Immigrant Detention in the United States: Hope and Change, or More of the Same?
Focusing on two detention facilities in Essex County, New Jersey—one privately owned and operated (Delaney Hall), the other a county jail that leases bed space to ICE and holds more than half of the 2,300+ detainees in the state—the report finds a significant gap between ICE’s official standards and the rhetoric of reform, and what actually transpires in the facilities. Among the problems highlighted: inadequate access to lawyers, and insufficient lawyer-client confidentiality and due process rights; unacceptable food quality; cold temperatures and insufficient blankets during the winters; poor response to requests for medical attention; numerous reported incidents of verbal abuse and mistreatment; and prohibitively expensive charges for the use of public phones.
While there is hope that Karnes will prove different, the fact that the GEO Group, a for-profit prison corporation with a history of lawsuits and allegations of abuse, will manage and operate the facility is cause for serious concern. But even if things turn out to be different in this instance, many, like Detention Watch Network’s Andrea Black, worry that Karnes will be a Potemkin village of sorts, something used by authorities to obscure the larger and ugly reality embodied by a system that holds more than 34,000 immigrants on any given day.
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