For a class requirement, I recently observed detention court in Chicago. I wanted to share my thoughts on this often unknown aspect of our immigration system.
The courtroom's location itself seemed telling. Detention court is in the basement of the federal building, and no one is allowed to enter unaccompanied. After I waited for a security guard to escort me, I was greeted with a bare hallway that leads to two nondescript, tiny courtrooms. Though deportations are initially determined at the administrative level, which is lower on the hierarchy than federal district courts, no one would ever imagine this area holds a court that makes life-changing decisions.
Based on the Obama administration's recent mandate, some immigrants without criminal backgrounds are generally not subject to deportation, so it appeared most detainees--all men--were present because of criminal offenses. However, Matt Soerens has pointed out a study by Immigration and Customs Enforcement ("ICE") that reveals only 5.6% of detainees each year, as of October 2009, have been convicted of a violent crime.
Immigration statuses were mixed - some had green cards, while others had crossed the border without papers. This means the immigrants had committed a crime independently of immigration laws. Through this crime, Department of Homeland Security ("DHS") determined the immigrants were now subject to deportation.
Out of the dozen cases I observed, only two immigrants were represented by counsel. Both of them were white European immigrants, while the remaining detainees were from Guatemala, Mexico, and Cuba. Only one detainee--one of the Europeans--had what appeared to be a family member in the courtroom.
All of the immigrants were in DHS custody. They were handcuffed and wore orange jumpsuits. The detainees were being held at two different locations, one of which was a county jail that received a $6,500,000 grant from DHS to build a federal detention facility.
I noticed that, during the judge's questioning, several detainees were not from Illinois. A few were from Kentucky, while one was from Florida. Human Rights Watch noted in a recent study:
Detainees can be held for anywhere from a few weeks to a few years while their cases proceed. With close to 400,000 immigrants in detention each year, space in detention centers, especially near cities where immigrants live, has not kept pace. In addition, ICE has built a detention system, relying on subcontracts with state jails and prisons, which cannot operate without shuffling detainees among hundreds of facilities located throughout the United States.
As a result, most detainees will be loaded at some point during their detention onto a government-contracted car, bus, or airplane and transferred from one detention center to another: 52 percent of detainees experienced at least one such transfer in 2009. And numbers are growing: between 2004 and 2009, the number of transfers tripled. In total, some 2 million detainee transfers occurred between 1998 and 2010.
An astonishing number of detainees in the study, 3,400, were transferred more than ten times. I assume the Kentucky and Florida detainees were in Illinois because of these types of transfers, which I imagine causes a hardship for their family and legal counsel, if any.
I also noticed a couple of detainees asked to be released with ankle bracelets, as they had families here. In fact, one detainee had been in the U.S. for twenty years. The judge advised she could not make the decision to allow ankle bracelets; rather, it is up to DHS. Soerens, in discussing the costly effects of keeping immigrants in custody, pointed out that ankle bracelets can cost taxpayers as little as $10 per day, while detention runs $122 on average.
The judge appeared to be compassionate. She asked the detainees questions that would indicate whether they had a chance to avoid deportation. She also agreed to lower some immigrants' bail, taking into consideration their less-severe crimes and their families' financial status. However, one sympathetic judge is simply swimming upstream in a broken, overwhelmed, and outdated system.
As for my personal reaction, I admittendly had mixed feelings when I learned of the serious nature of one detainee's crimes. It was hard for me to feel compassionate toward the fact he lacked legal counsel and would soon be deported. However, for the most part, I was extremely saddened by what I observed. I felt physically sick to my stomach, and couldn't stop thinking about the detainees' plight for the next several days afterward.
In the federal immigration context, immigrants are not afforded all of the precious, rights-preserving guarantees of our Constitution, such as the right to counsel. The main reason is that immigration violations are considered civil matters, rather than criminal, so detainees do not receive all of the usual criminal protections.
Even if all the detainees had committed disturbing crimes, it would still bother me that a segment of our population does not have the same rights as U.S. citizens, despite having families here and having made vital economic contributions. It does not sit well with me that people who have deep roots in our country are caught up in a system that lacks sufficient legal counsel, does not afford full Constitutional protections, and is increasingly driven by entities that receive profitable government contracts.
It seems hardly anyone wants to pay attention to a couple of courtrooms relegated to the basement, unwelcoming to visitors by design. As a Christian who cares about vulnerable populations, I have to count immigrants in deportation proceedings as one of the most vulnerable - yes, even those who have committed crimes.
Any thoughts? Should immigration violations be considered criminal rather than civil proceedings? Is it misguided to have compassion for immigrants who have committed crimes?
A huge source of this problem (and arguably the biggest reason for the ridiculous number of transfers) is the desperate shortage of EOIR judges available to hear cases. If you thought the dockets of state and county courts were overflowing, they have nothing on the workloads of immigration judges.
While having more judges would help, I think you touched on some deeper issues when you pointed out that most detainees are imprisoned for nonviolent crimes, and that the prison system is largely managed on a for-profit basis now. I believe that while our immigration policies do desperately need reform, most of the abuses of immigrants are part of a larger pattern of discrimination against poor and nonviolent offenders. Something is broken in our culture when our response to people behaving like assholes is to wish they would go to prison to be raped.
Posted by: Leighton | October 27, 2011 at 09:42 AM
I think not only the abuses against immigrants, but also how we formulate immigration policy itself is a complex web that entails economic status, race, and the U.S.'s long, sad colonial history. And while the debate rages on, crops in AL and GA continue to rot...ugh.
Posted by: Natalie | October 27, 2011 at 06:46 PM