Support the "Dignity not Detention" Campaign

Imagine a legal system in which a person must spend more time incarcerated for civil charges than for criminal offenses. Such a system exists. It's called immigration detention. The Detention Watch Newtork (DWN) has launched a campaign to end this unjust practice, calling on the Government "to halt the expansion of the U.S. immigration detention system and demand that immigrants are treated with full respect for their human rights and dignity." See, http://www.detentionwatchnetwork.org/DND_about

According to DWN, immigration detention costs the Government an annual $1.7 billion, and the practice has resulted in more than 300,000 people being detained each year. Those detained by immigration authorities include individuals who have no criminal background. They are simply held on civil violations of immigration law, such as overstaying a tourist visa or entering the U.S. illegally. However, even those who have been convicted of crimes in the past do not deserve the excessively harsh detention terms which exist under current law. One of my "green-card" holding clients, as an example, was convicted a couple of years ago of a drug possession. The county court ordered him to participate in an intensive drug rehabilitation program instead of serving a term of imprisonment. When he relapsed by smoking a joint, he was sentenced to six months in the county jail, but was released for "good behavior" after serving four months. Unfortunately, he's now been in immigration custody for thirteen months (and counting) while fighting to remain in the United States as a permanent resident. It makes no sense that he should now be held for over one year on a civil deportation charge, when a criminal court deemed that six months of jail was an appropriate sentence for his wrongdoing.

When Congress enacted the "mandatory detention" provision in the 1996 immigration law, it stripped immigration authorities and judges from conducting an individualized assessment of whether a noncitizen subject to deportation constituted a flight risk or a danger to the community. The law demands that even permanent residents with strong ties to the U.S. must be detained during the entire course of their removal proceedings, including any appeals they may take. Yet permanent residents are quite unlikely to abscond. They have strong ties to an American community, having lived here legally-- many since childhood. They often have parents, spouses or children who are citizens or permanent residents of this country. They have nowhere to go but home, where they may even have a job waiting for them. Clearly, if they were released from detention, even on a bond, they'd no longer be burdens to the taxpaying public. In addition, in my experience, most noncitizens detained by immigration authorities on account of a criminal offense have been convicted of non-violent drug charges. As such, they pose no threat to the community. Despite all of these common-sense considerations, permanent residents convicted of most criminal offenses are legally subject to mandatory immigration detention even when they have available to them a defense against deportation.

Asylum seekers are also among those who are detained under our current immigration regime. As I've previously detailed in my January post, Happy New Year?, detention clearly frustrates an asylum applicant's ability to prepare a meritorious claim for protection and defend him or herself against deportation to a country where persecution is feared. Furthermore, the vast majority of those seeking refuge in the U.S. have no criminal background and consequently, present no danger whatsoever to our society. Many also have family or friends in this country willing and able to provide them with shelter, food, and other financial needs such that it is unjustifiably costly to keep them detained at Government expense.

When Congress passed the 1996 law, it seemed convinced that if immigrants were not detained during the deportation process, they would flee and thus frustrate the Government's objective to remove them from the U.S. if an immigration court found them deportable. It's not clear, though, that this notion was based on anything other than pure anecdote from the former Immigration and Naturalization Service. It's now time to reconsider this law and its repercussions.

Today immigration detention is a multi-billion dollar industry and the private sector stands to benefit extraordinarily if this inhumane and nonsensical practice continues (for more on this particular issue, see the excellent website: http://www.businessofdetention.com/ ). Like other powerful special interest groups, the prison-industrial complex would no doubt unleash a ruthless lobbying campaign to keep the current detention system in place. However, it is the only one who would clearly benefit from more detention. We the people, as the DWN Campaign announces, "have a responsibility to uphold our core values: dignity, human rights, and due process of law -- principles that are fundamental to a democracy."