U.S. to Reform Policy on Detention for Immigrants
Peterwl22
The Obama administration intends to announce an ambitious plan on
Thursday to overhaul the much-criticized way the nation detains
immigration violators, trying to transform it from a patchwork of jail
and prison cells to what its new chief called a “truly civil detention
system.”
Details are sketchy, and even the first steps will take months or
years to complete. They include reviewing the federal government’s
contracts with more than 350 local jails and private prisons, with an
eye toward consolidating many detainees in places more suitable for
noncriminals facing deportation — some possibly in centers built and
run by the government.
The plan aims to establish more centralized authority over the system,
which holds about 400,000 immigration detainees over the course of a
year, and more direct oversight of detention centers that have come
under fire for mistreatment of detainees and substandard — sometimes
fatal — medical care.
One move starts immediately: the government will stop sending families
to the T. Don Hutto Residential Center, a former state prison near
Austin, Tex., that drew an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit and
scathing news coverage for putting young children behind razor wire.
“We’re trying to move away from ‘one size fits all,’ ” John Morton,
who heads the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency as assistant
secretary of homeland security, said in an interview on Wednesday.
Detention on a large scale must continue, he said, “but it needs to be
done thoughtfully and humanely.”
Hutto, a 512-bed center run for profit by the Corrections Corporation
of America under a $2.8 million-a-month federal contract, was
presented as a centerpiece of the Bush administration’s tough approach
to immigration enforcement when it opened in 2006. The decision to
stop sending families there — and to set aside plans for three new
family detention centers — is the Obama administration’s clearest
departure from its predecessor’s immigration enforcement policies.
So far, the new administration has embraced many of those policies,
expanding a program to verify worker immigration status that has been
widely criticized, bolstering partnerships between federal immigration
agents and local police departments, and rejecting a petition for
legally binding rules on conditions in immigration detention.
But Mr. Morton, a career prosecutor, said he was taking a new
philosophical approach to detention — that the system’s purpose was to
remove immigration violators from the country, not imprison them, and
that under the government’s civil authority, detention is aimed at
those who pose a serious risk of flight or danger to the community.
The Hutto legal settlement expires Aug. 29. In the most recent
monitoring report last month, Magistrate Judge Andrew W. Austin wrote:
“Although the use of this facility to hold families is not a violation
of the settlement agreement, it seems fundamentally wrong to house
children and their noncriminal parents this way. We can do better.”
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