Dignity, Not Detention: Calling Congress to Task on Immigration and Detention Policy

America's Voice Blog

Posted 03/01/10 at 05:51pm

Detention Watch Network’s current campaign, “Dignity Not Detention: Preserving Human Rights and Restoring Justice,” aims to protect human rights by putting an end to the expansion of the US immigration detention system, with these four goals in mind:

Reduce detention spending by the Obama Administration
Demand the use of secure release options as a meaningful alternative to detention
Restore due process to immigration laws
End expansion of enforcement programs (i.e. ICE ACCESS) that are contributing to the growth of the detention system

Watch the video that accompanies Detention Watch Network’s campaign, in which lawyers and former detainees describe, in vivid detail, how immigrants are unjustly treated in the various detention facilities around the country:

28 year old Walter Rodriguez-Castro, who reportedly complained about symptoms including fever and vomiting, died in detention from undiagnosed meningitis and HIV. Sadly, such events in detention are not uncommon. Many immigrants housed in detention facilities are routinely mistreated and abused, and sick immigrants are often refused treatment. Needless to say, deaths usually go unreported.

Nina Bernstein of the New York Times reported earlier this year:

Silence has long shrouded the men and women who die in the nation’s immigration jails. For years, they went uncounted and unnamed in the public record. Even in 2008, when The New York Times obtained and published a federal government list of such deaths, few facts were available about who these people were and how they died.

As the Standing FIRM blog notes:

Immigrants in the United States are detained in a secretive web of over 350 private, federal, state and local jails and prisons, at an annual cost of $1.7 billion to taxpayers. Last July, the National Immigration Law Center, ACLU-SC and the law firm Holland and Knight released a report finding that these detention centers routinely violated their own minimal standards. Detention centers often failed to remedy these standards violations for years, leaving immigrants to languish in facilities that lacked access to legal resources, working phones, and other basic needs.

Show your support by signing on to “Dignity, Not Detention” or cick here to get involved in the campaign to put an end to the human rights abuses that occur every day under a very un-American detention policy.