Two must reads we’ve seen so far today:  One was today’s Washington Post Metro section front page look at law students aiding in immigration law clinics.  With so much deportation going on and with so many obstacles to legal immigration and staying legal, it’s all hands on deck. 

The second was the lead story in Sunday’s New York Times by Julia Preston on how the business community is starting to stir to put pressure on GOP lawmakers about immigration.  Employers trying to play by the rules are being tarred with the same brush as bottom-feeding employers who exploit the illegal status of workers.  Until we find ways of allowing for sufficient legal immigration, many small business owners are suffering.

The Post story looks at how much need there is for legal counsel in immigration-related matters.

But there is a growing realization, students and professors said, that policies on issues such as asylum and due process are evolving as never before, particularly since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. A growing immigrant population also means that legal status often complicates what might have once been simple criminal or labor cases.

 

“It’s not just that people think immigration is important, but they’re seeing that it affects everything,” said Hiroshi Motomura, an immigration law professor who will join UCLA in the fall.  – Karin Brulliard, “Law Students Rush to Meet Needs In Booming Field of Immigration,” Washington Post, July 7, 2008

The Times story looks at how at the state and local level, businesses are uniting to keep up the pressure for immigration reform and beat back harmful initiatives aimed at immigrants – which are having a tremendous impact on the economy and business environment.

The offensive by businesses has been spurred by the federal enforcement crackdown, by inaction in Congress on immigration legislation and by a rush of punitive state measures last year that created a checkerboard of conflicting requirements. Many employers found themselves on the political defensive as they grappled, even in an economic downturn, with shortages of low-wage labor.

 

Mike Gilsdorf, the owner of a 37-year-old landscaping nursery in Littleton, Colo., saw the need for action by businesses last winter when he advertised with the Labor Department, as he does every year, for 40 seasonal workers at market-rate wages to plant, prune and carry his shrubs in the summer heat. Only one local worker responded to the notice, he said, and then did not show up for the job.

 

Mr. Gilsdorf was able to fill his labor force with legal immigrants from Mexico through a federal guest worker program. But that program has a tight annual cap, and Mr. Gilsdorf realized that he might not be so lucky next year. His business could fail, he said, and then even his American workers would lose their jobs.

 

“We’re not hiring illegals, we’re not paying under the table,” Mr. Gilsdorf said. “But if we don’t get in under the cap and nobody is answering our ads, we don’t have employees.” His group, Colorado Employers for Immigration Reform, is pressing Congress for a much larger and more flexible guest worker program. – Julia Preston, “Employers Fight Tough Measures on Immigration,” New York Times, July 6, 2008

Littleton, Colorado?  Isn’t that where anti-legal-immigration firebrand Rep. Tom Tancredo is from?  Boy, his agenda sure is helping the local folks!!!

For more information on what the business community is facing and how they are pushing back, visit ImmigrationWorksUSA.

If our goal is to have an immigration system that almost all rational intending immigrants choose to go through rather than around, then we need to do more than just focus on fencing and boots on the ground at our Southern border.  Today’s lead editorial in the New York Times makes this point superbly.

Immigration policy has mostly been directed by opponents of legal immigration for the last two decades.  They have helped bottle up legal immigration channels so that they can then shout bloody murder at the resulting illegalities in the labor market.  They direct all the focus on the fence –”The Great Wall of Chihuahua,” which the Supreme Court says can be built with no consideration for any laws, foreign or domestic — and on the Border Patrol force than cannot recruit, train, and deploy agents at nearly the rate the do-little Congress has authorized.  Add substandard detention conditions, massive and record-setting round-ups, and truncated or non-existent due process for those swept up, and you have our current approach to controlling and regulating immigration.

But how effective is it?

The National Guard is leaving the border at the end of the month. And even though the border states want them to stay, the Bush administration is declaring victory. That’s how good things are down there.

 

Too bad, though, that the results that restrictionists predict from victory — an end to illegal immigration, the expulsion of illegal immigrants, the restoration of jobs to American workers, the protection of American culture and language from a Hispanic invasion — are not coming anytime soon. That’s because fixing immigration has very little to do with any of the hustle and bustle along the 2,000-mile line from San Diego to Brownsville, Tex.

According to research by the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California, San Diego (summarized here) more than 90% of intending immigrants from Mexico get through the gauntlet at the border somehow.

Maybe establishing law and order in our immigration system is more complicated than just focusing on the border, enforcement, and deportation alone.

This is not to argue for giving up on enforcement. The real victory will come when a repaired, well-patrolled border coincides with a repaired, well-run immigration system that requires undocumented workers to come forward and be legalized, has expanded avenues for legal workers, including would-be citizens, and cracks down on illegal hiring as staunchly as it protects workers’ rights.

 

There is a long list of things to do to make the immigration system correspond to American values and economic realities, and the country is doing just about none of them. We’re paying a huge price to pay for an ineffective fence and some symbolic victories on the border. — “False Victory at the Border,” New York Times editorial, July 5, 2008

Well said, Grey Lady.

As we are learning (and have reported here previously), one consequence of being put in ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) detention is quite literally death.  Because of the way health care for immigrant detainees is restricted, many face consequences and 83 have died in recent years.  Now it appears that at least some think ICE leaders have been less than honest in congressional testimony about the standards of care given detainees.

CQ Homeland Security reporter Caitlin Webber reports that experts on detention and advocates for detainees feel that Julie L. Myers, Assistant Secretary for Homeland Security and the head of ICE, failed to disclose that “non-emergency conditions are assessed or treated only if doctors believe their illness would prevent deportation.”  According to the critics interviewed by Webber from the Detention Watch Network, the ACLU National Prison Project, and the New York University Program for Survivors of Torture, the policy is problematic for a number of reasons, but that this is not the first time senior ICE officials have not fully disclosed the standard for care.

“What I find most troubling . . . is that it is the second time now that ICE has been called to testify before Congress on the issue of medical care in detention and it’s also the second time that it has misrepresented the standard,” Tom Javits, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, said in an interview.

Javits said Gary E. Mead, assistant director for management of the ICE Office of Detention and Removal Operations” also diluted the non-emergency care standard in testimony Oct. 4, 2007, before the House Judiciary Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security and International Law Subcommittee. – CQ Homeland Security, “ICE Officials’ Testimony on Detainee Medical Care Called Into Question,” June 16, 2008

Pressed by the CQ reporter, Homeland Security/ICE spokesperson Kelly Nantel came up with this telling response:

“We are in the deportation business. . . . Obviously, our goal is to remove individuals ordered to be removed from our country…We address their health care issues to make sure they are medically able to travel and medically able to return to their country.” – CQ Homeland Security, “ICE Officials’ Testimony on Detainee Medical Care Called Into Question,” June 16, 2008

What does this statement mean for all of those who are detained but are seeking relief in immigration court – like asylum seekers? Or those who should be given relief to testify against employers or traffickers? It’s the classic idea that immigration enforcement is just about booting people out of the country rather than attempting to ensure that all of our immigration laws are fairly enforced.

We are witnessing an unprecedented period best described as enforcement on steroids without reform.  The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, which follows government law enforcement data closely, indicates that by several measures we are in a new era of unleashing the Department of Homeland Security and the courts in the war on immigrants. 

TRAC reports that immigration-related convictions were up 96.3% in February 2008 compared to the same month in 2007 (see “Immigration Convictions for February 2008”) and that the U.S. set a new record for immigration-related prosecutions in March 2008 (see “Surge in Immigration Prosecutions Continues”).

[A]ccording to timely data from the Justice Department. The total of 9,350 such prosecutions was up by almost 50% from the previous month and 73% from the previous year.

The dramatic changes in the number of defendants charged with immigration-related charges are based on case-by-case information obtained by TRAC under the Freedom of Information Act from the Executive Office for United states Attorneys…

The spurt in the prosecutions of individuals charged with various immigration crimes is the result of “Operation Streamline.” Under this recently intensified administration policy, according to news reports and interviews with federal public defenders, the government has charged a rapidly growing number of undocumented aliens with various federal criminal charges in selected districts along the Mexican border. “Operation Streamline” began as a pilot project in December 2005 in Del Rio, Texas. – “Surge in Immigration Prosecutions Continues,” Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).

The editorial writers at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Monday addressed this new enforcement era with an editorial headlined “Abhorring a vacuum: The absence of comprehensive immigration reform from Congress is resulting in a crackdown — a repudiation of who we are as a nation.”

A recent New York Times article described how authorities throughout the country are using existing laws to round up illegal immigrants, with deportation as the end game. This is a nuclear, enforcement-only approach that disintegrates families and local economies.

Workplace raids occurred last month in Postville, Iowa, at Agriprocessors Inc., the nation’s largest kosher slaughterhouse. They resulted in 260 illegal immigrants sentenced to five months in prison on charges related to federal identity theft laws.

In Florida’s Santa Rosa County, the sheriff had businesses searched for illegal immigrants, making arrests on charges of violating state identity theft laws.

One consequence of this is precisely what immigration foes want: more apprehensions, more deportations and a pall of fear cast over the immigrant community and those who would join them. Other consequences, however, include a repudiation of who we are as a nation of immigrants and swimming against a global tide that makes labor as fluid as goods. – Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorial, “Abhorring a vacuum,” June 16, 2008

This has been a bad month or so for the Department of Homeland Security.  Congressional oversight hearings have been called to examine recent revelations of deaths in detention, lack of health care, and forced drugging of detainees.  Processing of citizenship applications remains hopelessly backlogged to the point that hundreds of thousands – perhaps more than a million – legal immigrants will not be able become citizens in time to vote in November.  This week, the Bush Administration announced that the flawed E-Verify worker verification system would be extended to all companies with federal contracts, thus placing additional pressure on an experimental system that is already underperforming.

As the bad news keeps piling up, editorial boards are taking notice.

Today the Los Angeles Times addresses E-Verify and other wacky developments in our hysteria to do something about immigration:

It’s legitimate to demand that contractors seeking Uncle Sam’s money jump through a few more hoops. And although Chertoff’s claim that E-Verify is “99.5%” accurate seems overstated (a new Government Accountability Office report indicates that the system produces uncertain results 8% of the time, and a 2006 report cited a 4% error rate in Social Security records, which E-Verify relies on), the collateral damage may be less troubling than the damage to the country’s sense of itself.

As we hustle to show resolve in the immigration “crisis,” we’re getting used to the idea that all private endeavor is subject to Washington’s prior approval. What kind of country do we want? A few years ago, a border wall would have seemed a relic from medieval China or Central Europe in the totalitarian era. Now it is official U.S. policy. – Los Angeles Times editorial, “Over the line: The anti-immigration furor is pushing us toward irrational policies, June 11, 2008

The New York Times in an editorial supporting a new bill introduced by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) and Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) that would create mandatory detention standards across the immigration detention system including basic, minimal medical care, has this to say about deaths in detention:

The government should be rushing to improve the oversight and care in its sprawling detention system to protect all detainees. Instead, the official reaction has been slow and defensive, promised improvements are piecemeal, and criticism of the system is making immigration hard-liners indignant…

Whether immigrants are legal or illegal has nothing to do with their right to humane care. As Ms. Lofgren bluntly put it: “You are not supposed to kill people who are in custody.” – New York Times editorial, “Dying in Detention, June 11, 2008

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff will be called before the House Committee on Homeland Security again on Thursday at 10 a.m. for additional questioning, presumably about these and other matters.

One of the new trends that we see as more bad news is the expeditious way immigrants swept up in home and workplace raids are being railroaded through the criminal justice system to deportation.  In the aftermath of the massive raid in Postville, Iowa, last month, immigrants were strongly encouraged – some would say coerced – into waiving rights, waiving access to relief from deportation, and pleading guilty to criminal, not just civil, charges during mass drive-by hearings.  The best overview we’ve seen comes from New America Media, a consortium of ethnic media outlets.

Wendy Sefsaf, a Washington-based writer for NAM, breaks down this complicated issue of due process denied and legal immigration status denied, using Postville and other recent stories to illustrate (We recommend you read the whole article).

In May, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid took place at an Iowa kosher meat-packing plant. It was the largest raid ever. Nearly 400 employees at Agriprocessors were rounded up and interrogated by immigration officials. The search warrant executed by ICE also laid out a range of workplace abuses, including physical abuse. According to the government’s own warrant: “In February, Source #7 told ICE agents he or she observed a Jewish floor supervisor duct-tape the eyes of an undocumented Guatemalan worker shut and hit the Guatemalan with a meat hook.”

…

If the government warrant itself outlined abuse, the workers should have been eligible for protected status. However, they were treated as criminals, not victims.

In another case in Louisiana, Indian workers were trafficked to the United States and housed in substandard conditions while their wages were held back, in order to pay back the $20,000 they were charged to come the United States to work at Signal Construction in New Orleans. After they walked out on their jobs en masse, the Department of Justice opened a trafficking investigation case acknowledging their victimization, yet refusing to protect them.

In past cases similar to Signal Construction, “continued presence” was automatically granted, allowing the workers to stay on in the United States while the case went ahead. According to Dan Werner of the Southern Poverty Law Center, “Continued presence is discretionary on the part of the Department of Justice, but people used to get processed on the spot. This delay is a new thing.” The lawyers representing the Indian workers have been told they must submit their clients for deportation hearings.

The remedies available to victims of trafficking and crimes are known as “T” and “U” Visas, and 5,000 T visas and 10,000 U visas are available annually.

Congress created these visas to protect victims, particularly those who could serve as witnesses to crimes. However, these cases show a possible change in policy to deport instead of protect these victims. – New America Media, News Report by Wendy Sefsaf, “Rush to Prosecute Leaves Immigrant Victims of Crimes Without Protection,” June 11, 2008

Advocates who watch the troubling world of immigration detention and due process closely (eg: the Detention Watch Network, Lutheran Immigrant and Refugee Service, and the Rights Working Group, among others) have recently been emphasizing “alternatives to detention” like ankle devices and regular check-ins with authorities who can also provide legal services to those who have a path to become legal.  These alternatives are not only more humane, they are cost-effective.  Unfortunately, to the Department of Homeland Security, “alternatives to detention” means getting people deported as quickly as possible, preferably without all that pesky due process or those meddlesome immigration judges, lawyers and translators.

Lots of dead immigrants in the news this week.  From Arizona, we are reminded by the Arizona Republic’s editorial board that the season of migrants dying in the desert is fully upon us.  Since the beginning of the fiscal year six-months ago, 61 immigrants are known to have perished attempting to cross the desert in the Tucson border sector.

Years ago, The Republic editorial page began writing about summer death counts in the hope of shaming Congress into reforming immigration policies that contribute to those deaths. Washington wasn’t paying much attention.

In recent years, the issue of illegal immigration reached hot-button status. Attention jumped right over those dead bodies. It leaped past the human dimension. Instead of being seen as people who are caught in a broken system, migrants are now portrayed as villains who are unworthy of sympathy.

That’s where Arizona is today. Anger has the upper hand. Rage is louder than reason.

But Arizona risks its humanity if it can’t refocus on what immigration policies are doing to real people.

Husbands.

Wives.

Sons and daughters.

– “Our Lethal Policies,” Arizona Republic editorial, June 2, 2008

In recent months, news of another migrant dying to get in here has been met with ho-hum indifference, or worse, out right glee from some in Arizona.  Responding to a Tucson Citizen story on a body discovered in the desert last summer, commenter “Chip B.” offered this cheerful response:

Better dead in the desert than here in our cities spreading their vermin, raping our women and consuming health care. – A comment on the story, “Remains found in desert may be illegal migrant,” Tucson Citizen, July 13, 2007.

Chip’s likeminded brother “roy w.” had a similar response to a story last summer on a proposed increase in border patrol and National Guard resources in the Tucson border sector:

Spend the money on 100 ex-Marine snipers with long rifles and scopes, turn 10 cabezas into red mush; the word goes out and people stop coming.

Savvy? Get these people out of this country before the American people start shooting them! — A comment on the story, “New bill calls for adding 14,000 border agents,” Tucson Citizen, August 3, 2007

And later the same month, “roy w.”’s death threats became a bit more specific:

God help the Pima County politicians, and businessmen, who brought this plague upon us, in the name of greed, profit and “humanitarianism”. We will hang them from lamp posts, and stick their severed heads on the Tucson City Walls. — A comment on “Border Patrol rescues 5, including 4-year-old girl,” Associated Press, August 29, 2007.

Lou Dobbs and Rep. Tom Tancredo must be proud of the rhetorical space they have opened in the public square for such thinking…if you can call it that.

But immigrants are not merely dying to get here because of our out-of-date and overly restrictive legal immigration system; they are dying in federal custody as well.  The stories about immigrants dying in detention first uncovered by the Washington Post, New York Times, and CBS News, (and ImmPolitic) are now being echoed across the nation.  Veteran immigration reporter Sandra Hernandez of L.A.’s legal-focused newspaper The Daily Journal, wrote a good summation of the health care for immigrants in detention issue for this Sunday’s Los Angeles Times.

More than 70 immigrant detainees have died in custody since 2004, at least 13 of them in California, more than in any other state, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The reason may shock you. Unlike federal and state prisons, immigrant detention centers, many of which are run by private contractors, are not legally mandated to abide by any healthcare standards when it comes to treating sick immigrants. Civil and immigrant rights groups have filed suit in New York to force federal officials to issue such rules, but the Department of Homeland Security, which has jurisdiction in the matter, has yet to produce them. In the absence of legally binding standards, detained immigrants…have no legal way to complain about the lax healthcare they receive at the facilities where they are held. They cannot appeal the denial of care or sue in federal court to obtain it. – “A lethal limbo for migrants,” Los Angeles Times, June 1, 2008.

Michael Martinez, national correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, also wrote Sunday about immigrants dying in detention.

Francisco Castaneda had been in a federal immigrant detention center because he was an illegal immigrant with a drug conviction. During his 10-month stay, his signs of cancer went untreated until the facility made him a free, but sick, man. He died a year later.

“If they do a crime, they should do their time, but take care of them,” said a tearful Yanira Castaneda, 35, whose family in the Los Angeles area is continuing her brother’s lawsuit against the government. “I think my brother could have been saved.” – “More immigrant detentions, more deaths,” Chicago Tribune, June 1, 2008.

So far, the response from the Department of Homeland Security has been unapologetic.  On Wednesday, June 4 at 2:00 p.m., Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Chair of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law, will hold a hearing on “Problems with Immigration Detainee Medical Care.”  We may learn more, and we may be further sickened by what we hear.  What we are not likely to hear from the Department or its leaders is an apology or a clear sense of accountability.

Looking at today’s clips, we came across a few stories that everyone should check out.  First up is the Los Angeles Times editorial on the recent revelations about immigrants in detention (see recent ImmPolitic posts here, here, and here).  The Times editorial said, in part:

ICE maintains that few people actually die in detention centers, and that may be true, but it doesn’t account for people such as Castaneda, who die after leaving custody. And then, ICE isn’t exactly forthcoming on the subject. When Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose) asked the agency for a list of the dead, it told her no. She obtained one from the New York Times. Lofgren has introduced HR 5950, the Detainee Basic Medical Care Act, a bill that would require Homeland Security to establish mandatory standards for basic healthcare in all detention centers. It also would require the department to report deaths to the inspectors general of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice within 48 hours….Mandating humanity shouldn’t be necessary, and Homeland Security could do this on its own, but it won’t, so this bill is needed. Our treatment of immigrants, illegal or otherwise, shouldn’t include watching them die. – “Immigrants detained to death,” Los Angeles Times editorial, May 20, 2008.

A response to the Washington Post and New York Times stories on immigrant and asylee deaths in detention by Julie Myers, assistant secretary of DHS for ICE, appeared in today’s Washington Post.

Must read number 2 (and 3) comes from the Houston Chronicle.  Local columnist Lisa Falkenberg calls our attention to a recent announcement from the Department of Homeland Security that in the case of an emergency evacuation for a natural disaster in Texas, the Border Patrol will use checkpoints to check the immigration status of every evacuee. 

Take a moment to recall the chaos.

The claustrophobic caravan of cars, trucks and SUVs creeping along a highway evacuation route-turned-prison with hundreds of thousands — by some estimates, millions — of men, women and children trapped in the steamy confines.

Recall the overheating engines, gas tanks bled dry, pumps tapped out. I’m still haunted by the image of one woman who carried the limp body of a toddler in her arms as she ran from car to car in search of water.

Now take those memories of the 2005 evacuation before Hurricane Rita and add another obstacle: a Border Patrol checkpoint at which each and every car would be stopped, drivers questioned, suspicious vehicles searched while those behind languish in the logjam.

That’s the plan, announced last week by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, in the event of a hurricane evacuation of the Rio Grande Valley. – “Evacuation hurdles are a threat to all,” Houston Chronicle columnist Lisa Falkenberg, May 20, 2008.

Sometimes America’s enforcement zeal to deal with the reality that we do not have adequate legal immigration channels is silly, as when House Republicans attached an anti-illegal immigration rider to a Native American Housing Bill.  Sometimes it is just a huge overreach, as with the “No work list” addressed in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorial below.  This one sounds down right deadly.  Qué negocio!!  What craziness!!

Must read number 3 also comes from the Houston Chronicle, which ran a story today about a new Texas study that asks the question: “If we got rid of all immigrants in the country that are here illegally, what would be the damage to our economy?”  The answer, according to the Perryman Group, is that the economy would lose $1.8 trillion in annual spending.

These are just some of the findings from a study done by the Perryman Group, a Waco-based economic analysis firm, whose work was commissioned by Americans for Immigration Reform, a group spearheaded by the Greater Houston Partnership.

Houston’s business community is trying to revive the politically charged immigration reform debate that has stalled in Congress. It plans to raise $12 million by December to fund a campaign for reform and thus far it says it has raised about 10 percent of that goal in pledges.

The government has recently increased enforcement, with raids at work sites and plans to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. But getting rid of all undocumented immigrants would hurt, not help the economy, Charles Foster, an immigration attorney and chairman of Americans for Immigration Reform, said Monday.

“If you do that, you would have serious economic upset,” Foster said.

He said immigration reform needs to give employers a method of hiring immigrants legally.

“We need comprehensive reform that looks at our needs and addresses those needs,” said Ray Perryman, president of the Perryman Group, which examined data for 500 sectors of the economy, Census Bureau surveys and other data to arrive at its conclusions. – “Price put at $1.8 trillion,” by Jenalia Moreno, Houston Chronicle, May 20, 2008.

Finally, we missed a gem of an editorial last week in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which joined the chorus of those looking at various proposals to mandate national use of the experimental government database known as E-Verify and saying, like many Members of Congress, “Wait a second; It does what??!!??”

One House bill would expand nationwide a pilot program, E-Verify, having employers use the Social Security database to verify legal status. It supposes bringing more than 7 million employers online over four years, requiring a one-time verification of an estimated 160 million existing workers and all new hires at a rate of 50 million to 55 million a year.

Unfortunately, this bill also supposes that an agency currently underfunded, understaffed and trying to deal with a crushing backlog in claims is suddenly going to become an effective arm of immigration enforcement.

Three words: Not gonna happen. Not without exorbitant costs to the federal budget and not without undermining a Social Security Administration that is facing the retirement of 77 million Baby Boomers.

Oh yes, the database also has a reported error rate of 4.1% that will ensnare workers who are here legally. In all likelihood, businesses will cut these employees loose rather than patiently wait for resolution. – “Permission to work, sir,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorial, May 16, 2008.

Over the weekend and today, a number of opinion columnists and editorial pages have begun to look more closely at the twin stories from last week – the raids and detention conditions expose – and what they tell us about the state of America’s immigration system.  Here are a few examples.

The Washington Post editorial page Saturday, under the clever headline “Detention Deficit,” recounted some of the most egregious highlights of the Post’s series, concluding:

Human error cannot always be avoided, but continuing to underfund and understaff the medical care system for these detainees only increases the chances of an unnecessary tragedy. The law requires that those in U.S. custody be given adequate treatment. Simple decency demands no less. (link)

New York Daily News columnist Albor Ruiz dedicated his Sunday column to the detention “scandal” saying in part:

The human rights scandal that immigration has become gets worse with every new revelation of official abuse, neglect and lack of accountability…Over the last couple of weeks, it has become clear that the scandal goes beyond the raids that terrorize thousands of immigrant families, or the hodgepodge of local - and often racist - anti-immigrant laws that have emerged after Congress failed to pass a rational immigration law. – “Immigration’s Human Rights Shame Is Now Moral Crisis” (link)

Although some national media (link, link, link, and link) have begun to focus on the immense impact of ICE’s Postville raid, it has been those closest to the action in Iowa that have been paying the most attention.  For example, the Dubuque Telegraph Herald’s editorial page asked Friday what will happen to the employer:

This is a broken system. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials are trying to enforce the laws in the wake of Congress’ utter failure to reform the country’s immigration policy….But enforcement must extend to the employers who exploit undocumented workers. At Agriprocessors, we are not talking about a worker or two who sneaked into a job. We are talking about nearly half the employer’s work force. In the case of Agriprocessors, the undercover source even witnessed at least one incident of physical abuse against a worker. Yet the focus of the sweep has been to gather up illegal workers, not to investigate the company. – “Agriprocessors should face charges as well” (link)

And finally, the last word goes to the Des Moines Register editorial page, which made the connection between our broken immigration system, the critical need for reform, and the massive raid in nearby Postville:

It’s time to look at immigration reform as more than a political problem. It’s an economic and a social problem, as Postville illustrates. The U.S. work force needs the labor of new immigrants as it faces a shortage with baby-boomer retirements. The country needs the vitality that new immigrants bring to communities…The nation needs higher, realistic immigration quotas to meet work-force demands. It needs a flexible guest-worker program. It needs a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants who are otherwise in good standing…Then there would be less need for raids like the one in Postville. – “Raid a reminder of need for reform” (link)

When the Washington Post revealed the appalling conditions facing our returning soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in March 2007, a national outcry arose, senior government officials were fired, and changes were made.

Now when the Washington Post, New York Times, CBS News, and others spotlight deaths in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention, the state of medical care for detainees, and the drugging of those in ICE custody to sedate them for deportation, will we see a similar outcry?

Our understanding is that a report is pending from the Office of Inspector General (OIG) for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that will further expose the issue of deaths in detention.  Meanwhile, detainees like Roxanne Brown, held in a facility at SEA-TAC Airport in Washington, continue to die.

So far, the response from ICE has been something less than outraged.

The detention of individuals who are unlawfully present in the United States and pending removal raises strong opinions and merits a more balanced view.  We regret that the New York Times, the Washington Post, and “60 Minutes” have failed to provide such balanced reporting.  This website and its contents are meant to correct the record and provide a comprehensive overview of ICE’s commitment to detainee health care.

Compare this with March 2007, when Defense Secretary Robert Gates, shortly before firing Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey for his handling of the Walter Reed debacle, stated:

The care and welfare of our wounded men and women in uniform demand the highest standard of excellence and commitment that we can muster as a government…When this standard is not met, I will insist on swift and direct corrective action and, where appropriate, accountability up the chain of command.

And Secretary Gates made good on that statement.

And what does DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff or the President have to say and when do they plan to say it?  Who will get fired and when?

One final point, this week we saw the largest ICE raid in the nation’s history as 300 plus detainees were marched to a makeshift detention facility in Postville, Iowa after their meat plant was raided.  To the best of my knowledge, there has not been one national network news story. Generally, any enforcement action resulting in 300 arrests would be cause for countless hours of cable reporting. Do we simply tune these actions out when it is immigrants who are arrested, detained, or denied due process? Have we become comfortably numb?

Secretary Michael Chertoff is right to feel disappointment that the Senate immigration reform proposal he helped craft and shepherd died at the hands of his own party. Yet he has taken his revenge out on immigrants rather than politicians.  With increasingly spectacular raids and seemingly unresponsive nonchalance to deaths in detention, it almost seems as if he is saying, “You wanna see what no immigration reform looks like, here I’ll show you;” letting the cowboy element at ICE and DHS have free rein over the country and her immigrants.

How long until the President says to Secretary Chertoff “You’re doing a heck of a job, Cherty!”

“The onus is on us if it hits the fan,” one official complained during a high-level headquarters meeting about staff shortages late last summer, according to records of the conversation.  “We’re going to be responsible if something happens, because it’s well documented that we know there’s a problem, that the problem is severe.”

It seems that “it” has hit the fan.  Sunday, The Washington Post opened a series on immigration detention, authored by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein, with a page-one story on the medical treatment of immigrants, illustrated with a photo of the white-sheeted corpse of Yusif Osman, a 34-year-old native of Ghana who died after collapsing in his cell in a large immigration prison near San Diego, California.

Many of the immigrants who are now thrown into prison by the thousands are not guilty of anything that most Americans associate with jail time.

Most are working-class men and women or indigent laborers who made mistakes that seem to pose no threat to national security…

Perhaps they would be better treated if they were.  As the Post reporters note,

The detainees have less access to lawyers than convicted murderers in maximum-security prisons, and some have fewer comforts than al-Qaeda terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

These non-citizen working-class men and women now make up five percent of our workforce.  They may have committed no other crime, or they may have committed a minor crime for which the justice system would mete out only minor punishment for a citizen.

Not so for immigrants.  If caught, they cross a threshold beyond which there seems to be little care for their very lives.

Nurses who work on the front lines see the problems up close.  “Dogs get better care in the dog pound,” said Catherine Rouse, a contract nurse at an Arizona detention center who quit after two months last year because she saw what she regarded as “scary medicine” in the prison: patients taken off medications they needed and nurses doing tasks they were not qualified to do.  “You don’t treat people like that.  There has to be some kind of moral fiber,” Rouse said.

For immigrants with medical problems, the detention system can be deadly.

About 83 detainees have died in, or soon after, custody during the past five years.  The deaths are the loudest alarms about a system teetering on collapse.  Actions taken—or not taken—by medical staff members may have contributed to 30 of those deaths, according to confidential internal reviews and the opinions of medical experts who reviewed some death files for The Post.

The article paints a bleak picture of a Division of Immigration Health Services (DIHS) that is under-staffed and under-prepared.  Yet, properly resourcing this agency to keep pace with a 65 percent increase in detainees since 2003 seems to be a low priority for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—the agency in charge of jailing non-citizens on immigration charges.

Of the 312 people who applied for new positions over the past year, 200 withdrew…because they found other jobs during the 250 days it took ICE, on average, to conduct the required background investigations.

Coming off a period when it had been run by interim directors, DIHS has a new director,

…who brought with him the credential of having been fired in 2003 by the state of Maryland for bad management and spending practices supervising detention and pretrial services.

Death in immigration prison may be the most extreme symptom of the collapse of the debate on immigration reform.  By failing to enact sensible reforms to update our immigration laws, Congress has given the most extreme voices inordinate influence over immigration policy.  We are taking immigrants away from their families and their American employers and throwing them into jail not necessarily because they are bad people, but because the political system has been paralyzed by extreme voices such as that of “rdar1,” who wrote in commenting on the Post story:

…these cynical lawbreaking invaders should not be in prison.  They should be deported with a shoot-to-kill order if they return.

Although a bill directed at correcting egregious behavior regarding the medical treatment of immigrants in detention has been introduced in the House, and is being introduced today in the Senate, the real issue is the failure of our political leaders to address the larger problem—that of our broken immigration system.

The Washington Post series can be obtained here as the stories become available. The New York Times recently ran a story on the issue, and we commented on that story, and the issue, in our policy update.