Animal rights advocates see the Biden administration’s development of detention- depend immigration protection as a deception, guided by political winds rather than operational essentials.
In a letter to President Biden delivered Thursday, 200 companies voiced “outrage over your government’s expansion of the violent and unnecessary immigration detention system”.
The organizations are furious over the$ 3.4 billion in federal spending that Biden signed in March, which includes$ 3.4 billion for ICE detention beds. The majority of the groups are long-time opponents of the immigration detention practice.
” Our agencies work with and support the rights of those who have been detained in multiculturalism.” They leave life-long scars from the abuse and dehumanization they endured as a result of the United States ‘ reliance on detention, most often through state prison and private jails. Your management is further cementing this rely, marking an abject betrayal of your strategy promises”, wrote the groups.
The Biden administration’s shifting political environment and a significant increase in immigration have caused ties with human rights activists who had praised his victory over former President Trump in 2020 to become more favorable.
While many aspects of immigration legislation are tender spots in that partnership, detention is the most intense.
Foreign nationals who are currently facing imprisonment or treatment are typically held pending their returning flight, according to recent enforcement rules. Deportees who are in waiting may face jail time regardless of whether they have a criminal history, even if the majority of their immigration violations are operational, such as those involving immigration overstays.
According to officials, the rise in incarceration space also means a smaller portion of the immigrant community is being detained than in the past, in spite of border encounters and the growth in expat population.
In governmental 2023, ICE conducted 170, 590 operational detention, and 43 percent of those arrested had earlier criminal convictions or pending charges. A month earlier, just 32.5 percent of international citizens arrested by ICE had some sort of legal record,  , according to official statistics.
According to the , Transactional Records , Access Clearinghouse ( TRAC ), a government , data , tracker housed at Syracuse University, 61.3 percent of ICE detainees as of April 7 have no criminal record, and “many more have only , minor offenses, including traffic violations“.
Administration officials, as in past administrations, maintain that emigration detention conditions are never jail- of or disciplinary and are required for functional reasons.
But immigration detention has for years been building up a large file of , alleged and proven cases , of human rights violations and , poor treatment, both by authorities watchdogs and outside groups.
” Your administration’s system is rife with impunity and abuse,” your president declared. These significant human rights issues have been on your senior officials ‘ radar since day one. The organizations that include Amnesty International USA, the National Immigrant Justice Center, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, and the International Refugee Assistance Project wrote in response to the insufficient standards and inspections that ICE’s jails and prisons use to conceal deficiencies.
According to the United Nations, “inadequate medical care frequently leads to deaths, LGBTQ people in custody suffer homophobic and transphobic harassment and abuse, basic sanitation is lacking, Black immigrants face unaffordable bonds and violence at disparately high rates, and ICE’s use of solitary confinement frequently meets the definition of torture.”
Detention was at a historically low level when Biden took office, largely as a result of the pandemic’s reduced immigration and enforcement.
Advocates for human rights saw that as an opportunity to end a necessary enforcement tool.
” On the date of your inauguration, fewer than 15, 000 people were in ICE detention. The groups wrote in their own words that this was an amazing opportunity to end a wasteful and violent system.
Detention abolitionists found some relief in the budget requests for 2023 and 2024, in which the administration requested a reduction in detention funding, as well as in the recommendations to close some detention centers with the most egregious violations.
” In an abrupt change of course, over the last two years, ICE has instead increased the number of people in custody. Despite numerous reports from advocates and service providers further highlighting the ineffectiveness of detention and the need for a different approach, the majority of facilities on ICE’s internal closure list remain open, they wrote.
According to administration officials, detention is essential for removal operations, and even more so given the increase in encounters at the southwest border.
Many of the migrants who are brought into the country have either already filed asylum applications that may not be heard in immigration court or have already been granted deportation orders. Other people can be processed through expedited removal, a quick-track procedure to deport foreign nationals who are apprehended at or close to the border within two weeks of entering the nation, which typically requires detention.
The Biden administration rescinded an expansion of expedited removal established by the Trump administration in 2022, which made any foreign national who was not able to demonstrate their legal standing or presence there for more than two years eligible for expedited removal.
Still, according to the American Immigration Council, more than 20, 000 migrants were placed in expedited removal , between May and December of 2023.
And only a small percentage of ICE detainees are removed quickly. According to TRAC, 34, 580 people were being held by ICE as of April 7.
A number of contentious measures, including digital tracking, are opposed by opponents of Trump’s policies but have significantly changed the Biden administration’s approach.
However, advocates and administration officials operate under two distinct conceptions of immigration policy: one that treats immigration policy as a broad administrative field with broad humanitarian effects, and the other as a hybrid legal and administrative matter subject to compulsion to perform physical tests and be dependent on tactical deterrence.
This suffering does not advance any logical policy objective. Detention does not offer a means of border processing that is both effective and moral, and it does not at all convey to migrants that they are welcome in the United States. It merely exists to advance the political goal of deterrence, which is cruel, cruel, and misguided, as even the most punitive detention have been shown not to deter people from seeking safety or a better life, wrote the groups.
