Conditions in ICE facilities must be investigated
The people of New Mexico and the nation deserve answers about conditions in facilities detaining immigrants. We cannot sit by while the federal government and its agents — whether government employees or private contractors — mistreat people. Cruel treatment of refugees and immigrants must be stopped. It violates the very nature of what this country is supposed to represent.
On Sunday, New Mexican reporter Jens Gould wrote about the conditions that Cuban detainees are describing at holding facilities in New Mexico. Two Cuban asylum-seekers being held at the Cibola County Correctional Center told the newspaper that authorities are holding people in solitary confinement to punish them for hunger strikes at detention centers in Cibola and Otero counties. The detainees also reported that the guards had insulted them and made racist remarks.
These latest accusations are on top of what we already know has happened in holding facilities in our state.
Earlier, a transgender asylum-seeker from El Salvador died in an El Paso hospital after spending two months at the Otero County Processing Facility. Last year, a transgender woman from Honduras died while in custody in Cibola County.
In July, asylum-seekers from India participated in a hunger strike at Otero that lasted 75 days. Last month, a group of detainees staged sit-ins at the Otero center and at least two people tried to kill themselves.
These are desperate people, an indication that conditions are hardly humane.
Our elected officials are calling for answers, with U.S. Sens. Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich on Monday asking federal authorities step in to investigate the conditions and oversight of immigrant detainees in these facilities. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham demanded last month that Immigration and Customs Enforcement end “inhumane treatment” at facilities in the state. Both the senators and the governor took their concerns to the Department of Homeland Security. The senators wrote to acting U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf, expressing “deep concern about the reports of inhumane treatment” at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers. New Mexicans should appreciate that their senators and governor oppose the ill-treatment of immigrants, especially at facilities operated with our tax dollars. We, in effect, are subsidizing cruelty.
We urge both the senators and the governor to look for additional methods of curtailing rogue actors, these guards and their supervisors who treat individuals, whose only crime is to come to the United States in search of a better life, with cruelty. Udall last month introduced legislation to create an independent ombudsman, a way to bring greater accountability and transparency. That would be a welcome reform. But we need to do more.
A Brookings Institution report published in September urged states to use oversight powers to improve conditions in facilities — whether ICE detention centers or shelters operated by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement.
The idea is that states could make a difference “… by enacting regulations to improve facility conditions, bolster transparency, protect whistleblowers, and draw attention to gaps in federal policy, state leaders have an opportunity to craft more humane immigration policies and processes and improve our immigration system from the ground up.” (The report is available at brookings.edu/ research/how-states-can-improve-americasimmigration-system.)
The federal government is failing in its responsibility, both in managing the entry of refugees and immigrants and later, in how it cares for men, women and children in its custody. Unless we stop this betrayal of American values, this failure will belong to all of us in these United States of America.