Republicans are supposed to be reaching out to Latino voters, but last year all they did was stall on immigration reform, pass the enforcement-only SAFE Act out of committee, and give Steve King a vote on his amendment to deport DREAMers. This year isn’t looking much better. Senate Republicans this week clamored to...
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Jan 8, 2014
A new story by Cristina Costantini at Fusion provides the latest illustration of the gap that exists between policy and practice in the world of immigration enforcement. ICE isn’t supposed to be detaining pregnant immigrant women, who might require care that ICE isn’t capable of providing and who can be...
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We know that House Republicans are in denial about the human cost of immigration enforcement and massive deportations. That’s why they’d rather kick immigrant families out of their offices than face up to the true consequences of enforcement-only policies. This week, two new developments make it clear that the...
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It’s an little-known issue that is slowly getting a lot of attention in the immigration reform world, making headlines for how nonsensical and inefficient it is—and how many Republican Congressmen are continuing to defend it. It’s the detention bed mandate, which we wrote about last month and which has...
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Imagine if a law enforcement agency insisted on incarcerating a certain number of prisoners, every day, every year, regardless of how many of those prisoners actually needed to be there; what the actual crime rate was; and whether there was another, cheaper way to keep track of them. That’s...
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Cross-posted from Cleveland Plain Dealer: Pedro Hernandez-Ramirez is at home in Elyria with his family. This may not seem like a monumental statement, but for Pedro, Seleste and their children, it means everything. That’s because, until two weeks ago, the government was trying to deport Pedro. Despite the fact that...
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Yesterday we wrote about a New York Times story on immigrants in detention who are forced into solitary confinement for 22 to 23 hours a day and weeks on end. The method of imprisonment—already considered a form of torture—is especially horrific when imposed upon immigrants, who are held for...
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Eye-opening piece by Ian Urbina and Catherine Renz in the New York Times this weekend, about immigrants who are put into detention and then—for various reasons—are held in solitary confinement. The United Nations has likened long-term solitary confinement to torture, and has called for a ban on the practice...
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At today’s House Judiciary Committee hearing on ICE’s recent release of hundreds of immigrants from detention, Rep. Spencer Bachus (R – AL) asked Director Morton a question that immigrant rights advocates have been asking for years: “Is it possible that you are detaining more people than you need to?…...
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Further evidence of the nation’s dysfunctional immigration system was on display this week, when ICE–in anticipation of the upcoming sequester–released several hundred immigrants from their detention facilities. It’s unclear where this policy came from, but immigrants–who have been the focus of decades of political battles–are now being used as...
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