Feds announce overhaul of immigration detention system

Repurposed hotels, nursing homes and other residential facilities could become the new face of detention for thousands of U.S. immigration detainees under a set of reform measures the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced Tuesday.

The shift to more comfortable, less prison-like structures for non-criminal immigrants is all part of a larger strategy to house them according to the risk they pose, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said.

“We run a huge detention system through (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement),” she said during a teleconference with reporters. “It’s a huge range of detainees from those who have criminal records and need to be housed in a prison-like system and those who have no criminal background and who have come to this country only seeking asylum.”

Tuesday’s reforms — which include drafting a system to classify detainee risk, developing alternatives to detention, and shifting facilities to locales where legal and medical help are more readily accessible — are expected to make the system more accountable and efficient while saving the government as much as $86 a day per detainee.

They come amid rising criticism from immigration attorneys and advocacy groups who fault the current system for too often treating those it houses as if they were violent criminals.

“I think this is a positive sign,” said El Paso-based immigration attorney Kathleen Campbell Walker, who also serves as general counsel to the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “In a time of extreme economic stress and a drive to maintain our standards of due process, they’ve managed to split the baby very well in getting the message across.”

A nationwide crackdown on illegal immigration over the past several years has swelled the nation’s network of detention facilities from 7,500 beds to 30,000 in just more than a decade.

Today, the $2.4 billion system is the largest detention program in the country and houses more than 370,000 immigrants each year — most of them in South Texas facilities like those in Los Fresnos and Raymondville, according to agency statistics.

But ICE’s outdated detention policies were not devised to handle that increase, leading to complaints from thousands of detainees who in some cases had committed no crime.

Unlike the federal prison population, the majority of detained immigrants stand accused only of civil violations. Their detention is not intended to punish but rather to assure their presence in court while their cases are being resolved or until they are deported to their home countries.

Still, the facilities used to house them often operate like — and in some cases are — prisons.

Up to now, ICE has relied on detention standards modeled on those used by the federal Bureau of Prisons and has maintained a network of privately run facilities, each with its own unique contract and little oversight from Washington, D.C.

The agency pledged Tuesday to streamline the contracts of third-party facilities and to oversee the facilities more aggressively, including by dispatching more government employees to monitor their activities.

“Our goal is to take a non-system and turn it into a system that enables us to assure the American people we are enforcing our immigration law while meeting the basic standards of safety and security in the most cost-effective way possible,” Napolitano said.

Many immigration advocates were skeptical when the government first announced in August that it would review its detention system. Tuesday, they hailed the reform package as a significant philosophical departure from the administration of President George W. Bush — a shift signaled early on with the choice of Dr. Dora Schriro, a corrections policy expert with strong human rights credentials, to head up the review.

Many of her recommendations, including more frequent oversight of contract facilities and an online system allowing outsiders to easily locate detainees, made it into final drafts of President Barack Obama’s policy.

But there is still plenty left to discuss, said U.S. Rep. Ruben Hinojosa, D-Mercedes.

“Together we are working on a more comprehensive immigration reform plan,” he said in a statement. “There is much more work to be done and much more to accomplish.”

Erica Schommer, an immigration attorney with Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, said a more crucial change is to recognize that many immigrants don’t need to be detained at all.

While recognizing the need to detain criminal illegal immigrants, she has encountered dozens of asylum-seekers looking for legal status and illegal immigrants who have spent most of their lives in the country and are eager to show up to court to work out their residency legally.

“(These proposed reforms) might make it slightly more pleasant to be in detention,” she said. “But at the end of the day it’s still detention.”

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Jeremy Roebuck covers courts and general assignments for The Monitor. You can reach him at (956) 683-4437.

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The proposed changes in ICE’s detention reform plan include:

>> Devising a system to place detainees in detention facilities based on their risk of flight and threat to society.

>> Exploring the use of converted hotels and nursing homes to house non-criminal, non-violent detainees.

>> Developing agency-wide detention policies that will govern activity at the nation’s 300 facilities.

>> Standardized contracts with third-party managed facilities, which are currently negotiated by individual field offices.

>> More aggressive monitoring of contract performance and canceling contracts at facilities that repeatedly fall short of standards.

>> Hiring 50 federal employees to oversee day-to-day operations at contract facilities.

>> Implementation of a medical classification system to assure necessary treatment for detainees.

>> Development of an online inmate locator system for attorneys and family members of the detained.