A new investigation by Colorlines Magazine has revealed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement continued to detain and deport individuals rounded up by the East Haven, Connecticut police, even after the Department of Justice launched its investigation into racial profiling. Four East Haven police officers have been arrested for targeting Latino immigrants with false arrests, false reports and harassment, prompting the East Haven police chief to resign. We’re joined by Seth Freed Wessler, a senior research associate at the Applied Research Center and an investigative reporter for Colorlines.com. "East Haven, Connecticut has a long history of profiling people of color," Freed Wessler says. "Folks of color in the greater New Haven area know not to drive through East Haven, Connecticut: you’re going to get pulled over if you’re black or Latino."
Showing posts with label Immigrant Prison Industrial Complex. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Immigrant Prison Industrial Complex. Show all posts
ICE Enabled East Haven Police's Racial Profiling By Detaining, Deporting Targeted Immigrants
ICE Enabled East Haven Police's Racial Profiling By Detaining, Deporting Targeted Immigrants
Lost in Detention
Democracy Now: Lost in Detention report
As Obama Admin Deports Record 400,000, Film Explores What Immigrants Face Behind Bars
The Obama administration has released new figures showing U.S. deportations of immigrants reached a record high. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement says it deported nearly 400,000 people in fiscal year 2011, the highest total in the agency’s eight years. The data was released the same day a coalition of Latino and immigrant rights groups held a National Day of Action to protest Obama’s immigration policies. The protesters called for an immediate end to the "Secure Communities" program, which requires local police to forward fingerprints of every person they arrest to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. More than one million immigrants have been deported during Obama’s tenure, even as efforts to reform immigration policy have languished. A new PBS Frontline documentary, "Lost in Detention," investigates the immigration program under Obama. We are joined by the award-winning broadcast journalist who led the investigation, Maria Hinojosa.
Stop Corrections Corporation of America Private Prison in San Diego
Dec 2010
Campaign targeting the President of the United States, The U.S. Senate, and The U.S. House of Representatives
Started by: Poet Jim Moreno
OVERVIEW
Francisco Castaneda is dead from medical neglect of Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) in their temporary prison in the Otay Mesa area of South San Diego County. Mr. Castaneda's family, with the help of the San Diego ACLU, won a lawsuit against CCA for his wrongful death.
CCA lost a second lawsuit for triple-celling human beings in two man cells. The third human being had to sleep on a mat by the toilet.
We don't need immigration policy that creates human rights abuses and death. We need immigration policy that promotes and expands human dignity and freedom; that doesn't build prisons.
Say no to Corrections Corporation's Private Prison in San Diego.
 |
| First Visible Sign of CCA Presence in Otay Mesa |
Imagine going into Family Court, Superior Court, Civil Court or Federal Court and you see the letters CCA underneath. You don't know that CCA means Corrections Corporation of America.
Prison Economics Help Drive Ariz. Immigration Law
October 28, 2010
Laura Sullivan
Morning Edition
[7 min 47 sec] Add to Playlist
Laura Sullivan/NPR: Link to the story
October 28, 2010 Last year, two men showed up in Benson, Ariz., a small desert town 60 miles from the Mexico border, offering a deal.
Glenn Nichols, the Benson city manager, remembers the pitch.
"The gentleman that's the main thrust of this thing has a huge turquoise ring on his finger," Nichols said. "He's a great big huge guy and I equated him to a car salesman."
What he was selling was a prison for women and children who were illegal immigrants.
"They talk [about] how positive this was going to be for the community," Nichols said, "the amount of money that we would realize from each prisoner on a daily rate."
But Nichols wasn't buying. He asked them how would they possibly keep a prison full for years — decades even — with illegal immigrants?...
Bakery Raided in Immigration Sting
Among the company's clients: schools and the military
By CHRIS CHAN
Source: Bakery Raided in Immigration Sting | NBC San Diego
Federal agents, targeting not just to illegal immigrants but also the employers that hire them, arrested more than 40 people at an Otay Mesa bakery Wednesday.
The company, boasts contracts with schools, the military and health care facilities and some say it's those contracts that made the bakery a target.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) executed a federal search warrant on S & S Bakery on Brittania Blvd. on Wednesday.
The bakery's owner Jesse William Fadick, two bakery supervisors, Rigoberto Sarmiento-Machuca and Rogelio Machuca-Sarmiento, and an employee, Abel Baizabal, were charged with conspiracy to harbor illegal aliens. The supervisors and employee were also alleged illegal immigrants.
ICE agents arrested 41 suspected illegal immigrants at the company's 35,000 square foot facility and identified 32 other employees. Three more suspects were arrested at homes in other parts of the county, including the aunt of Moises Martinez.
"They knocked and I guess she didn't open right away and they broke the door down," said Martinez.
He felt the arrest was unfair. "She's not breaking the law or anything. She's just working like any other person," he said.
The company's contracts with the military may have brought more scrutiny to S & S Bakery.
Pedro Rios of the American Friends Service Committee arranges legal help for illegal immigrants. He said ICE has been targeting companies that have government contracts.
Rios said the high profile raids have decreased, but audits of companies have increased leading to an increase in deportations.
"Under the Obama administration, there have been more deportations per year than with the previous Bush administration," he said.
He complained that the deportations have disrupted families and communities.
Rios said by Thursday night, at least 12 people had been released for humanitarian reasons.
"One couple was arrested. They had a two year-old child that was left in the care of someone else. The mother has been released to care for the child, the father is still detained," said Rios. However, Rios said they will still face deportation.
Immigration officials said 19 of the detained immigrants will serve as material witnesses.
S & S Bakery employees would not comment but workers seemed to be baking, with the smells of food escaping the facility. Other people arrived at the bakery seeking employment.
Source: Bakery Raided in Immigration Sting | NBC San Diego
Wall Street and the Criminalization of Immigrants
Americas Program
Oct 6, 2010
Peter Cervantes-Gautschi
Over the past four years roughly a million immigrants have been incarcerated in dangerous detention facilities in our taxpayer-financed private prison system. A growing number of news reports and investigations confirm that for many of the people funneled into this system, it is a living nightmare. Children were abused, women were raped, and men died from lack of basic medical attention.
These facilities are run by two Wall Street-backed companies that actively promote the criminalization and incarceration of immigrants in the United States -the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group.
The T. Don Hutto immigrant detention facility in Taylor, Texas provides a now well-known example of the abuses that take place within private prisons for immigrants. Beginning in May 2006,the Don Hutto prison was used to house children and their parents who were on a path to deportation. Reports began to surface of widespread abusive treatment of immigrant children by staff of Corrections Corporation of America. An ACLU lawsuit filed on the basis of documented cases of abuse finally led to the closing of the Don Hutto facility for housing families in 2008. After the children were excluded, the Don Hutto only held women detainees. But the abuses continued. Evidence has surfaced that a number of women were sexually abused over the past two years in Don Hutto by CCA staff. Sexual abuse, including rape, has been documented in several detention centers.
The other large private prison corporation contracted by the federal government to run immigrant prisons is the GEO Group. The GEO detention facilities have also racked up many reports and complaints of abusive treatment of immigrant detainees and corrupt staff practices that violate the basic human rights of prisoners. Last month we spoke with the sibling of a detainee in a GEO-run facility who was denied basic medical attention for lack of funds to pay. The detainee’s family had to raise funds to get their relative medical attention in the facility from GEO. Other GEO detainees have died from a lack of medical attention.
Another relative of a GEO detainee told us that prisoners who avoid getting on the wrong side of GEO guards could aspire, at most, to a job in the prison that pays 17 cents an hour for doing office work.
GEO recently agreed to pay restitution for its employees’ physical abuse of prisoners who were strip searched in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Texas, and New Mexico. In another case, GEO was ordered to pay $40 million in the wrongful death of a prisoner in its custody in Raymondville, Texas. GEO has also been sued by seven children who were sexually assaulted by a guard while being held in a GEO facility.
Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), based in Nashville, Tennessee, and the GEO Group, a global corporation based in Boca Raton, Florida are the nation’s two largest prison companies. They run highly integrated operations to design, build, finance and operate prisons. GEO rakes in $1.17 billion in annual revenue, and CCA tops that at $1.69 billion. Together these companies are principal moving forces in the behind-the-scenes organization of the current wave of anti-immigrant legislative efforts, which, if successful, would dramatically increase the number of immigrant prisoners in over 20 states.
Wall Street and the Criminalization of Immigrants – CIP Americas
06/10/2010
Peter Cervantes-Gautschi
Americas Program
Over the past four years roughly a million immigrants have been incarcerated in dangerous detention facilities in our taxpayer-financed private prison system. A growing number of news reports and investigations confirm that for many of the people funneled into this system, it is a living nightmare. Children were abused, women were raped, and men died from lack of basic medical attention.
These facilities are run by two Wall Street-backed companies that actively promote the criminalization and incarceration of immigrants in the United States -the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group....
Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), based in Nashville, Tennessee, and the GEO Group, a global corporation based in Boca Raton, Florida are the nation’s two largest prison companies. They run highly integrated operations to design, build, finance and operate prisons. GEO rakes in $1.17 billion in annual revenue, and CCA tops that at $1.69 billion. Together these companies are principal moving forces in the behind-the-scenes organization of the current wave of anti-immigrant legislative efforts, which, if successful, would dramatically increase the number of immigrant prisoners in over 20 states....
Borders and Walls
Borders and Walls: A focused look at profiteering at "tough on crime" policies, growing prison populations, and "three-strikes" laws. An interview with human rights activist Rania Masri. Also Third World Majority a media training and production center run by young women of color and their allies.
This movie is part of the collection: Free Speech TV
Proponen en Arizona "ciudad de carpas" para recluir indocumentados
El tesorero estatal de Arizona, Dean Martin, propuso este martes la creación de una gigantesca cárcel dotada de carpas para albergar a bajo costo a los indocumentados que sean detenidos en esta entidad tras la entrada en vigor de la ley SB1070.
Prisiones, Prisons and Jails: Junio 2010
Proponen en Arizona "ciudad de carpas" para recluir indocumentados
El tesorero estatal de Arizona, Dean Martin, propuso este martes la creación de una gigantesca cárcel dotada de carpas para albergar a bajo costo a los indocumentados que sean detenidos en esta entidad tras la entrada en vigor de la ley SB1070.
America's Secret ICE Castles
Jacqueline Stevens, December 16, 2009. "If you don't have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but you think he's illegal, we can make him disappear." Those chilling words were spoken by James Pendergraph, then executive director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Office of State and Local Coordination, at a conference of police and sheriffs in August 2008. Also present was Amnesty International's Sarnata Reynolds, who wrote about the incident in the 2009 report "Jailed Without Justice" and said in an interview, "It was almost surreal being there, particularly being someone from an organization that has worked on disappearances for decades in other countries. I couldn't believe he would say it so boldly, as though it weren't anything wrong."
Guard at Private Immigration Prison Fired for Sexual Assault
And a prison guard at a privately run Texas immigration jail has been fired for allegedly sexually assaulting several women prisoners. Immigration and Customs Enforcement says the guard groped several women and forced at least one woman to have sex with him while transporting them to their deportation flights. ICE says the company hired to run the prison, Corrections Corporation of American, is on probation pending the outcome of a probe into the allegations.
Un guardia de una prisión privada de inmigración de Texas fue despedido por presuntamente abusar sexualmente de varias prisioneras.
El Servicio de Inmigración y Control de Aduanas (ICE, por su sigla en inglés) dice que el guardia manoseó a varias mujeres y obligó a al menos una de ellas a tener sexo con él mientras las transportaba a sus vuelos para ser deportadas. El ICE dice que la empresa contratada para dirigir esta prisión, Corrections Corporation of American, está a prueba a la espera de los resultados de una investigación sobre estas acusaciones.
ICE Secret Prisons
Detention Practices Used by U.S. Immigration Officials Questioned
First Part: Barack Obama has vowed this week to overhaul the American immigration system. And with half a million people entering the U.S illegally every year, the number being deported is growing. And there is criticism that officials dealing with the issue often resort to questionable methods, as RT's Cedric Moon reports.
Undocumented Immigrants May Be Loocked Up in Cruel Conditions Across America
Second Part: RT is continuing its investigation into claims illegal immigrants are being held in secret detention centres across America in inhumane conditions. In the second of his special reports, Cedric Moon tries to gain access to one of the alleged facilities...
Prisions for Immigrants
Questions On Public-Private Prisons
For Immigrants
For Immigrants
In remote places along the southwest border of the US, the consequences of recent immigration crackdown are changing the face of imprisonment in this part of America. There, public-private prisons are being built to hold immigrants both legal and illegal.
These prisons are publicly owned by local governments, privately operated by corporations, publicly financed by tax-exempt bonds, and located in depressed communities, says journalist Tom Barry, who reported on a new trend in dealing with immigrants in a recent issue of the Boston Review.
The immigrants held at these prisons are dubbed "criminal aliens" by the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security. Barry tells Fresh Air host Terry Gross that following 9/11, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Customs and Border Protection Agencys have teamed with local police to target immigrants — legal and illegal — who have criminal records for deportation.
Tom Barry covers border security and immigration issues as the Senior Policy Analyst at the Center for International Policy. He has written several books, including The Great Divide and Zapata's Revenge.
Immigrants Die in US Jails
January 10, 2010-New York Times
Officials Hid Truth About Immigrant Deaths in Jail
By NINA BERNSTEINSilence has long shrouded the men and women who die in the nation’s immigration jails. For years, they went uncounted and unnamed in the public record. Even in 2008, when The New York Times obtained and published a federal government list of such deaths, few facts were available about who these people were and how they died.
But behind the scenes, it is now clear, the deaths had already generated thousands of pages of government documents, including scathing investigative reports that were kept under wraps, and a trail of confidential memos and BlackBerry messages that show officials working to stymie outside inquiry.
The documents, obtained over recent months by The Times and the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act, concern most of the 107 deaths in detention counted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement since October 2003, after the agency was created within the Department of Homeland Security.
The Obama administration has vowed to overhaul immigration detention, a haphazard network of privately run jails, federal centers and county cells where the government holds noncitizens while it tries to deport them.
But as the administration moves to increase oversight within the agency, the documents show how officials — some still in key positions — used their role as overseers to cover up evidence of mistreatment, deflect scrutiny by the news media or prepare exculpatory public statements after gathering facts that pointed to substandard care or abuse.
As one man lay dying of head injuries suffered in a New Jersey immigration jail in 2007, for example, a spokesman for the federal agency told The Times that he could learn nothing about the case from government authorities. In fact, the records show, the spokesman had alerted those officials to the reporter’s inquiry, and they conferred at length about sending the man back to Africa to avoid embarrassing publicity.
In another case that year, investigators from the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that unbearable, untreated pain had been a significant factor in the suicide of a 22-year-old detainee at the Bergen County Jail in New Jersey, and that the medical unit was so poorly run that other detainees were at risk.
The investigation found that jail medical personnel had falsified a medication log to show that the detainee, a Salvadoran named Nery Romero, had been given Motrin. The fake entry was easy to detect: When the drug was supposedly administered, Mr. Romero was already dead.
Yet those findings were never disclosed to the public or to Mr. Romero’s relatives on Long Island, who had accused the jail of abruptly depriving him of his prescription painkiller for a broken leg. And an agency supervisor wrote that because other jails were “finicky” about accepting detainees with known medical problems like Mr. Romero’s, such people would continue to be placed at the Bergen jail as “a last resort.”
In a recent interview, Benjamin Feldman, a spokesman for the jail, which housed 1,503 immigration detainees last year, would not say whether any changes had been made since the death.
In February 2007, in the case of the dying African man, the immigration agency’s spokesman for the Northeast, Michael Gilhooly, rebuffed a Times reporter’s questions about the detainee, who had suffered a skull fracture at the privately run Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey. Mr. Gilhooly said that without a full name and alien registration number for the man, he could not check on the case.
But, records show, he had already filed a report warning top managers at the federal agency about the reporter’s interest and sharing information about the injured man, a Guinean tailor named Boubacar Bah. Mr. Bah, 52, had been left in an isolation cell without treatment for more than 13 hours before an ambulance was called.
While he lay in the hospital in a coma after emergency brain surgery, 10 agency managers in Washington and Newark conferred by telephone and e-mail about how to avoid the cost of his care and the likelihood of “increased scrutiny and/or media exposure,” according to a memo summarizing the discussion.
One option they explored was sending the dying man to Guinea, despite an e-mail message from the supervising deportation officer, who wrote, “I don’t condone removal in his present state as he has a catheter” and was unconscious. Another idea was renewing Mr. Bah’s canceled work permit in hopes of tapping into Medicaid or disability benefits.
Eventually, faced with paying $10,000 a month for nursing home care, officials settled on a third course: “humanitarian release” to cousins in New York who had protested that they had no way to care for him. But days before the planned release, Mr. Bah died.
Among the participants in the conferences was Nina Dozoretz, a longtime manager in the agency’s Division of Immigration Health Services who had won an award for cutting detainee health care costs. Later she was vice president of the Nakamoto Group, a company hired by the Bush administration to monitor detention. The Obama administration recently rehired her to lead its overhaul of detainee health care.
Asked about the conference call on Mr. Bah, Ms. Dozoretz said: “How many years ago was that? I don’t recall all the specifics if indeed there was a call.” She added, “I advise you to contact our public affairs office.” Mr. Gilhooly, the spokesman who had said he had no information on the case, would not comment.
On the day after Mr. Bah’s death in May 2007, Scott Weber, director of the Newark field office of the immigration enforcement agency, recommended in a memo that the agency take the unusual step of paying to send the body to Guinea for burial, to prevent his widow from showing up in the United States for a funeral and drawing news coverage.
Mr. Weber wrote that he believed the agency had handled Mr. Bah’s case appropriately. “However,” he added, “I also don’t want to stir up any media interest where none is warranted.” Helping to bury Mr. Bah overseas, he wrote, “will go a long way to putting this matter to rest.”
In the agency’s confidential files was a jail video showing Mr. Bah face down in the medical unit, hands cuffed behind his back, just before medical personnel sent him to a disciplinary cell. The tape shows him crying out repeatedly in his native Fulani, “Help, they are killing me!”
Almost a year after his death, the agency quietly closed the case without action. But Mr. Bah’s name had shown up on the first list of detention fatalities, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and on May 5, 2008, his death was the subject of a front-page article in The Times.
Brian P. Hale, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in an interview that the newly disclosed records represented the past, and that the agency’s new leaders were committed to transparency and greater oversight, including prompt public disclosure and investigation of every death, and more attention to detainee care in a better-managed system.
But the most recent documents show that the culture of secrecy has endured. And the past cover-ups underscore what some of the agency’s own employees say is a central flaw in the proposed overhaul: a reliance on the agency to oversee itself.
“Because ICE investigates itself there is no transparency and there is no reform or improvement,” Chris Crane, a vice president in the union that represents employees of the agency’s detention and removal operations, told a Congressional subcommittee on Dec. 10.
The agency has kept a database of detention fatalities at least since December 2005, when a National Public Radio investigation spurred a Congressional inquiry. In 2006, the agency issued standard procedures for all such deaths to be reported in detail to headquarters.
But internal documents suggest that officials were intensely concerned with controlling public information. In April 2007, Marc Raimondi, then an agency spokesman, warned top managers that a Washington Post reporter had asked about a list of 19 deaths that the civil liberties union had compiled, and about a dying man whose penile cancer had spread after going undiagnosed in detention, despite numerous medical requests for a biopsy.
“These are quite horrible medical stories,” Mr. Raimondi wrote, “and I think we’ll need to have a pretty strong response to keep this from becoming a very damaging national story that takes on long legs.”
That response was an all-out defense of detainee medical care over several months, including statistics that appeared to show that mortality rates in detention were declining, and were low compared with death rates in prisons.
Experts in detention health care called the comparison misleading; it also came to light that the agency was undercounting the number of detention deaths, as well as discharging some detainees shortly before they died. In August, litigation by the civil liberties union prompted the Obama administration to disclose that more than one in 10 immigrant detention deaths had been overlooked and omitted from a list submitted to Congress last year.
Two of those deaths had occurred in Arizona, in 2004 and 2007, at the Eloy Detention Center, run by the Corrections Corporation of America. Eloy had nine known fatalities — more than any other immigration jail under contract to the federal government. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement was still secretive. When a reporter for The Arizona Republic asked about the circumstances of those deaths, an agency spokesman told him the records were unavailable.
According to records The Times obtained in December, one Eloy detainee who died, in October 2008, was Emmanuel Owusu. An ailing 62-year-old barber who had arrived from Ghana on a student visa in 1972, he had been a legal permanent resident for 33 years, mostly in Chicago. Immigration authorities detained him in 2006, based on a 1979 conviction for misdemeanor battery and retail theft.
“I am confused as to how subject came into our custody???” the Phoenix field office director, Katrina S. Kane, wrote to subordinates. “Convicted in 1979? That’s a long time ago.”
In response, a report on his death was revised to refer to Mr. Owusu’s “lengthy criminal history ranging from 1977 to 1998.” It did not note that except for the battery conviction, that history consisted mostly of shoplifting offenses.
A diabetic with high blood pressure, he had been detained for two years at Eloy while he battled deportation. He died of a heart ailment weeks after his last appeal was dismissed.
Sheriff Joe Arpaio tortura mujer al dar a luz
The news team for Telemundo 52 recently reported on Alma Minerva Chacon, a women who was terrorized by Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Unfortunately, she is just the latest in a long line of Latinos who have suffered at the hands of the ruthless Sheriff whose personal goal is to rid Arizona of all "illegals" and just maybe, all Latinos. Arpaio has repeatedly stated that he is breaking no laws and just enforcing the constitution by arresting more than 600 Latinos a year. But the problem with his tactics is that less than half of those arrested are even in this country illegally.
The most recent atrocity committed by the self-proclaimed "America's Toughest Sheriff" involves a woman who was detained while 9-months pregnant. Alma Minerva Chacon's case has been receiving media attention due to the brutality with which she was treated. The very same night of her arrest, Chacon went into labor and found herself afraid and alone, being rushed to a local hospital with her hands and legs chained in shackles.
Once she reached the hospital, nurses repeatedly begged the Sheriff's staff to allow them to unchain the mother, but they refused and Chacon was forced to give birth while still shackled to the bed. At one point, the nurse asked for them to release her so that she could be escorted to the bathroom for a urinalysis, but even that request was denied. But the worst came once Chacon gave birth to her baby girl.
Still chained to the bed, Arpaio's police staff refused to allow Chacon to hold her newborn baby and then warned her that if no one came to pick up the child within 72 hours, she would be turned over into state custody. Telemundo 52 sat down with Chacon and let her tell her side of the story. Check out the interview below and if you don't support Sheriff Arpaio's barbaric practices sign the petition at www.SheriffJoeMustGo.com:
sdcampaigns.blogspot.com
The most recent atrocity committed by the self-proclaimed "America's Toughest Sheriff" involves a woman who was detained while 9-months pregnant. Alma Minerva Chacon's case has been receiving media attention due to the brutality with which she was treated. The very same night of her arrest, Chacon went into labor and found herself afraid and alone, being rushed to a local hospital with her hands and legs chained in shackles.
Once she reached the hospital, nurses repeatedly begged the Sheriff's staff to allow them to unchain the mother, but they refused and Chacon was forced to give birth while still shackled to the bed. At one point, the nurse asked for them to release her so that she could be escorted to the bathroom for a urinalysis, but even that request was denied. But the worst came once Chacon gave birth to her baby girl.
Still chained to the bed, Arpaio's police staff refused to allow Chacon to hold her newborn baby and then warned her that if no one came to pick up the child within 72 hours, she would be turned over into state custody. Telemundo 52 sat down with Chacon and let her tell her side of the story. Check out the interview below and if you don't support Sheriff Arpaio's barbaric practices sign the petition at www.SheriffJoeMustGo.com:
sdcampaigns.blogspot.com
Ilegales: Human Right Watch
Critican ausencia de defensa legal para inmigrantes detenidos en EUA
Las organizaciones Human Right Watch (HRW) y Constitution Project cuestionaron hoy al gobierno de Estados Unidos por la ausencia de defensa legal para inmigrantes detenidos y su transferencia a zonas remotas del país.
Hacen falta cambios porque de lo contrario continuará el actual "sistema costoso y caótico", dijo Alison Parker, directora adjunta de (HRW), en una conferencia con el ex secretario adjunto de Seguridad Interna, Asa Huchison, quien es miembro del comité de libertad y seguridad de Constitution Project.
Parker señaló que el traslado de los indocumentados a zonas remotas del país los aleja de sus familias, les impide contar con testigos de sus comunidades, les perjudica el acceso a servicios legales y causa un gran daño psicológico a sus familiares, incluidos niños nacidos en Estados Unidos.
En el foro, moderado por la directora de la Comisión de Inmigración de la Asociación de Abogados de Estados Unidos (ABA), Megan Mack, participó también el juez Bruce Einhorn, profesor adjunto de la Escuela de Leyes de la Universidad Pepperdine.
El juez Einhorn manifestó que hace falta una mayor supervisión judicial al poder ejecutivo sobre el uso del sistema de detención, para evitar prácticas injustas cuando todos saben que los inmigrantes, que en su gran mayoría son personas de color, no son terroristas.
En un informe titulado "Encerrados y alejados", HRW señaló que "los traslados interponen obstáculos a menudo insuperables para el acceso de los detenidos a asistencia legal, independientemente de los fundamentos de su caso".
"Los traslados obstaculizan el derecho a impugnar su detención, provocan cambios injustos, a mitad del procedimiento, en la interpretación de las leyes aplicables a sus casos y, en última instancia, pueden dar lugar a deportaciones injustas", señaló.
Casi 380 mil extranjeros fueron detenidos en 2008 por el Servicio de Inmigración y Control de Aduanas (ICE) y enviados a unas 300 cárceles, la mayoría administradas por gobiernos estatales y locales, que son subcontratadas por el ICE para albergar a esas personas, según HRW.
Indicó que los inmigrantes son consignados primero a establecimientos cercanos a su lugar de residencia, por ejemplo, en Nueva York o Los Angeles, pero luego son trasladados sistemáticamente por el ICE a cárceles a cientos o miles de millas de distancias en Arizona, Louisiana o Texas.
Entre 1999 y 2008 se llevaron a cabo 1.4 millones de traslados de detenidos, lo que realiza el ICE como medida de control de inmigración tras la aprobación de restrictivas leyes en 2006 y por la ausencia de políticas efectivas que eviten esas transferencias innecesarias, señaló el reporte.
Por su parte, Hutchison indicó que hace falta un sistema más humano y eficiente a la vez, pero que los cambios deben hacerse sin afectar la seguridad nacional.
La organización Constitution Project sostuvo en su informe que a pesar de la naturaleza "civil" y no "criminal" de sus ofensas, los indocumentados son a menudo detenidos en cárceles locales y estatales y otros enviados a lugares remotos.
Señaló que en los últimos cinco años 83 personas murieron en centros de detención para inmigrantes, según reportes de prensa y que el diario The New York Times reportó la muerte del inmigrante Boubacar Bah, de Guinea, por falta de tratamiento tras una caída que le produjo una fractura de cráneo.
El informe indicó que, a diferencia de los acusados que son criminales, los no ciudadanos en proceso de deportación no tienen un derecho general a defensor público, y que casi las dos terceras partes de esos inmigrantes carecen de representación legal.
La designación de un consejero legal beneficiaría tanto al extranjero como al gobierno, lo cual haría más eficiente y menos costoso el proceso de "deportación expedita" aplicado por las autoridades, según el reporte de Constitution Project.
illegalilegales.blogspot.com
Hacen falta cambios porque de lo contrario continuará el actual "sistema costoso y caótico", dijo Alison Parker, directora adjunta de (HRW), en una conferencia con el ex secretario adjunto de Seguridad Interna, Asa Huchison, quien es miembro del comité de libertad y seguridad de Constitution Project.
Parker señaló que el traslado de los indocumentados a zonas remotas del país los aleja de sus familias, les impide contar con testigos de sus comunidades, les perjudica el acceso a servicios legales y causa un gran daño psicológico a sus familiares, incluidos niños nacidos en Estados Unidos.
En el foro, moderado por la directora de la Comisión de Inmigración de la Asociación de Abogados de Estados Unidos (ABA), Megan Mack, participó también el juez Bruce Einhorn, profesor adjunto de la Escuela de Leyes de la Universidad Pepperdine.
El juez Einhorn manifestó que hace falta una mayor supervisión judicial al poder ejecutivo sobre el uso del sistema de detención, para evitar prácticas injustas cuando todos saben que los inmigrantes, que en su gran mayoría son personas de color, no son terroristas.
En un informe titulado "Encerrados y alejados", HRW señaló que "los traslados interponen obstáculos a menudo insuperables para el acceso de los detenidos a asistencia legal, independientemente de los fundamentos de su caso".
"Los traslados obstaculizan el derecho a impugnar su detención, provocan cambios injustos, a mitad del procedimiento, en la interpretación de las leyes aplicables a sus casos y, en última instancia, pueden dar lugar a deportaciones injustas", señaló.
Casi 380 mil extranjeros fueron detenidos en 2008 por el Servicio de Inmigración y Control de Aduanas (ICE) y enviados a unas 300 cárceles, la mayoría administradas por gobiernos estatales y locales, que son subcontratadas por el ICE para albergar a esas personas, según HRW.
Indicó que los inmigrantes son consignados primero a establecimientos cercanos a su lugar de residencia, por ejemplo, en Nueva York o Los Angeles, pero luego son trasladados sistemáticamente por el ICE a cárceles a cientos o miles de millas de distancias en Arizona, Louisiana o Texas.
Entre 1999 y 2008 se llevaron a cabo 1.4 millones de traslados de detenidos, lo que realiza el ICE como medida de control de inmigración tras la aprobación de restrictivas leyes en 2006 y por la ausencia de políticas efectivas que eviten esas transferencias innecesarias, señaló el reporte.
Por su parte, Hutchison indicó que hace falta un sistema más humano y eficiente a la vez, pero que los cambios deben hacerse sin afectar la seguridad nacional.
La organización Constitution Project sostuvo en su informe que a pesar de la naturaleza "civil" y no "criminal" de sus ofensas, los indocumentados son a menudo detenidos en cárceles locales y estatales y otros enviados a lugares remotos.
Señaló que en los últimos cinco años 83 personas murieron en centros de detención para inmigrantes, según reportes de prensa y que el diario The New York Times reportó la muerte del inmigrante Boubacar Bah, de Guinea, por falta de tratamiento tras una caída que le produjo una fractura de cráneo.
El informe indicó que, a diferencia de los acusados que son criminales, los no ciudadanos en proceso de deportación no tienen un derecho general a defensor público, y que casi las dos terceras partes de esos inmigrantes carecen de representación legal.
La designación de un consejero legal beneficiaría tanto al extranjero como al gobierno, lo cual haría más eficiente y menos costoso el proceso de "deportación expedita" aplicado por las autoridades, según el reporte de Constitution Project.
illegalilegales.blogspot.com
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)