Viewpoints: Why imprison immigrants at all?

By Christina Fialho

For the Los Angeles Times

The Trump administration, shamed by the national outcry over separating children from their asylum-seeking parents at the border, has capitulated. The president Wednesday signed an executive order to end that brutal practice — and instead could imprison children alongside their parents indefinitely.

The question Americans need to ask themselves next is this: Why are we imprisoning immigrants or asylum seekers at all?

I have been working with families and individuals in our immigrant prison system for about a decade, including people arrested in ICE raids, victims of human trafficking and those who arrive at the border seeking asylum. There are, on any given day, approximately 34,000 to 40,000 such people being held in immigration detention.

The largest of these facilities is the adult-only Adelanto Detention Facility, just 90 miles outside Los Angeles where up to 1,960 immigrants are held.

This is a form of civil, administrative confinement, which means people held in these prisons are not afforded the safeguards of the criminal justice system, such as legal counsel. The conditions are just as inhumane. We have documented widespread abuse in immigrant prisons, including physical and sexual assault, medical neglect, bacterial infections from mold, and maggots in food.

Since the creation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2003, there have been more than 180 reported deaths in immigration detention. A new report from Human Rights Watch looked at 15 deaths between December 2015 and April 2017; it found that inadequate medical care contributed or led to the person’s death in eight of them.

The idea of imprisoning immigrants and asylum seekers while they await the outcome of their requests to stay in the United States is a relatively new phenomenon. It wasn’t until 1981 that the Reagan administration opened the McAllen Detention Center on a former U.S. Navy Base in Puerto Rico to detain Haitians. The next year, as Reagan warned of a “tidal wave of refugees” fleeing civil wars in Central America, the administration established its Mass Migration Emergency Plan, requiring that 10,000 immigrant prison beds be ready for use at any given time.

This gave rise to the formation of the world’s first private prison company, Corrections Corp. of America, which changed its name in 2016 to CoreCivic. CCA got its first federal government contract for an immigrant prison in Texas in 1983. And the publicly traded corporation has been lobbying to expand our immigrant prison system ever since. In the 1980s, there were anywhere from 30 to 3,000 people being held at a time; today it’s 10 times that, and 73 percent of them are in facilities operated by private companies.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/viewpoints-why-imprison-immigrants-at-all/