Enforcement on Steroids: Homeland Security's Emerging Immigration Police State (Part II)

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted May 22, 2008.

This is the second in a two-part series looking at immigration enforcement. Readers can find the first installment here.

In a wildly successful disinformation campaign, immigration hard-liners have convinced many Americans that the United States is not serious about enforcing its immigration laws. It's a narrative that plays to people's distrust of government and anxieties about the loss of sovereignty in the era of globalization.

With heightened attention on immigration, that narrative allows conservative lawmakers to advance their larger agenda -- justifying calls for an expanded security state with more surveillance, increased police actions and an almost endless series of increases in Homeland Security spending.

In reality, though, it's a Big Lie, and it's hard to overstate just how big it is. Not only does the United States attempt to enforce its immigration laws, it does so with the authoritarian zeal one would expect to find in the most repressive police states.

Immigration and Custom Enforcement is the second-largest police agency in the country. According to official figures analyzed by the watchdog group Detention Watch Network, ICE rounds up more than a quarter of a million people each year, half of whom have never been charged with a crime. (Being in this country without papers is a civil violation; immigration violations are the only civil offenses for which people are regularly jailed.)

In 2006, almost 200,000 immigrants were deported. With more than 1.5 million people currently in immigration proceedings, a Washington Post analysis found that ICE "holds more detainees a night than Clarion Hotels have guests, operates nearly as many vehicles as Greyhound has buses and flies more people each day than do many small U.S. airlines."

According to a suit filed by the ACLU, children as young as 3 years old are detained along with their parents in adult prisons leased by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Before the lawsuit was settled by the government, children were dressed in prison garb and guards disciplined them by "threatening to separate them from their parents." According to Amnesty International, "Children are subjected to pepper spray, placed in solitary confinement, and routinely restrained in violation of international standards." ICE runs two "family detention centers," and the Los Angeles Times reported that the agency is planning to build three new ones.

Homeland Security is one of the largest jailers in the world, "but it behaves like a lawless local sheriff," Paromita Shah, an immigration expert with the National Lawyers Guild, told the New York Times. The 280,000 people detained by ICE each year, mostly poorer workers, have limited access to legal help; there is no public defender available to low-income immigrants. According to the Minnesota Star Tribune, 3 out of 4 are left, like characters in one of Kafka's dramas, to navigate a bewildering legal system on their own.

The United States holds around 350 detainees in its "legal black hole" in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and people around the world are rightly appalled by the lack of due process afforded them. Three times that many people, picked up within the United States, have been ordered deported but can't be returned to their country and are now facing the prospect of "indefinite detention" -- they could potentially die in prison if the Bush administration and its allies have their way. In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled that the government didn't have the authority to detain immigrants forever, but Homeland Security has resisted the order.

In addition to its own detention facilities -- they're not called "jails" because those being held include many who aren't charged with a crime -- ICE leases thousands of beds in 312 county and city prisons, where a majority of immigrant detainees are held.

These include dozens of private, for-profit prison facilities. The immigration detention system has proven a cash cow for companies like Halliburton, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group. "Housing federal detainees typically brings in more per 'man-day,' an industry term for what is earned per detainee," than they can get from state prison systems," wrote Leslie Berestein in the San Diego Union-Tribune.

See more stories tagged with: immigration, detention, dhs, ice, workplace enforcement

Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.

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