US: Remote Detainee Lockups Hinder Justice

Transfers of Detained Immigrants Interfere with Lawyer Access and Right to Challenge Deportation

(Washington, DC) - The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency's increasing practice of transferring immigrants facing deportation to detention centers far away from their homes severely curtails their ability to challenge their deportation, Human Rights Watch says in a report released today. The agency made 1.4 million detainee transfers in the decade from 1999 through 2008, the report says.

-Human Rights Watch

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Immigration Detention System Lapses Detailed

By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: December 2, 2009

Growing numbers of noncitizens, including legal immigrants, are held unnecessarily and transferred heedlessly in an expensive immigration detention system that denies many of them basic fairness, a bipartisan study group and a human rights organization concluded in reports released jointly on Wednesday.

-New York Times

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Immigrant Finds Path Out of Maze of Detention

Holding tight to her sister’s hand in the bustling streets of New York’s Chinatown last week, Xiu Ping Jiang looked a little dazed, like someone who has stepped from a dark, windowless place into a sunny afternoon.

In a sense, she has. For a year and a half Ms. Jiang, a waitress with no criminal record and a history of attempted suicide, was locked away in an immigration jail in Florida. Often in solitary confinement, she sank ever deeper into mental illness, relatives say, not eating for days, or vomiting after meals for fear of being poisoned.

With no lawyer to plead for asylum on her behalf, she had been ordered to be deported to her native China, from which her family says she fled in 1995 after being forcibly sterilized at age 20. Too ill to obtain the travel documents needed for the deportation to take place, she was trapped in an immigration limbo: a fate that detainee advocates say is common in a system that has no rules for determining mental competency and no obligation to provide anyone with legal representation.


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Update: The above article was a response to the previous New York Times Article on mental illness and immigration.


Mentally Ill and in Immigration Limbo

By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: May 3, 2009

Twice the immigration judge asked the woman’s name. Twice she gave it: Xiu Ping Jiang. But he chided her, a Chinese New Yorker, for answering his question before the court interpreter had translated it into Mandarin.

“Ma’am, we’re going to do this one more time, and then I’m going to treat you as though you were not here,” the immigration judge, Rex J. Ford, warned the woman last year at her first hearing in Pompano Beach, Fla. He threatened to issue an order of deportation that would say she had failed to show up.

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Some Holiday Toy Drives Checking Immigration Status

Some toy drives check immigration status

By JEANNIE KEVER Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle

Nov. 30, 2009, 8:59PM

They don't claim to know who's been naughty or nice, but some Houston charities are asking whether children are in the country legally before giving them toys.

In a year when more families than ever have asked for help, several programs providing Christmas gifts for needy children require at least one member of the household to be a U.S. citizen. Others ask for proof of income or rely on churches and schools to suggest recipients.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Detained immigrant children face legal maze in U.S.

By Rose Marie Arce
CNN

MIAMI (CNN) -- When "Marta" was 12, she entered the United States illegally, hoping to join her mother, who had left her in Central America years ago to search for work. Three years later she was sitting in immigration detention by herself waiting to be deported back home to her grandmother, who was dying of cancer.

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Second immigration official leaves new federal office
"A second high-ranking official in a two-month-old federal office that oversees immigration detention policy and planning has left the government, sources say. Cree Zischke, tasked with addressing detainee health care issues for Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Office of Detention Policy and Planning, departed just weeks after her boss, Dr. Dora Schriro, left ICE in late September to become commissioner of New York City's jails." Andrew Becker, Oct. 23, 2009.

Remembering the late Plyler vs. Doe Judge William Wayne

Judge William Wayne Justice dies at 89

He was once called 'the real governor of Texas’

By R. G. RATCLIFFE and JANET ELLIOTT
HOUSTON CHRONICLE

Oct. 14, 2009, 9:37PM

AUSTIN — U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice — beloved by some, loathed by others — changed Texas civil and inmate rights in ways few political figures have over the past half-century. Justice, who spent 30 years on the bench and once was dubbed “the real governor of Texas” for his rulings, died Tuesday at age 89.

Black children across Texas attend public schools because Justice enforced federal desegregation laws in 1970.

Hispanic children gained the same rights as blacks because of Justice's rulings. His orders prompted bilingual education in Texas.

Texas must educate all children regardless of their immigration status because of a Justice decision.

Juveniles convicted of crimes were moved from incarceration in work camps to modern rehabilitation facilities at his command.

The most sweeping change of all was the Ruiz prison reform case that ended brutal conditions for inmates and prompted a massive building boom that gave Texas one of the largest and most modern incarceration systems in the nation.

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The Pecos Insurrection

How a private prison pushed immigrant inmates to the brink.

FORREST WILDER - OCt. 2, 2009 - Texas observer