The University of Arizona Alumnus / Winter 2010
Unseen Prisoners
A Report on Women in Immigration Detention Facilities in Arizonaby Margaret Regan
Maria slipped illegally over the border from Mexico into the U.S. when she was 17. For the next eight years, she and her family followed the harvests, picking lettuce, apples, or cotton, whatever was in season and needed picking.
But as a young adult, Maria got involved with an abusive boyfriend. One day, in a rage, the man kidnapped her, beat her up, and then, to punish her further, gave her up to the Border Patrol. The agents took the badly injured woman to a hospital for treatment, but right after that, she was sent straight to a detention center for immigrants in deportation proceedings.
Ana was another undocumented Mexican that University of Arizona researcher Nina Rabin met during the course of her year-long study of women held within the immigration detention system. Rabin focused on Arizona, but the nation has a vast network of prisons and county jails, where some 32,000 immigrants await deportation.
Ana had been brought to the U.S. as a baby and grew up in Tucson. She was a good student in high school, but when she was a teenager she got into a scrape with the law for buying some merchandise at a mall with a credit card that turned out to be fake.
A judge eventually reduced Ana’s charge to a misdemeanor and she did her time in the county jail. An American citizen who commits the same crime is free to go after serving the designated sentence, but Ana was turned over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. She too was hauled up to a detention center in Florence, in shackles. She was six months pregnant.
Rabin’s report, Unseen Prisoners: A Report on Women in Immigration Detention Facilities in Arizona, tells the stories of Ana, Maria, and other women behind bars. An attorney who is a researcher with the UA Southwest Institute for Research on Women (SIROW) and a lecturer at the James E. Rogers College of Law, Rabin found disturbing conditions for male and female immigrants alike.
“The detention centers are indistinguishable from jail,” she says.
Food was scant, strip searches were routine, medical care was elusive, legal consultations were rare, phone calls were prohibitively expensive. Detainees were held thousands of miles away from their families.
Female detainees, she found, face particular problems.
“There are physical and mental-health issues that are distinctive to women,” Rabin says, such as Ana’s pregnancy and Maria’s domestic abuse. Other women are postpartum or lactating; many women suffer from depression behind bars, and not a few have suffered gender-based violence, especially border crossers who are raped on the journey into the United States.
In the past, the detention system didn’t have to deal with large numbers of women — Arizona had none before 2001 — and the system is not set up to accommodate their needs. Ana, for instance, never got the medical attention she needed for a potentially dangerous ovarian cyst. Her doctor had warned her that the cyst could grow to hurt her or her developing baby, but her pleas for help went nowhere.
Most heartbreaking of all, Rabin says, “So many women are primary caregivers. There’s an impact on their children.”
One breastfeeding woman Rabin interviewed had been taken away from her 2-month-old daughter. Another woman, betrayed to the authorities by an abusive husband, has two children. The husband turned up at the detention center one day to tell her he was taking the kids to Mexico. There was nothing the woman could do. When Rabin met her, the woman hadn’t talked to her children in eight months.
Eighteen out of the 21 women Rabin and her students talked to had been separated from their children. And those children are U.S. citizens.
“More than any other issue,” Rabin wrote, “separation from their families was identified by women as the most difficult aspect of detention.”
Rabin arrived at the UA in 2006, hiring on as director of border research for SIROW. “SIROW is the research arm of Women’s Studies,” Rabin explains on a sunny fall morning in her office in the law school, where she is director of the Bacon Immigration Law and Policy Program. “They wanted a new project on underserved women and the border.”
Rabin was eminently qualified for the task. A lawyer with a J.D. from the Yale Law School and a B.A., magna cum laude, from Harvard, she had spent the year between college and law school working in Honduras and perfecting her Spanish. The plan had been to work for a rural development organization on an environmental-education project, but when Hurricane Mitch hit in October 1998, the job turned into helping desperate people in any way she could.
After law school, Rabin clerked with a judge in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and then went to work as an immigration and employment attorney in California, representing low-wage workers of all kinds, including farmworkers and household laborers.
Once she was established at the UA, she turned her attention to the federal detention system. Immigrants being held there are in a legal limbo. They’re not criminal offenders; they are administratively held while the government determines if they are deportable and, if so, makes the arragements for their deportation. Unlike the convicted criminals with whom they’re incarcerated, detainees don’t have the right to an attorney, and they have no definite sentence. They can be held for days or years. (Some detainees are legal permanent residents who commit a crime, which can be as low-level as shoplifting, that leads to deportation.)
In 2009, Arizona had 3000 such immigrants in detention, and 10 percent of them were women. “The population of women is rising,” Rabin says, for a host of reasons. Overall immigration to the U.S. increased dramatically in the late ’90s, with migrants pushed from their home communities in Mexico and Central America by poverty and pulled to the U.S. by an abundance of low-paying jobs. Since the early 2000s, more women have joined the throng of migrants traveling north. They are seeking to meet up with their husbands and families already in the U.S., or simply hoping to find jobs to support their families back home.
Once they get here, women workers have been increasingly arrested in raids of factories and other job sites where wages are low.
“There’s a large population of women in such workplaces,” Rabin says. After their arrests, they’re taken into detention. A 1996 federal law, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Responsibility Act, mandates detention for “broad categories of noncitizens,” Rabin writes in her report. No judicial review of individual cases is permitted. Legally, a judge can’t evaluate whether a detainee is at risk of fleeing while awaiting a hearing, or consider whether locking up the mother of an infant or children is really necessary.
Rabin received a grant from the Vital Project Fund to study the plight of these “unseen prisoners.” Her most challenging task was to get into the three Arizona centers where female detainees are held.
“It was hard for me to get access,” she says. “It took months, and I got only five days of interviews.”
Rabin never did get permission to enter the Pinal County Jail, but she gleaned information about conditions there from a letter written by some of its female inmates. She and her students eventually interviewed 17 female detainees at two detention centers, both run by the for-profit Corrections Corporation of America; they also talked to five women who had been released. All of the women volunteered to be interviewed.
Rabin and company also spoke with 19 professionals — lawyers and social-service providers — who had worked closely with detainees for years.
The UA team found disturbing evidence of violation of the written standards ICE has developed for its facilities: women were denied phone calls, access to legal materials for their cases, appropriate medical care, and even adequate food.
“ICE says the standards are mandatory for the facilities but there is no enforcement,” Rabin says. “Congress has never required legally enforceable standards,” and even the federal Government Accounting Office has found that they’re not enforced.
Women not charged with crimes were housed with criminals and subject to “severe penal conditions,” including routine shackling during transport. Even pregnant women, like Ana, were shackled hand and foot.
The women told their visitors that their medical care was inadequate. One woman with cervical cancer had to wait months to see a nurse, she told Rabin, and the only treatment the nurse gave her was aspirin. Only when her condition turned into an emergency was she allowed to see an oncologist.
The difficulties of mothers were legion. Sometimes mothers had been picked up by ICE while their children were at school or daycare — and they had no means of contacting anyone else to pick the kids up. Many had little or no opportunity to let their families know where they’d been taken; and even if they could get to a phone, calls at the center were prohibitively expensive.
Detainees were routinely ripped out of their home communities and flown hundreds or thousands of miles away to distant detention centers. The woman with cervical cancer, for instance, had a U.S.-citizen husband and five U.S.-citizen children all living in Florida, where she was picked up. It was impossible for her impoverished family to visit her in faraway Arizona.
“The generous view,” Rabin says, is that detainees are sent far from home because the government doesn’t have adequate detention facilities in the detainees’ communities. “The other view is that it speeds deportation.” A woman from Florida locked up in Arizona has “no ties to the community here,” and little means of getting help.
And detainees desperate for release more readily give up their appeals and agree to be deported.
Rabin is the first to admit the limitations of her study. ICE wouldn’t allow its officers to speak to her, and the month before she published her study, Rabin met with ICE representatives, who, she writes, deny “that most of the problems outlined in this report exist.”
And the numbers of interviewees was relatively small. Still, Rabin says, she and her team carefully noted recurring themes.
In her final report, Rabin recommends, among other things, that Congress change the law to allow judges to give consideration to individual family circumstances and the fate of children, “so that women are not needlessly separated from their families.” The U.S. should institute “gender-specific regulations,” she wrote, to “address the distinctive medical needs of women.”
The government should allow alternate means of supervising female detainees at home, or if worse comes to worse, house detainees in their home states, near their families and communities. And every detainee should be allowed at least one free phone call to family, consuls, and legal-service providers.
After Unseen Prisoners was published, Rabin traveled to Washington, D.C., in June 2009 to discuss it in a Congressional briefing called The Impact of Immigration Enforcement on Women and Families. And she was able to present her findings to Dora Schriro, special advisor on ICE and detention and removal for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, who wrote a report on the sprawling detention system at the behest of DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano.
Last summer, the Obama administration announced plans to reevaluate the whole system.
“They’re acknowledging that the system is out of control,” Rabin says. “There need to be changes. Some of these facilities are so egregiously violating human rights. But what’s disappointing is that there is no talk of reducing the number of detainees.” Even with the proposed changes, the system “still would have a destructive impact on families.”
Rabin remains busy with her teaching at the law school and her evening law clinics, and she’s already received another grant from the Vital Projects Fund for another study. This time around, she says, “I’ll be looking at child welfare, with CPS (Child Protective Services) and custody issues.”
She wants to study detained immigrant mothers who, because they’re being held in the centers, are at risk of losing custody of their children.
“Access is always a challenge,” she says, but she’s determined. “I’m hopeful we’ll be able to get the information.”
Margaret Regan is the author of The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories from the Arizona-Mexico Borderlands (Beacon Press, 2010).
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