News (Noticias) Tagged ‘detention center’

At a time when angry rhetoric over illegal immigration often dominates the U.S. political agenda, a new book introduces a compassionate voice to Americans: a Cuban refugee who has devoted his life to helping 20,000 other refugees find freedom, hope and healing at the U.S. border.

“I Was A Stranger, Hope for a Hidden World” is the inspirational story of Feliberto Pereira and his life as a modern Good Samaritan. Pereira escaped the persecution of Fidel Castro’s 1960 regime aboard a “freedom flight” to America. Knowing firsthand that most refugees arrive with nothing more than the clothes on their backs, Pereira, a U.S. citizen, started a ministry in South Texas assisting refugees in their path to freedom.

Since 1979, what is now Southwest Good Samaritan Ministries has assisted some 20,000 refugees from more than 40 countries — Muslims, Jews, Christians and atheists. Refugees and those who serve them are welcomed at a five-acre facility built by volunteers called Casa Compasíon (House of Compassion) located three miles from one of the U.S. government’s largest immigration detention centers, from which detained refugees are released to Pereira’s custody.

Tragically, the book also describes how political asylum is now being lumped together with all forms of immigration and, as a result, asylum as a legal path to freedom appears to be vanishing for hundreds of thousands of people. Since the September 11 attack on the United States, the number of refugees both seeking and being granted political asylum has fallen dramatically.

“I have a place in my heart for all refugees and immigrants,” said Pereira. “They are just like you, just like me — only many are placed by life in circumstances none of us would ever freely choose. Illegal immigration is a problem no country can ignore, but we Americans must distinguish between illegal immigrants seeking a better way of life economically and individuals in need of protection.”

In 2007, The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees noted : “More and more asylum seekers are portrayed not as refugees fleeing persecution and entitled to sanctuary, but rather as illegal migrants, potential terrorists, and criminals — or at a minimum as ‘bogus.’”

This book is published by Brown Books. For more information on the book, visit www.iwasastranger.org “*

People in Oregon who are accused of immigration violations most often end up at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington. A new report alleges serious human rights violations at that facility.

Seattle University law students who interviewed detainees and worked to confirm their stories heard about a wide range of problems, from overcrowding and lack of food and medical attention, to physical and verbal abuse by guards and federal marshals.”*

Ann Kim made monthly trips this year to a Richmond area immigrant detention center, trying to free a mentally ill Honduran man. He ended up being deported, but Kim got something out of it: more experience in the burgeoning field of immigration law.

“Immigration is becoming more and more complex, and it’s going against immigrants rather than for them,” said Kim, 27, a second-generation Korean American who took the Honduran’s case as part of her immigration law clinic at American University’s Washington College of Law. “There’s a great need for lawyers.”"*

José Balderama spent half a decade in the United States working roofing jobs in Texas. The money he sent home each month went to his wife and four children – a source of income the family expected to count on for many years to come.

But after serving six months at the Eden Detention Center in Texas for getting caught without the proper paperwork, he says he is never going back. “This was six months, next time it could be six years,” he says on a recent day in this tiny town tucked in the foothills of the Sierra de Guanajuato mountains. “*

European Union lawmakers voted Wednesday to allow countries in the bloc to hold undocumented migrants in detention centers for up to 18 months and ban them from EU territory for five years.

Approved in this medieval French border city, which is home to a significant population of North Africans and Turks, the legislation establishes common rules for expelling foreigners who are detained on EU territory without permission to be there.

Described by critics like Amnesty International as “severely flawed” and an erosion of human rights standards, but by supporters as a balanced approach, the so-called return directive passed in the European Parliament by a vote of 369 to 197, with 106 deputies abstaining.”*

Mexican officials said Thursday that at least 18 Cubans have reached Texas more than a week after masked gunmen hijacked an immigration bus in southern Mexico and seized them.

Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office said in a statement that the U.S. Border Patrol detained the immigrants in Hidalgo County in Texas.

At least six masked gunmen hijacked the bus along a remote jungle highway June 11. They forced seven unarmed immigration agents and two drivers to get off before they fled with 33 Cubans and four Central Americans who were being taken to a detention center for undocumented migrants.”*

Eighteen months after filing a lawsuit against the Department Of Homeland Security and Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of San Diego County has reached a settlement with the hope of ending severe overcrowding at the San Diego Correctional Facility.

In January of last year, the ACLU joined a lawsuit, previously filed in San Diego Federal Court by Isaac Kigondu Kiniti, a Kenyan man who was arrested in May 2004 for immigration violations and has been at the Otay Mesa facility since November of that year.

Kiniti is awaiting a ruling on whether he will have to return to Kenya, but he is resisting going back, claiming that if he goes back, he would be subjected to persecution and torture. “*

Eight-year-old Gianella Ramos clutched a protest sign Monday at a City Council meeting, chanting “No to GEO! No to detention!”

She was among 30 protesters who rallied on the steps of the Aurora Municipal Center on Monday and called on the City Council to oppose the planned expansion of an immigration detention center that will more than triple the size of the facility.

“I do this for my mother who is an immigrant,” she said.”*

May has been an embattled month for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, faced inquiries from House and Senate members about the inhumane treatment of people detained for violating immigration laws. This congressional scrutiny followed a special report in the Washington Post (and a rash of articles elsewhere) detailing stomach-turning—and sometimes deadly—mistreatment in immigrant detention centers.

A bill to improve detention center conditions has recently been introduced in Congress, but this legislation would do nothing to address the abuses committed by ICE officers well before the people they pick up reach a detention center. Nor would it alter the framework of immigration enforcement that has led to the mistreatment. Congress should be thinking about these problems, too—and so should the courts. “*

Each day, over 30,000 people are housed within detention centers across the United States. The New York-based Detention Watch Network says that last year, over 276,000 immigrants were deported.

Deportations have increased significantly since 1996, when laws became much more punitive. A criminal charge results in jail time and guarantees deportation of non-citizen immigrants, regardless of legal status and family “*

In an NPR interview with Washington Post reporters, Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein, responsible for a four part series on the treatment of foreign detainees inside ICE detention facilities, the pair describe how medical care for those detained is decided based on manuals that tell staff what they cannot do rather on what they can do for ill inmates.”*

Hundreds of illegal immigrants awaiting deportation rioted at a county-run detention center and had to be subdued with tear gas, authorities said Wednesday.

The riot Tuesday started as a fight between detainees from rival gangs and spread to the detention center’s outdoor yard, said Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”*

Undocumented immigrants are often held behind bars for weeks before their cases go before a judge. Detainees are experiencing depression, anxiety and uncertainty about the fate of family members, advocates said at a press conference last week.

“There have been suicides,” said Sister JoAnn Persch, a nun with the Catholic Campaign for Immigrant Justice who regularly prays with immigrant families outside a federal immigration detention center at Broadview, Ill., near Chicago.”*

*From: http://www.watertowndailytimes.com
Traducido: usando Google o Altavista/Babel Fish

The Charles County Sheriff’s Office recently began offering an English as a Second Language (ESL) course to Spanish-speaking inmates at the Charles County Detention Center.

The class is offered through an agreement with the Charles County Public Schools Adult Education Program, which also provides General Educational Development diploma classes to other inmates. In the ESL program, two classes of seven to 10 inmates meet weekly to learn and practice English. “*

*From: http://somd.com
Traducido: usando Google o Altavista/Babel Fish

Amid the idyllic Americana setting in a small Texas town is a place where young children lived surrounded by razor wire fence with the threat of separation from their parents. They and their families—none of whom were charged with crimes—had been kept in prison cells with limited access to medical care, education and even food. You likely wouldn’t have found the typical colorful drawings found in most homes with children, because they weren’t allowed to have even paper and crayons in their cells.

While Taylor, Texas, advertises itself as a “a vibrant, growing community of…friendly people living the good life,” something it doesn’t promote is the T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility, a former medium security prison that now is a detention center for immigrant families, including children, awaiting decisions about asylum in the U.S. or other immigration-related issues.”*

Four employees of a privately run immigration detention center have been charged on accusations that they used company vehicles to smuggle illegal immigrants through checkpoints, a U.S. attorney said Tuesday.

Immigration officials arrested Carlos Miguel Garcia, 36, and Benjamin Lopez Sanchez, 36, both of Raymondville, after the men tried to smuggle 28 illegal immigrants late Thursday in South Texas, U.S. Attorney Don DeGabrielle said. They were charged with transporting illegal immigrants.

Also arrested were Juan Trevino Jr., 27, and Alberto Vasquez, 37, both of Harlingen. They were charged with conspiring to transport illegal immigrants between Sept. 1 and Nov. 8.”*

Cobb’s Hispanic population is learning the hard reality of heightened immigration enforcement at the Cobb County Adult Detention Center.

The new deportation program means more families wait at the jail to learn if a loved one will be released.

It means families don’t know whether to pay bond on local charges if there is the chance a relative will be held anyway until the federal government deports him. Visits at the jail have been limited to one per week because of the volume of inmates, for an array of reasons.

On top of that, immigrant advocates say some inmates are held longer than permissible while the sheriff’s staff decides whether to press immigration charges. They say Cobb County is targeting Latino immigrants in traffic stops.”*

The Bush administration’s effort to increase enforcement of federal immigration laws is stretching the resources of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the limit, and agency officials need an updated set of guidelines when investigating and apprehending suspected illegal immigrants and undocumented workers, according to a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released Oct. 15, 2007.

Several members of Congress asked the GAO to conduct the study after ICE investigators arrested thousands of undocumented workers in a series of high-profile workplace raids in late 2006 and early 2007. Immigration advocacy groups and politicians criticized the raids, saying that ICE did not consider how the raids would disrupt the lives of families who depended on these workers.

A raid conducted on Michael Bianco Ltd., a leather goods manufacturer in New Bedford, Mass., in March 2007, made headlines around the country when 361 undocumented workers were arrested. More than 200 of them were sent to a federal detention center in Texas, which left by some estimates more than 300 school-age children without any means of support. Dozens of the detainees were later released.”*

“He was a Catholic priest who roamed the gulag of secret Argentine detention centers like a kind of spiritual predator.

“The life of men depends on God — and on your collaboration,” Father Christian Federico von Wernich once advised an inmate before betraying the prisoner’s trust, according to testimony.

Von Wernich, 69, was sentenced to life in prison this month for crimes against humanity, the first priest convicted of human rights abuses during Latin America’s era of military dictatorships and civil wars.”*

“A number of illegal immigrants at a federal detention center have been transferred to other facilities, authorities said Saturday.

The detainees were moved while authorities perform maintenance and conduct inspections at the center located in Los Angeles’ San Pedro section, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said in a statement.

The agency wouldn’t say when or where the detainees were relocated or how many, citing security concerns. It also declined to give more information about the maintenance work, but said “the need for preventative maintenance was identified during a facility evaluation.”"*

“Virginia is considering creating a detention center exclusively for undocumented immigrants accused of committing crimes in the state, according to El Tiempo Latino. The plan was presented on September 26 by the Virginia Crime Commission. In order to carry out the project, Virginia would have to reach an agreement with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The location of the 1,000-bed center has not been decided. “

“The latest fight for accused Mexican drug boss Osiel Cardenas isn’t in a courtroom, but a jail.

Behind the closed doors of a detention center, the location of which is being kept secret for security reasons, he and his lawyers are digging through tens of thousands of pages of documents and hundreds of hours of recordings made by federal agents.

The material was collected as the U.S. government worked for years to snare Cardenas in a web that led to his extradition from Mexico to Houston.”

“The strip mall storefront of International Educational Services opens up into cheery offices and classrooms decorated with American flags. Open a classroom door, and dozens of smiling children look up from their workbooks for a heavily accented group “good morning.”

The children are illegal immigrants, and all but one are from Central America. In the afternoon, they will go to foster homes, where they will live until they can be united with a “sponsor” – a parent, relative or family friend within the United States.

Its a better scenario than they would have faced in the past, when children caught crossing the border were locked up like adults. But critics say the majority will eventually fade into the nations illegal immigrant subculture, easily becoming lost in a maze of homeland security and social service agencies.”

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“Illegal immigrants held in alien detention centers are isolated from the world, a new report says.

The illegals cannot reach their families or their lawyers because of a faulty telephone system, according to a new Government Accountability Office report released Friday.

The GAO found that over a 12-month period starting in November 2005, phones weren’t working properly in 16 of 17 alien detention centers around the country that use pro bono telephone systems. In June of 2006, only 35 percent of phone-calls out of the detention system were successful and the percentage was never above 74. “