In Colorado, Secure Communities has been very controversial, with former Governor Bill Ritter signing the state up for the program, current governor John HIcknlooper supporting it, Denver mayoral candidates sparring over it and the Legislature debating it.

The promise by Director Morton came after immigrants rights groups and local leaders publicized recent incidents in which ICE agents triggered panic by following parents as they dropped off and picked up their kids at Hope of Detroit Academy and Neinas Elementary School in predominately Latino Southwest Detroit.

According to Alliance for Immigrants Rights and Reform Michigan director Ryan Bates, on the morning of March 31 ICE agents detained Jose Maldonado Plasencia a block away from Hope of Detroit Academy where he had dropped off his child, though the agency had not obtained prior authorization for performing enforcement at a school.

Later that morning agents in SUVs and sedans with tinted windows followed two other families from their homes to the school and surrounded the school and playground after the families took refuge in the school.

Parents and children began to panic and the school received many phone calls from parents worried about the safety of their children, he said.

Bates said that when he intervened at the school and asked whether the agents had a warrant, the agents acknowledged that they did not and left in a convoy of five or six vehicles. Weeks after the incident school attendance remained low because parents were afraid to bring their kids to school.

The incident at Hope of Detroit Academy is part of a pattern of Detroit area ICE agent behavior that has included warrantless searches, a mother strip searched in front of her son, detainees,,including a pregnant woman, denied needed medicines in jail, an immigrant shoved through a wall by agents and harassment of American citizens, according to immigrants rights advocates.

Bates said that while the deadline for the 30 day investigation has expired, the ICE Office of Professional Responsibility has been investigating the incident at the school and has interviewed victims across the state.

“While we are glad that the review is underway, we want to make sure that those investigations are completed as soon as possible,” he said. “The people of Michigan and Detroit deserve answers about what happened at Hope of Detroit Academy and why there is this pattern of abuse in the Detroit field office.”

Bates said that the ICE actions at schools violate the agency policy against conducting enforcement at sensitive community locations.

“It is clear that the leadership at the Detroit ICE office is either unwilling or unable to comply with current policy,“ Bates said. “This needs to lead to accountability.”

“We want to know who approved the operation, what was their rationale, and if no one approved the operation then clearly there is a break down in management command and control,” he said.

“This isn’t a matter of one operation gone awry this is a matter of an entire field office demonstrating a widespread pattern of abuse.”

Hispanic Bar Association president Lawrence Garcia participated in the April 15 meeting where Morton promised a 30-day investigation and he said he remains optimistic that the agency will deliver the promised investigation.

“You might call me an eternal optimist. I do think that ICE is taking our concerns seriously and doing a workman like investigation, it just seems to be taking longer than they estimated,” he said. “We are not going to drop the issue.

Garcia said that Southwest Detroit’s large minority population makes it a hunting ground for immigration enforcement activities and that racial profiling and strong arming is a problem in immigration enforcement nationwide.

“Whenever ICE needs to show some resolve, rounding up people in Southwest Detroit is just too convenient of a way to that,” he said.

“The dangers that lead to people being out of control are just endemic to the enterprise. It is hard to ask people to find immigrants and not run the risk of racial profiling or violations.”

ICE did not give a status report on the investigation or explain why the matter is taking longer than expected.

“We continue to work with local community advocates to address their concerns regarding immigration enforcement in Detroit,“ ICE Spokesman Khaalid Walls said. “Additionally, the ICE internal review is ongoing.”

It appears that ICE is reworking its policies as a result of complaints from the Detroit area.

According to a draft enforcement memo obtained by Michigan Messenger, ICE plans to elaborate on its policy for enforcement in sensitive locations.

The new draft policy more clearly defines the types of activities covered by the policy and includes more sensitive locations including “site of a public demonstration, march or parade.”

It also states:

“This is not an exclusive list, and ICE officers and agents shall consult with their supervisors if the location of a planned enforcement operation is likely to be viewed as sensitive in a particular community. Extra care should be taken when assessing whether an enforcement action may affect a sensitive location, and ICE employees should err on the side of caution. For example, particular care should be exercised with any public location serving children, pregnant women, victims of crime or abuse, or individuals with significant mental or physical disabilities.”

According to the memo the proposed new rules would also apply to “enforcement actions at or focused on a sensitive location which are part of a joint case led by another law enforcement agency.”

Bates, who is familiar with the memo (but did not provide it to Michigan Messenger out of respect for ICE internal process), said that the new draft policy is a welcome improvement but not a sufficient response to violations by ICE agents.

“[T]he fundamental problem is one of behavior, not policy alone,” he said. “ICE’s existing policies were violated during the Hope of Detroit Academy incident, and there must be accountability for the leadership that allowed ICE agents to surround an elementary school.”

More than 80 percent of detainees in the survey were housed in isolated facilities far from legal aid organizations, creating heavy caseloads of 100 detainees per attorney, The Los Angeles Times reported. Another 10 percent had no access to legal representation:

“While access to legal counsel is a foundation of the U.S. justice system, our survey found that the government continues to detain thousands of men and women in remote facilities where access to counsel is limited or nonexistent,” said Mary Meg McCarthy, executive director of the National Immigrant Justice Center. “In some facilities, it is impossible for detained immigrants to find attorneys.”

Federal officials said they were making progress in helping provide legal help for detained immigrants.

“ICE is committed to allowing detainees access to telephones, legal counsel and law library resources,” agency spokesman Brian Hale said in a statement. “ICE is working with our stakeholders, including the U.S. Department of Justice … and nongovernmental organizations, to expand and support pro bono representation for those in our custody.”

ICE has attempted to reform its detention system, but human rights groups have argued more reform is necessary. One major issue is that immigrants must know — or be told — some of their rights so they can seek out legal representation. The survey found that more than half of facilities did not offer detainees information about their rights.

The Justice Department provides a list of free legal service providers in many areas, and large detention centers often have libraries with information on the legal system. But these services vary from center to center. Ultimately, access to a lawyer can have a huge impact on the outcome of a detainee’s case:

A 2005 Migration Policy Institute study found that 41% of detainees applying to become lawful permanent residents who had legal counsel won their cases, compared with 21% of those without representation. In asylum cases, 18% of detainees with lawyers were granted asylum, compared with 3% for those without.

Migration Policy Institute argued that granting better access to lawyers would save money by making the process more efficient — saving some of the $122 per day costs of detention.

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

When they showed up, she says, the first thing they did was ask for his immigration status. “These are the sort of situations that prevent day laborers from asking for help when their wages are denied,” Gonzalez says.

The politics of immigration are thorny, but it is a simple truth that construction companies routinely use day laborers without checking their immigration status: Thousands of those workers have helped and are helping to rebuild New Orleans. But those workers commonly suffer abuse due to their immigration status, including threats of violence and wage theft. Despite the best efforts of workers’ rights groups, five years after the hurricane, advocates say abuse remains rampant. Now, those groups are calling for specific legislation to protect vulnerable workers — documented and not — and to make sure they get their due.

After Hurricane Katrina, the number of undocumented workers in New Orleans increased substantially, in part because of a Department of Homeland Security directive to suspend employment immigration enforcement in the area immediately following the storm. The suspension expired quickly, but it created an inviting environment for undocumented immigrants, says Elizabeth Fussell, a professor at Washington State University.

“Conditions were set to attract a labor force of Latino immigrants,” Fussell says. “There was a large population of undocumented immigrants who were coming to do the work that was necessary in the city.”

Though there are no firm numbers on undocumented workers, social scientists point to increases in the Latino population to show the influx of immigrants. The Latino population increased from a 4.4 percent share of the population in 2000 to 6.6 percent last year, according to Census data. Advocacy groups say it is likely higher, about 10 percent.

Thousands of those workers came to work rebuilding New Orleans — clearing debris, fixing roads, building houses, constructing schools. “After Katrina hit, there was much more work and much more wages for people — there were other wages to be found,” Gonzalez says.

And along with the rise of undocumented workers and construction problems came wage theft — to which undocumented immigrants are particularly vulnerable. In a 2007 survey of Mexican migrants at the Mexican mobile consulate in a suburb of New Orleans, Fussell found that 24 percent had experienced situations where an employer did not pay, while about 16 percent had been paid less than they were promised. Nearly 90 percent of those surveyed were working in the country illegally. The Congress of Day Laborers last year found that 80 percent of the workers it represents had been victims of wage theft in the past year.

The consequences are particularly dire for undocumented workers, who do not have access to the same legal and policing resources as other workers. “When you’re not paid for that money, the consequences can be much more serious. It’s the difference between being able to pay rent and being homeless,” says Gonzales.

Nonprofit and advocacy groups stepped in to fill the void, helping undocumented workers regain wages from bosses who stiffed them. The Pro Bono Project and Loyola New Orleans’ School of Law help workers sue their employers, for instance. At the Pro Bono clinic, established in 2007, lawyer Vanessa Spinazola says 90 percent of the workers represented are undocumented. Last year, in a nine-month period, lawyers at the clinic saw 476 workers, filed 365 cases and helped draft 146 demand letters.

Oxfam America funds the Pro Bono clinic, but was forced to discontinue its project on workers’ rights in July due to a lack of funds. Ilana Scherl, a field representative for Oxfam who previously worked on the worker’s rights project, says New Orleans just had too much need and too little funding for the initiative. “I guess a lot of foundations feel like five years later everything should be taken care of,” she says. “The problems are still there but the funds are not.” Spinazola says the clinic has enough funding from Oxfam to operate until July 2011, and she is “writing grants as fast as possible” to find money to continue the clinics.

The clinic is still very much needed, particularly because workers often face violence from employers for demanding their wages, she says. The clinic tells workers to put the address of a clinic P.O. box on their demand letters, so that if employers want to retaliate they won’t have their home addresses. Workers whose employers know their addresses often move before sending the letter. Fear deters some workers from seeking their wages, but others move forward with claims, Spinazola says. “They’re afraid but they need the money or they think they deserve their money — which they do.”

Of course, for illegal immigrants there is also a fear that their employers will call ICE. Spinazola said she suspects that happened a few years ago, when the clinic helped a group of about 40 men who were living and working in an apartment complex to send a letter demanding wages. Most of the men moved out before the letter was sent, but seven were still present when the employer received the demand letter. Two days later, Spinazola said ICE raided the apartments. Three of the men were deported.

Worker’s rights advocates argue that a city ordinance is essential to combating a wage theft problem too big for advocates and undocumented workers to deal with on their own. “The workers need protection, they’re not getting it right now,” Scherl says. “The only way we see to achieve that is to have a policy in place protecting the workers.”

The New Orleans Center for Racial Justice helped develop a policy, but the exact direction of the potential ordinance remains unclear. New Orleans City Councilman Arnie Fielkow has said he would support a wage theft ordinance, and groups are now negotiating the ordinance with the mayor’s office and other officials at city hall.

In New Orleans, some advocates of a wage theft ordinance said they are concerned growing anti-illegal immigrant sentiment will play into their effort to pass the ordinance. But they are hoping the general goodwill many New Orleans residents feel toward the workers who helped rebuild their city will make matters easier.

“In this climate, the fear of opposition is always there,” Gonzalez says. “But New Orleans is a city that recognizes that day laborers did participate and did come to the rescue in terms of reconstruction.”

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

“I was asleep when they arrived. My mom cried. My sister wasn’t upset, she got mad instead… I complied with them as they arrested me and took me to Glenwood Springs for processing.”

He said he arrived at the Glenwood substation at around 7 a.m. and they held him there until 5 pm.

“There was just a room with a bench and a toilet and a sink. They hold you there until they have gathered enough people” to make it worthwhile to transport them in a group, Niebla said.

Officers eventually took Niebla and two other undocumented immigrants, one from Montrose and one from Craig, to the main ICE facility in Aurora.

Niebla said he asked to make a phone call in Glenwood and, after a few hours, the officers let him place a call. Niebla said they mocked him for wanting to be a police officer and they mocked a T-shirt they found in his bag that said “Reform immigration for America.”

Niebla wasn’t beaten or tortured or killed. By most standards, he wasn’t ill treated.

But that’s not the point, at least not this time, say critics of the subfield office system.

Considering the nether realm

Chandra Russo of the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition told the Colorado Independent in December that because immigration is regulated by civil law, it lies in a legal “nether realm.” She said that the absence of proper regulation surrounding the subfield office networks raises legitimate questions about due process.

Jacqueline Stevens, a professor in the Law and Society Program at the University of California Santa Barbara, wrote an article for the Nation in December based on a list she obtained of 186 unlisted subfield offices used as temporary detention facilities across the country. The list included the Aurora Center run by the GEO Group, plus facilities in Colorado Springs, Pueblo, Grand Junction and Loveland, none of which appear to be listed on the ICE detention center page, which only appears to list the Aurora Center and Denver and Washington DC contact numbers. There is no Glenwood Springs ICE detention facility listed on the site.

Stevens argued that the lack of contact details is critical in matters of detention. She said ICE is operating in a bureaucratic void where the laws governing processing and guaranteeing rights can be muddy or can break down, setting up a system in which detainees can “disappear” for even the most diligently searching family members and friends. The lack of transparency in holding suspected criminals is a situation ripe for abuse. There’s no check. Verbal mockery over the course of nine hours could easily escalate and who is to stop it?

‘Extremely rare cases’

When the Colorado Independent first took these concerns to Colorado ICE spokesman Tim Counts, he said on average detainees are held in the facilities for “two or three hours at the most” before being transferred to local jails.

He said detainees are provided telephone access in all of the offices, provided the opportunity to speak with the consular officials from their home countries and given a list of free or low-cost legal assistance in the area.

Another ICE spokesman, Carl Rusnok, wrote emails in January to the Independent also tamping down concerns over the subfield offices, saying that they were the product of journalists looking to sell stories.

Rusnok reiterated that suspects were held at subfield offices for up to two hours before being transferred to long-term holding facilities.

“For an alien being processed for two hours, why would it be important for the public to have access to the address or phone number? The agents should not be burdened with after-the-fact calls (or harassment calls) when the alien will be able to call his relatives/friends when he arrives at the longer-term detention facility?” Rusnok wrote.

Contacted for response to Niebla’s story, Rusnok said that in “extremely rare cases” detainees might be held for 12 hours. He said it is now ICE policy to provide suspects access for one phone call when they arrive at the subfield centers. He said they are also transferred to local county jails overnight and brought back in the morning if they cannot be transported to the central Aurora detention center over the course of any 24-hour period.

Living in America

Niebla has been living in the United States since he was seven-years-old, he is not an American citizen. He was born in Culiacán, a city in northwestern Mexico, and immigrated here illegally, coming across the border in Arizona as a child with his parents in the early 1990s. He went to public school in Basalt and hopes to attend the police academy at Colorado Mountain College. His family had all applied for visas last year. His mother and sister’s applications were accepted. His application and his father’s application were rejected. The rejected visa applications are the thing that brought the ICE officers to Niebla’s home.

Niebla has been active in working to change U.S. immigration policy for years, and it was his association through the activist group Immigration Reform that, he says, made the chapter in his life that started at the Glenwood Springs subfield office different from the stories of so many others in similar situations.

Once he got to Aurora, he called the Immigration Reform leaders, who sent out a text message to millions of members across the nation asking them to call lawmakers on Niebla’s behalf.

On April 29th, Niebla was temporarily released from the Aurora facility. He can stay one year in the country while appealing the ruling that rejected his visa.

[Photo of Edgar Niebla by Taran Volckhausen ]

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

Critics of the system say men and women held on suspicion of immigration violations in the state are housed in conditions that rival those established for violent criminal offenders, that the immigrants are becoming fodder for a booming detention industry, and that detainees are often difficult to locate in the tangle of state facilities, which include unlisted so-called subfield offices.

The detention center in Aurora. (Katie Redding)

The state of affairs has gained traction as national media outlets reported that more than 100 ICE detainees have died in captivity since the agency was created in 2003 under the Department of Homeland Security.

The story took an additional turn here last month when the Colorado Independent, building on an investigation published by the Nation, reported that ICE operated at least four but perhaps as many as nine subfield offices in the state and confirmed that the agency was processing immigrants at the offices.

Local ICE officials confirmed that the subfield office addresses and contact information do not appear on the agency’s Office of Detention and Removal website. They said suspects were held at the facilities only for brief time periods, “up to two hours,” and they contested charges that the facilities were “black sites,” where detainees can slip through the cracks and effectively disappear.

Numerous reports and no surprises

None of this comes as any surprise to the protesters who gather once every month outside the state’s main detention center in Aurora, just outside of Denver, and perhaps least of all to protest organizer Jennifer Piper, interfaith organizing director for immigrant rights for the American Friends Service Committee.

“There have been numerous reports from the Government Accountability Office about the lack of immigrants’ access to legal counsel, to phones, to adequate medical care and about the indefinite nature of immigration detention,” Piper told the Colorado Independent at the most recent vigil in Aurora.

“Every day people are lost to their families. Every day families look for their loved ones. Because our system transfers people.”

Protesters prayed in a group on the concrete in front of the facility, as Piper spoke, hands waved in response from behind the foggy windows of the warehouse facility.

Piper said she once spent two weeks trying to locate a detainee who was reportedly being transferred throughout the system. She said the detention system even loses immigrants scheduled for trial.

Addressing the protesters, Aurora Democratic State Senator Morgan Carroll said the Colorado delegation in Washington should push to develop comprehensive immigration reform and fix what she called a “broken system.”

Not at all like local police stations

Carroll told the Colorado Independent that she is very concerned about the existence of the unlisted subfield offices. At very least, she said, those centers should be listed so that attorneys and family members can contact the people being held or processed there.

Carroll said that although the offices fall under federal jurisdiction, there may be a way local ordinances can be enforced to compel the Department of Homeland Security to list the subfield office telephone numbers and addresses on their websites.

Piper agreed, explaining that her organization is very concerned, not least because well-known facilities like the one in Aurora “already have so many visible problems.”

ICE currently lists only the Aurora Detention Center on its website. It lists the Denver subfield office as its point of contact.

Carl Rusnok, a Colorado ICE spokesman, told the Colorado Independent that the other facilities in the state are not listed because they do not offer public services.

“They are federal facilities but they are not public buildings,” Rusnok said. “It is not like a post office or a social security office. These are federal offices that do business but do not offer public services.”

He said that detainees who are booked at subfield offices are transferred to other holding facilities.

“At that time, [when they are transferred], they are given full access to telephones so that they can contact lawyers or family members.”

Another ICE spokesman, Tim Counts, told the Colorado Independent that the subfield offices are anything but secret.

“Anyone who is arrested on immigrations violations is brought to one of our field offices,” Counts said. “It may be, for example, a larger office, or the one in Denver, or we have smaller sub-offices all around the country, which by the way are anything but secret.”

He said the processes followed at field stations are similar to routine local police station bookings. “[Suspected illegal immigrants] are booked just like they would be in a police station: fingerprinted, photographed, and interviewed.”

Piper took issue with that assessment.

“I think that that would be one main difference from a police station, actually,” she said. “A police station is published and you know were they are. There are signs out front.”

She said in trying to find detainees she has looked at the Aurora detention center and in four county jails around the state.

“Now I’m wondering,” she said. “I am wondering if they weren’t also being held in subfield stations where I couldn’t call because I didn’t even know that they existed.”

It’s more evidence she said of the main problem, that the agency acts with only loose connection to the laws of the land. What are the enforceable immigration detention standards? she asked.

“The detention standards exist,” she said. “But if you violate them, there is no penalty.”

She said it was up to Janet Napolitano and the Obama administration to create penalties that would force facilities to uphold the guidelines.

Cattle call in Aurora

Sen. Carroll said she supported closing the Aurora facility altogether and other for-profit operations like it around the country, which she said lay “beyond the reach of accountability, transparency — every part of due process that we normally assume is present when you detain someone,” she said, “like a trial, legal representation, access rights, you know, a finite sentence. Those things just aren’t present here.”

Carroll believes the Aurora facility represents the path the justice system in the United States has taken in the last decade away from core Constitutional principles when it comes to immigrants.

“The reason we are focusing on this facility is that it really is a symbol… When we are talking about immigration and immigrant rights, what we are talking about is at the core of fundamental human rights. What we tolerate and what we allow to pass as immigration laws and rights says a lot about who we are as a people.”

Carroll told the Colorado Independent that the Aurora facility ran a “complete cattle call” for the detainees, the product of “warehousing methods” where detainees are herded into group cells. She said the people detained are basically “serving [indeterminate] sentences in rooms with 40 to 50 other people.”

Rusnok said media reports were exaggerated. He said the people looking into this now should familiarize themselves with the laws. “This is immigration law 101,” he said. He added that immigrants were not held indefinitely. Once they are charged, no matter whether their home countries take up the case or not, they are released after an established period.

GEO, the for-profit company that owns the Aurora detention center, is the latest incarnation of the security corporation Wackenhut, which has drawn major charges of neglect and abuse for a decade. GEO receives more than $133 a day per prisoner held at the Aurora facility. The company, which runs prisons in the U.S. and internationally and was tangentially implicated in the recent “Lord of the Flies” abuses at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, was nominated one of Forbes’s Best 400 Big Companies in America (pdf) in 2008, for registering a 22 percent return over a five-year period.

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

The Nation, which broke the story last week of such sub-field offices, called them “secret” and suggested that they are “black sites” into which detainees might effectively disappear. ICE disputes the terminology.

ICE detention center, Aurora. (Katie Redding)

The author of The Nation piece, Jacqueline Stevens, a professor in the Law and Society Program at the University of California Santa Barbara, obtained a list of 186 unlisted ICE sub-field offices used as temporary detention facilities across the country. The list included the Aurora Center run by the GEO Group, plus facilities in Colorado Springs, Pueblo, Grand Junction and Loveland, none of which appear to be listed on the ICE detention center page. The agency’s Denver Field Office is noted as the point of contact for the Colorado region.

In a story covering the opening of the ICE office in Colorado Springs three weeks ago, the Denver Post reported that there were nine ICE offices in the state. The Post did not list the locations.

According to Stevens, the system of sub-field offices creates a bureaucratic void where the laws governing processing and guaranteeing rights can be muddy or can break down, setting up a system in which detainees can “disappear” for even the most diligently searching family members and friends.

Not immediately available for response, Stevens explained her findings in a recent interview with Democracy Now.

“I found that there are 186 ICE sub-field offices that are scattered around the country and that are designed, according to ICE’s own reports by Dr. Dora Schriro, to hold people on a temporary basis, typically for no more than sixteen hours. The problem with these is that they’re not marked … — information about their whereabouts is not publicly available, and there’s no accountability for the treatment of people who are held in those facilities.”

Stevens said anecdotal reports abound detailing the difficulty in locating ICE detainees. She said ICE officials have said they are not responsible for tracking the locations of the accused.

Chandra Russo of the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition said that because immigration is regulated by civil law “it is in the nether realm.” She said that the absence of proper regulation surrounding the field offices leads to concerns due process problems.

Tim Counts, ICE spokesperson for the Colorado area, told the Colorado Independent that ICE was presently not responding to questions concerning the Stevens article. He added, however, that the field stations were “anything but secret.”

“Anyone who is arrested on immigrations violations is brought to one of our field offices,” Counts said. “It may be, for example, a larger office, or the one in Denver, or we have smaller sub-offices all around the country, which by the way are anything but secret.”

Counts pointed to the recent Colorado Springs field station opening ceremony covered by the Post. Local dignitaries turned out as well as members of the press. “I’m not sure how that would qualify for being a secret office,” he said.

Counts said the process followed at field stations are similar to those practiced in the booking of criminals in smaller police stations.

“[Suspected illegal immigrants] are booked just like they would be in a police station: fingerprinted, photographed, and interviewed,” Counts said.

He suggested The Nation may have stretched the facts for the benefit of readers. Take the amount of time detainees are held in ICE field stations, Counts said.

“After reading The Nation article, how long do you think detainees are normally held in the field stations?” He said on average detainees are held in the facilities for two or three hours at the most before being transferred to local jails.

He said detainees are provided telephone access in all of the offices, provided the opportunity to speak with the consular officials from their home countries and given a list of free or low-cost legal assistance in the area.

Talking to Democracy Now, however, Stevens appeared to take issue with the kind of picture painted by Counts.

“ICE claims that it’s not their position … to locate people, that it’s not their responsibility to even notify attorneys when their clients are transferred from one facility to another facility. They’re on record stating that.”

Although calls to individual field stations on the list published by The Nation went unreturned, voice messages identified each office as an ICE facility and provided numbers where additional information on detainees might be available.

The ACLU, Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network and a number of immigration lawyers were not available for comment.

“I am not making any claims about a conspiracy,” Stevens said. “I’m simply noting that, according to their own records, there are 186 sub-field offices, and their locations are not publicly available.”

–
Edit note: The Colorado Independent is scheduled to speak to Jacqueline Stevens today and will post additional reports on this story this week.

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

Reps. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.) and Mark Souder (R-Ind.) (house.gov)

The number of immigrants in government detention has more than doubled over the last ten years, with more than 360,000 detainees in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody in the last year. As a result, ICE now operates the largest detention and supervised release system in the country, creating an unprecedented challenge for the agency and for immigrants seeking to challenge their detention. Detainees often face long waits for deportation hearings, and are increasingly transferred to prisons far from where they were apprehended, disrupting their connections with family members and lawyers who can help them.

Thursday’s hearing, ostensibly about how ICE should improve its immigrant detention system, underscored the fundamentally inconsistent positions of lawmakers who either view illegal immigrants as dangerous criminals that need to be locked up and ultimately deported, or as hapless men and women who only broke the law in the hopes of attaining the American dream: a better life for themselves and their families.

“I think the most effective immigration reform is to truly enforce the laws on the books,” said Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind.), who stands squarely in the former camp. “Detention is an important part of enforcement,” he said, a view repeated by most Republican lawmakers and witnesses. “It is not safe or efficient to release thousands of foreign nationals who are in this country illegally,” he continued. “Aliens in detention facilities are not here on vacation . . . They should not be kept in facilities that are better than we give to U.S. citizens who are arrested and awaiting trial.”

Democrats, meanwhile, were concerned that the U.S. is detaining too many immigrants in unnecessarily restrictive conditions, and hampering their ability to claim a right to remain in the United States. Recent reports from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse and Human Rights Watch have concluded exactly that, as did a recent report commissioned by ICE itself.

Committee vice-chair Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.), presiding over the hearing, said she was “more concerned about the cost of incarcerating people and what type of people we’re incarcerating,” and “if these people have a claim under current law to be in this country that they get through the process in a timely manner in order to put that forward,” she said. “That’s why I called this hearing — not to purchase Hilton hotels,” she quipped, responding to Souder. “They’re not good investments these days anyway.” The Detention and Removal Operations division of ICE had a budget of about $2.6 billion in fiscal year 2009, according to a recent ICE report.

Immigration activists and experts testifying before the committee were equally divided.

Continue reading at the Washington Independent, the Colorado Independent’s sister site in D.C.

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

Although the program may be cost-effective for the federal government, there is some evidence that increased costs to local law enforcement agencies are significant.

Writes CIS:

287(g) is cost-effective — much less expensive than other criminal alien identification programs such as Secure Communities and Fugitive Operations. For example, in 2008 ICE spent $219 million to remove 34,000 fugitive aliens (mostly criminals). In 2008, ICE was given $40 million for 287(g), which produced more than 45,000 arrests of aliens who were involved in state and local crimes. In Harris County, Texas, the billion-dollar ICE Secure Communities interoperability program found about 1,718 removable aliens in its first six months beginning late in 2008; meanwhile the locally paid 287(g) officers in the same jail system charged about 5,000 criminal aliens over the same time period.

But a recent article in the San Bernardino Sun notes that taxpayers in San Bernardino, Calif., have spent an estimated $54.5 million to jail illegal immigrants since 2004. Federal officials have reimbursed the county only $6.7 million in that time, through the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, reports the Sun.

Some critics question whether the program is helping taxpayers or hurting them.

“It’s a burdensome cost to the local government,” said Suzanne Foster, policy committee chairwoman for the Justice for Immigrants Coalition of Inland Southern California. “ICE does provide initial training, but it does not fund the screening process, overtime hours, or any part of the housing of inmates. … It has been found all over the country to be quite burdensome to the local governments, costing taxpayers more than is necessary.”

And in Harris County, Texas, where the county commissioners recently voted to renew the 287(g) program, the county estimated that the program cost it nearly $1 million a year, according to the Houston Chronicle:

The county will pay about $928,000 a year in overhead and salaries for eight sheriff’s employees needed to screen jail prisoners around the clock, according to the budget office review.

And finally–a recent posting at a blog written by the Immigration Policy Center, not only directly refuted any claim that 287(g) agreements save communities money, it explained why:

CIS Assertion: 287(g) agreements result in cost savings for localities.

FACT: While Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) covers the cost of training deputized local officers and some detention costs, ICE does not pay for implementation of the program or any lawsuits that may arise due to civil rights violations. Local communities are responsible for the high costs related to the immigration enforcement activities. A report by the Brookings Institute found that Prince William County, Virginia, had to raise property taxes and take from its “rainy day” fund to help fund their 287(g) program. Their local law enforcement of immigration, which cost $6.4 million in its first year, is projected to cost $26 million over five years. They eventually slashed $3.1 million from the budget that was intended to buy video cameras for police cars to protect themselves against allegations of racial profiling. Arizona’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio created a $1.3 million deficit in just three months, much of it due to overtime for immigration enforcement.

In Colorado, both the El Paso Sheriff’s Office and the Colorado Department of Public Safety have 287(g) agreements with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

287(g) scares victims and witnesses of crimes to avoid contacting police for fear of being mistreated.  287(g) invites exploitation by those who know that they won’t be reported to police, because it combines the contradictory duties into the same police force.

What is the result? A sweep of terror that has frightened legal and undocumented immigrants into hiding, undermining both law enforcement efforts across our country.  287(g) programs undermine the spirit and text of the U.S. Constitution, and I encourage Congress to repeal 287 (g).

Polis was speaking in reaction to Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) announcement last Friday that it had signed, or was in the process of signing, 67 287(g) agreements. Two of those are with Colorado agencies:  the Colorado Department of Public Safety and the El Paso Sheriff’s Office

The controversial program had previously been suspended by ICE. Critics say the program is abused by many local law enforcement agencies, and promotes racial profiling. The poster child for misuse of the program has been Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, famous for his sweeps of Latino neighborhoods and his penchant for requiring detainees to wear pink underwear (and who is, incidentally, said to be miffed about earning a modified 287(g) agreement this time around, in a nod toward his alleged abuses).

Watch the one-minute speech:

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.