No More Prison for Immigrant Families?
| Thu Aug. 6, 2009 1:59 PM PDT
President Obama announced today a tiny sliver of his much anticipated and long forgotten plan to reform immigration policy: The US will stop detaining families at T. Don Hutto Residential Center, a CCA prison near Austin, TX that holds exclusively immigrants. I've never been to T. Don Hutto, but I did hang out in one of the private Corrections Corporation of America's non-criminal detention facilities in New Jersey, the hub for undocumented immigrants snagged coming in or out of one of the New York Metro airports.
It looked, not surprisingly, like a prison. And it was run like one, if a prison had window-walled dormitories instead of cell blocks: breakfast at 7, dinner at 5, showers with no curtains and toilets with no stalls. The inmates all wore gray uniforms (including gray hijabs for Muslim women, since Muslims make up a third of the inmate population there). Mostly they made paper flowers and played dominoes while waiting for the other shoe to drop. Legally, it should take a maximum of three months. But lawyers who represent immigrants say the three month maximum detention limit is a myth.
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About 400,000 immigrants go through non-criminal detention a year; 32,000 are held at any given time. Some are kept in local jails cheek-to-jowl with violent offenders. Others are shipped to privately-run facilities specially built for them, hundreds of miles from where they were picked up. Every year, some die.
Once upon a time (in 2006) people facing deportation didn't go to prison at all. Instead, they awaited trial at home until they were either cleared to stay or sent packing. Given our country's notorious prison congestion, you'd think there'd be more of a push to let law-abiding non-citizens keep doing their thing through months' long deportation proceedings. And if you think undocumented immigrants are a drain on our national resources, you'd be shocked to learn how much we spend locking them up.
Unfortunately, even as reforms are implemented, more people, not fewer, will likely be headed to lock-up. In a world where CHP officers and local cops can start deportation proceedings from their cruisers, who would expect to see less?
Comments
Harsh!
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed Aug. 12, 2009 11:38 AM PDT.
A jail sentence for that long when it would be far easier, cheaper, and expeditious to just deport these poor people would have made far more sense. Granted, we have a definitive need for immigration reform, both in allowing access to guest work permits for, say 6-10 months - as many of these people return to their country of origin, but for those who don't - make it easier to become a citizen - the reason why is that if the citizenship or VISA application process is too long, then they have a financial incentive (i.e. money right away) to cross the border illegally and start working here, whereas if it's an easy process to sign up for a visa or guest permit - then they wouldn't have an excuse.
Not to mention the fact that we certainly need to secure our borders far better. Not to put too fine a point on it, but there is a serious Drug War going on in Mexico - some of the violence being an hour or two away from our borders. It's already known that some narcos are sending "soldiers" across the border into the USA to conduct hits on people - that's a serious situation. Sorry, but Haliburton's oil platforms should not be as pressing a priority as our border is in this kind of climate - and it's worth a bit of a cash advance to get some National Guard troops down there. That's what they are intended to do, address issues that require action domestically, not to supplement the other 4 branches. There are a lot of people that probably wouldn't like the Nat'l Guard stationed there, but the idea that there's a need for better border security is not speculative any more, at this point it's definitive.
Granted, Washington DC is technically no better about being bought off by drug dealers (i.e. the FDA, Congress, and Big Pharma) than our neighbors, but it's getting out of hand down there. We need to make sure the drug cartels know that they might be almost be able to get away with their shenanigans there, but we aren't going to tolerate it.
