New Report: Aggressive Immigration Enforcement Quotas Also Used to Detain Mothers and Their Children

By Center for Constitutional Rights
June 16, 2016

Contact: press@ccrjustice.org

Practice of Guaranteed Minimums, 93 Percent for Private Companies, Found Far More Prevalent Than Initially Thought

June 16, 2016, Washington, D.C. and New York – Today, Detention Watch Network (DWN) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) released a new report that reveals for the first time that mothers and their children are jailed under guaranteed minimum bed contracts for local jails. The report shows the extent to which ICE grants financial benefits to private and public entities that detain immigrants through government contracts requiring ICE to pay for a set number of beds at detention facilities, rendering immigrants, including children and families, a source of profit for contractors.

“While the Obama administration continues to support the use of aggressive raids to unconstitutionally detain and deport immigrants, our report exposes the extent to which local lockup quotas incentivize the incarceration of immigrants and fuel ICE to pursue punitive and unjust enforcement practices,” said Silky Shah, Co-Director of Detention Watch Network. “The costs of detention are two-fold: moral and financial. American taxpayers are paying over $2 billion a year to tear apart hundreds of thousands of families across the country.”

The widespread use of local lockup quotas throughout the immigration detention system was exposed in DWN and CCR’s report, Banking on Detention: Local Lockup Quotas and the Immigrant Dragnet, in June 2015. Since then, the government has released additional documents that shed light on the continued use of local lockup quotas, covering at least 24 detention facility contracts. Today’s report updates the earlier one with new information, including uncovering a local quota at Essex County Detention Facility in New Jersey where just this week Luis Alonso Fino Martinez died for yet to be determined reasons.[...]

Read the full press release:
http://ccrjustice.org/home/press-center/press-releases/new-report-aggressive-immigration-enforcement-quotas-also-used

Download the rerpot:
http://www.detentionwatchnetwork.org/sites/default/files/reports/Banking%20on%20Detention%202016%20Update_DWN,%20CCR.pdf