Fortress America: Detention and Removal

Thursday, Feb. 2, 2006
8:30 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.
National Press Club
Washington , D.C.

Fortress America: Detention and Removal
Part three of a four-part series
Presented by the ABA’s Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities

Panelists:
Deanna Burdine, Whistle Blower, Oklahoma City
Judy Greene, Justice Strategies
Joanne Kelsey, Director, Detention and Asylum Program, Women's Commission for Refugee Women
Malik Nduala, Keeping Hope Alive, National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild
Chris Nugent, Holland & Knight
Judy Rabinovitz, Senior Staff Counsel, Immigrants' Rights Project, ACLU
Aarti Shahani, Families for Freedom
Nina Siulc, Vera Institute of Justice

My name is Andrea Black and I am the coordinator of the Detention Watch Network, which is a national collation advocating for reform of the U.S. immigration and detention enforcement policies. So that all that come to our shores receive fair and humane treatment. I am pleased to be moderating this morning’s panel. The billion dollar issue of detainment and deportation. This a critical time to examine the current U.S. detention system and the enforcement policies that are driving its relentless expansion. With national attention fixed on securing our borders, Congress is considering vastly increasing its detention capacity and adding excessive new enforcements measures as the cornerstone of its response. Without fixing a broken system we have constructed to detain and deport people. The purposed package includes expedited deportation along the border without hearings, expanding mandatory detention, a gutting of the federal courts’ authority to review immigration matters and new far reaching grounds for deportation. Mainstream media is stoking the fires with its coverage of the issue without taking a close look at the harsh and unjust realities of the current system. Detained immigrants are now the fastest growing prison population in the U.S. This includes men, women, children, the transgendered, the mentally ill and people suffering from serious illnesses all put in prison setting for their administrative hearings. Having been spirited far away from their families and communities in the U.S., immigrants and asylum seekers are house in isolated facilities isolated around by barbed wire and escorted to their immigration hearings behind locked prison doors. In detention, roughly 90 percent of individuals go before a judge without an attorney to help them since there is no right to government appointed council. It is difficult to impossible to get access to phone, mail or legal materials. Unlike our prison system, there are no enforceable standards for detention facilities. This has allowed abysmal conditions and instances of abuse to be tolerated in many places. As a journalist Mark Douhl reported in his book, it is a vital American gulag.

Our panelists this morning that I will be introducing will be discussing many aspects of the system. Including the current law which is greatly restricted in the individuals ability to fight their cases and as a result is tearing families apart and eroding immigrants due process rights and civil liberties. They will also discuss the current unenforceable system which is open to abuse without real oversight or accountability. As well the many private prison corporations and county and state entities that are profiting this industry with little community oversight. This cash cow feeds expansion even as the U.S. prison population declines. And finally they will discuss the devastating impact of our policies on communities national wide, the countries they return and our international reputation. And at what cost? Our fiscal year in 2006, the Department of Homeland Security has been appropriated a record one billion dollars for immigration detention, including 90 million dollars for new detention beds. This is not our only choice. You will hear about alternatives to detention that have proven to be more humane as well as secure and cost effective. You will also hear about more carefully drawn enforcement policies that would keep this country secure while upholding U.S. values. The full brunt of our current policies is being born by families and communities across the U.S. Some family members have been able to join us and will be introduced shortly. There is also a handout available at the table outside which provides stories of people in detention and they are available to speak individually with reporters. I am now pleased to introduce our panelist who will provide a rare glimpse of the world of detention and deportation that is hidden in plain sight in our communities. They will each make a statement and then there will be time for questions. Their full bios are available at that table outside as well as well as a lot of material and background on the issues. So, I am pleased to introduce first Aarti Shahani, Co-founder and Organizer Families for Freedom, a defense network for immigrant families facing deportation. And then after Judy Rabinovitz, Senior Staff Council Immigration Rights project of the American Civil Liberties Union. Following is Miss Deanna Burdine, former immigrant custom and deportation employee and whistleblower. And after Malik Ndaula Soros, Justice Fellow, with Keeping Hope Alive, a project of the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild. To my left is Judy Green, Policy Analyst Justice Strategies. Nina Schultz, Senior Research Associate with the Immigrant and Justice Program with the Veer Institute of Justice. And finally Chris Nugent, pro-bono counsel for the Woman’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children and co-chair of the ABA Individual Rights and Responsibilities Section Committee on the Rights of Immigrants. Thank you.

You can see from the size and range of this panel there is a lot to get out so I actually wrote down my comments and they are available outside to try and keep myself within time. Good morning and thank you for inviting me to speak about the impacts of immigrant families on deportation and American citizens as well. My name is Aarti Shahani. I am the co-founder of Families for Freedom, New York based multi-defense network for by and for immigrants who are facing deportation. I wish I could start with a note of America’s treatment of immigrants. The President and Congress are talking about fixing the broken system. The system is in fact very broken. Unfortunately, their fixes, mainly detention, deportation, and heightened enforcement, are broken too. Let’s start with a couple cold hard facts. The Department of Homeland Security is becoming the single largest destroyer of American families. The people who call Families for Freedom are black and brown women who have unexpectedly been turned into single mothers by the U.S. immigration system. Many of them are American citizens; virtually all of them have American born children. These mothers were part of duel earner households but when their partners were taken by immigration everything changed. Now they don’t just have to struggle to pay the rent in New York, which is by the way one of the expensive cities in the world. They also have to scramble for childcare, deal with the depression and grief their children are suffering daily due to the loss of one parent and they also have to provide for their deported partners. Deportees abroad can not find work and they certainly can’t get paid in detention. They are converted instantly from breadwinners into dependents. Every civil proceeding, whether its juvenile court, child service adjudication family court, considers children. Experts are brought in to access the best interest of children. Yet in deportation courts children simply do not exist. When Congress rewrote the immigration laws in 1996, they erased children from the equation. Our lawmakers forbade judges from even considering hardships to U.S. children whose parent faces deportation. In most cases that Families for Freedom sees, immigration judges are explicitly barred from seeing the best interest of a child when issuing order against a parent. Furthermore, each law that Congress is passing or purposing widens the net of kids erased. Meanwhile in the real world, where we live, American children who lose parents to deportation suffer extraordinarily. Psychiatrists have likened the losing of parents to deportation as to losing them to death. The experience is very similar through the eyes of a child. Deportation is the cruelest civil procedure in America. The irreverence of American children in our civil immigration court should raise red flags with foreign countries. Deportation is a unique form of punishment. It requires two state actors, the sending and receiving countries. Unlike the United States, most countries around the globe have ratified the Convention on the Rights of a Child. When receiving countries, like Jamaica, like Mexico, like the Dominican Republic, when receiving countries facilitate the deportation process they are not just acting like a dumping ground for the U.S. they are violating their own international legal commitments.

I am a little tired right now. I arrived in D.C. just after midnight with a van full of F.F.F. members. I wish I could point to them now but people are still getting ready and hopefully will be here within a minute or two. But they included Hialo, an American teenager whose dad was suddenly deported to the Dominican Republic. His little brother, born in the Bronx, had to been sent to Santo Maringo because childcare and work became impossible for mom to juggle alone in New York. Brooklyn resident Angela Rosen is campaigning against the deportation of her brother Warren. Let me ask you a question. How many people here think that veterans can get deported? Veterans can get deported. Her brother, Warren, is a veteran who was honorable discharged after years of service. He is behind barbed wire at the moment, separated from children and facing exile to Trinidad. Latisha couldn’t make the trip today; however, she was evicted from her apartment a few months after her husband was detained. She and her children had to relocate to a homeless shelter in Brooklyn where they cannot receive phone calls or guests. I began working with immigrant families torn apart by deportation in 1999 when my uncle was deported to India and my dad was placed in deportation proceeding. I went to the capitol regularly to try to push for changes to the 1996 laws. Before September 11 th lawmakers from both sides of the aisle realized we had already taken too many rights away from immigrants. Since the towers fell, however, the lawmakers on the far right have exploited the tragedy to push their preexisting agenda and those in the center have either suffered amnesia or laryngitis. Your guess is as good as mine. After today’s briefing, we are visiting the offices of Hilary Clinton and Chuck Schummer. We need them to vigilantly oppose every single anti-immigrant provision that comes before Congress. We also need them to go a step further and make things better for our new American families. Our leaders have an obligation to help stop the inflation of national security and immigration. Immigrants do not have anything inherently to do with terror. After all it was Timothy McVeigh, a Gulf War veteran and white man, who bombed the Oklahoma City federal building. We need Senators Clinton and Schumer to reinsert children and their hardship into the deportation equation. We need them to take a stand that is in the best interest of all of our families and children and the health of our communities. We are deeply interested in what they have to say. We need to hear what they have to say and we are desperately hoping they are going to help us.

Since the 1996 immigration laws, 1.3 million people have been deported. Over 15 percent of U.S. families are mixed status, in which one parent is a non-citizen and one child is a citizen. Some anti-immigrant and frankly racist politicians like to paint our members, that are those facing deportation, as people without communities in this country. But every time a father or mother is deported, it is not just the children who grieve. Church goers say that they miss their pastor. Teachers lament their students falling grades. School social workers caution about a child’s destructive behavior. And shop keepers admit the loss of their good employees. The list that I just mentioned is those who call us daily. They ask us who they can reach out to explain the reality of the person they love and to stop the deportation. More often than not we are forced to tell them the existing law leaves no room for a solution. No one short of Congress can stop this. Thanks. I will just point out my crew made it out, in the back and maybe we can talk a little bit more together. Thanks.

Hi. I am Judy Rabinovitz, a lawyer with the ACLU and the Immigrants Rights Project. I have been working on immigration and detention for probably, I don’t know, long time, 15 or 20 years. As I was thinking about it, coming here, that when I first started working around detention I think it was around 1990 or 1992. We did a study about the Varick Street detention center in New York. And I remember what hit us then was just people were being warehoused in places where there was nothing to do. They were just sitting there, sitting there, sitting there. They didn’t know what was going on with their cases. And they were just there. They didn’t have access to counsel. There were a lot of people who weren’t unnecessarily detained who were there just waiting for their removal orders to be executed. They were there for a year or two or three, just waiting for that. There were U.S. citizens that were being detained, but because they were in detention they couldn’t get the documents that they needed to prove that they shouldn’t have been detained. And I guess what’s striking is – and then also when it came down to our ultimate recommendations were, we pointed out how detention made it so difficult for people to pursue their cases. Because when you’re in detention there is no right to counsel, as Aarti said, you aren’t making money so it’s harder to afford counsel. At least of Varick Street, it was a detention center in New York City so they aren’t physically removed but for many people in detention they are way far away. So they can’t get counsel, they can’t get the documents they need and so it’s sort of perpetuating thing. So our recommendations were, you know big picture, well you know there should be a right to counsel at least for people who are in detention. There needed to be oversight of detention facilities and detention conditions because of the incredible abuses there. And then there needed to be alternatives to detention. Because why were people being detained when they didn’t need to be? We don’t lock up everybody that is charged with a crime. We have a system of bond. And so I’m afraid to say that 18 years later we really haven’t changed expect that it’s gotten a lot worse. Instead of having five to six thousand people in detention we now have over 20 thousand. And as Andrea was referring to, a recent appropriation bill has mandated five thousand new detention beds for the next four years. Or is it more than that? It maybe more than that. And at the same time I know we haven’t gotten any further in terms of counsel and we haven’t gotten any further in terms of oversight. We have detention standards now but they are not enforceable. And you will be hearing from other panelists here about the conditions stuff. What I was going to focus on, and I try will do in my two remaining minutes or whatever, is just how we have also seen during this period a systematic erosion of due process rights. So just to begin, like you know, in terms of substantive rights that individuals had. It used to be that you had to get individualized – and let me just say overview- when I talk about due process, it seems the essence of due process is individualized and consideration and what we have seen in the last 15 years a lot with the 1996 laws, it’s continuing today, a move away from completely individualized determinations to categorical determinations. Just basically you’re a criminal, that’s it. You’re this kind of a criminal, that’s it. Let me just say this kind of a criminal has expanded into any kind of a criminal. You have anything that’s at all related to terrorism, just because you come from a country like that, that’s it. Just categorical. And here are some examples. In terms of substances relief it used to be that you could get a 212C waiver of deportation if you were a long time permanent resident. A judge would actually look at your factors. As Aarti was saying, judges don’t have any say anymore. They can’t look at this and say what’s going to happen to your children. They can’t look and know this conviction was ten or 15 years ago when you were addicted to drugs and since then you have rebuilt your life. Discretion is out, it’s basically categorical. You are convicted of a certain crime and that’s pretty much the end of the day. In terms of – and unfortunately I am going to talk about the erosion of due process. Congress doesn’t seem to get it, because this is where we are at and now their proposals expand the grounds for which there will be no discretion. So this category for aggravated felony which started at being serious crimes, murder, rape, and then expanded to into other types of crimes which are not aggravated or felonies is now going to be expanded again to anybody who is in the country unlawfully. I mean the Supreme Court says that driving under the influence isn’t an aggravated felony, so what’s congress going to do? It’s going to fix it. It’s going to make it an aggravated felony and what does that mean? Exactly what Aarti was talking about, all of these families are going to be destroyed. So that’s for me, who is focused on detention, the other issue is bond hearings. And I remember when were at Varick Street two years ago, or I mean 15 or 20 years ago, we were very upset that there were a lot of people detained with 20 or 30 thousand dollars bonds and they couldn’t make it. Those days are gone. Forget bonds. You don’t even get a bond hearing. I mean you hear about someone who gets a bond and hallelujah. They at least saw a judge and got a bond. We don’t have bond hearings anymore. And in those few situations where the judge says, wait a second, this is the kind of person who should still get a bond hearing because in fact even though the law is pretty bad there is still get hearings. The immigration judge says, oh this person should get a bond hearing they are actually a citizen. This person should get a bond hearing. This conviction doesn’t actually make them deportable. Well, the government now has the authority to automatically stay that decision. So it doesn’t matter what the immigration judge says. This is the system that we are in now. Then in terms of just having a hearing before an immigration judge, I feel like oh la la, we take that for granted. The immigration judge hearing, as you heard from Andrea, what we are seeing in Congress is an expansion of our ability to remove people without a hearing at all. This started in 1996 with people who were stopped at the border, but not it’s being implemented for people who are already in the country. So even though one of the hallmarks of our is due process, that all persons who are in the United States, this goes back to the beginning of the 1900’s and the Supreme Court saying you can not be removed without a fair hearing. Well, you know, I guess a fair hearing doesn’t include having a judge. I guess a fair hearing doesn’t include the fact that you could be locked up and if you want to actually challenge it assuming you get a chance to challenge it. Since I realize my time is coming to a close soon, I want to get to this last aspect which is federal court review. You are talking about people who have no right to counsel in their proceedings and are facing a law that is getting more and more complicated. They are detained yet they don’t even have the opportunity for judicial review. First there was administrative review, judicial review, all of these things were absolutely essential. What we have seen was a systematic curtailment of that as well. There has been streamlining of the board of immigration appeals, so that now most of those appeals are judicator by summary firmaments from one judge, which means it all goes into the federal court and what you have seen is congress saying, we don’t want the federal court involved. So basically any type of issue with discretion, any kind of discretionary bond decision, any kind. Anyway discretion, there is a whole limit of the kinds of review there can be and again what we are seeing now, Congress wants to go further. Congress hasn’t gone far enough. They have already gotten rid of habeas as a sort of safety net for people who can’t do a petition for review. The person who had ineffective assistant of council or had no council at all. They have already gotten rid of that in the Real ID Act. Now they want to just create a situation where either, and I think this is the SensenbrennerBill but someone can correct me, where you wouldn’t even get to have review unless a judge certified you could have review and then you have an inspector, who is supposedly one of our friends-arguing for a separate immigration in court so it wouldn’t be part of the federal system. You would have court where judges just do immigration cases which means they are not going to be aware of the full level of constitutional and civil rights protections that should apply to immigrants as well. It’s another way of saying immigrants are different. They are not citizens. They do not get these same due process rights, so I’ll stop it at that. If there’s a chance I would like to say a few things later on prolonged detention and the government’s failure to comply with the Supreme Court decision about indefinite detention.

Good morning to all of you. My name is Deanna Burdine. I am a former immigration employee. I was fired, dismissed if you will, from my position last year in April 2005, because I took the responsibility to report some things that were happening at the lower level at my office in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Last week, I happened to tune into a press conference and I heard President Bush make a statement about the McCain amendment to this House Bill 1437. And if I may quote, ‘No American will be allowed to torture anyone anywhere in the world.’ I appreciate those words from our president, but what about our back yard? I am going to tell you about an incident that occurred within the Detention Removal Area of the Oklahoma City immigration and customs office. On June 14, 2004, as I was conducting my official duties as a deportation assistant, where I had been employed for seven years. I went into the detention area; I needed to have four bonds signed by my supervisor. Normally, I would not even go to that area, but I was placed there. I was able to look into some of the small windows into the processing area where I saw my first line supervisor and the second in command visibly assaulting a man, a Nigerian asylum seeker by the name of Daso Abibo. I was initially shocked and outraged. I knew I needed to immediately report this, so I began to try to find out who I report this to, because you have to realize the Department of Homeland Security immigration, if you will, being such a large entity sometimes we as employees don’t even know who to go to report these things. But I happened to know that OPR was who to report to. I didn’t think too much more about this after the first couple of weeks, but while I was preparing the paperwork to report it. When I was in an immigration court working, I do some liaison work with the immigration court and happened to be there on a particular day, when one of the local immigration attorneys handed me a photocopy of a written letter that had been given to her by Shakiru Adebayo. I immediately connected the two events, because the things he described in that letter were the very things I had witnessed. When I finally found out who it was, I knew I immediately and definite responsibility to report this. So I did. Subsequently, I became what is know as a whistleblower, and I was dismissed from my position. Mr. Adebayo was being assaulted by five to six detention officers. He was in shackles. He describes this torture and beating in the letter, very distinctly. He was being deported after being here for 23 years. Mr. Adebayo had committed no crimes. He was a model citizen. He had two children, U.S. citizen children, a U.S. citizen wife and a U.S. brother. Both his wife and his brother had petitioned for him to remain here. Those petitions had been approved and somehow lost within the system, which does not surprise me. There was a backload of cases everywhere at that time. I spoke with Mr. Adebayo colleague in Oklahoma City last night; I wanted to know exactly what was happening with his children. Mr. Victor Kin called, a very close friend of his, told me he is now working only odd jobs in Nigeria, because when you return to Nigeria, in his words, with no assets and in those circumstances you are kind of a non-citizen. So, he is having a very difficult time. His children had been in foster care of some sort, but are now back with their mother. But she is now working two and three jobs just to try to keep substance of family is still there, to keep them together. This is a very sad situation. One that I saw often. There would be raids when our officers would go out to a factory, bring all these women in. I remember one incident in particular where they raided a t-shirt factory, brought all these workers in, did not even allow them phone calls to the daycare where their children had been that day. They come home and their mother is gone. What a sad situation. Something must be done, must be done. You know I love my country. I love the fact that we have a system of justice, but immigration has become criminal justice. Shakiru Adebayo was not a criminal and he had no justice. Thank you.

Thanks. Excuse me. Hi. My name is Malick Ndaula and I’m with Keep the Hope Alive. I’m with the Immigration Project, doing my fellowship with Keep the Hope Alive. And at Keep the Hope Alive, we provide backup support to immigration prisoners across the United States. We assist detainees and their families in investigating and documenting and taking action against abuses perpetrated in federal facilities and local jails. Our aim is to create accountability where there is none to improve access to the detainees and to provide legal resources where there is none. And to bring attention to those in the detention industries. I will begin by making it clear that detention centers are in fact prisons. And people incarcerated for the sole reason they are not United States citizens and to me that is wrong. The wrong is compounded by the abuse the immigrants face or subjected to while they are in prison. The detention industry is expanding and I think that it is estimated that at any given day right now we have about 22 thousand immigrants in prisons across the United States. While local and private prisons are paid 20 dollars or around 20 dollars to upkeep, and for lack of a better word I’ll say a traditional prisoner. They are actually paid around 75 dollars or more for an immigration detainee. Why do I say that? I feel like that is a powerful economic incentive for private prison operators to actually want to have immigrants in their prison and detention centers and actually have them for longer periods, because for them, the longer the better. To me, in other words, the very structure offers significant rewards to treating detainees as if they were prisoners. Aside from depriving immigrants the basic rights to freedom, movement and other things, ‘cause I always like to say its statutory to say the detention centers are now prisons. At the same time people are actually in prison but the United States Constitution provides us protection where someone who has been accused of a crime or if he has to go to court you actually have a right to counsel but at the same time immigrants in prisons facing removal proceedings without the right to counsel or without means or without the means to obtain counsel, private counsel. So a lot times you have people, say for instance, you may have me or you may have someone else, who is in there and doesn’t really have family or the money to pay for an attorney before an immigration judge or before the U.S. government attorney who actually has all these resources and they are telling you all this stuff you that don’t really understand. But I believe my panel has kind of got into that already. I am going to say that since September 11, 2001 the Office of Inspectors has conducted endless investigations into the allegations of detainee abuse. Of all these investigations, at least to me in my eyes, have not yielded any, much improvements to date. Speaking at least from the point of authority, I participated in recently a concluded audit at the CCA, Corrections Corporations of America, facility in San Diego, which house a lot of immigration prisoners. In the audit I was on the phone everyday with staff in the office of investigators, the auditors office excuse me and provided them with lots of useful contexts from both the outside and from the inside. However, I can say that to this date, I still get complaints from CCA that people are still being you know denied access to medical care. They still have problems with updated legal material. Those are problems, they still don’t know what’s going on with their cases. You know that kind of stuff. I still receive complaints of inadequate medical care, lack of access to court or legal materials, physical abuse that goes unpunished. From other prisoners at Elmore county in Alabama, Plymouth, Massachusetts, Suffolk county jail, Massachusetts and many more. This facility, despite holding hundreds of immigration prisoners don’t ever follow the detention standards as enumerated in the contracts with the government. And most detainees have never heard of the detention standards. Usually when people contact me and are like oh I need this case and I need this. What we do sometimes is we print out the detention centers standards and send them to them. They are often amazed and are like oh we didn’t even know these things existed. Like, where did you get this from? The immigration offices over here say they have never heard of these or something like that. And it is just plain ridiculous. Also, the regulation requires deportation officer’s visits to detention centers to check on detainees needs. And quite frankly the offices do conduct the visits when they can. The problem is that in many cases deportation officers are too inundated with documents to do anything about findings of abuse or wrong doing. Or some of them simply don’t care. They encourage them to adopt meaningful detentionary reform that would improve the treatment of detainees. To conclude I’ll say that what is truly missing here is accountability at least on the detention part of it. With the rise of the billion dollar detainee industry that is dominated by contracted facilities, the question of account ability becomes even more urgent. We need to make sure that immigrant—that if they are going to be imprisoned in these facilities that they at least have access to law books legal materials. That when someone is ill they at least get medical attention, because as is the traditional prisoner can’t when they have a medical complication they can go directly to whatever it is called. You know the sick call or medical staff. Immigration is a whole ‘nother process. You submit a request which you are told is supposed to be submitted to immigration health services but sometimes it may take a couple weeks. So if you have a heart complication, you know it just makes no sense. And how do we make sure the claims of abuse and other wrongdoings are properly investigated and the appropriate remedial measures are taken on such corrections are reached? At that I’ll close, thanks.

I am Judy Greene a Policy Analyst with Justice Strategies located in both New York City and Washington D.C. I do primarily research on sentencing corrections policies. Some thirty five years of experience trying to address one way or another the laws, policies and practices that have brought the United States into a state of mass incarceration. So I became concerned with the problem of immigration in detention center as I watched this population explode. After 1994, we have seen almost a tripling of the numbers of immigrants in NSICE detention system. Also, many of you may know, nearly a third of the prisoners in the federal prison system are immigrants behind bars. Principally, serving on either drugs or some 19,000 of them serving on immigration violations, principally, almost all of them for reentry into the United States. The growing backlash against the undocumented immigrant workers has been inflamed by public officials and media personalities who hype the fear incriminating immigrations with criminals and criminals with terrorists. So we see legislators across the country now debating whether to localize immigrant enforcement using state laws trespassing and identity theft to arrest and prosecute immigrants at the state level. Arkansas has now joined Alabama and Florida in bracing a policy using local law enforcement resources to arrest people for immigration violations. NSICE officials reports that more than 230,000 immigrants were placed in detention during 2004. Now these crack downs campaigns were only going to exasperate and put added strain on a poorly managed system of federal detention in the United States. Now I want to talk about federal detention and U.S. marshals in ICE detention because they are kind of interwoven, because they are. ICE uses a lot of U.S. marshals contracted capacity to incarcerate many of the 22,000 immigrants currently in ICE custody. The federal detention system is an unwieldy patchwork of detention beds located in more than a thousand facilities across the country. Almost 90 percent of these are either state, federal or private lockups. Not administered by the marshals or ICE and ICE uses something in the neighborhood of 20,000 of these beds for people in their custody. Private prison executives have long relied on immigrate detention to grow their business. Those that know the history of the two giants, CCA, Corrections Corporations of America and Wackenhut, which now calls itself GO, will remember that they began their work in the mid-80’s with contracts from the INS. The first two private facilities in the U.S. were INS detention centers in Texas and Colorado. Within weeks of the 9/11 tragedy in New York, while the smoke was still rising from the ruins of the World Trade Towers, the chairman of the Cornell Corporations, based in Houston Texas, told stock analysts who were interested in the stock potential in his country. I am going to quote his directly, the massive terrorist strike in New York was a boom for his business. He said, ‘it’s clear since September 11 th there is a heightened focus on detention, more people are going to get caught. I would say that is positive. The federal businesses are the best business for us since September 11 th increasing that business.’ Local jailors are included or involved in expanding their industry. Where federal funding they see as a resource for expanding their own operations. York County, Pennsylvania, officials built a 20 million dollar expansion in the mid 90’s in order to attract contracts from INS and were raking in 60 dollars per day in detainees until the late 90’s when Inspector General Department of Justice audited their books and discovered they were only spending 37 dollars a day on each of these prisoners. The I.G. recommended that York County be done for over six million in over charges. Currently ICE payments for jail beds in the New Jersey jails currently average in the neighborhood of 80 dollars per detainee per day, but the private prison companies in this region seem to be able to reach a lot more deeply into the public purse. Recently, a GO contract to operate a small detention facility near JFK airport in Queens, New York was converted into a U.S. marshal’s detention facility, and news report about that conversion revealed that ICE had been paying GO 225 dollars a day for each detainee. Locked up in what was a converted warehouse near the airport. Texas is the capitol of the private prison industry and the federal detainee department for jail beds was booming far before 9/11. The federal detainees held in local jails is by INS and U.S. marshals grew by 167 percent between 1992 and 2001, compared to a growth of just 9 percent of all other populations held in other Texas lockup facilities. Currently federal detainee’s makeup 55 percent of the people held in private Texas and Texas lockups, private and public, dominate the ICE market holding more than 20 percent of all detainees. Organizers for South Texans Opposing Private Prisons, STOPP, an organization of reformers that was formed in 2003 to oppose construction of a private super jail in Laredo, say that even though the justification currently given explosion currently given in south Texas with more than 2500 built in the last year and another 5000 purposed. The government says this is necessary to protect the country and filter gangs and terrorism, but they have obtained data from the U.S. marshals that reveal that immigrants in the custody of U.S. marshals in South Texas are almost all nonviolent drug and immigration offenders. You are going to hear about effective, inexpensive alternatives to offenders that have been tried and true and proven successful. And yet federal policy makers can’t seem to take these seriously. Recently ICE has begun to divert money to what they call alternatives to incarceration but what is really is primarily is just electronic bracelets confining people to their homes which is just another form of detention. In the meantime, as we are hearing, federal officials are intensifying the crackdown on immigrants launching a further expansion on immigration beds. ICE has just signed a new contract with CCA in Florida for up to 600 at the T. Don Huddle correction facility in Tyler, Texas. Sort of frosting on a half baked cake, on July 24 th KBR, the Texas based engineering and construction subsidiary of Halliburton, which is currently engaged in building detention facilities at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, announced they received a new contract from ICE for 395 million dollars, an open ended contract which they say provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment ICE detention and removal operations in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S or support the rapid development of new programs. And you know, where is this spiral going to end?

Thank you. Thank you. I am going to talk to you about the research I have been doing for my doctorial dissertation that looks at the deportation policies on Dominican citizens and I also know there are a couple members of Families for Freedom that can also talk to you about the situation in the Dominican Republic. My research looks at the people who have lived the majority of their lives in the United States, like citizens, returned to the nations that are considered home under the law. And what I really want to talk to you today are some of the truths and perceptions about people who have been deported. Often when we hear of arguments of increasing detention and deportation we hear that people who are people deported are violent, dangerous criminals, that they are people who are here unlawfully, those who recently entered the country, and I want to talk to you a little bit about some of the statistics I have gathered from Dominicans that have been deported that really contradict those stereotypes. First of all, there have been around 30,000 deported in the past ten years, and many of those were people who entered the United States legally. More than 85 percent of Dominicans who have been sent back to the Dominican Republic came here legally. About 75 percent of them lived here as lawful permanent residents or green card holders. Something around 70 to 75 percent of lawful permanent residents who were deported to the Dominican Republic were eligible for naturalization before they were deported, so had they chose to naturalize, they would have avoided deportation. There is often the impression these are young men. One third of those deported to the Dominican Republic are over the age of 40. More than 65 percent of them have lived here for more than ten years and more than a quarter have lived here for more than 20 years or more. Many of them came here young and spent most of their lives in the United States. More than half of those deported to the Dominican Republic leave children behind and those are U.S. citizen children. They are not Dominican citizen children. I found that more than one third of the people deported to the Dominican Republic in the last few years had a single conviction. These are not violent career criminals. As many as 15 percent of the sample that I looked at had conspiracy to a drug crime as their only conviction. I also want to highlight and pick up on some of the things that have already been said. That many of the people that I worked with had possibilities for release but had no opportunity to speak to attorneys before they were deported so they didn’t contest to their deportation. And 15 percent of the sample never saw an immigration judge. I also want to talk to you very briefly about what happens to people who are returned to the Dominican Republic. There is extreme persecution both by the families and the state in the Dominican Republic. Despite the fact that the majority, the overwhelming majority, of the people deported to the Dominican Republic have never committed a crime there they are entered into a criminal database. They are finger printed criminals and are put on a parole system. In the Dominican Republic they are subject to routine surveillance by the police and harassment on a regular basis. And in order to get a job in the Dominican Republic one needs a certificate of good conduct from the police. And if you do not complete this parole program despite not being a criminal, it is impossible to get work. The criminal database there is widely available so if someone goes to open a bank account a bank teller can see that you have been deported from the United States and there will be a word or two saying something like drug trafficker or violent criminal even though these labels don’t represent the nature of the crimes these people were convicted of. I also want to say that despite the perception of the Dominican Republic the deportees are creating new types of violence and reeking havoc on the nation very few of them have been convicted of crimes in that country and in fact in the past few years that I have been conducting my research there are more police officers incarcerated in the Dominican Republic. Which I think is a very overwhelming statistic or piece of information and when you look at it verses the types of stereotypes that exist. I also just wanted to echo what Aarti said about the kind of effect this is having on families. Most of the people that I worked with that were deported that left U.S. citizen children behind don’t have the resources to see their children, so the families that they leave behind in the United States are now sending money to the Dominican Republic to support them because they can’t find work there. The families can’t return with them because there isn’t enough work there to support people in the Dominican Republic and people who have tried to relocate their families have often ended up having the family members return to the United States because they can’t support themselves there. And you see children sometimes not being allowed to travel to the Dominican Republic to visit their parents because the immigrant parent here, let’s say the mother in the United States isn’t able to afford to send them back down there. More than the kinds of sorta destabilization, that media often talks about the costs of deportation in the Dominican Republic because of crime I really want to kinda point to the economic destabilization that deportation is causing for families in the United States and the Dominican Republic. And I sorta want to leave you with the thought that the sorta economic costs of deportation seem to be much greater than the benefits for this population. And I guess I am going to turn it back to Andrea, because Chris left me a note here saying he felt ill and had to step out. I think he’s not going to comment.

Thank you all very much. I would like to open up for questions, have the opportunity to open up for questions and then I think I also have some questions for my colleagues and I think some of the issues Chris was going to address include the alternatives to the detention program and some of the upcoming legislative proposals if we call all be thinking maybe we can pitch in at different points on some of those issues. But first, if people have questions in the audience. There is a microphone right up here. If you don’t mind using it because this is being taped distribution later. Thank you.

Um, this is a question for Miss Burdine. I was wondering what the reason was for being let go and if you were aware of other colleagues who were similarly concerned and were considering coming forward about things they had observed and if they were deterred for doing so.

The essential reason, or let me say the official reason, that they gave was failure to follow instructions or orders. That was because I had begun taking notes or putting notes in a personal diary for my own self protection more than anything. They said that was something I should have not been doing, so that was their reasoning. Also I belonged to the AFGE, the union for us, and they took on this case as my representative. However, they did not get their answer in on time and that was probably the main reason I was dismissed. They had very flimsy reasons actually for dismissing me but because that answer was not timely, I was dismissed. What was the other question? Other colleagues? Yes, there was a colleague of mine who resigned under duress. He had witnessed many, many of the things that I know about. There’s much more. The management there in the Oklahoma City office is probably a very poor management system. Consists of the good old boy club, if you will, and they tend to stand up for one another and cover for one another when these things happen. One of these, the second on command that assaulted Mr. Abibo, has a known criminal record or court record if you will, known that is a man who is known for violent offenses. Having assaulted two ex-wives at various times and his children having witnessed him assaulting one ex-wife. So there is no wonder that he would commit what he did on someone who was a shackled person and totally defenseless. But, yes, there is another colleague and he is willing to speak out also.

Good morning, I am Lynn Fredrickson with Amnesty International and of course we are very concerned about reports of violations against asylum seekers and immigrant detainees in general. And we have in fact written letter to DHS on behalf of the case of Deanna Burdine and Daso Abibo. My question is for Miss Burdine. I am actually interested in hearing more about the remedies you must be seeking for Mr. Adebayo and for yourself in the unjust dismissal and abuse you suffered while at DHS. Thank you.

Thank you. I am not totally aware of all the remedies either of us might be able to seek. I am told that my case is being arbitrated. However, I have been told that for months on end now and they keep telling me it has been assigned to a Mr. Angelo who is the arbitrator in California. I am getting a lot of lip service and I really don’t know if they are helping me. They have given me the name of an attorney in San Antonio who has said, well yes, this is going to be arbitrated. You can only be told this so many times before you begin to wonder if they are going to do anything at all. I am going to pursue this. I hope that I can get a letter writing campaign, anything at all on my behalf to be able to restore me back to my position. That in it self would not be a good situation. You can imagine going back into that situation. As far as Mr. Abibo is concerned, Mr. Abibo should be allowed to come back to this country. He had petitioned things that had been filed for him that had been approved and lost subsequent to those two petitions he filed for asylum and those papers were also lost. And these are facts ladies and gentlemen. I have been in that file. I have looked at it carefully. I have things in my possession that document the fact that all of these papers were lost and you have to realize that even a local office like Oklahoma City is just buried in paperwork. They have passed law upon law and rule upon rule to where you just, to where its impossible and these people thread through this and some people do not even have representation. They don’t know what to do. They’re fearful. They know the things that can happen to them like I have spoken about this morning. I really don’t know what the remedy is going to be for Mr. Abibo but a lot of us in here might have some ideas about how he can be helped. I hope so, because I would love to help this man. He was a productive citizen. He had begun his own business and suddenly everything in his life was wiped out. After being here 23 years he has pursued an education. I believe he was only seven hours away from a master’s degree. It’s not like this man was not trying with all his heart to do the best that he could, the best that he could for his family. He deserves to be back here. He truly does.

Hi. My name is Liz McGrail. I am the Detention Project Director here at CAIR Coalition here in D.C. I want to make a couple comments and then address or inquire the panel. First, Miss Burdine, I thank you very much for your courage. It takes a lot to speak up and risk your job on reporting these abuses. I just hope more people take your lead on that. Mr. Ndaula, I really appreciate you bringing out the point about medical conditions because as we see the increase in beds and detainees we don’t see any attempt to revise the system for providing medical care for these detainees. At CAIR Coalition we visit detention centers in Virginia and I think that’s one of the biggest concerns we have as medical conditions as the number of detainees increase. Just in Virginia alone the number of detainees has gone from around 400 when I started at CAIR in May to well over 650 now. And yeah, there are more beds but there aren’t more detention officers taking care of these peoples’ cases getting them expedited. There is no system proved removal of people so people are staying for longer periods of time. But the medical care is a huge problem. I really appreciate the pointing out of the fact that Halliburton has gotten this huge contract and I wish the press would put more influence on this. But my inquiry is really something that Miss Rabinovitz mentions which is indefinite detainees, which is another huge concern for us. We are seeing people well beyond that six month period and unless you file a habeas the government isn’t going to do anything. My question is: Is there any consideration for a class action suit and could you just speak to that and what you all are seeking.

I wish I could tell you I had an answer to it. It’s definitely a very big problem. Benitez was the Supreme Court case that said that people could not be indefinitely detained if their country won’t take them back. And what we are seeing is a systematic noncompliance. And noncompliance in a bunch of different ways. One is what you are describing, unless someone brings a habeas they sit there so we represented somebody that fortunately filled a habeas on his own and we got involved. It turned out he had been detained for over two years and the government said he had been obstructing his rule to China. He wasn’t obstructing his rule to China. He just couldn’t get a travel document. So the bottom line is that to the extent that there is all these people there who don’t have counsel, they are just sitting there unless they have someone who is going to bring a habeas for them. I mean one approach I would like to think about developing and I don’t think we are close to it yet is whether we could talk about a right to counsel for those who have been detained more than six months after a final order. Something that said how do you make Benitez, how do you make it meaningful if you’ve got people who are locked up there. Another way to do it, and I know there was a class action, there is a class action that is pending in Illinois which was trying to get the DHS and ICE to actually follow their own review procedures. Because there are regulations on how they are supposed to do things but I think it is just notorious that they don’t follow those. So I think those are possible issues that there is possibility of litigation, class action has certain hurdles to try to peel people off. I guess my response is that I defiantly think it’s worth looking at. We need resources to try to figure out where to do it. Also, I don’t think you would want to do it in Virginia given you’re the Fourth Circuit, so it’s just, you know, in terms of litigation and then you have to take in mind the courts. And there are other advocacy approaches and maybe there is some way together. One other thing in terms of indefinite detention that I had wanted to say which is that there is the indefinite detention of those who have been ordered to be removed and can’t be removed. And there is a lot of that, but there is also just indefinite detention of people who are fighting their cases. And that I think at this point that is the issue that is so pervasive. The process of getting federal court review can be years and people are just sitting in detention and then they can get federal court review and their case is remanded and they are still in detention. So I believe if you look at some of the summaries that have been prepared, I think there maybe one, I’m not sure if it got included or not. But somebody has been detained in Louisiana for five years, five years. I think he spent all of about a few months of criminal incarceration for two petty offenses. Patrick Brown is his name, I think I’m getting this right, he has been in detention five years. He brought a habeas, he won the habeas, the habeas remanded it, and he is back there in detention. The governments position is well you guys can just leave. Well the reason he’s not leaving is because if he is deported to Jamaica he could be killed. You know it’s not just that. I am trying to help someone right now who has been detained for 20 months while he is seeking federal court review of his removal order. He was ordered removal because 20 years ago when he was a college student in Jordan he collected donations for the PLO. So because of that, he is married to a U.S. citizen. He has been married to a U.S. citizen for six years. He was denied adjustment status and when he was denied adjustment status he was ordered removed and 20 months ago they picked him up and put him in jail. He has repeatedly asked the immigration service to release him under an order of supervision. He is not a danger. He is not a flight risk. Finally, they have responded and one of their justifications for why he can not be released under an order of supervision is because he is a flight risk. And he is a flight risk because he chose instead of going back to Jordan to challenge his removal order. So just the near fact that he is exercising his right to judicial review makes him a flight risk. And he is sitting in jail at this very moment, as he has for the last 20 months, just sitting doing nothing.

Hi. My name is Prince Brown. I am a former detainee and I am also in Families for Freedom. I just want to make some concerned comments on Miss Judy, sorry I can’t pronounce the last name, excuse me. I am one of the detainees that have been incarcerated for five years. I was just released after five years, five months. You were right, if you fight your case they are going to detain you. You have no rights. And I really want to commend you on what you are doing because I know Patrick Brown too.

That’s what I thought. Nice to meet you. I have talked about your case a lot with Tara.

Okay, thank you. And the next thing I want to talk about is with Mr. Ndaula about medical conditions. What he said is true. Since my five year incarceration I have been to four different immigration holding centers and county jails. The worst one was Pasay county jail. The medical conditions is very bad. U.S. immigrant is like you are the bottom of the pile, you don’t have no rights. You causing problems. You have no rights. You have medical people that – to see a medical person you have submit a medical slip. To submit a slip you write your name and your problem and you put it on jail bars and even the medical person says you have to submit the slip more than one time. One time this guys was so sick he couldn’t get medical attention but when his court date come they come get a stretcher to take him to court. So it’s like when I was locked up I felt like nobody out there cared or nobody out there really doing anything to help us. But I see people on this panel really do want to help us. And I want to thank you.

Hi. This question is for any of you who might be able to address this. I am wondering if any of you can speak to the extent to which recent legislation or upcoming legislation or also the increase in the detention and deportations have been motivated or at least justified to the public on the basis of post 9/11 efforts to go against terrorists whether you have seen that shifting of things here?

Have you ever looked at the Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcements website? So the website is – well it looks like something out of a Hollywood website basically. You go to ICE.gov and you go to the news releases. Now they definintely don’t have detention officers going and making sure detention standards are observed, but they have master communication specialists who everyday, or ever business day that is, turn out at least three press releases about the joint operations to target criminal aliens, gang bangers, terrorists, and whatnot. They are very, very, very invested right now in making sure that the public actually does believe that the current detentions and deportations are in fact just part of the war on terror. Now, factually, the problem with that is the war on terror has existed before 9/11. They were being enforced before 9/11 and 9/11 just caused heightened predatory enforcement. And so I think that, on one hand, the way that homeland security, I mean it’s called Homeland Security. It’s a winning title. We all want Homeland Security. The way that they in fact justify the fact of picking up people, the fact of deporting people. The way that they silence the people who are being picked up are actually part of families here is through this lens of post 9/11 protecting the borders. The problem with that is, actually, I would say that you would expect a prosecuting agency to prosecute. It’s in the culture of the organization to want to prosecute but then you have to have checks and balances in your society and in your government to make sure that the prosecutors don’t go crazy. Right? Now the problem is we don’t have those checks and balances for two reasons. For one, the executive branch since 9/11 has consistently expanded its power to go ahead and enforce immigration law and create regulations that sidestep Congress, that sidestep the need for regulation just to put more limitation on people based on their immigration status. One problem under the legislative branch. The other power, however, is with Congress. We are close to congress right? I mean they should be hearing these facts. They should be seeing the fact that plenty of constituents are coming to their district offices. People that can’t afford the drive to D.C. The people are going to district offices asking for help but they are silenced on the issue. I think Clinton and Schumer are perfect examples of that.

Well, I would like to talk about one incident in our local office. I think it was about two years ago, approximately, we started a system called In Sears system. A lot of you are aware of that. That was where the middle eastern men had to come in and register if they were over the age of 16. So, we asked all these people to come into the office and register and a lot of them were taken into custody at that point, in our office. The others, who were essentially given an eight file number if they didn’t have one, their files were to be seen to our District Councils office in Dallas, so that they could be set up for an immigration hearing, I mean immigration judge. I personally know that these files were deliberately withheld and not sent to the District Council’s office in a timely manner. So that when they finally did get a hearing it was the twelve month bar had passed. Some of you may not know about that. If they are in the country illegally for more than 12 months then they are given a deportation order that essentially bars them from coming back to the United States for ten years. The form of it almost makes them criminal aliens and they can not come back for ten years. That was a very deplorable situation that those files were not sent like they should have been. It was a small thing but it affected many many people, many people of the Middle Eastern countries.

Hi. Happy to meet you all. My name is Sebastian. I am the other Co-director of Families for Freedom. And I have a tendency to ask questions I already know the answer to but I want you all to answer them for me. I want to quickly mention two things that I want you folks to elaborate on. One specific thing is in all detention facilities around the country you have two custodians, the Department of Homeland Security and the actual facility that’s holding the prisoners. Whether it’s a local county jail, the sheriff or the federal detention centers, it the federal bureau of prisons, right? Now something very peculiar happens when incident of abuse happens or an incident of abuse occurs. Immigration Enforcement pays money to these facilities as a subcontract to hold detainees, right? When a detainee is abused in one of these facilities and their abuse is reported to the officer or the deportation officer or someone in charge. If they are nice enough to send a letter back they often say they don’t take responsibility for anything that happens to you under subcontracted facilities, right? Now when you send a letter to the sheriff, you know about which process do I follow about this instance of abuse they tell you, you have to talk to someone in immigration about that, right? That’s one thing. Now the second thing is, almost every case that I have seen where there has been concrete documentation of detainee abuse, there has been corresponding charges of in inciting a riot, of terrorist threats, of the same detainees that were reporting physical abuse. Stuff that eventually came to be known through the radio, through the TV, through government investigations to be founded, to be true. Now once you have in your record inciting a riot, you don’t go to like criminal court to find out if you really were inciting a riot. You go to internal administrative procedure in the actually facility, right? Now that internal procedure is probably going to find that you really were inciting a riot. After all you filed a complaint against the sheriff and that caused a riot, right? Now when you go for your discretionary release, whether it be removal, a 212C and you have been locked up for five years they look at your record and they see that your record inside wasn’t that great. You were inciting a riot inside there. And that’s one thing I just wanted to bring up in terms of the types of checks and balances that we aren’t even talking about. That’s the type that once you’re inside the system the type of black hole that we are creating for people and the type of type of thing you see in movies. And I want folks to kind a relate on that piece of it a little bit. Because I think that is one aspect that people don’t talk about a lot. And then the other side of it is, actually that’s enough of a question.

I would agree with you, Sebastian. It’s, you know, a black hole and we’ve seen it in terms of indefinite detainees that the longer you are there then you have a disciplinary infraction so, then they use the disciplinary infraction to say, oh we’ve got to keep you there and I mean so then you are there again and then the next year they say oh well you know you not excepting – anyway its just its very Costa-esque how they can keep people in there. There is somebody right now, another one of the descriptions on the list is this guy, Benameer Menicah, who was detained as part of the post 9/11. Most of the post 9/11 detainees are long gone. He’s Algerian. He’s still in detention. I guess now that means it’s like four and a half years later and he’s still in detention. No crime, he was actually somebody who had left the United States before 9/11 to seek asylum. He had gone to Canada and then right after 9/11, it was around the same time, they just took him back to the United States and put him in detention here. And then they charged him – it was all just trumped up with charges, but bottom line is that this guy has no criminal convictions. He is an asylum seeker who has been in detention for four and half years, finally they do a release request, can’t you just release him on bond, there is an organization here that will be ready to sponsor him and they say oh no he is a danger, disciplinary infractions. Give me a break! This guy has been in detention for four and a half years. As Shahani was saying, he hasn’t been criminally charged. He still hasn’t gotten the Freedom Act records showing what his disciplinary charges have been, but disciplinary charges? It’s enough to keep someone locked up for five years for being – having a few disciplinary charges. It’s just horrifying.

I would just like to say that the way that this system is structured is currently inherently unaccountable. 22,000 strewn in a network of hundreds and hundreds of facilities across the country. ICE has not the resources if they wanted to carefully monitor those facilities or the capacity of the local officials and ICE officials are pointing fingers at each other when things go wrong in terms of abuse. It’s a morass. It’s not manageable and Congress knows it. Now they are going to expand it.

My question is primarily for Miss Burdine but I invite anyone else to answer if they have a perception on this. I have represented a fair number of detained people in asylum cases and other cases as have other people in my firm, and sometimes I have noticed that after entering in appearance, sometimes only after making an appointment to visit a person in detention to evaluate their case they get transferred immediately, especially if we enter into an appearance and do something, take an appeal, file a motion to reopen, whatever it may be. Not only transfer but other kind of problems that initiation of disciplinary proceedings, putting people with violent criminals, abuses by detention officers that had not happened in the seven or eight months or two years that there was no counsel. As soon as you start doing something on their behalf, then this other pattern of activity goes on, then they maybe even get a charge of criminal assault in the detention center that seems designed to negatively effect there case on merits or make them want to give up because of the detention convictions. And I wondered if you observed that link between obtaining council and those kind of repercussions?

I actually have and I have many of the local immigration attorneys have reported this to me. They have a lot of difficulty doing this. I had a call from a gentleman about two weeks ago that told me that he knew of someone they were trying to deport in a Texas office and so he had called and said this man has valid reasons for being here so please let him know that I will represent him and will be there to help him as quickly as possible. And this attorney tells me that before he knew it they had coerced this man and told him you don’t need representation and if you do this you are going to have more trouble than what you even wanted. And so they actually deported him immediately. I think they gave him a voluntary return but I’m not certain. But at any rate, before he could even get representation to this gentleman he was gone. He did report that to me. I saw many instances where the attorneys were, I don’t know how to put this, just they did not corporate with the attorneys. The attorneys would ask to come in and talk to someone. They didn’t even want them to talk to someone who had been detained. They tried their best to not even let them do that. They forbid me from even faxing dockets, they didn’t even want them to get the dockets. I said, ‘Look if the attorney has the dockets they can go down to the county jail and talk to these people.’ They said, ‘no we can’t do that because if every attorney got that they would start fighting over who was going to represent who.’ I said, ‘this is ridiculous.’ And so they forbid me to do that. They told me later on I was not even to talk to any of the attorneys who came into the office there in the foyer, in the court, anywhere. I was not to tell them the names of anyone who need help and essentially they did not want anyone having representation.

I appreciate a couple of the panelists discussing the shift in these cases away from federal article three courts into the entirely administrative immigration system. And I am wondering that if within that system if you can address the degree of political control over immigration judges and what you may see coming out of the Justice Department’s recently announced review of EIA and the immigration judge system? Thanks.

Going into the history, in I believe in 2002 the Attorney General Ashcroft, wanted to streamline the immigration court system. And the idea behind it was, and the logic escapes me I will say, that we have a huge docket in immigration courts. And the way to reduce the docket is to reduce the number of judges. That was the idea. So then what he did was hand select people to remove from the immigration judge position and the judges selected to be removed were actually the judges that tended to be the more liberal or progressive. I think there is this definite fear amongst them, I mean I go to court all the time for other Families for Freedom members, people go in our organization for their own cases all the time and judges will systematically tend to not be neutral judicators but colleagues with the homeland security prosecutors. That’s like the culture of the court room and then judges will sometimes comment on like if you don’t like the laws don’t talk to me about it, go tell Congress to change it. These are not things that get on record or court report. It’s a very sort of strange courtroom to enter. It’s weird because it has the facade of a courtroom. You have someone with a cloak on, you have like you know you have the judge and the gavel, but the court isn’t a real court. And you are wondering, ‘how am I here?’ That is the problem with the system as it is. I think that one thing that is important to be said is that for the most part immigration judges don’t have discretion. And I can see why they don’t take their jobs that seriously or why they are sort of fatalistic or cynical about their positions. I mean they don’t have the discretion in whole categories of cases to consider whether or not to deport somebody. I don’t want to steer just into that point but the fact that is we are having these discussions because immigration is an extremely hot topic right now. And legislation, the Real ID Act passed last year, that actually heightened the enforcement against immigrants and further reduced the ability of immigrants to get into real courts, not kangaroo courts, but real courts. This year we are in a situation where, yet again, we are facing terrible legislation.

And I just wanted to sort of follow up on that because I think that there does seem to be this kind of finger pointing in the sense that for Chertoff to point to the immigration judges and say hey we are going to clean this up. Great, there does need to be cleaning up, but I mean DHS clean that up. Yes, there are really bad immigration judges but there are also really bad decisions by DHS prosecutors that are going cases that aren’t releasing people from detention and so it’s hard to take it coming from him.

Hi. Thank you so much for your presentations. I am from Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service and I wanted to ask any of the panelists to be able to identify opportunities for us to positively impact immigration polices. And I would also like you to identify priorities issues that you would want certain organizations that work with a constituency base to use our constituencies to address. Lutheran Immigration Service views itself as working on behalf of 7.5 million Lutherans in the United States and working with tens of thousands of refugees and immigrants we have served for decades and I would like to talk about how do we move forward. What are possibilities for impacting immigration policies positively? And then how can we use our constituency base to take advantage of those opportunities?

Well, I would like to say something about the alternatives to detention and then purpose the probably quixotic notion that we purpose a moratorium on detention expansion. Vera Institute, an organization where I work for some seventeen years, got its start as a reform organization in the 60’s pioneering simple systems where people could be released on their own cognizance from criminal courts. In the mid 90’s, for four years they operated an experiment funded by the National Institute of Justice to demonstrate that simple systems of contact and notification of hearings would be effective in terms of returning people to their immigration hearings. 91 percent of people released under simple contract supervision were with Vera Institute did appear for their hearings. This system works and should be expanded nationally before Congress plows any more money into more hard beds.

I just wanted to add, I worked at the Appearance Assistance Program and in addition to NIJ the NIS actually funded that project. That shows that they were also interested in reforming the detention system. Unfortunately, the people who were at INS at the time are no longer there but they were very supportive of that program. And I also wanted to talk just briefly; it’s not an alternative to incarceration following up on the last question about a program that the Vera Institute is work with immigration courts on now, which are the legal orientation programs. DHS in some places has been very corporative with the immigration courts allowing nonprofit attorneys to go into the detention facilities and give presentations to groups of detainees about their legal rights and possibilities for release. So it’s a program that has limited funding and doesn’t exist nation wide right now it’s at least beginning to provide legal information to people who are in detention.

The only thing I would want to add is that I do litigation. I don’t really do advocacy, I mean legislative advocacy. I just think we have these new laws and these laws are impossible. I mean we can talk about coming up with positive things but if they are basically saying everybody that comes here illegally is an aggravated felon and has no relief and you can’t get into court because we have basically said there is no judicial review. Then even if – they are getting us on both sides. One is that the law is so jargoning at this point that as everyone here is saying there’s not that much room for a judge to do something and when there is room they are saying the courts can’t review it. So then what do you have? I think it is so incumbent on all of us is a way to do it, to communicate to congress this is not going to get them political points. This seems to be the very mean spirited way of getting points by saying we are against terrorism, we’re against crime, we’re against illegal immigrants so then everybody, even our allies purposing this kind of legislations and this is just very scary. This is completely unmoored from reality. It’s just this sort of fantasy thing where we all say we are against this, against this and against this and its like wow how is this actually affecting people? I am trying to remember, it was 1996 architect and somebody came to his district and said look how this is affecting so and so who was the son of a big campaign contributor. And it was like oh yeah this wasn’t supposed to happen this way. This person isn’t supposed to be deported just because he had this one minor drug conviction. Hello! This is what the statues are doing. This is what there is going to be more and more of. There needs to be someway, which is why I think it’s unfortunate that there’s not more press here. One of the things is to make people more aware of this. This is what is going on and to the extent that any of you from your organizations can make it more real to your constituents, make it more real to your congressmen, make it more real to the public. I think we just need to bombard them with it, because I mean its just going to get worse.

I just want to jump in with one thing. I really appreciate the questions. The system is broken and rather than trying to tweak it here or there we really just have to sort of nix it. And I think that if you’re going to purpose legislation, start with community help. If the goal of our laws is community help and safety, start with where your community is. One thing that I would say that we need to push for across the board is consideration based on U.S. citizen children specifically is when their parents are deported. Across the board, whatever categories people are being deported for, the fact that U.S citizen children are going to foster care. The fact that they themselves might have to relocate, that has to take center stage. In our culture and our rhetoric of family values, that is at the center. One thing that I want to completely put out there is that April 24 th is the ten year anniversary of the first 1996 law. The first l996 law is the antiterrorism and death penalty law. It was passed exactly one year after Timothy McVeigh bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building. That was Congress’ anniversary gift to immigrants. On April 24 th 2006, that’s this ten year anniversary a lot of different immigrant organizations, a lot of different communities are coming back to DC to revisit the halls of congress, specifically to revisit the Senate and to try to remind of the fact that after 1996 they had actually regretted what they had done and to remind them there are children suffering for what they have done. The fact that there are people in this room who are interested as organizations we would really, really love to talk with you and to the extent that there are journalists in this room who want to stay in touch with the development of April 24 th itself would be a great opportunity.

Kevin Prentice, and I work with Judy Greene at Justice Strategies. My question goes to I guess if the – assuming it doesn’t get better and actually is getting worse it seems the biggest determinant of how much worse it gets might be the number of new beds. The 40,000 new beds that are being talked about on one hand and on the other hand the question of how involved local law enforcement becomes in immigration enforcement because you know as bad as things are now a lot of immigration is being driven by a handful of ICE employees who do immigration enforcement. And they are a drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds of thousands of local enforcement who if they were involved in immigration enforcement would be a completely different world. We talked about it actually being quite a bit more than 40,000 potential new detention beds. And obviously there are incentives for local law enforcement, different incentives to get involved in immigration enforcement and to stay out of immigration enforcement. As they have historically done and I’ll just throw out on example of an interesting situation that I can’t verify myself but from friends in Los Angles I understand that the sheriff operates kind of a for profit detention center as many county officials have begun to do. Sort of expanding their own sort of public empire in Antelope Valley. Basically, they deal a lot with the so called alien criminal population and the sheriff has also begun cross training staff. Staff from the jail to do their own immigration interviews, because they feel ICE can’t interview enough of the people going in and out of the L.A. county jail everyday to catch every single person who might be subject to immigration proceedings. Since those people, when they get detained, are pretty likely to go to Antelope Valley, which is run by the sheriff. That is just one question that raises questions, is this self dealing to the degree to which local law enforce does or doesn’t have an incentive to get involved and that hug impact that could have. I am curious about what people know about the state of play in terms of local law enforcement and their decision about how much to get involved and any success efforts to pursued local law enforcement that public safety is best served by maintaining close, friendly relationships with immigrant communities. And not sort of increasing levels of fear.

Bottom line is that I think there have been efforts where local communities could decide we are not going to corporate and I think there have been very successful efforts by mobilizing community members and police forces and saying we don’t this. The problem is under the Clear Act it isn’t up to the local communities it’s going to be mandated.

I think one thing to throw in there to is that as the government is pushing the local enforcement of federal immigration laws you sort of see the expansion of the prosecution but not the accompanying rights that follow. So you have the system where it is enforcement, enforcement, prosecution, prosecution, identification, identification but along side that you don’t actually have legal protections in place. So like an example of that in New York would be Rikers Island. Rikers Island is the primary pipeline into deportation in New York in about 300 immigrants weekly get warrants dropped on them, according to the New York Post, who based their article on an ICE report. At Rikers Island when people get targeted for immigration enforcement it’s not as though they have their attorney present. Homeland Security has an actual trailer at Rikers Island. What they use is corrections officers and Rikers data to help identify potentially foreign born immigrant inmates. They use linguistic and racial profiling in the process. The fact is if you are Latino and you don’t speak English, you get interviewed by homeland security within 15 minutes of entering the island. If you are black and you do speak English and you can sort of pass for African-American you might be able to go a whole few weeks without being marked down. Now the issue at Rikers is when homeland security actually identifies people, corrections officers will go to the person and be like hey you have a legal visit. I think my lawyer is visiting me so I go ahead to this legal visit. I sit down with the person, who doesn’t identify them self. I start talking about my situation. I start answering the questions. They ask me to sign a paper and then bam at the end of it we are Homeland Security have a nice day. That’s Rikers Island. Now one thing we would want to point out that is so many of our members get picked up from there. My dad got picked up from there. A lot of people get picked up from the Island. Now one thing to put out there to add another spin to this is that how can these people be interview without their counsel being present of notified and besides that you know what there are actually a few international laws that the U.S. has actually ratified. There are just a couple here and there. The Vienna Convention happens to be one of them. Under the Vienna Convention, there is an obligation for counselor notification. When a foreign national is arrested, they have to be able to contact their conciliate. If a U.S. citizen was arrested in Mexico for smoking marijuana, you better believe they would be on the phone with U.S. Embassy instantly. But in this country, that doesn’t happen. So right now we have a situation where we are talking actively with foreign consulate about do you know your nationals at Rikers Island are getting targeted left and right and they aren’t getting to speak to you first. And they have to come into the equation too.

I just want to wrap up. I want to thank you all for being here. And I want Aarti to have to the opportunity to introduce the Family for Freedom members who are here in the audience if you want to talk to them individually about their stories.

I’ll just introduce a couple of people. I have Prince, who needs no introduction, so if people want an expert on detention conditions and deportation Prince is a Jamaican national and one of our members. Rafiella, right over there, is an expert largely on Dominican deportation and lots of members of her family have gone through the proceedings and she has taught us a lot about what specifically is happening at Rikers and other state facilities. And then also Angela Joseph, if you want to raise your hand Angie. She is the sister of a U.S. veteran who is currently behind barbed wire facing deportation. She would like to talk about the impact on deportation of people who have clearly committed their life. And I can sort of point out more people if we are busy.