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immigration detention
Report Exposes 'Systemic Abuse' at For-Profit Migrant Detention Centers in Louisiana
"These individuals have fled persecution and violence only to be thrown in 'civil' detention and left to fend for themselves in an abusive, profit-driven, and manipulative system."
Aug 26, 2024
A coalition of rights groups on Monday released a report documenting "systemic human rights abuses" at migrant detention centers in Louisiana and called for an end to the use of for-profit facilities by U.S. agencies.
The 108-page report, drawn from more than 6,000 interviews at Lousiana immigrant detention centers since 2022, was produced by Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) Human Rights, the ACLU, the ACLU of Louisiana, Immigration Services and Legal Advocacy, and the National Immigration Project.
Louisiana has nine immigrant detention centers that together typically hold more than 6,000 people—second only to Texas. Eight of the nine are run by for-profit companies that have contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The report—which calls for these detention centers, which are under the remit of the New Orleans (NOLA) ICE field office, to be shut down—details a wide range of abuses including sexual assault, humiliating speech, medical neglect, and a lack of nutritious food and clean water.
"These individuals have fled persecution and violence only to be thrown in 'civil' detention and left to fend for themselves in an abusive, profit-driven, and manipulative system," Sarah Decker, a lawyer at RFK Human Rights and a lead author of the report, said in a statement.
"We've heard horrific stories over the last two years, stories that have been corroborated by extensive documentation," she added. "Our findings further support what detained people and their advocates have long demanded: the NOLA ICE jails must be shut down."
The New Orleans #Louisiana ICE Field Office (“NOLA ICE”) detains over 6,000 immigrants each day, more than any other state in the U.S. but Texas.
Our new human rights report shares first-hand accounts from detained people of abuse and degrading conditions in NOLA ICE jails,… pic.twitter.com/w63e7zCKaj
— Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights (@RFKHumanRights) August 26, 2024
Many of the interviews with the rights groups were conducted as part of initial legal screenings with detainees seeking representation. The work revealed widespread "inhumane treatment" at the nine facilities, including prolonged solitary confinement and the extended use of restrictive five-point shackles.
The report says the centers' food is insufficiently nutritious and cites instances of it being contaminated by rats or cockroaches. Authorities there often deny detainees access to menstrual products and key medicines, it says.
The report's authors argued that some of the abuses qualified as torture. "In some instances, the abuses that detained people describe firsthand in this report meet the definitions of torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment under international human rights treaties to which the United States is a party," they wrote.
The nine facilities are in rural Louisiana, far from New Orleans. One is connected to an airport—the only such ICE facility in the country, making it a key hub for the federal agency as it moves detainees around. The network of Louisiana facilities the result of what the report authors called an "explosion of immigrant incarceration" in the state that took place in the late 2010s.
Four of the nine centers are run by Geo Group, a Florida-based multinational prison firm that has long been the target of activist rage and reform efforts, which the Biden administration hasn't successfully delivered. The company reported $2.41 billion in revenues for 2023. Four other facilities are run by LaSalle Corrections, which operates facilities across the U.S. South, while one is publicly run per an ICE contract with a local sheriff's office.
The report says that the "for-profit incentive" leads to "a dangerous combination of overcrowding and understaffing" as the firms seek to pad their bottom line. A woman at one detention center said she was not fed enough so she had to buy extra items at its commissary, where a bag of Doritos cost $9. Meanwhile, detainees who took jobs at the center earned as little as $1 per day.
The rights groups' statement calls for an immediate investigation into abuses at facilities under NOLA ICE's remit. In fact, the detention centers have already been the subject of a federal oversight investigation, initiated in December 2021, but no findings have yet been released publicly, an ACLU spokesperson told Common Dreams.
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200 Rights Groups Call On Biden to End 'Cruel' Expansion of Immigrant Detention
"This suffering does not advance any rational policy goal," said the advocacy groups. "It merely exists to further the political goal of deterrence, which is cruel, inhumane, and misguided."
Apr 25, 2024
Citing ample evidence of human rights abuses in U.S. immigration detention centers, 200 advocacy groups on Thursday demanded that the Biden administration reverse course on a planned expansion of detention facilities and said President Joe Biden's "further entrenching" of the government's reliance on detaining migrants marks "an utter betrayal" of his campaign promises.
The president's signing of a spending bill last month provided $3.4 billion for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), clearing the way for the agency to make space to jail 41,500 immigrants per day in facilities across the country.
After Biden campaigned on ending the use of for-profit detention centers, said the groups, he took office at a time when fewer than 15,000 people were being held in immigration detention facilities—which gave him "a remarkable opportunity to wind down a wasteful and abusive system."
But after the president's 2023 and 2024 budget requests signaled an intention of reducing detention funding—with ICE itself recommending that numerous facilities be closed due to "critical staffing shortages that have led to safety risks and unsanitary living conditions"—Biden last year requested supplemental detention funding as commentators and Republicans in Congress hammered the administration for allowing so-called "chaos" at the U.S.-Mexico border.
"Your FY2025 budget request sought funding for 34,000 beds instead of the 25,000 sought in the two previous cycles," wrote the groups, including Amnesty International USA, the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC), and the Texas Civil Rights Project. "The result is unsurprising: the FY2024 spending bill you signed provides ICE $3.4 billion to jail an average of 41,500 immigrants per day, historically high funding surpassing all four years of the Trump administration."
The groups, which provide legal aid and other assistance to people who have been detained as migrants, said many of their clients "carry lifelong scars from the mistreatment and dehumanization they endured because of the United States' reliance on detention, mostly through private prisons and county jails."
The administration is seeking to expand a system, said the groups, in which the jails and prisons used have been found to "operate under insufficient standards."
The organizations cited a 2018 ACLU reportthat found inadequate medical care contributed to the deaths of more than half of the detained immigrants who died in custody between December 2015-April 2017; a 2021 case in which an LGBTQ+ man reported "physical and homophobic verbal abuse" at a facility in Louisiana; and the finding by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) that the use of solitary confinement in detention centers "regularly meets the United Nations' definition of torture."
Biden signed the spending bill two weeks after Charles Daniel, a 61-year-old migrant from Trinidad and Tobago, died at a detention center operated by the private contractor GEO Group after being held in solitary confinement for four years. ICE has placed people in solitary confinement over 14,000 times in the last five years, according to PHR, for an average of 27 days each; U.N. experts say exceeding 15 days in solitary confinement constitutes torture.
"This suffering does not advance any rational policy goal," said the groups on Thursday. "Detention does not provide an efficient or ethical means of border processing, and it certainly does not indicate to migrants that they are welcome in the United States. It merely exists to further the political goal of deterrence, which is cruel, inhumane, and misguided—as even the most punitive forms of detention have been proven not to deter people from seeking safety or a better life."
Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which tracks government data, found that as of April 7, more than 61% of ICE detainees have no criminal record, while "many more have only minor offenses, including traffic violations."
"Increasing the incarceration of immigrants is a grave mistake," said the groups, "and we urgently implore you to reverse course."
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EU's New Migration Pact Called a 'Bow to Right-Wing Extremists'
The Pact on Migration and Asylum would allow for the detention and fast-tracked deportation of new arrivals who immigration officials believe pose a threat to security or are not likely to win asylum.
Dec 20, 2023
The European Union reached an agreement Wednesday on new rules to manage migration and asylum cases that the Left party in the European Parliament called the "death of the individual right to asylum in Europe" and a "bow to right-wing extremists and fascists."
The Pact on Migration and Asylum, decided after all-night negotiations, would allow for the detention and fast-tracked deportation of new arrivals who immigration officials believe pose a threat to security or are not likely to win asylum, The Guardian reported. Those detained or deported could include women and children.
"This agreement will set back European asylum law for decades to come," Eve Geddie, the director of Amnesty International's European Institutions Office, said in a statement. "Its likely outcome is a surge in suffering on every step of a person's journey to seek asylum in the E.U. From the way they are treated by countries outside the E.U., their access to asylum and legal support at Europe's border, to their reception within the E.U., this agreement is designed to make it harder for people to access safety."
The E.U.'s previous system for managing new arrivals, the Dublin agreement, primarily tasked a migrant's first port of entry with processing their asylum case. However, that system broke down in 2015, when more than 1 million people crossed the Mediterranean and arrived at the E.U.'s southern border, primarily fleeing the civil war in Syria as well as ongoing violence in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This put an administrative strain on less wealthy E.U. nations like Greece, where 66% of arrivals between 2014 and 2016 landed. As journalist Patrick Kingsley pointed out in his 2017 book on the topic, the E.U. could have comfortably settled the new refugees among its nearly 500 million inhabitants, but other E.U. countries only agreed to accept one-ninth of the people who arrived in Italy and Greece, straining the bloc's concept of solidarity.
The new pact was announced in 2020, but member states, the European Commission, and the European Parliament had not been able to agree on its contents until now.
"There is currently a major risk that the pact results in an ill-functioning, costly, and cruel system that falls apart on implementation and leaves critical issues unaddressed."
"It's truly a historic day," European Parliament President Roberta Metsola said, as The Associated Press reported.
But Oxfam's E.U. migration expert Stephanie Pope had a different response.
"As we hear E.U. statements celebrating this deal, the question is, at what cost?" Pope asked.
For Pope and other advocates, the cost is the human rights of refugees and migrants. According to the agreement, the country where a migrant first arrives will take their biometric data, including facial images and fingerprints from everyone older than six, and quickly consider their case. It is at this point that migrants can be detained or earmarked for deportation.
Countries where new migrants are less likely to arrive can either accept a number of refugees determined based on the country's gross domestic product and population or put money into an E.U. fund. Italy's Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi said border states would "no longer feel alone" after the deal, but Amnesty International said the support was not sufficient.
"Instead of prioritizing solidarity through relocations and strengthening protection systems, states will be able to simply pay to strengthen external borders, or fund countries outside the E.U. to prevent people from reaching Europe," Geddie said.
"The E.U. now risks sleepwalking into a system in even greater need of reform than the current one."
Left Member of European Parliament (MEP) Cornelia Ernst of Germany said the option to send funds for border surveillance within the E.U. or abroad was a "pure mockery" of solidarity, while Left MEP Konstantinos Arvanitis said it would enable "European Guantanamo with legal European sponsorship."
Amnesty and Oxfam joined more than 50 other non-governmental organizations in sending an open letter to E.U. leaders ahead of Wednesday's agreement, urging them to protect human rights in any deal.
"There is currently a major risk that the pact results in an ill-functioning, costly, and cruel system that falls apart on implementation and leaves critical issues unaddressed," the letter read in part.
The NGOs argued that the E.U. should base its overall refugee policy on its response to those fleeing Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
"Europe's solidarity and commitment to human rights cannot be defined by place of origin, race, ethnicity, or immigration status," the groups said.
Amnesty expressed concerns about part of the new deal that allows E.U. states to ignore asylum rules in response to large numbers of new arrivals, as well as its reliance on deals with countries outside the E.U. to help police its borders. Such deals have led to human rights abuses in the past, such as reports that Tunisia was leaving intercepted migrants in the desert, according to AP.
"Amnesty International has long called on E.U. institutions and member states to put human rights at the center of negotiations on E.U. asylum reforms," Geddie said. "However, after years of complex negotiations, the E.U. now risks sleepwalking into a system in even greater need of reform than the current one."
The European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) wrote on social media that the reforms were "byzantine in their complexity and Orban-esque in their cruelty to refugees," referring to right-wing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Save the Children Europe, meanwhile, called the deal "historically bad" and said it would violate children's rights and put them in danger.
"It is evident that for the majority of legislators, the priority was to close borders, not protect people, including families and children escaping violence, conflict, hunger, and death while seeking protection in Europe," Willy Bergogné, Save the Children Europe's director and E.U. representative, said in a statement.
Technical talks will continue on the pact until February of next year, and it is expected to be adopted before elections for European Parliament in June. Metsola said it was important to reach an agreement before those elections, according to the AP, since immigration will likely be a major issue.
The ECRE said it would now focus on making sure the law was interpreted and implemented in line with E.U. and international law, while Oxfam called on the E.U. to pass a measure that truly shared responsibility for new arrivals, funded better systems for processing asylum cases, and created safer routes to Europe while rescuing migrants stranded at sea.
Geddie said that Amnesty International would continue to call on the E.U. to address human rights violations and "take steps to ensure a human rights compliant, sustainable, and well-resourced response to people arriving at Europe's borders."
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