The administration is changing federal immigration detention and enforcement amid an effort to cut costs across the system and increase detention capacity to implement President Biden’s new asylum policy.
The bombshell cost-cutting plan was unveiled on Monday when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced the closure of the South Texas Family Residential Center, a 10-year-old detention center better known as Dilley.
Advocates are reporting other cost-saving measures – in particular, they are concerned that detainees can no longer make weekly phone calls, which for many represented their only connection to the outside world and legal representation.
While it’s unclear whether the need to expand border detention is driving all the changes, advocates say it’s a distinction without a difference.
“I think all of these measures are part of their shift to the right on immigration policy, both in terms of asylum and borders and detention, and what they consider to be the way forward politically, without any consideration for the harm it imposes on immigrant communities,” said Nayna Gupta, associate policy director at the National Immigrant Justice Center.
“So the question of whether this is related to last week’s order, you know, doesn’t really matter when we’ve seen this administration’s pattern of embracing immigration detention as a way of enforcing immigration laws and responding to challenges politically on immigration,” she added.
The Biden administration’s political challenge on immigration has only grown in the last three years – its efforts to strengthen border controls have been rejected by Republicans and criticized by the left.
The limited expanded legal avenues introduced by the Biden administration have also been denounced as an illegal invitation to foreign citizens by the right and as an insufficient humanitarian safety valve by immigrant advocates.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told a group of reporters that the administration has no plans to further expand these legal pathways through ports of entry due to “operational constraints.”according to NPR’s Sergio Martínez-Beltrán.
Administration officials, however, are pushing for an expansion of ICE’s arrest and detention capabilities.
That impulse is rooted in a disconnect officials see between the tasks required of ICE by Congress and the resources provided by lawmakers.
On a exclusive interview on NewsNation’s “Elizabeth Vargas Reports,” ICE acting director Patrick Lechleitner said the agency needs Congress to increase its funding.
According to ICE officials, the agency’s number of non-detainees — migrants released into the interior with deferred removal or pending cases — has grown to about 7.5 million people.
Non-detained people may be required to check in with ICE just once a year, or they may be included in the alternative to detention program, which primarily means electronic monitoring via bracelets or phone-like devices.
Lechleitner complained that ICE has relatively few agents to monitor this group.
“That’s like a probation officer supervising about 7,000 people. It’s nonsense. It’s really crazy. It’s so big and it’s unsustainable,” he said on NewsNation. “We don’t have enough people to arrest our way out of this situation.”
NewsNation is owned by Nexstar Media Group, which also owns The Hill.
These complaints strike at the heart of fundamental divisions between the Biden administration and immigrant advocates, who see a threat in an expanding immigration enforcement system.
“The experience of immigrant communities is that the more we inflate and expand a punitive system of immigration enforcement, the more permanent this approach to immigration becomes,” Gupta said.
“So these changes, whether you want to think they are temporary or not, contribute to an bloated law enforcement system that costs American taxpayers a ton of money, imposes irreparable harm on immigrant communities, and does nothing to actually address the humanitarian challenges in general. the border where they face political pressure,” he added.
And advocates who work where ICE meets the road say the agency’s changes — whether tied to the asylum proclamation or not — are worsening outcomes for foreign nationals caught up in the system.
In the closure announcement Monday, ICE officials stressed that Dilley was the system’s most expensive facility and that by eliminating it, the agency would generate an expansion of the detention system to 1,600 beds.
“They are saying [detention center operators], ‘reduce your cost’. And what does that mean? ‘Lower the standard of living,’” said Maru Mora-Villalpando, a community organizer with La Resistencia, a group that focuses on abuses at the Northwest ICE Processing Center (NWIPC) in Tacoma, Washington.
“Every time someone dies or we hear about a case of medical negligence, the first thing we see from ICE is the same statement. ‘We take the well-being and health of those in our custody very seriously’ – I’m paraphrasing that, but they always send the same template response. However, you see the conditions,” continued Mora-Villalpando. “It’s not that. So for ICE, it’s always claiming it doesn’t have enough money and it keeps asking Congress for more money, and it gets more money.”
She told The Hill that in addition to cutting free weekly phone calls at NWIPC, severe cuts to cleaning staff and detainee work programs led to worsening sanitary conditions at the facility.
“What ICE under the Biden administration is signaling is that when it comes to people’s freedom, their lives and their rights, there is an end result. And they are more interested in getting the best return possible, regardless of which basic rights are violated,” said Gupta. “They are willing to cut off access to telephones so that detained people can call their loved ones in the name of getting more beds. and detention facilities.
In addition to denouncing these conditions, advocates are concerned that draconian immigration enforcement is being normalized.
“Immigrants have always been, since I’ve been here in the US, the scapegoat. One way or another. As long as you are an immigrant and a person of color, you will be the scapegoat. All the problems [are] because of you,” Mora-Villalpando said.
“It’s all about us. The scapegoat. Scapegoating our community, and it’s worked,” she continued. “Really, a lot of people who vote want to see this because it’s a lot easier to blame a specific community than it is to really understand and make a critical analysis of the root causes of the different problems we have as a country and as a community.”
Such political scapegoating, Gupta added, is uncharacteristic of a Biden administration “operating from a position of fear.”
“If the Biden administration operated from a position of confidence and strength, rather than fear, then they would be able to present an agenda to defeat Donald Trump without throwing the most vulnerable, marginalized and powerless communities under the bus,” said Gupta . . “Bullters attack the most vulnerable because they are afraid, and that is what these actions are about.”
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
