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Sec. Mayorakas has taken action against the two facilities where immigrant women were being sterilized:
ICE to stop detaining immigrants at two county jails under federal investigation
The Biden administration has decided to stop detaining immigrants in a pair of county jails facing federal probes in Georgia and Massachusetts, calling the decision an “important first step” in a broader review of the nation’s sprawling network of immigration jails.
DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas ordered U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to immediately terminate its contract with the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office in Massachusetts and to transfer the few remaining detainees elsewhere, according to documents provided to The Washington Post. He also directed ICE to rescind an agreement with the sheriff’s office, which trained deputies to screen inmates arrested for crimes to see if they are also eligible for deportation.
Mayorkas also directed ICE to “as soon as possible” sever its contracts with the Irwin County Detention Center in rural Georgia, a more complicated endeavor because the facility is county-owned but run by a private contractor.
Federal officials chose the two facilities mainly because their detention rosters have shrunk and they are “no longer operationally necessary,” said a DHS official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the administration’s deliberations. Bristol is holding seven detainees out of nearly 200 beds; Irwin has 114 detainees out of almost 1,000 beds.
Both county jails are also under federal investigation for complaints of abuses against immigrants — allegations that remain open and unresolved — and those factored into Mayorkas’s decision, the official said.
In a memo to ICE directing the changes Thursday, Mayorkas said his “foundational principle” is that “we will not tolerate the mistreatment of individuals in civil immigration detention or substandard conditions of detention.”
“We have an obligation to make lasting improvements to our civil immigration detention system,” Mayorkas said in a statement Thursday. “This marks an important first step to realizing that goal. DHS detention facilities and the treatment of individuals in those facilities will be held to our health and safety standards. Where we discover they fall short, we will continue to take action as we are doing today.”
Officials said the moves are part of the Biden administration’s broader plan to overhaul the nation’s network of more than 200 county jails and detention centers housing civil immigration detainees in deportation proceedings. More changes could come as Mayorkas conducts a sweeping review of detention facilities in the coming weeks.
President Biden has pledged to end for-profit immigration detention and reverse former president Donald Trump’s push to detain as many immigrants as possible. He warned Congress last week that it is “long past time” for lawmakers to pass a bill that would allow millions of undocumented immigrants to apply for U.S. citizenship.
And his changes are having measurable impacts: Immigration arrests in the interior of the United States have plunged by more than half, records show. Jails that were holding more than 50,000 detainees a day under Trump are detaining approximately 20,000 now.
The Biden administration has been under increasing pressure from left-leaning lawmakers and advocacy groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union to close detention facilities.
The Bristol County Sheriff’s Office came under state and federal investigation a year ago when staff members deployed pepper balls, a flash-bang grenade, and canines against immigrant detainees amid a dispute over coronavirus testing. Irwin is facing federal investigations after a former nurse filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that women held at the facility were subjected to unwanted gynecological procedures, including hysterectomies; the doctor who treated them has denied wrongdoing.
Mayorkas said in the memo that the Bristol facility southeast of Boston “is of minimal operational significance to the agency” and there is “ample evidence that the Detention Center’s treatment of detained individuals and the conditions of detention are unacceptable.”
Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey (D) faulted Sheriff Thomas D. Hodgson and his staff for a May 1, 2020, incident at the jail, and urged DHS to terminate its agreements with Bristol, according to a December report. She said some detainees who had refused to submit to coronavirus testing and isolation, partly because of fear of catching the disease, threw plastic chairs at staff members, smashed walls and attempted to barricade the unit with tables, trash bins and appliances.
Healey said she did not condone the detainees’ behavior, but she said they had largely quieted when officers attacked with pepper spray and other materials. Three detainees had to be taken to the hospital and a fourth had to be revived by chest compressions, but she said he was not taken to the emergency room. Healey concluded that the sheriff’s office violated the detainees’ civil rights via “a series of institutional failures and poor decisions.”
Bristol also faced a class-action lawsuit last year alleging unsafe conditions during the pandemic that led to the release of dozens of detainees. U.S. District Judge William Young, a Ronald Reagan nominee, barred Bristol from accepting new detainees. But he also said in a May 2020 ruling that the jail’s staff had “admirably taken significant steps toward protecting the detainees” from covid-19.
Hodgson — an outspoken Trump supporter who once offered to dispatch jail inmates to build the wall on the U.S.-Mexico border — criticized the judge’s rulings and disputed the attorney general’s findings, saying the DHS Office of Inspector General is still investigating the incident.
“I’d love to show everyone the security footage from the incident that night, because it shows my staff did everything right and by the book, and dispels many of the false claims being peddled by the political activist attorneys/publicists,” Hodgson wrote in a letter to the editor of the Sun Chronicle, a local newspaper.
Mayorkas did not detail in the memo to ICE acting director Tae Johnson his reasoning for closing the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Ga., almost 200 miles south of Atlanta. But he said the agency should relocate staff, release or transfer detainees, and preserve evidence and witnesses needed for ongoing investigations.
The DHS inspector general’s office and the FBI are investigating allegations that surfaced last year when a former nurse at the Irwin facility filed a whistleblower complaint saying that a doctor — later identified as Mahendra Amin — was performing hysterectomies and other unwanted procedures on female detainees. Amin has denied wrongdoing, and no charges have been filed. Prism reported the FBI investigation earlier this month.
Irwin no longer houses women at the facility; many have been released as the investigation is ongoing, and some have been deported.
Mayorkas said in the memo he would schedule a meeting next week to lay out the plan to close Irwin and to “discuss my concerns with other federal immigration detention centers” across the United States.
Johnson, the acting ICE director, has said that the agency will continue to arrest immigrants who match the new administration’s criteria.
“ICE will continue to ensure it has sufficient detention space to hold noncitizens as appropriate,” Johnson said in a statement Thursday. “Withdrawing from the Bristol agreement, and planning to close the Irwin facility, will not impair or in any way diminish ICE operations.”
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Illinois Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth is unveiling a legislative package Thursday that would protect from deportation military servicemembers and veterans who don’t have U.S. citizenship, as part of a new effort to reverse Trump-era policies.
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Biden Will End Detention for Most Pregnant and Postpartum Undocumented Immigrants
Like the president’s other immigration policies, the protections could disappear under a future administration because they are not being created through legislation.
The Biden administration will ease restrictions placed on undocumented people who are pregnant, postpartum or nursing, the latest change in its broader efforts to soften immigration detention policies put in place by former President Donald J. Trump.
Under the new policy, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers generally will not detain or arrest people who are pregnant or nursing, or who had a baby within the previous year, according to a draft of the plan shared with The New York Times and a person familiar with the policy. The language in the policy will be gender neutral, acknowledging that transgender men can give birth — another departure from past directives.
The number of pregnant immigrants in detention increased sharply under Mr. Trump, who reversed a policy put in place in 2016 by President Barack Obama that called for detaining them only under extraordinary circumstances.
Since 2016, ICE has arrested undocumented pregnant immigrants more than 4,000 times, according to internal government data shared with The Times. The number in custody has fallen more recently, partly because of measures to reduce the number of people in congregate settings who are at greater risk of contracting Covid-19. There are currently fewer than 20 such immigrants in custody, staying for an average of three days.
Immigration advocates welcomed President Biden’s new policy, which they said went even further than the 2016 version that was issued when he was vice president. But like Mr. Biden’s other immigration policies to date — all of which have been made through executive orders or directives and not codified in law — protections for undocumented pregnant and postpartum immigrants could disappear under a future administration, just as Mr. Trump rewrote Mr. Obama’s policy.
“Any change in presidential administration can materially change people’s lives, especially immigrants and folks who are kind of trying to navigate their way through the immigration system,” said Breanne J. Palmer, a lawyer with UndocuBlack Network, which advocates for current and formerly undocumented Black people in the United States.
“People who endure detention when they’re pregnant or nursing, you know, they really have very little recourse,” Ms. Palmer said.
Though the new policy will affect only a small number of immigrants, it could rankle some conservatives who previously supported an effort by Mr. Trump to nullify the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship, in part to deter migrants from trying to get into the country to deliver babies.
Ms. Palmer’s organization was among a number of immigration advocacy groups that filed a complaint in March with the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, about how pregnant immigrants had been treated in detention centers between February 2020 and February 2021. The complaint included descriptions of pregnant detainees not getting needed medical care.
Advocacy groups separately sued Customs and Border Protection this month for records since 2020 on pregnant migrants and how they were treated in government custody. The suit came after reports of the Trump administration deporting migrant women and their babies, who had been born days earlier in the United States. Some of the women, the advocates said, had come here to request asylum but were sent back, usually to Mexico, without a birth certificate documenting their babies’ U.S. citizenship.
The new Biden policy will not apply to pregnant, postpartum or nursing migrants in the custody of Customs and Border Protection. Border Patrol agents are typically the first American law enforcement officials to encounter migrants who cross the border, and they typically hold them for only a few days before transferring them to ICE custody.
A Customs and Border Protection spokesman said he could not comment on pending litigation.
Policies that govern the detention or incarceration of pregnant citizens vary across the country. Most states ban the shackling of pregnant women during labor, as well as other restraints. Fewer have banned restraints throughout the entire pregnancy, according to data collected by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
Andrea Meza, the director of family detention services at the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, or Raices, a nonprofit organization, said she and other advocates were hoping for a policy that banned the detaining of undocumented pregnant immigrants or those with infants under any circumstance. A person familiar with the new policy said an extraordinary circumstance in which a pregnant immigrant was detained would be if the immigrant committed a violent crime. Ms. Meza said the Obama administration’s policy — which allowed for pregnant women detained for immigration violations to be released while they awaited deportation proceedings — did not go far enough, leaving out protections for nursing immigrants, for example.
The Trump administration ended that policy in December of 2017. After human rights advocates learned about the change in 2018, they increased their focus on the health of detained pregnant immigrants, arguing that they were not getting the prenatal care they needed.
Vice President Kamala Harris was among a group of Democratic senators in 2018 who raised concerns about the treatment of pregnant people in ICE custody, after the Trump administration restarted the practice of detaining them.
The issue gained more attention the next year, after a 24-year-old Honduran woman in ICE custody delivered a stillborn baby boy. She had been arrested a week earlier by Border Patrol agents in Texas, near the border community of Hidalgo, and told authorities she was six months pregnant. Homeland Security officials said the woman was taken to the hospital after she was apprehended. A few days later, she was discharged into ICE custody, where she soon complained of abdominal pain. A clinical director at the agency said she needed to go back to the hospital, but she went into labor before getting there.
An ICE spokeswoman at the time said there was no information to suggest that the woman’s detention had been a factor in the stillbirth. Still, between October 2016 and August 2018, 28 women “may have experienced a miscarriage just prior to, or while in ICE custody,” the spokeswoman, Danielle Bennett, said.
Mr. Biden has used executive orders to reverse a number of Mr. Trump’s immigration policies, including accepting more requests from asylum seekers, easing travel and visa restrictions and changing the categories of undocumented immigrants that law enforcement should prioritize for enforcement actions. Legislative fixes, however, that could provide a legal path for families seeking asylum to enter the country, appear increasingly out of reach.
John Hudak, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, said that uncertainty about how long a policy would remain in place “creates enormous instability” that can interfere with governing.
“It can really begin to gut the agencies, it can gut agency expertise,” he said, if, for example, a policy change leads to staff cuts but the next administration decides to “just flip the switch back on.”
This has been the case for what became one of the administration’s earliest and greatest challenges: sheltering migrant children and teenagers who have been arriving alone and in record numbers at the country’s border with Mexico.
Mr. Trump had been turning away the children under a special public health rule put in place during the pandemic. When tens of thousands of unaccompanied children started entering the country this spring after Mr. Biden reversed the policy, the previous cuts to the program left federal authorities without enough space to shelter them or enough staff to safely place them with family members already in the country.
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Sadly, this is 100% legal. Awful, but legal.
Texas governor orders National Guard to arrest migrants
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This is a great article, which does highlight how many variables there are in how to deal with immigration. I would say a combination of all these ideas and rationales.
Yes, economic woes.
Yes, shifting demographics affecting voting for Dems
Yes, identity of the new Rep party, ie Trumpers who are anti-other (than white)
And so on…
Total restriction on who can come in, with these horrid conditions to act as a BARRIER (unjust, and inhuman) is the T and Sessions way.
Shifting conservative perspectives in what was listed here for WSJ and National Review…so no one conservative viewpoint can be determinative.
Immigration is a key issue facing this country and the T admin is shoving it down everyone’s throats.
…family values be damned.
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Because T, Sessions, Stephen Miller, and others (Bannon) operate out of a racist mindset, they pursue these hard line policies that play on very bigotted preferences. Outside of the two coasts, with the most liberal mindset, it is difficult to assume that a white, middle class person wants to have immigrants in their community. Trump defines the immigration problem as inviting dangerous criminals in, and his dog whistling does resonate with his base.
Logic does not serve very well here unfortunately. It is a natavistic approach. Other = bad, criminals, rapists…etc.
Sessions is a southern bigot, always was, always will be.
The irony that T has disdain for immigrants, and yet uses their labor at Mar-A-Lago getting a lot of personnel with the H-2B visas, because he knows he can pay them less and they will work for that to get into the US.
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