Immigrant Daily

Scores of Locked Up Immigrants Entangle in Detention Mess

The grim violations of human rights in detention system are still far from over. Scores of foreigners locked up on civil immigration violations and awaiting deportation are neither criminals nor accused of any crime, but you’d never know it from the way they are treated. Scattered across a network of 350 local and state jails, private, for-profit prisons and a handful of federal facilities, more than 30,000 detainees are held on any given day in conditions that range from adequate to dirty, deplorable and dangerous. The system, which houses five times the number of detainees it did in the early 1990s, is riddled with violations of the federal government’s own standards for detention. Recognizing that the problems with the status quo are serious, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency that oversees the detention system, recently announced an overhaul. John Morton, the new director of ICE, said that the driving principle of the reform would be to create “a truly civil detention system” in which the federal government itself will build and manage some new facilities and professional monitors will be stationed permanently in others.

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