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Report Shows Abuses of Women in Immigration Detention Centers

By Jeralyn

A new report by the University of Arizona reveals the substandard medical treatment afforded to women at immigration detention centers.

The study concluded that immigration authorities were too aggressive in detaining the women, who rarely posed a flight risk, and that as a result, they experienced severe hardships, including a lack of prenatal care, treatment for cancer, ovarian cysts and other serious medical conditions, and, in some cases, being mixed in with federal prisoners.

A sample story:

[A] woman being held at the Central Arizona Detention Center in Florence who experienced excruciating abdominal pain for months after she had been forced to undergo female genital mutilation in West Africa was told by the center’s staff to “exercise and watch her diet,” her lawyer at the time, Raha Jorjani, said. After nearly six months, the woman, who had been convicted of a nonviolent crime, was taken to a hospital where an ultrasound revealed a cyst the size of a five-month-old fetus, Ms. Jorjani said.

Immigration officials then suddenly released the woman with no money or health insurance to treat the cyst, Ms. Jorjani said.

Nationally, 3,000 are being held in immigration detention centers pending deportation. The study examined three centers in Arizona, home state to our new Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano. [More...]

ICE officials deny the charges. Yet,

The director of border research for the institute on women, Nina Rabin, an immigration lawyer who led the study, countered that interviews with detainees, former detainees and their lawyers corroborated a pattern of endemic mistreatment.

And Ms. Rabin said she had spoken with immigrant advocacy groups around the United States, many of whom stated that mistreatment of women at the centers was not unusual.

The centers which were the subject of the study are not ICE facilities, but those of the Pinal County Sheriff’s Department and the Corrections Corporation of America.

It's not a new problem:

The immigration department has been under increasing pressure to improve conditions at its detention centers. The federal Government Accountability Office and the inspector general’s office at the Department of Homeland Security have each released reports in the last three years criticizing standards at such centers, many of which are operated by private contractors.

President Obama promised the Latinos he would be their champion. This isn't an issue of Latino and immigrant rights, it's an issue of human rights.

Another problem:

Last September, the immigration department announced plans to improve conditions at its detention centers, but the new rules will not fully take effect until 2010. Meanwhile, Congress has been weighing whether to impose its own requirements on the department after a New York Times article on immigrants who died in federal custody.

Let's hope Obama directs his new HSA chief to look into this report immediately and order any remedial action. The first step might be to cancel the contract with Corrections Corporations of America, the private prison system. Another would be to move up the 2010 date. A third might be to allow these women to remain at liberty on bond pending a final removal hearing. A fourth might be to ensure they have access to counsel who can advise them on topics like whether they are eliglble for asylum.

With Obama's huge staff, these are the kinds of issues that need to be nipped in the bud with a simple directive: "This is not acceptable." And his new HSA chief must make it a top priority. Refusing needed medical treatment to an ill prisoner is a human rights violation. We cannot restore ourselves as a leader of the free world when we allow these critical abuses to continue.

Obama needs to read the study personally and then send Napolitano out in the field to determine her own assessment of it. I can't think of a more helpless group than non-dangerous Hispanic and Latino women in jail-- if even one of of these stories is true, this needs to be acted on immediatley.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on January 21, 2009 (boomark / email).