America's Secret ICE Castles - The Nation

America's Secret ICE Castles from The Nation (Online)

"If you don't have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but you think he's illegal, we can make him disappear." Those chilling words were spoken by James Pendergraph, then executive director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Office of State and Local Coordination, at a conference of police and sheriffs in August 2008.

RAD - read the article if for no other reason than you don't hear references to the 1978 movie "Ice Castles" everyday.

Immigration Detention System Lapses Detailed - NYTimes.com

Immigration Detention System Lapses Detailed - NYTimes.com

Growing numbers of noncitizens, including legal immigrants, are held unnecessarily and transferred heedlessly in an expensive immigration detention system that denies many of them basic fairness, a bipartisan study group and a human rights organization concluded in reports released jointly on Wednesday.

RAD~This is not news to immigration attorneys or the families of immigrants - but thanks Nina Bernstein, the Constitution Project, and Human Rights Watch for putting this system, and its flaws, in the public eye. 

BBC NEWS | Americas | US 'to cut immigrant detention'

BBC NEWS Americas US 'to cut immigrant detention'


US officials are expected to announce plans that would allow illegal immigrants not considered a threat to be taken out of jails, reports say.

The new policy would list immigrants according to the risk they may pose, the Wall Street Journal reports.

ICE Deports another US Citizen

Here is a link to a story in the Charlotte Observer (you can also see it on the BIBDaily). Sometimes you see only what you want to see. Mr. Lyttle (the "victim" in this sordid matter) did not cover himself in glory either...but it seems like doing the job correctly in this case was just a "Lyttle" too much for ICE.

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/topstories/story/917007.html

http://www.bibdaily.com/

The ICE Death Roster

The fact that the Dept. Of Homeland Security couldn't account for 10 percent of the detainees that died in their custody is troubling. What is going to be more difficult is if and when we discover that a majority of the persons who died in US custody were denied or delayed medical treatment for chronic or emergent medical conditions and that their deaths were likely preventable.

from the NY Times:

What Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials call “the death roster” stands at 104 since October 2003, up from the 90 that were on the list the agency gave to Congress this spring.

The latest search for records began late last month, officials said, when Freedom of Information litigation by the American Civil Liberties Union uncovered one of the 10 deaths that had gone unreported — that of Felix Franklin Rodriguez-Torres, 36, an Ecuadorean who settled in New York and died of testicular cancer on Jan. 18, 2007, after being detained two months at an immigration jail run for profit by the Corrections Corporation of America in Eloy, Ariz.

What is -- but what should never be.

Detained and Abused --

The NY Times editorial highlights a new report from the National Immigration Law Center. The report presents a none too flattering potrait of the immigration detention system run by the Department of Homeland Security's ICE bureau. To see the report itself click:


http://www.nilc.org/immlawpolicy/arrestdet/A-Broken-System-2009-07.pdf

on another musical note (see Public Enemy reference in previous post) is the NYT editorial staff making an allusion to the 1969 Led Zeppelin song "Dazed and Confused" by titling the editorial Detained and Abused? If not it is an odd title.