Final Spending Bill Means More Immigration Detention in 2020

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Media Contact: Rebekah Entralgo, rentralgo@freedomforimmigrants.org; Carly Perez, cperez@detentionwatchnetwork.org

On December 19, the Senate voted to approve a government spending package for FY2020. In response, Freedom for Immigrants and Detention Watch Network released the following statement: 

“The final spending package includes an increase in the gross budget authorities for both Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The bill also did not place any limitations on the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) ability to transfer funds between accounts, meaning that the agency can continue to raid accounts to finance expansion of immigration detention beyond congressionally appropriated levels. 

The final government spending package also included a significant increase in funding for the U.S. Marshals Service Federal Prisoner Detention account, which operates a lesser-known component of U.S. immigration detention for non-U.S. citizens serving sentences for federal immigration offenses, such as illegal re-entry, in 1,100 jails and private facilities throughout the country. According to a DHS OIG report, approximately 19 percent of the overall immigration detention population were held in facilities contracted by the U.S. Marshals Service at the end of 2017. This funding is in addition to the millions of dollars each of these accounts received as part of a supplemental funding bill earlier in the fiscal year. 

Although the final government package included oversight and transparency measures, including the creation of a new Immigration Detention Ombudsman, reporting language requiring that ICE detention facilities permit members of Congress access for unannounced inspections, and increased funding for DHS’ Office of the Inspector General, these measures are not accompanied by enforcement mechanisms. Without clear consequences for abuses and standards violations, these well-meaning oversight measures will not result in improved conditions or accountability.  

In 2019, ICE detained a record number of people in jails, prisons, and private detention facilities throughout the country. At the beginning of FY19, Congress instructed ICE to reduce the number of people the agency detained per day from 49,000 to 40,500, funding an average daily population of about 45,000 people. Instead, ICE ignored this directive and continued to overspend Congress’ allocation, reaching a historic high of over  55,000 people in detention in August. This was in large part due to the lack of restriction on DHS’ transfer and reprogramming authority, which allowed ICE to raid funding appropriated to other agencies to compensate. This is the fourth year in a row that ICE has executed this pattern. Rather than learn from the past, Congress granted the same appropriation without any accountability provisions that would prevent them from using this scheme again this fiscal year.  

This dramatic expansion in immigration detention included an explosion in the number of ICE detention centers concentrated in the southeast. These facilities are located in extremely remote, rural areas, where detained immigrants are unable to access legal services and face extremely high barriers to lawful avenue of release on parole and bond. Louisiana now detains more than 8,000 immigrants, making it the state with the second-highest population of detained immigrants, following Texas. However, many of these newly-opened facilities still do not appear on ICE’s facility locator, despite calls from members of Congress for ICE for increased transparency regarding the contracting mechanisms behind these facilities. Advocates report a litany of abuses within these facilities, including violent repression of peaceful protests, deaths in custody, and force-feeding.

Barriers to lawful avenues for release in Louisiana mirror broader national trends and run counter to ICE’s own directives. Throughout about one-fifth of people in detention at any given time had established a credible fear of persecution or torture in their home countries. Rather than allowing people who are exercising their lawful right to claim asylum, ICE is keeping them locked up indefinitely. 

We also saw ICE attempt to expand detention via hastily arranged and non-transparent contracting with private prison companies. In California, days after the state passed a bill banning the use of private immigrant prisons, ICE released a request for solicitation for four new contracts, to be signed less than two weeks before the ban is scheduled to go into effect. Advocates and lawmakers have expressed concern with the speed and parameters of this solicitation, alleging that it appears to be tailored to favor private prison companies already operational in the state. Activists in Texas are challenging similarly opaque direct contracts between ICE and private prison companies to keep open facilities with long histories of abuse. 

The amount of time immigrants are held in CBP custody also increased in 2019. Although CBP holding facilities are intended to detain individuals for 72 hours or less, lawyers advocates, and DHS’ own Inspector General report much longer periods of detention. In November 2019, a man reported that he was held for more than three weeks in Border Patrol custody without being able to contact family or a lawyer. 

Sadly, the FY2020 government spending bill passed on Thursday, means that we are on track for more of the same abuses and patterns of non-transparency as we saw in 2019: expansion of immigration detention beyond congressionally appropriated levels in remote rural areas; opaque contracting; barriers to legal access; denial of lawful avenues of release; abuse; and deaths. 

ICE and CBP’s budgets continues to grow and yet, people are still dying in detention and going on hunger strikes to protest their incarceration. That should tell you that the problem isn’t the need for better conditions or bigger budgets, the problem is the agencies themselves.

We thank the members of Congress who lead with their principles and voted against this immoral budget. We can and must do better. 

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Freedom for Immigrants is devoted to abolishing immigration detention, while ending the isolation of people currently suffering in this profit-driven system. We monitor the human rights abuses faced by immigrants detained by ICE through a national hotline and network of volunteer detention visitors, while also modeling a community-based alternative to detention that welcomes immigrants into the social fabric of the United States. Through these windows into the system, we gather data and stories to combat injustice at the individual level and push systemic change. Visit www.freedomforimmigrants.org. Follow @MigrantFreedom

Detention Watch Network (DWN) is a national coalition of organizations and individuals building power through collective advocacy, grassroots organizing, and strategic communications to abolish immigration detention in the United States.. Founded in 1997 by immigrant rights groups, DWN brings together advocates to unify strategy and build partnerships on a local and national level. Visit www.detentionwatchnetwork.org. Follow @DetentionWatch.