Last week, President Obama made another push for Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform. However, as Obama and advocates strive for reform, there's one issue that remains under the rader: thousands of undocumented immigrants will continue to be thrust into the detention system regardless of whether reform takes place this year or not.
In the past five years, Homeland Security officials have jailed record numbers of immigrants due to a congressional directive known as the "bed mandate" that requires at least 34,000 immigrants be detained daily, reports the Washington Post. This quota, which is mandated by the Congressional Appropriations committee each year, targets undocumented workers to fill immigration jail beds.
Despite the fact that illegal crossings from Mexico have plummeted to an all-time low since the early 1970s, policies like the detention bed quota effectively force immigration and local police to find people that are deportable in order to make sure beds are filled. Department of Homeland Security officials deny that they are needlessly jailing immigrants to meet the quota, but critics of the mandate note that the majority of ICE detainees are non-violent offenders.
What makes matters worse is that fact that immigrants in detention are subjected to subpar living conditions and denied basic needs like adequate food and hygiene and access to fresh air and sunlight, writes Silky Shah, the Interim Executive Director of the Detention Watch Network.
"More than 132 deaths have occurred in detention since 2003-many of which could have been prevented with proper medical attention or mental health services," Shah adds.
Plus, holding immigrants in detention has a detrimental effect on families, communities and local economies that often lose their chief breadwinner.
Instead of addressing the systematic flaws in the detention system, the system is being privatized by corporations looking to secure government contracts to increase their profits in the billion-dollar industry. Meanwhile, county jails benefit by funneling money earned from detaining immigrants into their shrinking budgets. As a result, 50 percent of the 34,000 detention beds are operated by private prison companies such as Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has yet to codify standards for detention, meaning there are basically no rules to how people are held. If this issue does not become part of the immigration debate, then tens of thousands of people will continue to be uprooted from their families, communities, and livelihoods and swept up into detention facilities while they wait indefinitely in subhuman conditions for their cases to be decided.
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