Lily Keber : Putting Families in Jail in America

Putting children in jail:
T. Don Hutto and family detention in America

As hope for change in Obama immigration policy dwindles, activists speculate on the fate of family detention.

By Lily Keber / The Rag Blog / November 20, 2009

See 'Hutto: America's Family Prison,' A film by Lily Keber and Matt Gossage, Below.

When she first arrived in the U.S. with her two small children, Denia didn’t realize she was pregnant. Fleeing an abusive relationship in Honduras, she had traveled north to the U.S. to reunite with her mother, a naturalized citizen living in Houston. But instead of reuniting with their grandmother, Denia and her daughters found themselves in a medium-security prison, dressed in prison garb and forced to line up to be counted several times daily.

Though pregnant, she was losing weight from lack of food. Guards shouted at her children and threatened to take them away if they misbehaved. Security lights were left on all night, and alarms went off if a child wandered from its cell during the night.

Denia remembers:

“I was really scared. I would say: 'Dear God -- what am I going to do with a newborn here? He’ll die in this freezing cold' It was so cold, and the worst thing was that they wouldn’t give us enough blankets... And how could I get enough rest if resting is prohibited here? I wouldn’t be able to take care of myself properly the way one should after giving birth. I was really worried.”

The rise of family detention

Unfortunately, Denia’s experiences are not unique. The U.S. has been detaining families since March 2001. In an effort to end what was labeled the “catch-and-release” policy -- wherein migrants with immigration violations were given a mandate to appear in court and then released back into the community -- the Department of Homeland Security under Michael Chertoff began detaining all immigrants without documents -- even those with small children.

The first facility for families was an 84-bed converted nursing home in Berks County, PA. At Berks, families were separated by age and gender and slept in dorm-style rooms, 2–8 per room. (Children under five slept with their parent.) But even with Berks open, there was not enough room for all the families ICE was detaining. Some were still being released. Others were separated -- adults sent to adult facilities while children as young as six months old were sent to children’s facilities or foster care. After 9/11, DHS announced it needed more room to expand, and turned to long-time partner Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) for solutions.

The largest for-profit corrections company in the country, CCA is best known for its infamous failed bid to take over the corrections operations of the entire state of Tennessee. However, by 2000 CCA had hit hard times and its stocks were at an all-time low. In July 2005, it had been forced to shutter the T. Don Hutto Detention Facility -- a medium-security prison in Texas -- due to lack of demand. CCA jumped at the government’s offer to pay $2.8 million a month to house immigrant families. In May 2006, it reopened the prison as the T. Don Hutto Residential Facility. Little had changed except the name and the population. Razor wire still laced the fencing, though now with wooden playgrounds in the yard and painted murals in the halls.

Familes in the hall of the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, Texas. Photo by Charles Reed / Dept. of Homeland Security / via AP.
“I was shocked. It was like nothing I had ever seen,” said Barbara Hines, director of the University of Texas Immigration Clinic and one of the first to visit Hutto. Frances Valdez, a former UT Immigration Clinic student, adds:

“It was surreal. It was everything I had already experienced in other jails, but here was this baby. I would go out [to Hutto] asking [the inmates] about their immigration issues and… they started telling me about the conditions… They were like, ‘Hey, I can't be here, get me out of here. My kids are getting sick, and they can't eat the food and I can't eat the food, and they separate us at night and they yell at us and they only give us 15 minutes to eat and my children are really scared and crying and it's horrible.’”

Other reports from initial visits describe children in prison garb, poor sanitation, limited education for the children, only one hour of access to fresh air and recreation, and armed guards threatening the families.

Denia’s 5-year-old daughter remembers:

“For me it was terrible because I would always dream at night that they were yelling at my mother and they were going take her to another jail. And they had told us that mothers who misbehave and take extra cookies in their pockets [for their kids to eat] would be sent somewhere else and…that they would take the children away from their mothers."

Word spread about the facility and outrage grew. An early report of the rape of an inmate by a guard mobilized neighbors. Local activists from Williamson County and nearby Austin began staging candlelight vigils and protests. Representatives from the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children testified to Congress about its findings at Hutto, recommending the facility be closed immediately.

Jorge Bustamante, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, attempted an investigation on conditions in Hutto and was denied access. Two documentaries were made, and screenings staged across the country. Articles appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, The Economist, salon.com, and local papers.

Barbara Hines, clinical law professor at the University of Texas, Austin, with ACLU lawyers Vanita Gupta and Lisa Graybill at T. Don Hutto in 2007. Photo from statesman.com.
In March 2007, the ACLU and UT Law Clinic waged a lawsuit against ICE maintaining that children were being held in inhumane conditions. Several months later, ICE settled and pledged improvements to the facility. Education and recreation times increased, pregnant women were allowed more food, and families permitted to close the door to their rooms as they slept. CCA officials maintain that reforms at Hutto had been underway already and were not due to the lawsuit.

Immigrant detention continued to expand throughout the Bush years. Plans were announced for three similar facilities to be built in other parts of the country, and rumors spread of families held in other unauthorized facilities.

With Obama’s election, hopes soared that the new administration would usher in comprehensive change in immigration policy. In August of this year, ICE Secretary John Morton announced a reworking of the nation’s immigration jail network into a “truly civil detention center.” In August 2009, ICE announced Hutto was to stop taking families, and that plans for three additional family detention facilities were to be scrapped. Obama’s call for progressive reform was, it seemed, coming to fruition. By September 17th, all families had left the facility.

Demonstrators at T. Don Hutto. Photo from Of América.

Family detention under Obama

Today, Hutto looks pretty much the same as it always has: a drab building tucked just out of town, sandwiched between a train car storage yard and fields of Texas beef cattle. The razor wire is gone, and freshly painted murals inside the facility depict smiling cartoon animals, a reminder to visitors of its former occupants. Hutto is back at maximum occupancy, though this time with women. Even before the last of the families were out, CCA had worked a new contract with ICE to house women from its other immigrant detention facilities at Hutto.

“By more fully utilizing the facility’s capacity and consolidating the female populations from multiple facilities, this change will yield substantial savings each month, “ICE spokeswoman Nina Pruneda said. And indeed, current reforms seem driven as much by the bottom line as by humanitarian concerns. By ending family detention at Hutto, ICE will save nearly $900,000 per month in contract costs.

The question remains, though: Where are arrested families going today? According to ICE, detained families will now be housed at Berks Family Residential Center in PA. Yet not a single family from Hutto made it to Berks; all were either deported or released. And at an 84-bed capacity, it is hardly sufficient for current needs, let alone for future expansion. Compounding this is an August announcement in the Reading Eagle that Berks County commissioners “are considering getting out of the alien-housing business.” New federal regulations prohibit governmental agencies from turning a profit on these types of services, and the county is just breaking even.

According to ICE spokesperson Carl Rusnok, today “each family is evaluated on a case-by-case basis. The Berks Residential Family Facility is the only facility ICE now uses to house families. Families that are encountered may be placed at Berks, placed on an ‘alternative to detention’ or issued a notice to appear before a federal immigration judge and released on their own recognizance.”

But Bob Libal of Grassroots Leadership worries:

“I think it is still unclear what is happening to people apprehended at the border. ICE says it is sending people to Berks, but I think there is some concern ICE may facilitate a new family detention center. I think it is important to look critically at Berks… and see if conditions are adequate or if people are being held for long periods of time. Is Berks another 84 beds that ICE doesn’t have to use?”

Libal adds: “The advocacy community is ready to fight for increased use of alternatives rather than increased family detention.”

Others worry that ICE has no intentions of limiting detention, only of avoiding the flashpoints that caused public outcry in the past. This spring, it released a request for comments on standards for a family residential facility, leading some to suggest that it will be building its own facilities. “ICE says they are in the process of developing a new assessment tool that will help them determine whether a family can be released, or placed into an alternatives program pending resolution of their status instead of being detained,” says Michelle Brane of the Women’s Refuge Commission. [The Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children has since changed its name to Women’s Refugee Commission.] “They have told us in the meantime that they are releasing families and using alternatives to detention.”

Alternatives to detention -- such as supervised release and ankle-bracelet monitoring -- allow a family to remain in the community while greatly improving the chances they’ll make their court hearing. It also saves the government a substantial sum of money: the most expensive alternatives to detention cost $14 per day, compared with detention rates that can exceed $100 per day.

“In general, ICE seems to be moving away from subcontracting its detention needs out to private companies and local jails,” said Lauren Martin, doctoral student at the University of Kentucky. This continued reliance on detention “indicates a lot of continuity between Bush and Obama. They’re going to build facilities for low-risk populations like asylum seekers, families, etc, and actually expand capacity.”

A cell with a baby bed and children's toys at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, Texas. Photo by L.M. Otero / Pool via AP.
Though all sides agree that Hutto is better than it was when it initially opened, it’s hard to find such enthusiasm about the broader picture. “Even though Hutto no longer holds families, there’s still 512 women being held there. That’s not something that anyone would have advocated for. Beyond that, here they haven’t made any moves to shut down or improve the most egregious conditions in Texas detention centers… There’s a lot of skepticism,” contended Martin.

A recent report by Dr. Dora Schriro, former director of the ICE Office of Detention Policy, focuses federal priorities on detainee care and uniformity at detention centers. The report recommends that ICE establish standards and assessment tools for its detention facilities, improve medical care, and provide federal oversight of its detention operations- all goals lawyers and activists have been calling for.

But with nearly 380,000 immigrants detained in ICE custody a year -- 30,000 on any given day in 300 facilities nationwide -- it is clear that Obama has not brought a shift away from detention, only a repeal of some of the worse malpractices of the Bush administration.

Where family detention will go from here, no one knows for sure. “ICE has made clear that they plan to issue [a Request for Proposals] and open a new facility, one that they say will be better suited to families with young children. It is still unclear what that means,” says Michelle Brane. “For the present, we are all still waiting for answers from ICE.”

[Lily Keber is a documentary filmmaker and teacher living in New Orleans. Her film Hutto: America's Family Prison brought family detention to national attention and continues to be used as an activism tool throughout the country. She currently is a media trainer for New Orleans Video Voices, a media collective devoted to fostering critical, independent thinking through the direct and meaningful use of new media.]

Hutto: America's Family Prison:
A film by Lily Keber and Matt Gossage

Hutto: America's Family Prison from Lily Keber on Vimeo.

• For previous Rag Blog articles on T. Don Hutto and immigrant family detention, go here.

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Beyond Hutto : Reforming Immigrant Detention

Demonstrator at T. Don Hutto detention facility on World Refugee Day, June 20, 2009. Photo by Melissa Del Bosque / The Texas Observer.
Beyond Hutto:
Activists reflect on the continuing struggle against immigrant detention centers.

By DC Tedrow / The Rag Blog / September 10, 2009

In response to mounting criticism of harsh policies, the Obama administration announced in August that the United States would begin reforming the government's immigrant detention system. Although details are sketchy and changes will be introduced slowly, one immediate and appreciable shift in policy was the announcement that Immigrant and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will no longer send immigrant families to the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, Texas, just northwest of Austin.

That the administration mentioned Hutto specifically is not surprising; news media, religious groups, and progressive activists have criticized the facility for locking up children since Hutto began detaining families in May 2006. In 2007, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against ICE on behalf of families detained at Hutto, which led to improved conditions at the facility. After investigating the prison in June 2009, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) announced in a press release that, even though conditions had improved since the ACLU lawsuit, the continued detention of asylum seekers and their children at Hutto violated principles of international law.

In addition to the ACLU and the IACHR, the organizations Grassroots Leadership and Texans United for Families have helped lead the charge against the Hutto facility. Below, Bob Libal of Grassroots Leadership and Lauren Martin of Texans United for Families discuss Hutto, the Obama administration’s announcement, and prospects for future organizing.

Bob Libal is the Texas coordinator for Grassroots Leadership, a southern based social justice organization taking on private prisons, and an activist in the movement to end immigrant detention at Hutto. Lauren Martin is a member of Texans United for Families, an Austin-based coalition working to end family detention, and is a PhD student in geography at the University of Kentucky.


Talk about the history of the T. Don Hutto facility.

Bob Libal: Basically, Hutto was a medium-security prison that Corrections Corporation of America took over in the late '90s. It was a failing private prison that couldn't retain much of a population base. CCA had contracted with U.S. Marshals, with ICE to house adult detainees, and both of those contracts had fallen through. Then, in the spring of 2006 they reopened it with the announcement that they were going to be detaining immigrant families, including small children for ICE. This was a pretty big expansion of the family detention system in this country.

In August, the Obama administration announced that the U.S. government would no longer be holding immigrant families at facilities such as Hutto. Why did they make this move?

Bob Libal: I think they made this decision because of political pressure, because organizers had made Hutto a lightning rod of controversy. The decision basically takes family detention policy back to pre-9/11 levels. Before the announcement last month, there were two family detention centers in the country: Hutto and the Berks County Detention Center in Pennsylvania, which has 80 beds. Last year, ICE proposed three new family detention centers around the country. What we were looking at, up until this announcement, was an expansion of the family detention system.

The announcement is that they would be either transferring families to Berks or releasing them on alternatives-to-detention programs. Berks is full right now: it's at capacity at 82 beds, so in reality what that's translated to is they're releasing families into alternatives-to-detention programs or releasing them with notices to appear at their immigration hearings. They also are taking the new family detention centers off the table. I think it's a pretty substantial victory. The New York Times described it as the first major departure on immigration policy from the Bush administration.

Is this going back to the idea of "catch and release?"

Bob Libal: I've heard John Morten, who is the Assistant Secretary for Homeland Security, say “No, we're not returning to that.” But I think the people who are getting out of Hutto are getting out on notices to appear. I think that it's still unclear how this sort of processing is going to take place. Say that you're apprehended or apply for asylum on the border. What happens to you? Are you then just released into an alternatives-to-detention program, or are you sent to Berks and then released? I think we don't know that yet. What it does mean is that, at any one time, there are a lot fewer families in detention.

Lauren Martin: I think it's important to differentiate, too, between "catch and release," which is really vague and could mean anything, and the bond and parole procedures that have been in place and are available to many immigrant detainees. That's often what families are released on. There is some degree of supervision, and they also pay quite a bit of money either in bond or for parole to participate in those programs. So "release" is misleading. Just because they're not in Hutto, there are still other forms of institutional supervision. Alternatives-to-detention programs have a wide range of forms of supervision.

"Catch and release" is this phrase that critics of this policy bandy about.

Lauren Martin: Right. And the justification for opening Hutto was that they need to move from "catch and release" to "catch and return." There's a presumption of illegality -- that all these families would be released into the population and abscond. Michael Chertoff said that. A vast majority of the families that have been detained at Hutto are asylum seeking families, so it's a lot more complicated than this simplistic illegal-versus-legal dichotomy.

Hutto has not been shut down, though. It's been converted into a detention center for women, correct?

Lauren Martin: Yes. After the legal settlement mandated that they do periodic reviews -- every 30 days they have to review whether a specific family qualifies to be released on bond or parole -- once they started doing that, they did start releasing families a lot faster, which made the population drop. So they filled Hutto halfway with immigrant women. As families are released, it will be filled completely with immigrant women without children. That's what they've announced. It's not closed.

What now? Will Grassroots Leadership continue to focus on Hutto?

Lauren Martin: I work with Texans United for Families, a coalition of people that have been fighting family detention at Hutto. I can sort of speak for the coalition, but not Grassroots Leadership. We're trying to figure out what the announcement really means, so we've been staying in close contact with Washington, D.C.-based advocates who have closer relationships with ICE, and the attorneys in the lawsuit who are actually representing folks at Hutto, to see what's going on there and to make sure that everything continues to go well. The next project is to figure out how to use the energy from the victory -- because it is still a victory, even it's a partial one -- how to roll that in to serve the next campaign. What are the lessons we've learned? How do we build on it and expand it?

We also have to think about, what do we do when there are not families detained? That was clearly something that mattered to a lot of people. And widening the question to detention requires very careful strategies about messaging, although there's plenty to organize around.

Do you think there's a climate for expanding this message to include more than just families? To target detention itself?

Lauren Martin: I think so. There have been a lot of really successful campaigns in the United States around other family-related issues, not necessarily family detention. In New York, Families for Freedom is a close ally of ours, and they've been organizing around the Child Citizen Protection Act, which is basically an act that says if someone has a citizen child, then the immigration judge will get some discretion to not deport the parents. Right now, in many situations, judges get no discretion. They don't get to say, "This person clearly has family ties, they have a few kids who need them, so it would be better not to deport this person." Immigration judges' hands are tied by the way our legislation is written right now.

Family unity is supposed to the backbone of our immigration system. However heternormative a form a family it may be, it is still what both conservatives and liberals think of as the touchstone of the immigration system. So I think that's actually a really powerful discourse that we can use to expand to other injustices in the immigration system, because it's something that everybody understands, whereas immigration law is totally obscure and difficult to understand.

Bob Libal: We will certainly continue to draw attention to the broader issues of immigrant detention and private prisons. And I believe that we will continue to draw attention to Hutto, since it's right outside of Austin and still a private prison that holds immigrant detainees. But I think that it is important to think strategically about how we can best push back on that system. I don't think we've figured out exactly what the next big campaign is going to be, because there are so many immigrant detention centers. It's important to both target geographic locations -- like a facility -- but also work towards policy change.

I think that is one of the lessons of the Hutto campaign: You can target a facility to make it very infamous, which the movement did to Hutto. But at the same time, it was drawing attention to a broader policy, which is family detention. I think we've pushed back family detention policy by drawing attention to Hutto. Hopefully we'll be able to do that again in the future: by targeting a facility and pushing back on a policy like mandatory detention, secure communities, or any of these other really horrendous programs that lead to the incarceration of immigrants on a mass scale.

[DC Tedrow edits The New Texas Radical where this article also appears.]

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Si Kahn : 44 Years of Music and Social Justice

Si Kahn. Photo by Robert Corwin / Photo Arts
Activist and musician Si Kahn:
Four decades in the struggle

By Bob Libal / The Rag Blog / July 28, 2009

I read in the paper, I watched on the show
They said that it happened a long time ago
The years had gone by, I just didn’t know
Working for freedom now
The songs that we sang still ring in my ears
The hope and the glory, the pain and the fears
I just can’t believe it’s been 45 years
Working for freedom now

-- Si Kahn, Working for Freedom Now

Acclaimed organizer, author, musician, and the executive director of Grassroots Leadership, the Southern-based social justice organization where I work, Si Kahn will be retiring next year after 30 years at the helm of the organization and more than 44 years in the Southern freedom movement.

The following is from Si's retirement announcement:

May 1st, 2010 marks almost 45 years to the day since I came South to join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the visionary student wing of the Southern Civil Rights Movement. That was the first step on a road that has led me as a civil rights, labor and community organizer and musician through the coal camps, cotton mill villages and prison towns of the South and Southwest.

That road has taken me inside such powerful times as the Brookside strike in Harlan County, Kentucky; the brown lung movement and J.P. Stevens campaign in the Carolinas; and the critical work of abolishing all for-profit private prisons, jails and detention centers, and putting an end to immigrant family detention, on which Grassroots Leadership has focused for the past 10 years.

The songs I’ve written grew out of the organizing I’ve done. The people I’ve met and worked with, their words and songs, their stories and jokes, have been the stuff out of which the songs of the last 45 years have been woven.

These people, the poor and working people of the South, Appalachia and the Southwest, have been a source of continuing inspiration to me, in my music and in my organizing. Their lives and dreams have given me strength and belief.

I hope that my songs will help people find in themselves the strength they need to keep on keeping on. But I also know music is not enough to change the world. It takes organizing, people working together to reach the goals they set for themselves.

Most recently, Grassroots Leadership has taken on a national Campaign to End Immigrant Family Detention, the policy made infamous at the T. Don Hutto detention center in Taylor, Texas. Hutto is a former medium-security prison operated by private prison corporation Corrections Corporation of America. Since opening in 2006, the facility has held immigrant children and their families from more than 40 countries and drawn international condemnation.

Si's latest song, called T. Don Hutto, can be heard at grassrootsleadership.org. It's the latest in a long line of songs of family, community, work and freedom such as “Aragon Mill,” “Gone,” “Gonna Rise Again” and “Wild Rose of the Mountain” that have been recorded by over 100 artists. Si has released 15 albums of his original songs, plus a collection of traditional labor, civil rights and women's songs with Pete Seeger and Jane Sapp.

Si Kahn to Perform in Austin

Si Kahn will be in Austin on Monday, August 3rd, performing an evening of music benefiting Grassroots Leadership's Campaign to End Immigrant Family Detention at MonkeyWrench Books, 110 E. North Loop, 78751. Email blibal@grassrootsleadership.org or call (512) 971-0487 for more details. A $7-$10 suggested donation will be collected at the door, though no one will be turned away for lack of funds.

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Prisons : Why Texas Still Holds 'Em

Forget oil and gold. In the Lone Star state, the boomtown business is locking up immigrants.
By Stephanie Mencimer

This article appears in the July/August issue of Mother Jones.

In 1997, with the private prison business booming, the Corrections Corporation of America picked a 64-acre plot near Austin, Texas, for its newest lockup. A medium-security prison, it was named after the company's cofounder and designed for some 500 federal inmates. But the anticipated stream of prisoners never arrived: By the time the T. Don Hutto Correctional Center opened, a glut of private prison beds, along with cca's own poor track record, had left the company nearly bankrupt. Its stock, which once traded at around $45 a share, bottomed out at 18 cents. Several of its facilities were shuttered or sat empty for years, including the Hutto prison, which cca moved to close in 2004.

But Hutto, like cca itself, has risen from the ashes thanks to a sudden source of new business: the Bush administration's crackdown on immigrants. Historically, Mexicans caught illegally entering the country have been dumped back across the border, while immigrants and asylum seekers from other countries were processed and released to await their court dates. (Only those with criminal records were detained.) Most of those released, though, failed to appear for court hearings and removal proceedings, and the government didn't have the resources to go looking for them. So in 2006, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ice) agency ended its traditional "catch and release" policy and instead started incarcerating non-Mexican immigrants—anyone from a Salvadoran migrant to an Iraqi family seeking political asylum—pending their deportation or asylum hearings. Over the two years since, the agency has increased its use of detention facilities by more than half; it now holds some 30,000 people on any given day.

In this new population—and in ice's $1 billion-plus detention budget—cca saw opportunity. In 2004, when Congress passed legislation authorizing ice to triple the number of immigrant detention beds, cca's lobbying expenditures reached $3 million; since then, it has spent an additional $7 million on lobbyists. Among them was Philip Perry, Vice President Dick Cheney's son-in-law, who later became general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, ice's parent organization, which has awarded cca millions in contracts; one of them, in 2006, allowed the company to reopen the old Hutto prison, now christened a "residential facility" housing immigrant families, including small children.

CCA isn't the only firm lining up for ice contracts: There's so much money to be made warehousing immigrants that in 2006, Cornell Companies, a private prison firm, sent the state of Oklahoma an eviction notice for more than 800 state inmates housed in its facility in Hinton. The company was negotiating with ice to take in immigrants for more than the roughly $45 per diem that Oklahoma paid.

State and local governments are also getting in on the action. In 2006, Willacy County, Texas, floated millions in bonds and, in 90 days, built a tent city for immigrants that it leases to ice for $78 a day per detainee. (A room at the local Best Western Executive Inn costs $65.) Run by the Utah-based Management and Training Corporation, a private prison management company, the camp houses up to 2,000 immigrants in a razor-wire-ringed compound holding 10 Kevlar tents of the sort used by troops in Iraq. Detainees have reported problems with heat and air conditioning, as well as maggot-infested food. The county has since approved another $50 million to add space for 1,000 more detainees.

Elsewhere, detention centers have been sued for providing inadequate health care, food services, and education. The aclu of Texas recently settled a lawsuit with ice over the conditions at Hutto for 26 children ages 1 to 17. According to the aclu, they were kept in cells 11 or 12 hours a day, forced to wear prison garb, fed "unrecognizable substances, mostly starches," and denied toys, bathroom privacy, and access to medical care.

According to the Washington Post, more than 80 people have died in ice detention, in many cases because of poor health care. The most famous case is that of Francisco Castaneda, a Salvadoran detained in San Diego for eight months. The government denied his request for a penile biopsy while in detention, arguing that it was an "elective outpatient procedure." He was eventually found to have cancer. His penis was amputated, but the malignancy spread, and he died last year.

On average, ice pays $95 a day per immigrant that it detains, yet research indicates that other, far cheaper, methods can work almost as well in making sure immigrants show up in court. Back in the late 1990s, the agency asked the nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice to run a pilot project under which people facing deportation got intensive supervision and connections to social service agencies. More than 90 percent appeared for their hearings—partly, the institute said, thanks to better information about the process. Intensive supervision costs an average of $14 per detainee per day, according to congressional testimony by Julie Myers, assistant secretary of Homeland Security. Yet in fiscal 2007, ice spent only about $44 million on alternative programs, compared with roughly $1.2 billion on detention—and legislation sponsored last year by representatives Heath Schuler (D-N.C.) and Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) in the House would authorize the agency to develop another 8,000 detention beds, which must be provided by private contractors such as cca "whenever possible."

CCA, meanwhile, is contributing to the detention boom in its own small way: Last year, after inspecting the Hutto center's personnel records, ice officials arrested 10 workers—illegal immigrants themselves.

Source / Mother Jones

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