Tag: Immigration and Customs Enforcement

The rights of detainees held on immigration charges are neglected, including fundamental rights like the right to legal counsel. Although a network of organizations...

Jacinta Gonzalez, an organizer with the Congress of Day Laborers in New Orleans, tells a story about the abuse of workers rebuilding the city after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. She once met a man who went to his employer’s house to demand payment for his labor on a construction site after the employer stiffed him of his dues. The man’s boss came at him, swinging a hammer. The worker immediately called the police.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokespeople balked at questions posed by the Colorado Independent in January about the roughly nine ICE "substation" holding facilities located throughout the state. They downplayed concerns about rights violations and about detainees disappearing for hours and days unable to be located by loved ones and advocates. Basalt-resident Edgar Niebla was held in one of the substations. He told the Colorado Independent the concerns are justified.

The detention policies of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in Colorado and the network of facilities that has grown here in the last few years are drawing increasing attention among local lawmakers and human rights organizations. 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.

According to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Office of Detention and Removal website, the federal agency has only one center for detention in Colorado, a privately owned facility located in Aurora. The website doesn't mention that the agency may also be holding people at unlisted sub-field offices around Colorado. 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.

A House Homeland Security Committee hearing Thursday morning highlighted the sharp divide in Congress over illegal immigration and what should be done about it, presaging the difficult fight ahead when Congress eventually begins to tackle proposals for comprehensive immigration reform.

A new report from the conservative Center for Immigration Studies makes a point of praising the so-called 287(g) program, calling it very “cost-effective.” The...

A federal program known as 287(g), which grants broad immigration enforcement powers to local law enforcement agencies, has resulted in a "sweep of terror,"...

As the federal stimulus dollars begin to trickle down to the states this week, Erin Rosa provides a very timely profile of national private prison matron, The GEO Group, which operates facilities in Colorado.

Bloated federal funding and political pressure pushed a U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement program to meet arrest quotas rather than focus on rounding up criminal fugitives and addressing national security threats, says a damning new report on the controversial agency.