A Breakdown on the U.S. Detention Infrastructure

The United States boasts the largest immigration detention infrastructure in the world, and yet many of its citizens don’t know much about it. With immigration as such a hot-button topic over the past decade in this country, we should understand the intricacies of it beyond policy. So what do detention centers look like?

The Basics

Immigration detention centers are facilities that house people who have been detained for being in this country without documentation. These facilities are a hodgepodge of federal and private facilities, in addition to local jails and youth detention centers. They are generally located away from populated areas.

History of Detention Centers

Immigrant detention started with the migrants coming to Ellis Island in the 1890s. Prior to the 1980s, only about 30 people were detained per day. More forceful detention and removal of undocumented immigrants began during the Reagan era, when there was an influx of asylum-seeking Haitians coming to the United States.

The UN created temporary safe havens for the Haitian people in surrounding countries like Trinidad and Tobago, Belize, and Honduras, but the coast guard was still overwhelmed, so in 1991, 538 Haitians were forcibly returned to Haiti. In 1996, Bill Clinton officially authorized mandatory detention by enacting the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility acts.

Section 133 of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility act had an addition called “Section 287(g),” which allowed for the Department of Homeland Security to deputize select local and state law enforcement agencies to enforce immigration law. Because of these acts, the number of people in detention went from 8,500 to 16,000 between 1996 and 1998.

In 2003, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or I.C.E, was created in order to investigate and facilitate deportation of undocumented individuals. I.C.E created the Secure Communities program in 2007 to identify and prioritize undocumented people who had committed crimes. With this new program, anyone arrested had their fingerprints run through both criminal and immigration databases to determine their citizenship status. If an arrested person is undocumented, I.C.E gets to determine if immigration enforcement action is necessary based on factors like the severity of their crime, their immigration status, and their criminal history.

Despite complaints from some police departments and government officials about Secure Communities doing more harm than good to the communities they claim to protect, President Obama remained in support of the program, and it exists to this day.

In 2006, the “task-force model” of 287(g) implementation was introduced, where local police forces were allowed to screen the public for immigration law violations. “Screening” allowed officers to detain or arrest people they encountered during their usual rounds that they either suspected or “could identify” as undocumented immigrants. This model allowed for abuse and racial profiling by some law enforcement officials, such as Joe Arpaio, an Arizona sheriff recently and controversially pardoned by Donald Trump. In 2012, the Department of Homeland Security decided to discontinue most of its partnerships with these local departments, in favor of more focus on the Secure Communities program. Between 2011 and 2017, participants in the task-forces dropped from 72 to 37. However, in an executive order from January 2017, Trump has asked the Department of Homeland Security to create more 287(g) partnerships.

How does detention work?

When someone is detained, they are usually taken to the facility closest to them. Based on an immigrant’s situation, different rules will be applied to different people. Some of the deciding factors in which rules are applied are if that individual  is being deported for certain actions or crimes, whether they have already received an order for final removal, and whether the government can actually send someone to another country. These rules may also vary depending on interpretations of laws in different states.

Generally, people are eligible for release from detention centers if they’re determined to not be flight risks and that they aren’t “a danger to the community.” If someone is eligible for release, there are multiple conditions they might be released under, including bonds and various forms of monitoring through I.C.E, such as scheduled check-ins or ankle monitors. However, if someone is subject to mandatory detention, they will not be released and will instead stay housed in a detention center during the extent of their removal process or court proceedings. Cases are usually filed after two weeks, but can take up to 90 days, meaning that people in detention often wait in a limbo for their case to even be filed. There are currently 2.3 million people in the system,  1.4 million of whom don’t know if they’re going to be deported or not.

Conditions

There has been an ugly history of abuse within immigration detention centers. Human rights violations, including physical and sexual abuse,  have been reported multiple times. The people housed in these centers are vulnerable because they face different conditions than those in regular American prisons. Detainees can be transferred to different facilities without notice, and unlike prisoners of the criminal justice system, they aren’t entitled to a lawyer free of charge. If a detainee wants counsel, they have to pay for it out of pocket, which is challenging for many people. Immigration courts are required to provide lists of free lawyers to detainees, but these may not be a solution, as they often specialize in certain kinds of detainees, like asylum-seekers.

While there were two previous versions of the Performance-Based National Detention Standards, standards that were meant to monitor and prevent abuse, in 2000 and 2008, the exposure of and outcry against the awful and immoral treatment of detainees caused the Department of Homeland Security to implement an updated version in February 2012. These updated standards are meant to help with quality of life and civil liberties for detainees, but are still not a complete solution, as detention centers are not required to follow them across the board. Only 60 percent of the immigrant population being held in 2016 was housed in facilities that conformed to these standards.

People in these facilities also often face a lack of comprehensive medical care, especially in regards to mental health and transgender healthcare. I.C.E detains an average of 65 transgender women a day. These women are often denied access to hormone therapy while in detention and are more likely to face sub-par medical care overall. At some facilities, transgender people are housed in an entirely separate unit, which may cause more harm, as they are singled out as “others” among the detainee population. Much like our prison system, many transgender women are given the choice to either live with a male population that could pose a significant risk to their safety, or live in solitary confinement for several months, which has been proven to be mentally and emotionally damaging.

Being anywhere along the queer spectrum can be dangerous in detention centers. LGBTQ-identified detainees are 15 times more likely to be sexually assaulted in detention than their cisgendered, heterosexual counterparts, and they are often abused by both the guards and other detainees.

Privatization

Much like the American prison system, detention centers rely on private contractors to run many of their facilities. This, in part, enables the aforementioned abuse, as there is less direct government oversight in private facilities.

The 1980s saw the rise of two major prison corporations, GEO Group and Corrections Corporation on America, both of which lobbied for laws to expand detention and other forms of incarceration. These private facilities are focused on turning detainees into profit. They set quotas of detainees in holding to maximize profitability, as they are paid per detainee per day. It’s not just the companies who benefit, however. Cities and counties that host detention centers also take in revenue from I.C.E’s multi-million dollar spending. On average, it costs taxpayers about $90.43 to detain someone in a private facility, and over 60 percent of detainees are held in private facilities.

Trump’s 2017 executive order has called for an increase in the construction of detention centers. Private prison companies will continue to benefit from this, as more of their contract facilities will be built and filled to comply with I.C.E’s new goal of 85,000 immigrants detained per day. Two private companies, GEO Group and CoreCivic, were backers of the Trump campaign.

To learn more about immigration and detention centers, check out EndIsolation.org, GlobalDetentionProject.org, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the PBS documentary Lost in Detention.

Additional facts

• There are three detention centers currently operating in Colorado. One in the Denver area, one in Aurora, and one in El Paso County.
• There are currently over 200 detention centers in the United States.
• It costs about $23,000 to deport someone after the costs of apprehension, detention, legal processing, and transportation. We spent nearly two billion dollars on deportation in 2015.
• Texas currently detains the highest number of immigrants.