October 6, 2009
Ideas for Immigrant Detention Include Converting Hotels and Building Models
By NINA BERNSTEIN
The Obama administration is looking to convert hotels and nursing homes into immigration detention centers and to build two model detention centers from scratch as it tries to transform the way the government holds people it is seeking to deport.
These and other initiatives, described in an interview on Monday by Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, are part of the administration’s effort to revamp the much-criticized detention system, even as it expands the enforcement programs that send most people accused of immigration violations to jails and private prisons. The cost, she said, would be covered by greater efficiencies in the detention and removal system, which costs $2.4 billion annually to operate and holds about 380,000 people a year.
“The paradigm was wrong,” Ms. Napolitano said of the nation’s patchwork of rented jail space, which has more than tripled in size since 1995, largely through Immigration and Customs Enforcement contracts for cells more restrictive, and expensive, than required for a population that is largely not dangerous. Among those in detention on Sept. 1, 51 percent were considered felons, and of those, 11 percent had committed violent crimes.
“Serious felons deserve to be in the prison model,” Ms. Napolitano said, “but there are others. There are women. There are children.”
These and other nonviolent people should be sorted and detained or supervised in ways appropriate to their level of danger or flight risk, she said. Her goal, she said, is “to make immigration detention more cohesive, accountable and relevant to the entire spectrum of detainees we are dealing with.”
Several of the initiatives Ms. Napolitano described, to be formally announced on Tuesday afternoon, are steps on a road outlined in August, when John Morton, the assistant secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, announced an ambitious plan to transform the penal network into a “truly civil detention system.”
But the corrections expert he had put in charge of the overhaul, Dora B. Schriro, quit last month to become the corrections commissioner in New York City, after delivering a report on her eight-month top-to-bottom review of the system. The report had remained under wraps until now.
Dr. Schriro’s departure, and the delay in making her report public, dismayed many of the dozens of immigrant advocacy groups she consulted. Her 35-page report, provided to The New York Times after the interview on the condition that it not be posted on its Web site until Tuesday afternoon, calls for prompt attention to individual complaints about a lack of medical care, and “a credible grievance process, sustained in an environment free from intimidation and retaliation.”
In her interview, Ms. Napolitano said little about medical care but promised that within six months the Department of Homeland Security would “devise and implement” a classification system to better place people with medical or mental health needs in the right detention centers.
That vow puzzled some immigrant advocacy groups that deal with seriously ill detainees, including some who have died in federal custody after not getting proper treatment. The groups said they were concerned about the gap between announced plans to improve medical care and the actions of immigration officials.
Cheryl Little, the director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, pointed to the case of a woman she called Rosemarie, who, while being detained at the Glades County Detention Center, has suffered severe daily bleeding as a result of a fibroid tumor in her uterus.
“This has gone on for more than the five months she has been in ICE custody,” Ms. Little said. “Since June, we have tried everything to get her proper treatment. We started the requests at the local level and escalated up to D.H.S. headquarters. Ultimately we’ve had to file a lawsuit, and Rosemarie still hasn’t had the surgery she needs.”
Ms. Napolitano noted repeatedly that some of the initiatives she was announcing were “easier said than done.” Plans to speed the implementation of an online system for families and lawyers to locate detainees, for example, have been complicated by privacy issues and by the fact that many detainees share names and some stay in the system for only a couple of days, she said.
Likewise, though alternatives to detention are much cheaper than the jails under contract — $14 a day at most per person, compared with more than $100 a day — the overall cost is more complicated to calculate, she said.
About 19,000 noncitizens are supervised daily using alternatives like electronic bracelets, but their immigration cases are moved to the back of the line for adjudication. Homeland Security is working with the Justice Department, which oversees immigration courts, to modify that practice, she said, and this fall will submit a proposal to Congress to expand detention alternatives.
A request for proposals to build two model detention centers, one in California, will be issued within a year, said Mr. Morton, the ICE official. On Oct. 30, he said, he will solicit proposals and market research about converted hotels, nursing homes and other residential facilities that could serve as less expensive and less restrictive detention centers.
Mr. Morton said that on Sept. 18 the agency began housing nonviolent detainees, including new asylum seekers, at the Broward Transitional Center in Pompano Beach, Fla., near free legal help. But Charu al-Sahli, the statewide director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, said the Broward center, run for profit by GEO, a large prison company formerly known as Wackenhut, had been housing asylum seekers since 2003.
A former work-release center now surrounded by barbed wire, it is being expanded to house 700, up from 530.
“Even though it’s a nicer environment than a jail,” Ms. al-Sahli said, “these are still the people we would hold up for release, not just nicer detention.”
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