Blessed Sr. Miriam Teresa

I was a stranger and you welcomed me!

by Janet Gildea

Recently I spent the night with the Sisters of Charity of St. Elizabeth at their convent in downtown Newark, N.J. They have offered me hospitality on several occasions when I have been coming or going to their retreat house, Maris Stella, on the Jersey shore some two hours away. Living just five minutes from the Newark airport, they are accustomed to visitors like me, in and out with barely time for conversation in the community room.

The night I arrived I was shown to my bedroom at the end of the second floor. As I pulled my suitcase into the old-style convent room, complete with tiny antique sink and medicine cabinet, Sr. Ellen remarked quietly, “A woman from Sudan is staying in the room across the hall.” Then as we walked back towards the community room she noted another closed bedroom door and said, “Oh, someone else must be visiting . . . .”

We greeted the group gathered in the living room of the house, with its array of standard-issue recliners oriented in the general direction of the television. One sister was working on her laptop, another reading on her tablet and a third was intermittently watching an episode of NCIS. The fourth sister was working with a woman attired in a bright orange and brown print wrap. She looked up shyly from her notebook as we entered the room. Ellen said, “I think you know everyone except Soraya* who is staying with us. She is from Sudan and she is studying English with Sr. Mary Walter.” By that time Mary had scooted to a straight backed chair and she motioned for Soraya to come with her notebook and pencil to where the light was better, vacating a recliner for me.

Ellen inquired about the additional house guest. The others reminded her of the call she had received a few days earlier from a sister from another congregation in Florida. She was flying in for the wake and funeral of Fr. Benedict Groeschel, founder of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal. One of their sisters had suggested that she call the Newark convent for hospitality.

“Oh, that’s right!”

No wonder Ellen didn’t remember. That was many days and several guests ago.

“You’re always welcome! Have a good trip, and we look forward to seeing you the next time you’re passing through.”

Ellen and I agreed upon the early departure rendezvous and I was off to bed, all the while reflecting on the ease with which these religious women welcome the stranger into their home.

In the early morning darkness as we loaded my things in the car I asked Ellen about Soraya and how they had made a connection with her. Like many congregations of women religious, the Sisters of Charity of St. Elizabeth had made a public statement in support of immigration reform many years ago.

“We wanted to make it more than just words, so when the organization First Friends was looking for places to offer hospitality to women awaiting rulings on their asylum petitions we decided that was something we could do.”

Soraya was a teacher and human rights activist in Sudan. Three of her siblings had been killed. After she gave a presentation at the United Nations, she began receiving death threats. She sought asylum in the U.S., leaving seven children in the care of her sister.

“Sometimes she is so distraught because she’s never sure exactly where they are. Sometimes they don’t have food to eat.”

She has lived with the sisters since August and hopes, when her English improves, to be able to get a job in the housekeeping department of a hotel or hospital.

A lament arose within me as I considered our government’s inaction on immigration reform and the violent conflicts displacing people around the globe from their homes and families. How very difficult is the life of the refugee! Immediately another thought brought me consolation. One woman has found a safe harbor and a place of welcome with the Sisters of Charity of St. Elizabeth. They are living up to their name every day. They, too, are as blessed as their recently beatified Sr. Miriam Teresa. “Come, you blessed by my Father, for I was a stranger and you welcomed me . . . .”

*not her actual name

[Sr. Janet Gildea is a Sister of Charity of Cincinnati. A retired family physician, she now serves with her sisters at Proyecto Santo Niño, a day program for children with special needs in Anapra, Mexico, as well as ministering with young adults in the Diocese of El Paso, Texas.]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

October 7, 2014

CONTACT: Adriana Lafaille, 617-482-3170 x 308, alafaille@aclum.org

BOSTON -- In a ruling that could enable more than 100 Massachusetts detainees per year to argue for their freedom, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit has rejected the federal government's application of a "mandatory" immigration detention provision that prevents certain noncitizens from requesting release on bond during their immigration proceedings. The ruling came Monday afternoon in a pair of cases—including one brought by the ACLU of Massachusetts, the national ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project, the Political Asylum / Immigration Representation Project, and Lutheran Social Services—in which noncitizens argued that they were being improperly detained without even the opportunity to request their release. 

The decision is part of an ACLU class action lawsuit filed in August 2013. Following the district court's ruling in that class action in May, at least 27 people have obtained their release from detention after demonstrating to an immigration judge that they did not pose a flight risk or danger warranting continued detention. Many of them are long-time lawful permanent residents whom immigration authorities were detaining on the basis of old criminal convictions. 

Yesterday's First Circuit ruling decides the core issue in that class action: "mandatory" immigration detention cannot apply to noncitizens who have been placed into deportation proceedings because of offenses for which they were released from custody long ago. 

"This ruling ensures that many noncitizens in Massachusetts will be allowed their day in court to argue for their freedom," said Adriana Lafaille, an Equal Justice Works legal fellow at the ACLU of Massachusetts, whose fellowship is sponsored by Greenberg Traurig, LLP. "Rather than automatic, costly detentions of noncitizens like Mr. Gordon, who are plucked from their communities based on old offenses, the decision means that only those who need to be detained will be detained, while those who can safely return to their families while their cases are pending may be allowed to do so."

ACLU client Clayton Gordon is a named plaintiff in the class action and one of the two noncitizens whose case was decided by yesterday's ruling. Gordon came to the United States at age six, has been a lawful permanent resident for more than 30 years, and served in the U.S. Army. In June, 2013, immigration authorities detained Gordon and held him without the possibility of bond because of a 2008 drug offense, even though he spent less than a day in jail for that offense and had completed his probationary term. 

After his arrest for that offense in 2008, Gordon and his fiancée had settled down, had a son, and bought a home. In 2013, Gordon was running his own contracting business and working on a project to open a halfway house in the Hartford area for women coming out of incarceration. But, as he drove to work on June 20, 2013, Gordon was surrounded by armed immigration agents, seized, and placed into mandatory detention.

In October 2013, as a result of the ACLU's lawsuit, U.S. District Judge Michael A. Ponsor ordered that Gordon was entitled to an individual bond hearing. An immigration judge granted him bond, and Gordon was reunited with his family in November 2013. Yesterday's ruling upholds the federal district judge's decision and ensures that Gordon can remain with his family while he awaits a ruling in his pending immigration case. 

Leiticia Castaneda, whose case was paired with Gordon's, was also unlawfully subjected to mandatory detention. She too had been held without the possibility of release on the basis of a 2008 drug offense. Following the decision of the District Court requiring a bond hearing in her case, the government released her on her own recognizance, reuniting her with her family during the pendency of her immigration proceedings. Castaneda was represented by immigration attorney Gregory Romanovsky. The ACLU filed an amicus brief in her case.

"Yesterday the Court rejected a policy that undermines both our constitutional values and common sense," said Eunice Lee, an attorney at the Immigrants' Rights Project of the national ACLU. "Our laws don't allow the government to put immigrants in mandatory lock-up simply because they had run-ins with criminal justice system many years ago. The Court's decision prevents the irrational, unjust detention of these individuals without basic due process of law."

For a copy of the First Circuit's opinion, go to:
https://www.aclum.org/sites/all/files/legal/castaneda_v_souza/2014_10_06...

For more information about "mandatory" immigration detention, go to:
http://aclum.org/mandatory_detention​

http://www.thenation.com/blog/181800/who-profits-plans-lock-more-immigrant-families-private-prison-companies#

Who Profits From Plans to Lock Up More Immigrant Families? Private Prison Companies

Last week, the federal government announced that it will detain as many as 2,400 women and children on property in Dilley, Texas, that is currently used as a “man camp” for oilfield workers. The new facility will be the largest family detention center in the country, and the third to open since the number of children and families crossing the US-Mexico border shot up early in the summer. Since then, the number of minors caught at the border has fallen back below last year’s levels.

Human rights groups are alarmed that the administration is nevertheless planning to double the number of people in family detention. The controversial practice of locking up women and their children, many of whom are awaiting asylum hearings, had been all but abandoned before this year. Calls for closing the two other centers opened this summer in Texas and New Mexico have intensified in recent weeks due to reports of “deplorable” conditions.

“The Obama administration is playing with the lives of these women and children in order to earn political points. What it comes down to is the administration being tough on immigration,” said Silky Shah of the Detention Watch Network. Shah’s organization joined more than 160 civil and immigrant rights, faith-based, and criminal justice organizations signing a letter to the Obama administration on Thursday criticizing the proposed Dilley facility and calling for the closure of the other family detention centers.

Another cause for concern is the company that the government chose to operate the new detention center, Corrections Corporation of America. CCA got its start in Texas three decades ago when it scored a contract for a federal immigration detention center in Houston. It’s now the largest private prison operator in the country. CCA has been sued a number of times for negligence, abuse and other mistreatment. The company is currently under investigation for allegations of fraud and corruption at the Idaho Correction Center.

CCA has profited handsomely from the criminalization of noncitizens, but its record on immigration detention is particularly poor. The government stopped holding families at a CCA-run detention center in Taylor, Texas, in 2009 after the company was sued for mistreating women and children, some of whom reported that they were forced to wear prison uniforms. In 2011, the American Civil Liberties Union released records of 185 allegations of sexual abuse at CCA detention centers over four years; fifty-six of the reports came from facilities in Texas.

Even before the government’s contract with CCA for the Dilley center was announced last Tuesday there were questions about the deal. According to a Texas nonprofit, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency did not take public bids before it signed up CCA. That the government and the company are tight is not particularly surprising, as CCA has vastly outspent other private prison companies on lobbying.

CCA was profiting from the refugee crisis at the border before the Dilley deal, too. Investors anticipated that the surge in migrants would necessitate new detention services; CCA’s stocks went up by 8.5 percent in August, compared to a 1.5 percent rise in the S&P. "Investors see this as an opportunity. This is a potentially untapped market that will have very strong demand," Alex Friedmann, an activist investor who holds CCA stocks, told CNN Money.

Concern about the role of prison corporations like CCA and the GEO Group, the company that operates a family center in Karnes, Texas, (and has its own dubious record of abuse), is only a small part of the backlash to the expansion of family detention, however. Many of the women and children are pursuing asylum, and advocates contend that mass detention—no matter who's running the facility—is inconsistent with international guidelines for the treatment of refugees, as well as physically and psychologically harmful to children. Lawyers report that instead of evaluating on a case-by-case basis and releasing those whose fear of return is credible until their court date, officials are effectively denying bond en masse by setting itnearly six times higher than the national norm.

“Many of these women and children have claims to protection and asylum here in the United State. To respond by locking them up in centers that are remote, far away from legal services…. It just doesn’t make any sense,” said Katharina Obser of the Women’s Refugee Commission.

Danielle Rosché, an immigration lawyer who volunteered at a family detention center in Artesia, New Mexico, witnessed and heard stories of illness and inadequate medical care, undercooked food, weight loss and lack of access to legal services. Every child she interviewed reported diarrhea or fever. “‘Detaining’ is a nice word for it,” Rosché said about conditions at the facility. “We’re putting people who have not been convicted of any crime in these facilities and we call it civil detention, but that doesn’t make it any better.”

Detaining families is significantly more expensive than alternatives like releasing people with monitoring bracelets. So why is the government intent on expanding the practice? Government attorneys have argued against releasing noncitizen mothers and children under bond on the basis that they present a “national security threat.” The agency claims that detention will discourage other migrants from crossing the border.

But there’s very little evidence to support that claim. In order to back up its argument, the Department of Homeland Security has cited a study from Vanderbilt University—a study thatactually indicates the opposite, one of its principal authors says.

“[M]y Report does not in fact support DHS’ conclusion that detaining these mothers and their children during the course of removal proceedings will deter illegal migration to the United States,” political science professor Jonathan Hiskey wrote in an affidavit. [Emphasis his.] “Further, there is absolutely no evidence in the Report that US policy with respect to detention has any influence at all on the decisions women and their children are making with respect to migration.”

Obser said that the government’s detention-as-deterrence policy has the perverse effect of keeping individuals who have real claims to protection from making them. Lack of access to legal services has been a common complaint in the family centers. Rosché is concerned that other women may be choosing voluntary deportation instead of fighting for asylum in the courts because conditions in detention are so bad. It’s not that none of their claims are valid. Only three asylum cases from women held at Artesia have gotten a final verdict from a judge, but in all of the cases the women’s claims were upheld.

Even if detention were effective as deterrence it would be inconsistent with guidelines laid out by the United Nations high commissioner for refugees. “Detention policies aimed at deterrence are generally unlawful under international human rights law as they are not based on an individual assessment as to the necessity to detain,” they read.

It’s not clear whether the government plans to expand family detention centers beyond Dilley. Certainly, there will be encouragement from the private prison lobby to do so. Locking up more women and children might line CCA’s pockets, but it doesn’t actually serve the government’s goal of returning people who do not have legitimate claims to asylum to their home countries more quickly. As Rosché pointed out, the backlog in the immigration courts is a bigger hurdle. “Why don’t we spend that $200 a day to hire more judges?” she asked.