Report: ICE using unlisted detention centers for immigrant prisoners

Stephen C. Webster
Raw Story
Wednesday, Dec 23rd, 2009

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is holding an untold number
of people in secretively maintained detention facilities all over the
United States, according to a report set to be published next year in The Nation.

Many of the sites are unmarked and unlisted, going unnoticed in office parks and commercial zones, according to reporter Jacqueline Stevens.
The so-called ICE “subfield offices” are mainly used to
house prisoners in transfer and are not subject to the basic standards
applied to ICE and even military prisoners.

At a subfield office known as B-18, located near a Los Angeles
federal building, ICE keeps immigrant prisoners in “a barely
converted storage facility.”

“You actually walk down the sidewalk and into an underground
parking lot. Then you turn right, open a big door and voilà,
you’re in a detention center,” explained Ahilan
Arulanantham, an ACLU immigration attorney interviewed by The Nation.
“Without knowing where you were going, he said, “it’s
not clear to me how anyone would find it. What this breeds, not
surprisingly, is a whole host of problems concerning access to phones,
relatives and counsel.”

The report continued: “B-18, it turned out, was not a transfer
area from point A to point B but rather an irrationally revolving
stockroom that would shuttle the same people briefly to the local
jails, sometimes from 1 to 5 am, and then bring them back, shackled to
one another, stooped and crouching in overpacked vans. These transfers
made it impossible for anyone to know their location, as there would be
no notice to attorneys or relatives when people moved. At times the
B-18 occupants were left overnight, the frigid onslaught of forced air
and lack of mattresses or bedding defeating sleep. The hours of sitting
in packed cells on benches or the concrete floor meant further physical
and mental duress.”

One former prisoner who spoke with The Nation said that
when she inquired how long she would be held, guards laughed at her.
“I was thinking these people are going to put me and the other
people in a grinder and make sausages and sell them in the local
market,” she reportedly said.

A list of the 186 facilities is available here [PDF format].

Read the full report here. The next edition of The Nation is due out Jan. 4, 2010.