December 03, 2009
US: Remote Detainee Lockups Hinder Justice
(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
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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December 01, 2009
Immigrant Finds Path Out of Maze of Detention
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
November 25, 2009
October 25, 2009
Detained immigrant children face legal maze in U.S.
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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October 23, 2009
"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.
October 15, 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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