Immigrant Detention Centers Essay Example

of domestic detention in the United States. The arrival of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and ensuing governmental response illustrated an episode of expanded immigrant detention and accumulation of power, as well as new turns in the trend toward privatization of U. S. detention.

Privatization of these operations has permitted at least three broad goals: one, the federal government shares the burden of detaining noncitizens, while expanding its capacity to do so; two, it generates profits and revenues for private and other nonfederal institutions; and three, it deflects accountability for the excesses of detention. First, the use of private and nonfederal detention facilities expands the total capacity of the federal government to detain noncitizens nationwide.

The federal government increases its material detention capabilities, while simultaneously reducing the overall costs and burden of detaining all noncitizens in deportation proceedings, by contracting out services to local and county prison facilities and also to privately owned properties and jails. The second result of the privatization of detention is the interpolation of profit motive into the rationale behind noncitizen detention.

Accordingly, Lahav offers this definition: "Privatization, loosely defined as the shift of a function from the public to the private sector, involves a dependence on market forces for the pursuit of social goods and may turn local actors or contractors into regulators” (Lahav, 228-229). Private detention produces a brisk commerce in immigrant detainees, and changes the way we view immigrants. For some poor counties and municipalities, noncitizen detention serves as a popular development strategy, much like prison construction nationwide.

In June 1993, for example, the Harrisburg Patriot-News in Pennsylvania carried the headline, "Prison Board Shopping for

Immigrants to Prevent Layoffs. " In this article, the county commissioner stated, "We tried like the dickens to get some of the Chinese…but it didn't pan out.... If no immigrants are secured, some layoffs may be inevitable" (Maruskin, 32). The acquisition of noncitizen detainees and the length of their time in detention are primary factors in determining revenue from detention as are the conditions of incarceration and the maintenance of standards.

The latter, which being part of the costs of doing business, creates a disincentive to dispense funds to provide healthy, safe, and humane conditions in order remain competitive and generate profits from detainees. In order to understand the privatization of detention as it is occurring post 9/11, it is necessary to bend Lahav's definition of privatization to include the use of nonfederal detention facilities together with private ones, and also, to introduce emerging international dimensions of detention amplified by the "war on terror.

This is to say, that 9/11 and the "war on terror" have allowed the U. S. to push outward and expand its detention project globally, utilizing an international detention structure such as the prisons at Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba and Abu-Ghraib in Iraq. These sites, as a rule shrouded in secrecy, are troubled with allegations of torture and widespread abuse of detainees, from physical violence to sexual and religious humiliation.

Most troubling is that these reports emanate not only from human rights organizations and supranational bodies like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Red Cross, and the United Nations, but much of the abuse has been confirmed in the back pages of newspapers by FBI, CIA,

and U. S. Army reports as well. Similar to the Department of Justice inspector general's reports detailing the abuse of Muslim detainees at domestic detention facilities after 9/11, recent admissions by the CIA that the U. S. is sending its detainees abroad—which has been criticized for being "torture by proxy"—in the "war on terror" has shocked the world community. According to the editors of the New York Times, "one of the biggest nonsecrets in Washington" is that the U. S. is secretly practicing what is termed "extraordinary rendition"—a "creepy euphemism" for the forced transfer of detainees to foreign governments for interrogation and torture (Editorial, A22).

Reports about this questionable practice are emerging weekly from other nations allied with the U. S. whose citizens have been tortured in Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Pakistan while under U. S. custody. . "Rendition" is the prototypical example of the global decentralization of detention practices. CIA officials contend that the White House has approved this procedure under classified presidential directives which provide "existing authorities to lawfully conduct these operations” (Jehl and Johnston, 11).

This story, of torture and detainee abuse practiced internationally, is in its early stages and has only been partially told, and we are likely to hear more detainee testimonies, reports from human rights organizations, and begrudging admissions from U. S. authorities in the foreseeable future. Society is apt to treat such detainees with sympathy. This is not the case for the majority of detainees who are criminal aliens, having committed and been convicted for a variety of crimes, although many of them minor and perhaps requiring zero jail time.

For criminal detainees, the

detention process most often resembles an extension of their punishment. As Schuck states, "Deportation, in fact, serves as an important adjunct and supplement to criminal law enforcement, and it reflects judgments, essentially indistinguishable from those that the criminal law routinely makes, concerning the moral worth of individual conduct” (Schuck, 27). Although detainees are incarcerated and experience being incarcerated as other convicts, in the eyes of the law, they are not being punished and thus bear the full weight of their noncitizenship.

Despite the less harsh framing of detainees as non-prisoners, throughout the twentieth century detainees have been held in prison-like conditions for their "administrative" offenses, often in actual prisons commingling with other prisoners convicted of criminal acts. Many asylum seekers, enemy aliens, and criminal aliens have never been to jail except for their immigrant detention. By denying the punishment they receive, the government reduces its culpability behind administrative language, and hides immigrant detainees from the public.

For instance, a recent Venezuelan detainee, who came to the U. S. seeking asylum and has been incarcerated since December 2003 at Miami's Krome federal detention center, states, "The issue is whether it's the right place to hold people like me who haven't done anything wrong in the United States. We came seeking asylum, and now we are in a detention center, like prisoners” (Chardy, 2005). Whereas other detainees referred to Krome detention center as a "depression center," a "black hole," or akin to a concentration camp, these detainees are incarcerated amidst the range of immigrants found in centers specifically created for detaining immigrants (Chardy, 2005).

For other detainees captured at or near more remote ports of

entry of within the interior of the nation, they are housed in the same cells and lock-ups as persons convicted in the criminal courts in that locality. In fact, detainees held in nonfederal, privately contracted prisons and in municipal and county jails amount to sixty percent of all detainees (Tangeman, 27). Not only are such detainees criminalized in the popular imagination, but they are distinguished by their lack of procedural rights guaranteed to alleged criminals.

The government's hostility to a meaningful procedural defense to noncitizens detention has contributed to its adversarial relationship with immigrant detainees. Consistently arguing that due process provides detainees with valuable tools that slow investigations arid deportations, the Department of Justice and its administrative managers have developed various strategies and avenues which can be used to limit detainees' and immigrants' due procedural rights. These methods are available both in the courtroom and at the detention facility, where distrust of detainees' grievances is commonplace.

Complaints by detainees citing abuse, for example, are often treated as "crying wolf. " According to one warden at the Houston private detention facility, "A lot of it is just attention-getters.... a lot of that is just a ploy and a game” (Dow, 98). But as Mark Dow argues, "Accusations of abuse against the INS and its surrogates, whether county jail or private sector employees, generally disappear into a whirlpool of circular logic and self-protecting bureaucracy (Schell, 7).

Fifty years after the contraction and reformulation of detention operations, the U. S. detention infrastructure finds itself in both similar and different circumstances, especially in regard to the detention of "criminal aliens. " As they were in the

1950s, Mexican nationals are again the largest number detainees held each year, representing fifty percent of persons in detention, or 101,000, in 2002 (Siskin, 12).

Converse to contraction, however, criminal alien detentions have propelled the pre-9/11 expansion of the detention infrastructure, as a result of the continuing "war on drugs" in the 1990s and also the increase in mandatory minimum sentencing for crimes that extend far beyond the "war on drugs. " Well under way prior to 9/11, the expansion of detention capacity has been in a significant growth spurt since the early 1990s, outpacing prison growth nationwide.

In fact, bed space tripled in the latter 1990s alone, facilitating the detention of 22,000 persons everyday, and over 220,000 annually. Spending for detention and removal has also increased five-fold since 1993 to one billion dollars. Staff more that doubled from 1,600 to 3,500 personnel. By 2001, increased expenditures on detention and removal amounted to "one third of all INS enforcement spending, or nearly as much as the agency's entire budget just seven years ago," according to Anthony Tangeman, former director of the Office of Detention and Removal (Tangeman, 16).

Anticipating the detentions stemming from the "war on terror," the pre-9/11 episode in detention growth in the 1990s resulted from a combination of new legislation that targeted immigrants by reducing their due process rights, and the reintroduction and codification of "national security" in the wake of foreign and domestic terrorism in the mid-1990s. The "war on terror," of course, catalyzed by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks generated the newest episode of expansion in the long pattern of immigrant detention in the U. S.