Corporate Responsibility Archives

Report: Contemporary Immigration Detention Practices in the United States (2010)

June 11, 2015 By Robert Goodis Leave a Comment

This report, prepared in 2010, documents the state of United States immigration detention practices, focusing on Northwest Detention Center – run by The GEO Group, Inc. – and on the T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility – run by the Corrections Corporation of America.

The report was prepared by Robert Goodis as his Senior Project in fulfillment of the requirements for his Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and Human Rights at Bard College. The report concludes that further research is necessary to reach any viable sociology-based recommendations, and it is based on these findings that The Goodis Center has continued researching immigration detention as one of our primary areas of focus. While the report was unable to point to a sociological key to reforming immigration detention, it does unveil systemic problems in immigration detention across the United States and broadly offer the insight that alternatives to detention should be used whenever possible.

An excerpt from Chapter Three – Case Study: T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility, Williamson County, TX, and the Corrections Corporation of America is included below. The full report is available for viewing and download here.

Excerpt from Chapter Three – Case Study: T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility, Williamson County, TX, and the Corrections Corporation of America

T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility, T. Don Hutto Residential Center, Immigration Detention, Detention Center

Read the rest of the report here.

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………….. 1
Focusing on Asylum-Seekers, Asylees, and Refugees………………………………………… 1
Chapter One………………………………………………………………………………………. 3
A Short Introduction to Refugee Policy and the Definitions of Refugee & Asylum-Seeker ……. 3
A Brief Historical Survey of the Role of Refugees and Asylum-Seekers in U.S. Legislation …… 14
A Survey and Summary of Select Laws, Doctrines, and Jurisprudence Affecting Refugee and
Asylum-Seeker Detention in the United States ……………………………………………………………… 17
The Response-Time of the United States in Changing Laws to Abide by International
Standards ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 34
Chapter Two – Case Study: Northwest Detention Center …………………………………………………… 36
The History and Purpose of the Northwest Detention Center and The GEO Group, Inc. …….. 36
Facility Design, Daily Living, and Detainee Demographics ……………………………………………. 38
Issues Facing Detainees at NWDC ………………………………………………………………………………. 41
Due process and grievances at NWDC ……………………………………………………………………… 41
Food, living conditions, medical care, and visitation at NWDC …………………………………… 48
Punishment and treatment by guards ………………………………………………………………………… 55
Administration and Oversight Issues at NWDC …………………………………………………………….. 59
Chapter Three – Case Study: T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility, Williamson County, TX,
and the Corrections Corporation of America ………………………………………………………………….. 66
The History and Purpose of the T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility and the Corrections
Corporation of America ……………………………………………………………………………………………… 66
Facility Design, Daily Living, and Detainee Demographics ……………………………………………. 71
Issues Facing Detainees at Hutto …………………………………………………………………………………. 78
Due process and grievances at Hutto ………………………………………………………………………… 78
Food, living conditions, visitation, medical care, and education at Hutto ………………………. 83
Punishment and treatment by guards ………………………………………………………………………… 93
Administration and Oversight Issues at Hutto ……………………………………………………………….. 97
Chapter Four – Analysis, Conclusions, and Recommendations …………………………………………. 102
The Human Rights, Social, and Legal Implications of Contemporary Detention Practices … 102
The Human Rights, Social, and Legal Implications of Contemporary Detention Practices as
Analyzed through a Sociological Approach ………………………………………………………………… 114
Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 125
Acronyms and Abbreviations ……………………………………………………………………………………….. 151

Abstract:

“Contemporary Immigration Detention Practices in the United States: A Study in Sociology and Human Rights” is a study on the detention and incarceration of immigrants, with particular focus on the effects and implications of detaining refugees and asylum-seekers, in the United States. The study reports on two specific detention facilities—the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington, and the T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility (a.k.a. T. Don Hutto Residential Center) in Taylor, Texas—as sociological case-studies, primarily presented as legal briefs, to explore how contemporary detention practices relate to the legal structure and ideals established by domestic and international law, including international human rights law. Through an analysis of how current practices satisfy or miss ideal standards set by laws, declarations, policies, and other such guidelines, this study determines that current detention practices constitute a clear and detrimental case of systemic human rights violations. While a brief sociological exploration of the trends and conditions in immigration detention offers various theories which may explain—and eventually go into forming an effective remedy for—these violations, this study can only determine that more research needs to be compiled in order to reach any valid sociological conclusions.

Read the full report, courtesy of the Bard College Digital Commons.

The report is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Browse our archive of full reports and essays.

ICE TO OPEN NEW IMMIGRATION DETENTION FACILITY IN TEXAS THIS VALENTINE’S DAY

February 12, 2012 By Robert Goodis Leave a Comment

When I revamped The Goodis Center’s website, I decided to also wipe out my blog and start over from scratch. Having done that, this marks my first entry on the new Goodis Center blog. The subject of this inaugural blogpost is a new immigration detention facility in Karnes County, Texas, which Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will be opening this Tuesday, Valentine’s Day. How romantic…

In early 2010, I began an intensive study of documented human rights abuses in United States immigration detention facilities, focusing on one facility near Tacoma, WA, and another near Taylor, TX. My research is ongoing, but I hope to update and expand the report over the next few months and release it to the public in due time. Until that research is complete, I’ll refrain from making too many broad statements about the current state of this nation’s immigration enforcement practices.

What I will say, however, is that the Karnes County detention center merits a critical eye from the public.

ICE is touting the new facility—the first facility designed and constructed with consideration for the agency’s 2009 commitment to reform the immigration detention system and shift away from its longtime reliance on jails and jail-like facilities—as a model for reform. That 2009 public commitment came after years of independent and governmental reviews raised one red flag after another, reporting inconsistencies between facilities and varying levels of human rights abuses throughout the immigration detention system nationwide. Considering the gravity of the situation, and the amount of time ICE has had to effect reform, we should expect nothing less than a model facility.

Unfortunately, ICE has a history of failing to live up to their promises. The T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility opened in 2006 after ICE retrofitted a county jail in Texas to become a first-of-its-kind family detention center. The idea behind the detention center, which is one of the subjects of my ongoing study, was to keep detained families together, rather than separating children from their parents and spouses from their partners.

In reality, ICE and the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA)—a private corrections corporation that maintains prisons and detention centers across the country—had no idea what they were getting into. Detaining small children in a former county jail proved troublesome and, as many independent reviews cited, dangerous for the children. Guards were not trained to deal with children, and the resulting circumstances outraged the local community to the point of protests outside the detention center’s gates chanting “T. Don Hutto has got to go!”

Admitting their mistake, ICE closed their celebrated family detention center and reopened it as a women-only detention center in 2009, again touting the place as a model for reform. A short time later, allegations of rape and other abuses began to surface. While one guard was arrested and convicted for multiple assaults, many questions remain as to the viability of the detention center and its place as a “model facility.”

Given these trends, there’s no telling whether ICE has learned from its mistakes, or whether it’s just going to keep making more of them. While the new facility in Karnes County is being lauded by ICE officials for moving decisively away from jails and jail-like facilities, many questions remain. As a recent release from Human Rights First explains:

In October 2011 Human Rights First released its report, “Jails and Jumpsuits: Transforming the US Immigration Detention System – A Two-Year Review.” In it were recommendations for ICE’s successful switch to this new detention model. It included the following findings:

More “normalized” conditions in detention are actually touted as best practice in the corrections context and can help increase safety inside a facility;

Despite its 2009 reform commitments, the United States continues to hold the overwhelming majority of its nearly 400,000 detained asylum seekers and other civil immigration law detainees in jails and jail-like facilities across the country;

A full 50 percent of immigration detainees are held in actual jails, a proportion that has not decreased in the past two years;

U.S. taxpayers will spend more than $2 billion to maintain this system in 2012 – more than 28 times ICE’s budget for more cost-effective Alternatives to Detention, which save more than $110 per detainee per day; and

Many of the individuals whom ICE will hold at the new facility are appropriate candidates for Alternatives to Detention or community-based release programs.

New Karnes County Immigration Detention Facility Touted as Model for Reform
(emphasis added)

Furthermore, groups such as Human Rights First which will have representatives inspecting the new facility on Valentine’s Day are already raising some serious concerns over the new facility, particularly in relation to the detainees’ due process rights.

Karnes County is located one hour from San Antonio and two hours from Austin. Detainees at Karnes will reportedly have their removal cases heard via video-conference rather than in person, because there will be no immigration judges on site. Legal service providers in Austin and San Antonio are under-resourced to meet the legal needs of hundreds of new detainees in the region.

“If Congress is going to fund detention and removal, they also need to provide funding for immigration judges to hear their cases – in person – and for detainees to receive basic legal information through the Legal Orientation Program at all detention facilities, including Karnes,” says Epstein. “While we welcome the development of a facility with conditions more appropriate for civil immigration detainees, ICE should not open any new facility without immigration judges in place, and adequately funded legal resources available.”

ibid

That said, here’s hoping ICE got it right this time.

The Karnes facility will be maintained by ICE and the GEO Group, Inc., another private corrections and detention company similar to the CCA.

If you want to learn more about the facilities mentioned in this blog, stay tuned for updates on the book I’m preparing on this subject. In the meantime, a quick Google search will get you a ton of results. Or, if you’re more moved by video, check out The Least of These, a documentary about the former family detention center in Texas.

“When Texas Executes One” : Occupy Wall Street and the Effects of Corporate Personhood

November 4, 2011 By Megan Towey 1 Comment

The extension of rights, privileges, and power under the mask of “corporate personhood” and its inherent application of the equal protection clause has turned industries into collections of Frankenstein’s monsters on track to devour their creators. In the midst of economic turbulence, demonstrators at Occupy Wall Street and around the globe have taken issue with the trend wherein corporate personhood extends rights traditionally reserved for natural persons to corporations, often without imposing the same standards of accountability traditionally applied to natural persons. But what exactly are “corporate personhood” and the rights granted by it? And to what extent can a corporation be held accountable for its actions? The answer to this question is soon to come.

The Supreme Court has recently agreed to hear the Kiobel vs. Royal Dutch Petroleum (Shell)case, which will determine whether or not corporations can be held responsible for human rights violations overseas. This case involves the Ogoni people of Nigeria who, after demanding an end to the oil development that was destroying their region, were tortured and executed by Shell in collusion with the Nigerian government. Now, if Shell is found to be liable, corporations will have a new layer of responsibility, further completing their status as persons.

But rather than to delve into a discussion on morality in the post-industrial age, let’s consider the history of corporate personhood and how it came to be. In the 1886 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case regarding the taxation of corporations, the Supreme Court declared that corporations can be considered persons under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. But more relevant and problematic to the Occupy protesters is the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, which gave corporations the right to give exorbitant funds to political campaigns without disclosure. The Citizens United case overturned the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, which prohibited corporations from “electioneering” – driving politics with corporate funding, asserting that the Campaign Reform Act was a violation of the First Amendment rights of corporations. Strengthening the corporatocratic behemoth behind modern politics, the ruling had unquestionable influence in the 2010 election cycle, in which spending from outside groups quadrupled from 2006 levels and nearly half of all campaign donations were provided by only ten corporations, according to Public Citizen.

However, the Occupy protesters believe that it is unfair that corporations can use their wealth to buy louder voices and bigger influence in the political sphere. In a recent interview with NPR, Professor John Witt of Yale Law School summarized the protesters’ opinion that “the differences…between natural persons and metaphysical persons or corporations might be a good reason to distinguish between natural persons and corporations for purposes of regulating speech.” In the spirit of Occupy Wall Street, the one-year anniversary of theCitizens United decision sparked a flurry of small demonstrations in January 2011.

The upcoming Kiobel decision, however, could be a significant step towards restoring corporate responsibility, or a tragic step towards unchecked corporate power and rights. If corporations are to enjoy the benefits of legal personhood and equal protection, they must also be held accountable for human rights violations and other criminal acts.

When I visited Zuccotti Park, the epicenter of the Occupy protests, on Oct. 15, I saw a few signs sporting this slogan: “I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one.” Even though a metaphysical execution, corporations have been “executed” for violating human rights laws. A key example is IG Farben, a German chemical conglomerate which was dissolved after WWII because of its role in the Holocaust and persistent widespread corruption. IG Farben worked closely with the Nazi government to secure chemical plants in the invaded countries of Poland and Czechoslovakia during WWII. Additionally, IG Farben held the patent for Zyklon B, the chemical used in gas chambers at the Auschwitz and Majdanek concentration camps, which killed roughly 1.2 million people. At the Nuremberg trials, 13 IG Farben executives were imprisoned for the war crimes committed by their company. A few years later, the conglomerate was forcibly split up by the Allies into four smaller companies. Although a corporation cannot literally be “executed,” the break-up of IG Farben may serve as a guide for future human rights violations committed by corporations. With the outcome of the Kiobel case, hopefully, we will see the beginning of a new era of corporate responsibility.

Report: Contemporary Immigration Detention Practices in the United States (2010)

Excerpt from Chapter Three – Case Study: T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility, Williamson County, TX, and the Corrections Corporation of America

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract:

Read the full report, courtesy of the Bard College Digital Commons.

ICE TO OPEN NEW IMMIGRATION DETENTION FACILITY IN TEXAS THIS VALENTINE’S DAY

“When Texas Executes One” : Occupy Wall Street and the Effects of Corporate Personhood

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