Forgot your password?
New user?
Community Investigation Documents Drug Use and Pedophilia on Tacoma Eastside
Centoilia Maldonado Vasquez, Oaxaca Community Leader
Document Actions
The Northwest Detention Center
Robert Sorensen is a master's candidate at the University of Washington, Tacoma, who has devoted considerable time and effort to researching the realities of the Northwest Detention Center, located right here on Tacoma's tideflats, at 1623 East J Street. Here we are treated to an introduction to the facility, in the first of a series of articles on this Immigration and Customs Enforcement prison.
The Northwest Detention Center.
On March 31, 2003, still in the wake of September 11th , the Department of Homeland Security absorbed the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and assigned the agency’s apprehension, detention and deportation responsibilities to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) . By April 7, 2004, ICE, with its Office of Detention and Removal (DRO) managing, opened its newest immigration prison, a $115 million facility named the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC) in Tacoma.
NWDC is a for-profit prison, a contract facility actually owned operated by the GEO Group Inc, a multinational corrections corporation that contracts with the DRO to run the day-in day-out operations. NWDC is located at 1623 East J Street in an industrial area not far from the Tacoma Dome.
Originally designed for between 700 and 870 inmates, the capacity had expanded to 1061 detainees by 2007, in part of a national enforcement strategy dedicated to “removing all removable aliens by 2012.”
Although daily operations have been outsourced to GEO, the DRO still transports aliens and manages the detainees while they are in custody awaiting their cases to be processed. The DRO calls the inmates detainees--not prisoners--even though the detainees are kept behind locked doors with armed guards. Not all detainees are charged with crimes. Many are economic refugees, commonly referred to as illegal aliens, who have simply entered the United States without inspection.
In the realm of detention and deportation, when illegal and criminally-convicted aliens are picked up by ICE or DRO agents, they enter a distinct world of sub-constitutional justice under a separate system of administrative procedural law. For example, detainee arrests are not necessarily public knowledge. The court files are not public. There is no public record of who is in the detention centers in the United States as required with citizens in prisons and jails. When noncitizens appear in immigration court to try to remain in the country, the burden is on them to prove they are in the country legally and deserve to stay. Moreover, the government is not required to provide them with a lawyer. Troubling is the fact that most people who appear in immigration hearings have no resources for attorneys.
Arguably, their cases are essentially lost before they appear in
court. Expulsions for noncitizens with prior criminal convictions
have been predetermined by the sweeping “aggravated felony” and “crimes
of moral turpitude” statutes under 1996 immigration law. The
majority of the deportees in the NWDC--those who only entered the
country without authorization--came only to work and got caught.
For them, the forgone finale to their detention is removal from the
United States.
Who and what is in the facility?
Of the 1061 beds, the average daily population totals 985, with approximately 890 men and 95 women. Most have been apprehended in the states of Washington, Oregon, and Alaska. Detainees represent approximately 60 countries or more; with the most representation from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, The Philippines, Honduras, China, and Vietnam. The duration of detention at NWDC for undocumented aliens and post-sentence criminal aliens ranges between 2–3 days up to 2-4 years. The average incarceration at NWDC lasts 33 days. In the fiscal year ending 2007, the NWDC booked-in 9,441 detainees and booked-out 9,258.
The vast majority of book-outs are deported from the US. However, a few are released on bond pending deportation and a few more are released on Order of Supervision (OS). There are approximately 600 noncitizens released under OS in the state of Washington. There are good reasons for this. OS status is granted to deportees that cannot be removed from the US due to international conditions or absent repatriation agreements. Many countries are too simply too dangerous to send anyone. Some countries that will not receive deportees from the US are Vietnam, Somalia, and Cuba. In spite of their temporary reprieves, OS releases remain subject to removal at anytime pending changes in international conditions.
All deportation hearings at NWDC are conducted in the adjacent Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR) courtrooms. The EOIR is an administrative court within the Department of Justice (DOJ). The Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) has the final say on who can enter or stay in the US. The EOIR interprets and administers federal immigration law by conducting immigration court proceedings, appellate reviews, and administrative hearings. The EOIR consists of the Office of Chief Immigration Judge, the Board of Immigration Appeals, and the Office of Chief Administrative Hearing Officer. The EOIR adjudicates immigration cases involving detained aliens, criminal aliens, and aliens seeking asylum as a form of relief from removal.
A division of the DOJ, the EOIR operates within a system of
administrative law independently of the immigration enforcement
functions ICE and the DRO.
Administrative law is procedural law administered by the executive
branch of government. Deportations are executed by administrative
agents called Immigration Judges. Some immigration law scholars
complain that they are not trained as real judges, but rather, they are
akin to bureaucrats in robes. Others complain that
pre-deportation detentions as well as deportation hearings extend a
lesser standard of due process protections to noncitizens.
It is important that citizens insist on the extension full constitutional protections to all persons, during all forms of legal adjudication. The standard of social justice that citizens accord noncitizens may be the same standard that citizens could someday be subjected to. One way to ensure that equal due process protections are accorded during deportation proceedings is to closely monitor the semi-secretive EOIR courts. Under normal conditions, an immigration judge will admit courtroom observers unless the case in question is deemed to be a matter sensitive to national security.
A local immigration law group is monitoring local EOIR court hearings to ensure that immigration judges treat noncitizens fairly. The Northwest Detention Court Watch Project, sponsored by the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, is looking for law school students and/or local community activists to participate in a monitoring project as court watch volunteers. Volunteers are needed to observe court proceedings in both the immigration court located in Tacoma’s own NWDC. A three hour training session to be held on Saturday January 12th, 2008 on the UW Tacoma campus can be accessed by emailing cricri@u.washington.edu.
immigration detention
How come?
northwest detention center and alien criminality
"these criminals" infers that the vast majority of economic refugees from the undeveloped southern hemisphere are criminals because they are compelled to migrate by the reality of impending starvation.
"who ignore the law by entering our country illegally" illegally aka without authorization, unauthorized, without proper documentation because there is really no other way for the multitudes of mostly brownskinned people who come to the US to escape misery, to avoid starvation, subjugation to economic slavery, gang violence, and lifetimes of desperation.
AND "perpetrate crime while here?" this is where the bigoted argument above really falls apart because as Rumbaut 2007, and Pew Hispanic Center 2005, and others certify, imigrants with or without documentation are incarcerated at a rate 5 times less that the Anglo popululation and even less than Black Americans *albeit Black Americans are disproportionately incarcerated for racially and culturally driven reasons too.* Imigrants, foreignborn visitors, and guest workers as a group conduct themselves better than citizens because they are guests.
Having visited the Northwest Detention Center and hence officially informed by ICE spokespersons that more than 50 per cent of the detainees have no criminal violations, rather they are inmates pending deportation for civil indiscretions like "entry without inspection" and visa overstays, I submit that "these criminals," erroneously named, are for the most part, merely underprivilieged people just trying to make their way.
"The perspective I'd like to throw out there is what do you think other governments might do to Americans who did not stop properly at the border, entered Mexico or pretty much any other country illegally," Immigration policy is tightening in various countries due to the huge numbers of those compelled migrate from their birth countries due to circumstances beyond their control. However, having lived in Mexico for five years without even as much as a tourist visa, Vietnam for a year on a tourist visa and now in Ecuador for the summer where the country welcomes Colombian and Peruvian economic refugees, I can say that for me it is easier to undergo extended stays in other countries that for foreign born persons to come to the US, especially since the advent of the neo gestapo Department of Homeland Security aka *DHS.* One of the latest meanspirited quirks of the DHS is to summarily fine any tourist visitors the sum of $545.00, including those from the UK, whose passports are more than three years old and do not contain the electronic data strip, or send them packing home directly from the port of entry.
"AND then committed a series of crimes?" Again the, slippery slope logic that ties crime to undocumented immigrations just doesn't hold true. The author of the above quoted comments displays a bigotry similar to that commonly heard and seen in followers of the likes of Lou Dobbs, Michael Savage, Michelle Malkin, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly. The populist anti foreigner, hate mongering rhetoric that permeates the neo nationalist right wing airwaves is popular among persons who feel their lifestyles becoming less comfortable. The unsubstantiated rhetoric of hate and fear trickles down from the airwaves and is bandied about providing persons who have not overcome their prejudicial instincts a convenient raison de etre which in turn emboldens and consents to the raison de etat we are currently undergoing known as the rise of the security state. Bigotted people are comfortable with scapegoating the foreign born for their econmic woes while increasing security measures prolongs their false senses of entitlement.
I'm not the expert on this topic...
Fascism, by the way, being, in part, the dissolution of division between government and profit-making enterprise. Please see http://oldamericancentury.org/14pts.htm. Pay special attention to Points 2, 3, 7, 9, and 12, which are particularly germane to the paranoia with which this nation has been taught to regard "illegal immigrants", and particularly applicable to your positions on the issue.
Regarding your argument about the GEO Group's profit (which, to my mind, is a disgusting topic to have to breach in this context, as the very idea of making a profit on this misery is wholly obscene), the greatest daily threat to their profit is spending too much money taking care of the prisoners. Most of the money they spend goes towards things like guards, guard training, food, space, medical care, mattresses, pillows, laundry, etc. These are the areas that they will cut back on in order to increase their sacred "profit". This results in an economic incentive to create degrading and inhuman conditions for the people who are incarcerated in the prison, simply because it's cheaper, and reflects much more on our society that has decided these conditions are ok than it does on the prisoners subjected to them. Profit has never been an incentive to treat people more justly, it is an incentive to take advantage. It is tragic that we trade our morals for money. Jesus would not approve.
The Northwest Detention Center