10/18/11 To mark the 15-year anniversary of the passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of 1996, a coalition of faith, immigrant rights, and community-based organizations joined Detention Watch Network (DWN) today to announce the launch of a new "Dignity, Not Detention" campaign.
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10/17/11 Derrick Cotterel, an undocumented immigrant from Jamaica, is seeking political asylum. His story is wrenching -- and says so much about the failings of the immigration detention system in the U.S.
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07/26/11 Tomorrow, Lamar Smith will hold a hearing on the HALT Act, legislation designed to bully President Obama. The HALT Act would prevent the use of discretion by the President in immigration cases. Smith's expert witness is Senator David Vitter, who knows a thing or two about prosecutorial discretion.
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07/15/11 According to the ACLU, Rep. Lamar Smith's deceptively named "Keep Our Communities Safe Act" bill "would in fact lead to the detention of thousands more immigrants for years without first having a hearing before a judge."
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06/24/11 House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX), Immigration Subcommittee Chair Elton Gallegly (R-CA), and Immigration Subcommittee Vice Chair Steve King (R-IA) -- our "three amigos" on immigraton -- keep advancing their wish list of immigration "reforms" that would tighten the screws on immigrants of ALL statuses.
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06/17/11 It's been more than 20 years since Miguel Aparicio has been in the United States. He moved here when he was 15 years old with his grandmother. He graduated high school, and with a cross-country scholarship, Aparicio was able to attend college.
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06/10/11 In a recent meeting with La Opinión's editorial board, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi criticizes the Administration's implementation of the controversial deportation program, "Secure Communities", La Opinión reports:"I understand that this is a program that is designed for a specific purpose, not simply to catch the undocumented but dangerous criminals."
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06/02/11 Rep. Lamar Smith, the Republican Chair of the House Judiciary Committee -- and one of the notoriously anti-immigrant "Three Amigos," just can't help himself when it comes to attacking and demonizing immigrants. Today, This time, Smith -- the GOP's top political strategist for Latino outreach -- is taking on asylum-seekers fleeing persecution and seeking freedom in America.
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04/20/11 Beatrice Kiarie, a mother of four has been in detention because of an INS "paperwork mistake" that could take three months to fix. This is another example of the real pain in immigrant communities due to the administration's unrelenting enforcement-only policies.
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04/15/11 As we've been mentioned in previous blog posts, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Detroit is one of the worst run offices in the country.
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04/14/11 Last May, Michigan DREAMer Ivan Nikolov and his mother were detained in a Michigan detention facility, where Ivan was forced to watch while his crying mother was strip-searched. Only a small, shoulder-length screen separated the two.
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03/29/11 Congratulations are in order as good news came through yesterday for bi-national same-sex couples.
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03/21/11 Last week, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights released their December 2010 report revealing namely that detention is a disproportionate measure and recommends an end to the 287(g) program
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03/18/11 Since Christmas, Mario Aregullin has been sitting in a Georgia detention center. Though he's been in the United States since he was a baby, he was forced to spend Christmas, New Year's, and Valentine's Day away from his family, friends, and his bride-to-be, Brandi.
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02/18/11 As anti-immigrant attitudes in the US intensify, Geri Mannion & Taryn Higashi, co-founders of the program, felt the need to honor fifteen people who would normally go unrecognized for the courage they've demonstrated in standing up for immigrants or refugees.
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10/29/10 Here's the harsh truth about our immigration system: When 392,000 immigrants are detained per year and 33,000 more are detained every day with limited staff and minimal federal oversight, institutional misconduct is inevitable. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is moving record-breaking numbers of immigrants through its ancillary agencies and, in the process, immigrant women are being raped by Border Patrol agents, LGBT detainees are being sexually assaulted at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities, and citizens and legal residents are certainly being deported.
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10/21/10 A new report by the Detention Watch Network reveals that the "truly civil" detention system once promised by the administration has truly failed to materialize. And while the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been crowing over its record number of deportations, it's suspiciously mum when it comes to the record number of detainees that still languish in woefully mismanaged detention facilities.
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10/14/10 The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced last week that it had broken its own record for deportations, affirming the Obama administration's zeal for heavy-handed immigration enforcement. According to the announcement, deportations have increased by 70 percent since the Bush administration, totaling 392,000 in fiscal year 2010.
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08/27/10 Surely everyone in America would think it's smarter to spend ICE resources going after dangerous criminals than immigrants who have applied for residency under the current system and are about to be granted a green card, right?
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04/05/10 Haitian-Americans, myself included, have been especially proud that our adoptive homeland not only took the lead in recovery and relief efforts in Haiti after the massive January earthquake, but also temporarily suspended deportations of undocumented Haitian immigrants and granted them work permits so that they could earn income and help affected relatives in Haiti.
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03/04/10 We must work to pass real immigration reform that creates an ordered, legal process for undocumented immigrants to come out of the shadows, register, and obtain the same rights and responsibilities as all Americans. Right now, there are millions of workers and families for whom that process does not exist, and so we continue to face a crisis in which employers can arbitrarily exploit workers, families can be separated without notice, and an increasing number of men and women are sent to languish in these unaccountable detention facilities.
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03/01/10 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: 1. Reduce detention spending by the Obama Administration 2. Demand the use of secure release options as a meaningful alternative to detention 3. Restore due process to immigration laws 4. End expansion of enforcement programs (i.e. ICE ACCESS) that are contributing to the growth of the detention system
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01/20/10 Here's another damning piece from the New York Times exposing the nation's shadowy immigration detention system, which exploded under the Bush administration. The editorial is called, "Secrets of Immigration Jails," and begins: "Americans have long known that the government has been running secretive immigration prisons into which detainees have frequently disappeared, their grave illnesses and injuries untreated, their fates undisclosed until well after early and unnecessary deaths."
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01/11/10 This devastating piece appeared on the front page of the New York Times yesterday. It's a blunt reminder of just how broken our immigration system has become-- and that every day we wait to fix it, the stakes get higher and higher. Real, enforceable standards for how we detain immigrants and asylum-seekers are clearly in order. Moreover, as a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws, we should be creating more lines for immigrants to get into, not more cells for them to languish-- or die-- in.
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12/02/09 The New York Times writes today that new reports from Human Rights Watch and the bipartisan Constitution Project say the immigration detention system "lacks basic fairness."
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11/02/09 A front-page article in today's New York Times takes a peek into an immigration detention center in the heart of Manhattan and finds that the detention system continues to have serious problems. Here's how former detainees describe conditions at the Varick Street Detention Facility: "...cramped, filthy quarters where dire medical needs were ignored and hungry prisoners were put to work for $1 a day."
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10/06/09 The Obama administration today revealed their plans for the anticipated immigration detention make-over -- much-needed reform of a system that is itself primarily based on a broken immigration system. This is, no doubt, a step in the right direction.
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