Melissa RossAn emailed report from the National Immigration Justice Center (NIJC) claims widespread abuse of detained immigrants at the Baker County Detention Center.
The report, “Lives in Peril: How Ineffective Inspections Make ICE Complicit in Immigration Detention Abuse” was released by the National Immigration Justice Center (NIJC) and Detention Watch Network (DWN).
The report draws on information from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) inspections documents for 105 immigration detention facilities and features focused analyses of inspections on the Baker County Detention Center in Florida and detention centers in Arizona, Georgia, Alabama, Texas, and Illinois.
NIJC says it obtained the inspections through a federal court order resulting from three years of litigation under the Freedom of Information Act.
“The government fought for years to keep these inspection reports hidden from the public eye, and now we know why: Despite its early promises to make the detention system more accountable and humane, the Obama administration has perpetuated a system that ensures detention contractors pass their inspections and continue to receive billions of dollars from taxpayers to detain immigrants, even in jails where there are highly publicized human rights abuses,” said Claudia Valenzuela, director of detention for the National Immigrant Justice Center.
Major findings:
- ICE’s inspection regime fails to provide an accurate assessment of the conditions immigrants experience in detention, holds most facilities to weak and outdated human rights standards, and often fails to acknowledge publicly reported abuses.
- At Baker County Detention Center ICE’s inspections reports have consistently ignored the lack of outdoor recreation and volunteer work programs.
- The inspections process at Baker check for the existence of certain policies, rather than whether or not they are implemented or effective.
The email goes on to call the immigration detention inspection process “a sham – designed to perpetuate a broken and abusive system,” and conditions at Baker County Jail as “dehumanizing.”
Baker County is well known as a locale featuring a high number of minorities in prison. Noting that landed State Rep. Janet Adkins in hot water when she discussed the county’s potential strategic importance and how it might contribute to unseating U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown during Florida’s redistricting process during a recent closed-door meeting with Republican activists.
