A major human rights organization has issued a report criticizing the Immigration and Naturalization Service for detaining aliens in jails where they are mixed with the criminal population and subject to abuse. The report has been released by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and is linked on our web site at http://www.visalaw.com/docs/.

The report states that the INS is now holding more than 60% of its 15,000 detainees in local jails throughout the country. According to HRW, the agency has handed over control of its detainees to local sheriffs and other jail officials without ensuring that basic international and national standards requiring humane treatment and adequate conditions are met. Some of the detainees are being subjected to physical mistreatment and grossly inadequate conditions of confinement. HRW is careful to note that the INS detainees studied in the report are not being held for criminal matters and the INS has simply contracted with local jails to hold the detainees. Some of the detainees, in fact, have simply applied for asylum from their home countries.

HRW interviewed more than 200 INS detainees in fourteen local jails in seven states. The report's authors also received hundreds of letters and telephone calls from detainees around the country. HRW interviewed INS officials, jails officials, immigration judges, immigrant rights advocates and immigration attorneys and obtained documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act, legal documents and press reports.

The report made the following findings:

- The INS has failed to provide oversight or to insist on humane conditions and treatment in the local jails with which it contracts to hold INS detainees. There are no laws, federal regulations, or national INS policy memoranda governing how local jails holding INS detainees should be inspected and monitored. Once detainees are placed in jails, INS contact with detainees is usually infrequent, even though they remain the INS' ultimate responsibility.

- Jail officials state that INS detainees "are treated just the same as regular inmates" even though INS detainees are held for administrative, not criminal purposes and should not be subject to punitive or rehabilitative treatment.

- The INS has begun to institute detention standards in its Service Processing Centers (SPCs) and contract facilities, but the standards are not being implemented at local jails, where the majority of INS detainees are currently held and where future increases in detention will be absorbed.

- Medical and dental care a substandard in many of the jails holding detainees.

- Access for legal representatives, family and friends is severely curtailed by strict jail rules that are inappropriate for immigration detainees. As a result, many detainees do not have legal representation which undermines their ability to present their cases and removes a critical element of monitoring treatment of INS detainees in the local jails.

- Jailsstaff are often unable to communicate with INS detainees due to language barriers.

The Human Rights Watch report listed a number of examples of problems. In one case in Florida's Jackson County Jail, INS detainees alleged that jail officials administered electric shocks on shackled detainees in July 1998. The report also listed the convictions of guards at the Union County Jail in Union, New Jersey for physically abusing INS detainees (we reported on this conviction earlier this summer).

Human Rights Watch also criticized the INS for transferring detainees on the basis of bed availability alone rather than based on a detainee's family ties or legal representation. Individuals taken into custody in New York, for example, may be sent to a jail in Pennsylvania and then transferred to an INS facility in Louisiana. Detainees are frequently transferred from jail to jail often without an opportunity to provide appropriate notice to family members. And attorneys are frequently not notified that their clients have been transferred.

HRW's report also found that detainees often suffer severe emotional distress as a result of the treatment outlined above. Some have become suicidal and, rather than receiving appropriate mental health services, are treated instead as a disciplinary problem by jail officials. Others were reportedly so ashamed of being held in a jail that they did not contact their families.

HRW expressed significant concern for detainees who cannot be deported because they are stateless or because their own country will not accept them back. These detainees are held indefinitely, theoretically getting a life sentence for an offense that may be as minor as overstaying a tourist visa.

The cost of holding INS detainees at local jails can cost as much as $20,000 per year per detainee. Yet despite these costs, HRW reports that the INS has been slow to develop release programs or to utilize alternatives to detention that already exist. For example, a program to allow the supervised release of detainees has shown promising results in New York. More than 80% of detainees are showing up for their court appearances and the cost to taxpayers is a fraction of the cost of detaining them, presumably more than offsetting the cost to society of the 20% who do not show up.

INS Commissioner Doris Meissner stated that she welcomed the report's recommendations, but noted that a fast rise in detentions relating to increased INS enforcement efforts have forced the INS in the position of holding detainees in facilities it does not control.

Meissner went on to say, "Ideally, we would like to house all detainees in INS-run facilities because they are the ones over which we have the greatest control of conditions. This is not a viable option, however, given the growth in demand for bed space and budgetary constraints we face." According to Meissner, the number of INS detainees has risen from 6,600 to 16,000 in the last three years. 9,000 of these people are in jail facilities.

Meissner denied that the agency is "shirking" its responsibilities to ensure proper treatment of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers. But she did state that the INS is revising its jail selection and inspection standards. Of course, one might ask the basic question - should the INS even be detaining so many people when it cannot ensure that basic human rights are being observed?