Legal Commentary

Obama to Announce Revamping of Immigrant Detention Centers

By Jeralyn

Every year, there are 400,000 immigrants held in U.S. detention centers. President Obama will announce a re-organization today, which includes no longer sending children and families to the notoriuous T. Don Hutto Residential Center outside Austin, TX. Hutto is a former state prison currently being operated by Corrections Corp. of America through a federal contract. It is also the subject of a lawsuit by the ACLU.

While the Obama administration will stress the new program will be more humane, there is unlikely to be a decrease in the number of detained immigrants. [More...]

John Morton, who heads the Immigration and Cu.stoms Enforcement agency as assistant secretary of homeland security said in an interview on Wednesday. Detention on a large scale must continue, he said, “but it needs to be done thoughtfully and humanely.”

... Mr. Morton, a career prosecutor, said he was taking a new philosophical approach to detention — that the system’s purpose was to remove immigration violators from the country, not imprison them, and that under the government’s civil authority, detention is aimed at those who pose a serious risk of flight or danger to the community.

Leading the way will be a new Office of Detention Policy and Planning. It sounds very bureauacratic:

Dora Schriro, special adviser to Ms. Napolitano, will become the director, assisted by two experts on detention management and medical care. The agency will also form two advisory boards of community groups and immigrant advocates, one focusing on detention policies and practices, the other on detainee health care.

Mr. Morton said he would appoint 23 detention managers to work in the 23 largest detention centers, including several run by private companies, to ensure that problems are promptly fixed. He is reorganizing the agency’s inspection unit into three regional operations, renaming it the Office of Detention Oversight, and making its agents responsible for investigating detainee grievances as well as conducting routine and random checks.

There likely will be new civil detention centers. Vanetta Gupta, lead counsel for the ACLU in the Hutto lawsuit, says:

“The ending of family detention at Hutto is welcome news and long overdue,” she said in an e-mail message. “However, without independently enforceable standards, a reduction in beds, or basic due process before people are locked up, it is hard to see how the government’s proposed overhaul of the immigration detention system is anything other than a reorganization or renaming of what was in place before.”

What will happen to Hutto?

Hutto will be converted into an immigration jail for women, [Morton] said, adding: “I’m not ruling out the possibility of detaining families.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on August 06, 2009 (boomark / email).