Tuesday 2nd March, 2010
A demonstration outside the Varick Immigrant Detention Center in lower Manhattan last Thursday should not have been necessary. The protesters planned to demonstrate opposition to the federal facility - the only one of its kind in New York City - that closed that day. Instead, a snowstorm forced the group of local immigrant rights advocates to head indoors to the New York University Law School to launch its national campaign for detainee rights. The campaign - dubbed "Dignity, Not Detention: Preserving Human Rights and Restoring Justice" - urges the Obama administration to address the broken immigration system and to end once and for all the profit-making immigrant detention system that is tearing families apart.
Today should have been a day of celebration - the closure of an immigration prison that has fallen short of even minimal detention standards," said Alina Das, supervising attorney of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at NYU Law School.
Instead, Das added, the federal government chose to ignore possible alternatives to detention and decided to transfer the Varick detainees to a New Jersey county jail making conditions even more difficult for them.
"The federal government chose an inhumane and unworkable path - to transfer 250 New Yorkers into a different cage, even further away from their families, their communities and legal support," Das said.
Immigration officials argue that the move will save money. But advocates disagree, pointing out that detention costs as much as $100 a day per person, while alternatives such as ankle bracelets and voluntary check-ins cost as little as $12 a day.
The participants in last Thursday's event are part of the Detention Watch Network, a national coalition that educates the public and policymakers about the immigration detention and deportation system.
The detention system, the activists charge, is an utter disaster. Each year, more than 300,000 immigrants are "funneled through a secretive web of over 350 immigrant detention centers," they said. One of these was the privately operated Varick center.
More than 80% of the detainees go through the immigration system without a lawyer, the group said. Many are denied their day in court because of arbitrary detention laws and policies that limit judicial discretion.
The horrific conditions detained immigrants endure have been well-documented in the press. Mistreatment by guards, solitary confinement, denial of medical attention, limited or no access to their families, lawyers and the outside world make for a veritable human rights scandal.
"In many cases," the activists said, "these conditions have proven fatal: Since 2003, a reported 107 people have died in immigration custody."
Immigrants along with their families and advocates are demanding that the Department of Homeland Security release all those who were detained at Varick. After all, most of them have done nothing wrong and many are simply awaiting an administrative decision by the government on their immigration case.
"When the government decided to close Varick, the question it should have asked is not where people should now be detained, but why they are being detained at all," Das said. "It's an ugly and costly system that should not exist. No one should be detained when alternatives are available."
Source: nydailynews.com
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