less penal and more humane for the roughly 400,000 detainees it houses annually.
Since 2009, the agency has winnowed down the number of facilities in use from more than 300 to 250 and has started laying the groundwork for a handful of detention centers that will offer less restrictive conditions, including greater outdoor access and more visitation time for family and friends.
But, just like in 2009, more than half of ICE detainees still are housed in county jails and state prisons scattered across the country, often alongside accused or convicted criminals. Even in private prisons that hold only ICE detainees, conditions are generally prison-like, with most immigrants passing their days behind double fences topped with barbed wire or concertina coils.
ICE has stationed detention monitors in the 42 facilities that house the bulk of the detainee population in an effort to improve oversight, and has hired private contractors to conduct annual inspections of each facility in use. The agency also has improved the system for tracking deaths in detention, which have totaled 124 since 2003.
But efforts to strengthen its detention standards - national guidelines designed to ensure detainees' health, safety and due process rights - have stalled out in part because of opposition by union members concerned for agent, contractor and detainee safety.
And internal records show ICE officials have quietly struggled to ensure contractors' compliance with the standards, including basic quality-of-life issues for detainees.
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