One man's battle with immigration detention echoes a multitude of national concerns

BAYVIEW — About a month ago, 39-year-old Rama Carty flew more than 2,000 miles from his home in Massachusetts to the southern tip of Texas. A GPS tracking device was shackled to his ankle as part of his pretrial release conditions.

He had been indicted by a federal grand jury in July for allegedly assaulting two officers while held at the Port Isabel Detention Center in Bayview. And after days of waiting in the motel room where he was confined between 4 p.m. and 8 a.m., he was tried last week in a Brownsville federal courtroom.

The jury deadlocked on the verdict. Six jurors believed there was enough reasonable doubt to find him not guilty. Now Carty, who has claimed in court records that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement unlawfully detained him, maintains he is innocent and says he will continue his quest to expose what he describes as pervasive abuse within the nation’s immigration detention system.

“I will not give up. There are serious humanitarian issues that need to be addressed,” he said on the phone from Massachusetts, where he returned earlier this week.

His case has garnered increasing attention among Texas activists who say Carty’s story sheds light on the “criminalization” of immigration detention, which is considered a civil process.

Carty, who was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, had been a legal U.S. resident when he was swept into the nation’s detention system in 2008 after serving two years in prison for drug-related offenses in Maine. During a period of about eight months, he was shuffled through detention centers in seven states, including the Port Isabel Detention Center. The procedure, he says, took him miles away from friends and family and deprived him of access to legal counsel.

Reports released last year by Human Rights Watch and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General detailed similar problems with the immigration detention system.

Such constant transferring of detainees among the nation’s detention centers, for instance, comes at a high expense to the country, limits these individuals’ access to legal counsel and results in wrongful deportations, according to the reports’ findings.

In many cases, detainees are relocated away from their attorneys without notice, even though they frequently have a high likelihood of posting bond or, conversely, despite having active arrest warrants in the area from which they were moved.

During Carty’s trial, his defense was not allowed to address such issues or any humanitarian complaints against the Port Isabel Detention Center. U.S. District Judge Hilda Tagle, who presided over the trial, approved a motion by the prosecution asking that such testimony be prohibited, according to court documents.

But activists who sat through the court proceedings said the facts of the case, as told by witnesses, provided insight into the criminal nature of the detention system.

The case centered on the facts of an incident said to have taken place at the facility on June 3. About 5 a.m. that day, according to court testimony, Carty was awakened and told to pack his belongings. He was scheduled for transfer to a processing center in Louisiana for his subsequent deportation to Haiti, the country where his parents were born but a place he has never been.

But Carty had also been planning to meet for a second time with representatives from human rights group Amnesty International. In an interview before the trial, Carty said he had met with members of the organization the day before the alleged incident to discuss human rights abuses at the facility that had spurred him and other detainees to go on hunger strikes in April 2009.

Carty said he only fasted for a week because he was threatened with losing his job at the center’s law library, where he often helped other detainees with their own cases. But at one point, as many as 200 detainees were on strike.

At the trial, detention officers testified Carty became “aggressive” and demanded to make a phone call when asked to gather his belongings for transfer. Officials said he stood in a “fighting stance” in an effort to avoid arrest. Feeling threatened, they brought Carty to the ground.

Carty also had been holding a razor during the struggle, which prosecutors allege cut one officer on the arm and another on the hand. Officers said they did not know whether Carty had caused the injuries intentionally, as he had checked out the razor in the morning — which is permitted — to have a friend shave his head.

Video footage showed during the trial only contained parts of the incident. Although the Port Isabel Detention Center has 140 rotating cameras throughout the facility, two detention officers monitor 30 screens from a control room. Officers on the ground called in the struggle but gave the wrong pod number, or dorm room, to the primary camera operator on duty at the time, according to testimony.

In DVDs played by the prosecution, Carty appears talking to detention officials. Close-up video of Carty captured by the camera operator shows him already on the floor as officers handcuff him.

When he took the stand, Carty said he had no incentive to engage in “physical combat.” Other detainees who witnessed the incident testified Carty had actually been the victim in the struggle. His counsel, Paul G. Hajjar, described Carty as an educated “library man” who had several petitions pending in court and “did not want to go without exhausting all legal remedies.”

Indeed, court documents reveal Carty has been proactive in his pursuit of freedom. Before he was confined in immigration detention, he attended the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he took courses in legal studies. He thus has written his own petitions for habeas corpus on sheets of notebook paper and mailed them from the various detention centers in which he was held. He has also helped other detainees with their own petitions.

Habeas corpus is a writ ordering a person in custody to be brought before a court. It places the burden of proof on those detaining the person to justify the detention.

The fact that Carty’s case ended in a mistrial says a lot about holding detention officers accountable, which often does not happen within the detention system, said Harlingen immigration attorney Jodi Goodwin, who works with many clients held at the Port Isabel Detention Center.

“I have tons and tons of clients that file grievances, and nothing ever comes from those grievances,” Goodwin said.

Still, the real solution to the problems with the detention system hinges on passing comprehensive immigration reform, now seemingly a shot in the dark, activists said.

A day after Carty’s trial ended, activists and immigrants from across the country took to the streets by the tens of thousands in Washington, D.C. Hundreds of them had boarded buses, planes and even walked miles to fill the city’s National Mall and demand action on comprehensive immigration reform.

Miles away, in his quiet motel room, Carty could only catch snippets of the demonstrations on television.

“If I had not been in Brownsville, I would have been in Washington,” he said.

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Jazmine Ulloa is a reporter for The Brownsville Herald.