âºCritics Appalled at ICE Prison Conditions
The Boston Globe last week reported some of the details of an ACLU report of an ICE detention facility in Massachusetts. These latest findings are a grim addition to the 130 page report forwarded to the UN Human Rights Committee last year on detention and deportation in the US. “There’s no one watching over them, so there’s no real incentive to make sure that the immigration detainees’ rights are protected…They are not protecting people’s fundamental rights,” said staff attorney Laura Rótolo of ACLU’s Massachusetts chapter. She was the lead researcher in the 22 month investigation, which included several visits to the detention center, the interviewing of 40 detainees, and documentation of medical conditions, which often went unreported to medical officials for several months. Medical opinions, once given, were ignored. Sometimes, medical records were not transferred between detention facilities when detainees were moved, leaving medical officials at the receiving end unable to properly treat their new inmates.
âºHomeland Security Releases Annual Immigration Report
Homeland Security released a report for the 2008 fiscal year (October 1st 2007 – September 2008) on immigration statistics. More than 319,000 immigrants were deported for the fifth consecutive record high – almost a third over the 2007 benchmark over 244,000. 65% of deportees were Mexican. An additional 891,000 were persuaded to sign a voluntary deportation order. Meanwhile, border security arrested 961,000 – almost a million – foreign nationals whom they suspected of crossing the border illegally. That comes to 2.17 million immigrants removed from or forcibly prevented from entering the country.
âºNew Law Provides for DNA Sampling from All Federal Detainees
Under previous laws, DNA samples could only be legally taken from detainees whom had been already convicted of federal crimes. New laws provide for DNA sampling from any federal detainee – irrespective of the degree of suspicion or the charge leveled. “There seems to be a movement to defining anybody who’s here in the United States unlawfully as a criminal per se,” commented Los Angeles immigration lawyer Alan Diamante, the former president of the Mexican American Bar Assn, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times on the 13th.
“A lot of these folks don’t have any crimes other than the fact that they’re here unlawfully.” UC Davis Law School Dean Kevin Johnson echoed these sentiments, and suggested the new rules would be challenged and possibly overthrown in court because they violate privacy rights. Usually, people who have not been convicted of a crime are protected from unnecessary prying by government officials.
“It’s unfair on so many levels it’s hard to describe,” Johnson said. “You can make the argument that we should take the DNA of the entire population because if we did it could help us solve crimes. But [in the past] we’ve made this decision as a society…that the freedoms that we stand for are more important.”