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WORD COUNT
704
JUNE 10.2009
THE
NIGHTMARISH DETENTION OF U.S. IMMIGRANTS – by Larry Cox
Coming to
the United States was a “dream come true” for Deda Makaj. Now 42, Deda
fled Albania 20 years ago after enduring five years in a hard labor
camp, the culmination of years of persecution he and his family suffered
due to their anti-communist beliefs. He escaped to Greece in 1992 and,
with the help of a charity in Athens, made it to California, where he
was granted refugee protection and became a lawful permanent resident.
Over the
next five years, he cobbled together his American dream, beginning with
a minimum-wage job and eventually buying a dollar store. He met his wife
Nadia, a refugee from Afghanistan, and they had three children.
Then a
combination of bad luck and naïveté tore Deda’s American dream apart. He
unwittingly bought a stolen car, and he falsified his income on a home
loan application upon the encouragement of his loan officer. After
serving 16 months in jail for his crimes, he was immediately placed in
immigration detention in Arizona. There, he spent the next four years
fighting deportation until he was finally released on bond late last
year.
Deda bore
witness to the human rights catastrophe that is the U.S. immigration
detention system: immigrants imprisoned for months before getting a
hearing and sometimes years before a decision; abuse from criminal
prisoners; suicides. By the time Deda was released, his business had
failed.
Amnesty
International’s recent report, “Jailed Without Justice,” details the
U.S. immigration detention system, a purgatory of legal limbo where the
core American value of due process does not apply. On any given night,
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) warehouses more than 30,000
immigrants in prisons and jails—a number that has tripled in the past 12
years. Among them, surely, are immigrants who have committed deportable
offenses or are undocumented—but the jailed also include large numbers
of legal permanent residents, individuals seeking protection from
political or religious persecution, survivors of torture and human
trafficking, U.S. citizens mistakenly ensnared in immigration raids, and
parents of U.S. citizen children.
Investigative news reports have exposed a litany of human rights abuses
in the detention facilities, including physical violence, the use of
restraints, and substandard medical care. While in detention, immigrants
and asylum seekers are often unable to obtain the legal assistance
necessary to prepare viable claims for adversarial and complex court
proceedings. Sometimes they cannot even make a simple phone call to
obtain documents that would prove they should go free. Some immigrants
become so desperate at the prospect of indefinite detention that they
agree to deportation despite valid claims.
Amnesty
International has launched a campaign to pressure our government to
honor its human rights obligations. Legislation is needed so that
detention is used only as a measure of last resort, after non-custodial
measures, such as reporting requirements or reasonable bond, have
failed. Lawmakers who fear anti-immigrant backlash might consider the
secondary benefits to honoring our moral imperative: the average cost of
detaining a migrant is $95 per person/per day, while alternatives to
detention cost as little as $12 per person/per day and yield up to a 99
percent success rate, according to ICE, as measured by immigrants’
appearance in immigration courts for removal hearings.
Congress
should also pass legislation to ensure due process for all within our
borders, including the right to a prompt individualized hearing before
an immigration judge. Currently, ICE field office directors have the
power to decide whether to detain someone; yet to incarcerate an
individual for months, or even years, before a court makes a judgment on
the individual’s case is an absurd negation of our nation’s stated
commitment to the rule of law.
Finally,
the U.S. government must adopt enforceable human rights standards in all
detention facilities that house immigrants. These standards can only be
overseen and enforced by an independent body that has the power to hold
ICE accountable.
For more
than a decade, the federal government has underwritten the unchecked
expansion of ICE’s power. The result is a detention system riddled with
inconsistencies, errors and widespread human rights violations. Tens of
thousands of lives hang in the balance. The time has come for the U.S.
government to apply the rule of law to those within its own borders.
--
Larry Cox
is executive director of Amnesty International USA and he is based in
New York.
Founded in
1961, Amnesty International is a Nobel Prize winning grassroots activist
organization with over one million members worldwide. Amnesty
International USA (AIUSA) is the U.S. Section of this international
human rights movement.
www.amnesty-usa.org
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