Homeland Security Pledges to Reform Nightmarish Immigration Detention System

Posted by Staff, RestoreFairness.org at 1:34 PM on October 9, 2009.

This week, Department of Homeland Security unveiled an ambitious plan to reform its immigration detention system, a largely unregulated network that includes 312 county and city prisons, many of whom have been accused of health and security violations. That's what Breakthrough's powerful new campaign Restore Fairness wants to keep seeing - a government that is restoring due process back to a broken immigration system. At the campaign's centerpiece is a 9 minute video Restore Fairness, produced in partnership with an amazing range of 26 leading organizations spanning human rights, immigration, and community based groups, that features interviews with influential Members of Congress, immigration judges, civil society leaders, and ordinary families affected by harsh immigration laws.

Watch the video:

Looking at the immigration landscape in the aftermath of 9-11, the campaign calls for a reshaping of immigration laws that often arrest people without warrants, hold them in inhumane detention conditions, and deport them without a fair trial. Like Ana Galindo and her husband Walter Chavez, legal permanent residents with a 10-year-old U.S. citizen son, who were raided, without a warrant in their home by armed immigration officers who finally admitted they were looking for the wrong person, traumatizing their son for months afterward. Or June Everett who lost her sister, a 53 year old grandmother, to immigration detention because of alleged medical negligence. Or Jean Pierre Kamwa, a torture survivor from Cameroon who came to the U.S. seeking freedom and shelter from persecution, but instead was greeted with 5 months in mandatory detention till he was ultimately granted asylum.

These stories make up the fabric of a broken immigration system, one which will sustain an estimated 440,000 detainees this year at a cost of 1.7 billion dollars. Watch Restore Fairness and tell Congress to fix a broken immigration system now. And keep up to date with upcoming immigration news on the Restore Fairness blog.

As the Chair of the House Subcommittee on immigration, Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren says in the video, "Everybody in America under our Constitution is entitled to due process of law and we’ve fallen short in the due process arena when it comes to the whole immigration system. If we’re not going to adhere to the basic standards that are in the Constitution, everybody is at risk."

Tagged as: immigration, detentions, dhs