New report blasts U.S. on immigrant detainees

By Tyche Hendricks, SFChronicle Staff Writer

More than 400,000 people a year are detained by immigration officials in the United States – including undocumented immigrants, legal immigrants who run afoul of the law and asylum seekers who come fleeing persecution – but according to a report released today by Amnesty International, conditions are often deplorable and detainees are routinely denied due process.

It’s the second major human rights report in a week to indict the nation’s immigration detention system. The system is attracting increased attention in part because the number of people in detention has grown exponentially in recent years and in part because of dozens of in-custody deaths and a lawsuit over the treatment of children.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano last month ordered her department to examine all aspects of Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations and hired a special assistant, Dora Schriro, to oversee detention and removal conditions.

A spokeswoman for ICE, as the immigration enforcement agency is known, acknowledged Tuesday that concerns have been raised about the treatment of immigration detainees.

“We have already made appreciable gains in improving the detention system by adopting detention standards and monitoring the compliance with those standards,” said Cori Bassett. “All that said, the care and treatment that some detainees receive does not yet meet our shared expectation of excellence, and we can all agree this is a reason for concern.”

The cases of two Bay Area men illustrate two of the problems highlighted by the Amnesty report: Detainees often are denied due process, and the burden is on the detainees to prove they don’t belong in custody.

Afghanistan-born Lemar Nasir of Fremont and Thailand-born Yuttasak Simma of San Francisco were taken into ICE custody in 2007, though both are naturalized U.S. citizens.

Though the men told immigration officials of their citizenship, neither had papers to prove it, and both languished in immigration custody in Santa Clara County jail – Nasir for 11 months, Simma for seven – before a lawyer finally secured their release.

Sin Yen Ling, an attorney with San Francisco’s Asian Law Caucus who represented the men, called the cases a violation of the men’s constitutional right to due process.

“Absent congressional authorization, you cannot use immigration laws to lock up a citizen,” she said. “And this is not unusual: I have on my docket right now five to seven of these cases. People have legitimate claims to citizenship, and they inform ICE, yet there’s no formal procedure to figure out what to do with these folks.”

The Amnesty International report, “Jailed Without Justice: Immigration Detention in the USA,” noted a variety of concerns over due process and the conditions of detention:

– People in immigration custody don’t have the same guarantees as criminal detainees to challenge their detention before a court, make a phone call or obtain legal representation.

– Detainees can be transferred from one facility to another, sometimes in another state, with no notice given to their families or attorneys.

– Two-thirds of people in federal immigration custody are housed in state or county detention facilities, usually alongside criminal detainees, even though violations of immigration law are considered administrative, not criminal, and asylum seekers have committed no violation.

– Immigrants are subject to excessive use of restraints such as handcuffs, waist chains and leg restraints.

“In the criminal justice system, anyone arrested is assumed innocent, but in the immigration system, they’re put in detention, and then it’s the individual’s burden to prove they shouldn’t be detained,” said Sarnata Reynolds, an author of the report. “That’s why you’ll see long periods of detention, because it’s an incredibly high burden.”

Both the Amnesty report and a study released last week by Human Rights Watch faulted ICE for failing to provide adequate medical and mental health treatment to detainees. Human Rights Watch, which focused on women’s access to health care, emphasized problems with perinatal care and care for survivors of sexual violence.

Since 2003, 90 people have died in immigration custody, according to Schriro of Homeland Security. Immigration authorities last year pointed out that the death rate in immigration detention is a small fraction of that in other U.S. jails and prisons.

But earlier this month, Schriro testified before Congress that detainees did not always receive timely and appropriate medical care. She vowed improvements.

A 2007 lawsuit over the treatment of children in immigration custody led to improvements in the conditions at a private Texas prison where families are held.

The Amnesty report called on the Obama administration to consider alternatives to detention for immigrants who are neither a flight risk nor a danger to others. That’s a proposal endorsed by San Jose Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee’s immigration subcommittee.

“Oftentimes there are alternatives, like these ankle bracelets and bonds and other ways to make sure the person doesn’t disappear into the woodwork,” said Lofgren, who is particularly incensed that asylum seekers are locked up until they can make the case they’d face persecution in their home countries.

“You’ve got people now waiting six months for a 20-minute (asylum) interview,” she said. “Well, at $90 a day, the meter’s running here. How can it possibly be cost-effective to postpone a 20-minute interview? It’s stupid.”

E-mail Tyche Hendricks at thendricks@sfchronicle.com.

Asylum detainees win record payout

In a landmark settlement, the Congolese family have been awarded £150,000, believed to be the biggest payout over the unlawful detention of child refugees seeking asylum in Britain.

Lawyers and immigration campaigners said the settlement could lead to dozens more compensation claims being brought by refugee families with young children who have been detained or are still locked up in the UK asylum system. It is estimated that every year the Home Office authorises the detention of 2,000 child immigrants. One firm of lawyers said it was already preparing three separate compensation cases where families had been unlawfully detained.

Mark Scott, of Bhatt Murphy solicitors, who acted for the family, said: “This case demonstrates not only the very damaging impact that detention has on children but the wholesale failure of the Home Office to comply with their own policy and the commitments given to Parliament that detention of children is only used as a measure of last resort and even then for the shortest possible time.”

But Patrick Mercer, the Tory MP for Newark and Retford, said: “It just shows everyone how chaotic the immigration and asylum system has become that we end up having to pay asylum-seekers [in a case] which could have been avoided if the Government had a properly run policy.”

In the case, the court was told that a one-year-old baby and an eight-year-old child from the Democratic Republic of Congo were deeply traumatised after immigration officers twice raided their West Midlands home. After their arrests they were taken to Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre in Bedfordshire where they were held for 57 days. Two months later, the family home was raided for a second time leading to a further three-day unlawful detention at the same centre.

Both children suffered post-traumatic stress disorder and were kept in detention despite warnings from Bedfordshire Social Services and an expert psychologist who raised concerns about the impact of the detention on children.

The family, who were detained in 2006, have since been granted asylum.

In the face of court proceedings brought by the family, the Home Office has accepted that their arrests and subsequent detentions were unlawful as the mother had not exhausted her asylum rights and could not have been lawfully removed from the country.

Amanda Shah, assistant director of Bail for Immigration Detainees, said: “Yet again the courts have found children’s rights have been violated by the Home Office’s detention policy. This case shows both the damage done to children in detention and also the inadequacy of Home Office safeguards to keep them from harm. the Home Office knew the impact detention was having on these children but continued to detain them anyway.”

She added: “Children we work with tell us they are scared of detention centre guards and don’t understand what they have done to deserve being put ‘in prison’ – it is little wonder that many suffer serious mental and physical health problems as a result.”

Emma Ginn, of the immigration campaign group Medical Justice, said: “This settlement recognises the severe harm to children of long-term immigration detention and flies in the face of the Home Office’s insistence that they only detain children for the shortest possible time prior to an imminent removal.”

A recent report by Anne Owers, the Chief Inspector of Prisons, found that the plight of detained children remained of great concern. She concluded: “An immigration removal centre can never be a suitable place for children and we were dismayed to find cases of disabled children being detained and some children spending large amounts of time incarcerated.”

After an inspection of detention facilities, she added: “We were concerned about ineffective and inaccurate monitoring of length of detention in this extremely important area. Any period of detention can be detrimental to children and their families, but the impact of lengthy detention is particularly extreme.”

A UK Border Agency spokeswoman said: “The UKBA is actively working on alternatives to detaining families with children. During detention or removal from the UK, we take the welfare of families with children extremely seriously. Officers involved in family removals receive thorough training in procedures to minimise the distress caused. All members of the family are treated as sensitively as possible.” – The Independent

Guns into greenbacks

(IRIN) – Hundreds of people in Kinshasa have handed over illegal weapons for cash and cloth in a no-questions-asked campaign to reduce crime in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

AK-47 automatic rifles, Uzi sub-machine guns and rocket launchers were among the 3,000 or so weapons collected over the past three weeks by the Ecumenical Programme for Peace, Conflict Resolution and Reconciliation (PAREC), an NGO. Those in working order were handed over to the police, the rest were destroyed.

Photo: MONUC/Kim Sarrazin Gjerstad

In a bid to prevent crime in the capital, citizens are being rewarded for turning in their guns (file photo

“There have been several hold-ups and attempted murders carried out by armed men in Kinshasa recently and several arms caches have been discovered,” said PAREC coordinator, Pastor Daniel Ngoyi Mulunda.

“These are the facts that motivated us to take this action, knowing that there have been too many fire arms in circulation in the capital.”

Ngoyi said the government had promised not to take any legal action against civilians surrendering their guns. So far, he added, no arrests had been made. Most of those who handed in weapons were women, Ngoyi said. Upon surrender, the women receive $100 and a length of cloth. However, several Kinshasa residents expressed concern over the origin of the fire arms being collected.

“I suspect those bringing in arms may be from the armed forces, not civilians,” Benjamin Yogolelo, a former military officer, told IRIN. “And those thousands of weapons could [have been] stolen from military camps. Some people come back many times to hand in different guns and get more money. This is easy money.”

Ngoyi said the police and the media were not allowed to talk to, film or photograph people handing over arms so as to encourage others to do likewise. Meanwhile, questions are being asked about the highly publicised discovery of four weapons caches in November and the subsequent arrest of former soldiers from Equateur province accused of preparing a coup.

“There is more to this story of arms caches than meets the eye because we don’t have any real proof that they existed. Only people from Equateur were arrested. We think it could be a set-up to carry out a purge in the army,” said Dolly Ibefo, the vice-president of La Voix, a human rights NGO.

Ibefo said the detainees included a woman and her baby, arrested in place of her husband.