A terrible reality about America’s immigration policy is how little the general public actually sees:
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s increasing practice of transferring immigrants facing deportation to detention centers far away from their homes severely curtails their ability to challenge their deportation, Human Rights Watch says in a report released today. The agency made 1.4 million detainee transfers in the decade from 1999 through 2008, the report says.
The 88-page report, “Locked Up Far Away: The Transfer of Immigrants to Remote Detention Centers in the United States,” presents new data analyzed for Human Rights Watch by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) of Syracuse University. The data show that 53 percent of the 1.4 million transfers have taken place since 2006, and most occur between state and local jails that contract with the agency, known as ICE, to provide detention bed space. The report’s findings are based on the new data and interviews with officials, immigration lawyers, detainees, and their family members.