ImmigrationICE to review conditions in detention centers housing women, children

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), pending a judge’s decision on the legality of immigration detention centers, will appoint an in-house official to review living conditions at three detention centers in Texas and Pennsylvania used to house women and children who illegally crossed the southern border. Immigrant rights advocates, who have sued to end the detention of families, called the announcement made last Wednesday insufficient.

“The only satisfactory step would be for the panel to recommend ending family detention immediately,” said Andrea Cristina Mercado of the group We Belong Together. “I don’t see anything short of that really being sufficient.”

In the past, parents and children who crossed the border illegally, would spend just weeks at a detention center before being released to family members. Immigration officials, however, were unprepared for the thousands of families who entered the country illegally last summer, most of them from Central America. In response the women and children were turned over to detention facilities in New Mexico, Texas, and Pennsylvania. The Los Angeles Times notes that the Texas facilities are run by private corporations, for which immigration groups say the government pays $267 per person per day.

Two lawsuits have challenged the government’s detention policies and the way ICE argues for detention or deportation, including the “deterrence policy” — where the government detains families while their asylum claims are being processed as a way to deter others from trying to cross the border. U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg in Washington, D.C. said the deterrence policy was “likely unlawful.” The Obama administration has asked him to reconsider.

Joanne Lin, a legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union, which is arguing against the deterrence policy, said expansion of detention facilities means the government could hold more than 3,500 people by the end of the year. “It’s been a dramatic and rapid expansion,” Lin said. She recommends alternatives to detention including placing ankle bracelets with GPS trackers on applicants while they wait for their asylum decisions.

A second lawsuit, filed in California, alleges that detention facilities fail to meet the standard for handling children who cross the border illegally. ICE announced it would create a panel of experts in public health, mental health, detention management, and children and family services to advise DHS chief Jeh Johnson on conditions at the centers.

University of Texas law professor, Barbara Hines, litigated a case leading to the closure of the Taylor, Texas-based T. Don Hutto Residential Center in 2009 for its “prison-like conditions.” She said the centers in use now are not materially different from the Hutto center. “It’s shocking he started this again,” Hines said of President Barack Obama, who closed the Hutto center. DHS, she said, is “not going to be able to argue that there is a difference.”