The Sorry State of Immigration Jails Saluja Thangaraja was tortured, beaten and held captive in Sri Lanka, her homeland. She was lucky and managed to escape before she was killed. When she arrived in the United States – the land of freedom she was seeking turned out to be the exact opposite: she was imprisoned in a federal detention center near San Diego for over four and a half years before a federal judge ordered her release. She is not alone. Immigration detention is in overdrive. In the past two decades federal immigration detention has grown dramatically with over 400,000 people locked up each year, about five times the number detained twenty years ago, costing American taxpayers $2 billion annually. These are not people serving criminal jail terms. Instead they are people facing possible deportation—a civil process that is not supposed to be punitive. Conditions in institutional detention facilities are marked by severe deficiencies—at least 141 people died while in detention in the last decade. Many are detained unnecessarily without any opportunity to appear before a judge. Thousands are held for months despite the fact that they have families and jobs and pose no threat to public safety. Locking up individuals facing civil immigration charges should be a last resort, used only when other means of supervision are not feasible. There are effective alternatives to jail detention, such as bond, supervised release, or electronic monitoring, that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) should be using. But DHS overwhelmingly prefers detention over smarter alternatives. As a nation founded on liberty, due process and fairness, we should be striving to minimize detention except where justified and absolutely necessary.
Posted on: Sun, 25 May 2014 16:15:55 +0000
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