News Update - July 29, 2009

By Alan Lee, Esq.

An Expose on Human Rights Violations in Immigration Detention Centers



A new publication entitled “A Broken System: Confidential Reports Reveal Failures in U.S. Detention Centers,” released by the National Immigration Law Center (NILC), the ACLU of South California and the international law firm of Holland & Knight exposes the unsatisfactory conditions of United States immigrant detention centers. According to the publication, immigrant detainee rights are routinely and systematically violated each day. Co-author of the report, Karen Tumlin states “These centers, where people are detained for months and often years at a time, often fail to provide people with their fundamental rights: access to loved ones, the basic materials needed to research and prepare their cases, or even a simple explanation of their rights while within the immigrant detention center.” Immigration detainees were found to be punished more severely than allowed for some rule infractions. Furthermore, gender equality is not enforced. It was found that while men were allowed two hours of recreation per day, women were denied rights to recreation. Ranjana Natarajan, co-author of this expose blames the rights violations on the system the detention centers have in place. He states that while jails and prisons at all levels have legal and binding rules they must abide by, the government refuses to approve binding rules for immigrant detention centers. Without written rules in place, rights to satisfactory conditions are never a guarantee in the first place. The link to “A Broken System” is listed: www.nilc.org/immlawpolicy/arrestdet/A-Broken-System-2009-07.pdf.


The author is a 26+ year practitioner of immigration law based in New York City. He was awarded the Sidney A. Levine prize for best legal writing at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law in 1977 and has written extensively on immigration over the past years for the ethnic newspapers, World Journal, Sing Tao, Pakistan Calling, Muhasha and OCS. He has testified as an expert on immigration in civil court proceedings and was recognized by the Taiwan government in 1985 for his work protecting human rights. His article, "The Bush Temporary Worker Proposal and Comparative Pending Legislation: an Analysis" was Interpreter Releases' cover display article at the American Immigration Lawyers Association annual conference in 2004, and his victory in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in a case of first impression nationwide, Firstland International v. INS, successfully challenged INS' policy of over 40 years of revoking approved immigrant visa petitions under a nebulous standard of proof. Its value as precedent, however, was short-lived as it was specifically targeted by the Administration in the Intelligence Reform Act of 2004.

This article © 2009 Alan Lee, Esq.

 

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