The Game of ICE - continued
PAY TO STAY
Sam Jones’ trip from Larimer County to Aurora took a brief detour in Park County, home of South Park, a trio of popular fourteeners and the Park County Jail, an ICE-contracted local prison — the same one that held dozens of the more than 200 workers netted in the Swift Meatpacking raid in Greeley last December.
“They cuffed us by the hands, the feet, around the waist, and they chained us to each other. And in the van, they chained us to the floor,” Jones says. “We were 50 in one cell the size of my kitchen. They gave us French fries and water.
“The people remain as they arrive. They didn’t allow them to get dressed before they left. They wore the same thing they had on when they were taken. I had been working, so I was more or less well dressed, but there were people there who were freezing. It was after the last snowfall; they were wearing tank tops and shorts. Others had been taken from bed” in their pajamas.
Jones spent a few days in Park County before he was hauled to Aurora, where he finally had a chance to bathe and was clothed in a fresh prison jumper. Almost immediately, though intermittently, Jones began collecting his observations, and transcribing the thoughts of others, in journal-type entries on loose sheets of white paper. (Most of them have been translated and are available at the end of this article.)
Although ICE contracts with Park County, the Aurora facility is their largest in the Rocky Mountain West. The prison, which first began detaining immigrants in May 1987, is owned and managed by the GEO Group, a Florida-based private company with more than 50 jails across the country, including one in U.S.-controlled Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and more in Canada, Australia, South Africa and the United Kingdom.
Formerly known as Wackenhut Corrections Corporation — which was charged with several alleged scandals stemming from abuse, neglect and sexual assault — GEO boasted $860.9 million in revenues last year alone. That pushed a 40 percent increase from 2005 and marks the most financially successful year for the company in its 22 years of operations.
The Aurora facility detains immigrants apprehended throughout Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho and Montana. During the past two decades, the jail has expanded its holding capacity from 150 beds to more than 400. As of July 10, the prison had processed 9,547 inmates since the beginning of last year.
One current lawsuit against the GEO Group alleges poor and inhumane medical care, a common gripe about the company and one that the federal government itself notes in a report recently released by the Government Accountability Office. The GAO reviewed “alien detention standards” at 23 facilities across the country, including Aurora’s, finding sporadic “deficiencies” in medical treatment, food service, recreation, access to legal materials and the processing of complaints as well as the use of “hold rooms,” physical force and overcrowding.
The Colorado branch of the American Civil Liberties Union also reports stories of overcrowding and poor medical care.
The GAO claimed to find only one “pervasive” problem throughout the system, however: telephone access. Against medical care and use of force, phone calls might not seem like such a big deal, except the best means for an inmate to submit complaints — grievances that “mostly involved legal access, conditions of confinement, property issues, human and civil rights, medical care, and employee misconduct at the facility” — is to call the Office of the Inspector General inside the Department of Homeland Security. Yet the “GAO encountered significant problems in making connections to…the OIG complaint hotline,” as well as consulates and pro-bono legal providers.
Jones says the misery that stemmed from a lack of communication with the outside world was matched only by the maddening dearth of information about his detention status.
“The big problem is the anguish of not knowing,” he says. “Psychologically, it’s terrible.”
Throughout the three weeks of Jones’ confinement in Aurora, he filed several requests that addressed the difficulty of making telephone calls. On his fifth day, he filed a grievance form with a simple request: “Phones are not working. I’m trying to call long distance (area code 970). I need to speak with my family and my lawyer. Please help me. Thank you.”
In a second request, filed five days after the first, he asked for clarification about why he was being held and when he would be released or deported. The next day, he received a response: He would be detained until his citizenship could be verified. Jones continued along the mostly fruitless course of attempting to contact the Mexican consulate and friends and family, including his wife and best friend, both back in Larimer County.
On April 27, Jones was suddenly released on a $1,500 bond.
START OVER
Upon entry to the Aurora detention facility, Sam Jones had the option of signing a form for voluntary return to his home country, but he declined. Some of the 50 detainees with whom he was transported signed return forms. Others opted to await an appearance before a federal immigration judge who rules on deportation status. Detainees in removal proceedings have access to presentations about their legal rights by the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network.
“People are feeling a tremendous amount of pressure, because they are told, ‘Look, you can either sign this and go back right now, or we’re going to take you to the detention center, where you are going to languish for weeks,’” says RMIAN’s Goehring. “Particularly for people who have never been in the criminal justice system, who haven’t been to a jail before, they will avoid that at any price.”
In November 2006, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General revealed detrimental problems in the detainee tracking system, called DACS, that includes both ICE-operated and private-run detention centers. Their audit found that “DACS and detention facility records did not always agree on the location of detainees” and that “ICE had no formal policy regarding what information it would provide to anyone inquiring about detainees in their custody.”
But the U.S. immigration detention system isn’t known for transparency. In May, the U.S. State Department invited Jorge Bustamante, the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants for the United Nations, to visit some of the country’s immigrant jails. But the Department of Homeland Security unexpectedly denied Bustamante entry to jails in Texas and New Jersey. The shafted official is expected to present a report on immigration issues, in the U.S., to the U.N. General Assembly later this summer.
Legal advocates say the government and private-prison operators should have nothing to hide from the public’s scrutiny.
“It’s always important to have a check and balance,” says Taylor Pendergrass, a staff attorney with the Colorado ACLU. “Especially when what you’re talking about is a deprivation of liberty, of taking someone’s freedom of movement entirely away and locking them up.
“Transparency benefits the people who are being detained. It also lets the public know that the government is treating those detainees in a way that’s consistent with the Constitution.”
Richard Stana, the GAO director for homeland security and justice issues, says it’s too early to tell what might result from their recent report.
“We will, after an appropriate period of time — in this case it may be several months — follow up with the agency with the actions that they’ve taken and try to assess whether that’s going to assess the problems we’ve found,” he says.
“Let’s hope that these deficiencies get corrected soon.”
The next GAO review of the Aurora facility is scheduled for October. Both a spokesman for the GEO Group and Aurora Warden Teresa Hunt referred questions about the problems outlined in the federal report to ICE.
ICE central region spokesman Carl Rusnok says the agency “places great value on the data and feedback” that it receives from the government watchdog, adding that ICE is establishing a weekly review of all detainee telephones to ensure they work, as well as an internal inspections group that will provide oversight during the detention standards review process.
Whatever changes may or may not occur will have no impact on Sam Jones’ future.
And he is still visibly shaken from his run-in with the U.S.’s amalgamated and defective immigration enforcement.
“For a broken car light, you are not a criminal. For being undocumented, you are not a criminal,” he says. “Yet the treatment is the same. They treated me as if I’d killed 10 people.”
Still, Jones isn’t expecting much from his next court hearing. The most he can realistically hope for is a delayed deportation and for authorities to ship him back to Mexico instead of Italy so that he will be closer to his family. But he doesn’t hold onto any delusions of freedom in the United States.
“I am illegal,” he says, lighting a Camel cigarette with his orange Bic. “Totally illegal.”
continued
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