Pledging more oversight and accountability, the Obama administration announced plans Thursday to transform the nation's immigration detention system from one reliant on a scattered network of local jails and private prisons to a centralized one designed specifically for civil detainees.
The reforms are aimed at establishing greater control over a system that houses about 33,000 detainees a day and that has been sharply criticized as having unsafe and inhumane conditions and as lacking the medical care that may have prevented many of the 90 deaths that have occurred since 2003.
"With these reforms, ICE will move away from our present, decentralized jail-oriented approach to a system that is wholly designed for and based on our civil detention needs," U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Assistant Secretary John Morton told reporters. "The population that we detain is different than the traditional population that is detained in a prison or a jail setting."
The federal immigration agency plans to review the use of 350 local jails, state prisons and private facilities, including more than a dozen in California. Within five years, officials said, detainees without criminal records probably would be held in fewer, less-restrictive locations with more federal oversight.
Morton also announced that the agency would stop sending families to the controversial T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility in Texas and instead hold them in the agency's only other family facility, which is in Pennsylvania. The Texas facility, which will continue to house women, opened in 2006 and faced lawsuits over substandard living conditions. A settlement resulted in changes to how children were treated.
Immigrant rights advocates welcomed the changes but said there was still no clear policy on how detention facilities would be penalized if problems were found.
"We are encouraged that the administration is taking a hard look at what has traditionally been a dark spot in our immigration system," said Karen Tumlin, a staff attorney at the Los Angeles-based National Immigration Law Center. "However, only time will tell if the reforms announced today amount to lasting change or simply creative repackaging of prior policies."
Tumlin and others said the detention standards needed to be made legally binding to guarantee immigrants access to counseling, family visits, legal materials and recreation time. Legislation has been introduced aimed at accomplishing this.
