CIVIL RIGHTS GROUPS ANNOUNCE COOPERATIVE EFFORT TO HIGHLIGHT UNCONSTITUTIONALITY OF IMMIGRANT DETENTION

For Immediate Release
Contact: Eric Lerner
elerner@igc.org
973-736-0522



CIVIL RIGHTS GROUPS ANNOUNCE COOPERATIVE EFFORT TO HIGHLIGHT
UNCONSTITUTIONALITY OF IMMIGRANT DETENTION

The New Jersey Civil Rights Defense Committee (NJCRDC) will announce at a
press conference on Thursday, January 25th at 12:00 noon, that they will be
producing their own "Shadow Report" on the abuse of immigrant detainees in
collaboration with Rutgers University professors, Robyn Rodriguez
(Sociology) and Michael Welch (Criminology). The report is in response to
what NJCRDC and other activists see as the inadequate "audit" of immigrant
detention just published by the Office of Inspector General of the
Department of Homeland Security.

The "Shadow Report" will be circulated nationally through collaboration
between NJCRDC and the Bill of Rights Defense Committee(BORDC),a national
organization with many local affiliates. "Our two groups will use the report
to hold local governments accountable for the unconstitutional immigrant
detentions taking place in county jails throughout the country and to press
those governments to close the detention centers," said NJCRDC spokesperson
Jeannette Gabriel.

The press conference will be held at 12:00 noon on Thursday, January 25th,
in front of 26 Federal Plaza, New York headquarters for the Immigration and
Customs Enforcement agency. Former detainees who were held at the two New
Jersey facilities included in the audit will provide testimony about the
abuses they witnessed and were subjected to by County Jail and ICE
officials.

The most recent government audit targeted five immigrant detention centers
around the country, two of them in New Jersey. Although the official report
identified conditions below legal standards, it was extremely cursory and
failed to include the most damning complaints of abuse by detainees.
Information gathered by NJ Civil Rights Defense Committee from hundreds of
detainees over a period of five years illustrates a clear pattern of
punitive treatment at the hands of local officials, including the use of
attack dogs, guard beatings and rapes, and systematic food and heat
deprivation. Detainees in NJ and elsewhere have been held in dungeon-like,
overcrowded, filthy, and vermin-infested conditions and have resisted with
hunger strikes and attempted suicides. Sami Al-Shahin, a Jordanian
immigrant who was held in detention in Passaic County Jail, and who led in
the successful fight to close the immigrant detention facility there, asked
in response to the report, "Where is all the information that I gave to the
government officials? Why didn't they include all the reports of abuse?"

NJCRDC will produce its report with assistance from student interns under
the guidance of the two Rutgers University professors. Sociology Professor
Rodriguez said, "I look forward to my students helping to systematically
organize and summarize a database of hundreds of pages of direct detainee
testimony, written and transcribed, about abuses occurring from the Fall of
2001 to the present in various New Jersey county jails and detention
centers, but especially in the jails of Passaic and Hudson Counties that
were included in the Inspector General's official audit."

The report will then be used by NJCRDC and the BORDC to encourage activists
nationwide to hold local governments accountable for abuses against
immigrant detainees and to work to shut down detention centers throughout
the nation. The intent of this project is to emphasize the inherent abusive
nature of immigrant detention and highlight its unconstitutionality.
Administrative detention punishes non-criminal immigrants who have not been
charged with any crime by forcing them into incarceration and denying them
access to government-provided representation. Flavia Alaya, a member of
NJCRDC and a BORDC board member, said that "The government is using
administrative detention to bypass the Bill of Rights. The bottom
constitutional line is that all those held without criminal charge should be
freed."