Detention Centers

The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service is planning a major expansion of its far-flung detention facilities in the Southwest that would increase capacity from 1,000 people to more than 1,600, authorities said. The plans include buying a newly built, 250-bed minimum-security prison in Yuma, Ariz., and converting the INS regional headquarters at Terminal Island into a 400-bed detention center. These plans come at a time when arrests of illegal aliens along the U.S.

Fifteen Latin American refugees filed claims against the Immigration and Naturalization Service on Tuesday, alleging that they were beaten, kicked and mistreated by their federal guards. The claims, filed as a necessary step before a federal lawsuit, seek $15 million in damages. Most of the alleged abuses occurred at detention centers in El Centro and Imperial and involved 10 INS guards. Two minors are among the aliens making the claims. Peter A.

A U.S. District Court judge in Los Angeles has ruled that the federal government may not indefinitely jail noncitizens who have been ordered deported because of crimes, but whose home countries will not take them back. The ruling Thursday by Chief Judge Terry J. Hatter immediately affects 130 legal immigrants from such countries as Vietnam, Cambodia, and Cuba who have served time for their crimes and are now being held at U.S. detention centers from Lancaster to San Pedro.

The federal government's tough policy of detaining Central American immigrants at the Texas border is working, according to a new congressional report that calls the approach "effective in deterring frivolous asylum applications."

The Marxist regime in Angola imprisoned Tony Rocha for eight months. The Americans locked him up for 11. The Marxists, he said, tortured him with ropes and sticks and fire; the Americans with doubts and waiting. He is a taciturn man of 26, the second generation of his family to take up arms. He hoped to wrench his country from the Communists, as his father once fought to disentangle it first from Portuguese colonial rule and later from the Marxists who eventually killed him.

Esther Valladares Munoz, a frightened, brown-eyed girl abandoned by her parents in Honduras, slipped across the Rio Grande illegally to live with an aunt in Texas. She was caught in Houston two years ago and held for a civil deportation hearing. Federal agents jailed her in a coed ward with accused rapists and drug addicts. She was 14. Valladares was treated like an accused felon. A female guard took her to a cell at the Liberty County Jail, 46 miles northeast of Houston.

For 23 hours a day, 169 men are confined to tiny two-man cells in an enclosed, three-level cell block called H-Unit. They can't eat in the mess hall. They can't mix with the other prisoners. They can't take a prison job. They can't leave their cells without handcuffs and shackles. The men in H-Unit are kept in "lock-down" not because they have committed worse crimes than the assorted bank robbers, drug dealers and kidnapers in the general population of the U.S. Penitentiary at Lompoc.

In an old classroom trailer on the grounds of Camp David Gonzalez detention center, Alex Munoz teaches a handful of youthful offenders the art of making films. Every year for the last five years, the class of teenagers has produced a number of dramatic scripts and, eventually, short films about the precarious twists and turns of a harsh life on the streets. But this year, one student's story was different: Marquise Calhoun's screenplay focused on death -- his own.

Le Tuan Hung has little use for his masters degree in economics these days. University degrees mean little inside the steel cages of Hong Kong's human warehouses.

Tensions have mounted among hundreds of refugees being held in a huge Florida detention camp in the aftermath of the U.S. decision that all Haitian boat people stopped at sea would be returned to their homeland without being given an asylum hearing.