Justice-Free Zones
US Immigration Detention Under the Trump Administration.
A research report from the American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Watch, and the National Immigrant Justice Center, provides an in-depth examination of the state of immigrant detention.
Through visits to five detention facilities, interviews with 150 detained people, and analysis of government data, this report shines a light onto our nation’s treatment of immigrants. Specifically, the findings illustrate how the immigrant detention system has grown since 2017, the poor conditions and inadequate medical care—even before the Covid-19 outbreak—and the due process hurdles faced by immigrants held in remote locations.
According to the report, the Trump administration grew the immigration detention system in the United States to an unprecedented size, at times holding more than 56,000 people per day.
When ICE was created in 2003, it inherited an immigration detention system that held about 20,000 people per day. The immigration detention system has since grown to a sprawling network of more than 200 detention centers nationwide. These facilities range in size and are largely operated by private prison corporations and, in some cases, by local jails. ICE uses these facilities to lock up people who arrive at the border or airports and request asylum, as well as long-time community members who are facing removal because of allegations of criminal conduct or simply because they are undocumented.
Read the ACLU’s 2020 report “Justice-Free Zones: US Immigration Detention Under the Trump Administration” at www.aclu.org/publications/justice-free-zones-us-immigration-detention-under-trump-administration.
