jsaya_SagStraps
Active member
And its some pretty scary stuff.
America's Secret ICE Castles
"If you don't have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but
you think he's illegal, we can make him disappear." Those chilling words
were spoken by James Pendergraph, then executive director of
Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Office of State and Local
Coordination, at a conference of police and sheriffs in August 2008.
Also present was Amnesty International's Sarnata Reynolds, who wrote
about the incident in the 2009 report "Jailed Without Justice" and said
in an interview, "It was almost surreal being there, particularly being
someone from an organization that has worked on disappearances for
decades in other countries. I couldn't believe he would say it so
boldly, as though it weren't anything wrong."
Pendergraph knew that ICE could disappear people, because he knew
that in addition to the publicly listed field offices and detention
sites, ICE is also confining people in 186
unlisted and unmarked subfield offices [1],
many in suburban office parks or commercial spaces revealing no
information about their ICE tenants--nary a sign, a marked car or even a
US flag. (Presumably there is a flag at the Veterans Affairs Complex in
Castle Point, New York, but no one would associate it with the Criminal
Alien Program ICE is running out of Building 7.) Designed for confining
individuals in transit, with no beds or showers, subfield offices are
not subject to ICE Detention Standards. The subfield office network was
mentioned in an October report by Dora Schriro, then special adviser to
Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security, but no locations were
provided.
I obtained a partial list of the subfield offices from an ICE
officer and shared it with immigrant advocates in major human and civil
rights organizations, whose reactions ranged from perplexity to outrage.
Andrea Black, director of Detention Watch Network (DWN), said she was
aware of some of the subfield offices but not that people were held
there. ICE never provided DWN a list of their locations. "This points to
an overall lack of transparency and even organization on the part of
ICE," said Black. ICE says temporary facilities in field or subfield
offices are used for 84 percent of all book-ins. There are twenty-four
listed field offices. The 186 unlisted subfield offices tend to be where
local police and sheriffs have formally or informally reached out to
ICE. For instance, in 2007 North Carolina had 629,947 immigrants and at
least six subfield offices, compared with Massachusetts, with 913,957
immigrants and one listed field office. Not surprisingly, before joining
ICE Pendergraph, a sheriff, was the Joe Arpaio of North Carolina, his
official bio stating that he "spearheaded the use of the 287(g)
program," legislation that empowers local police to perform immigration
law enforcement functions.
A senior attorney at a civil rights organization, speaking on
background, saw the list and exclaimed, "You cannot have secret
detention! The public has the right to know where detention is
happening."
Alison Parker, deputy director of Human Rights Watch, wrote a
December comprehensive report on ICE transit policies, "Locked Up Far
Away." Even she had never heard of the subfield offices and was
concerned that the failure to disclose their locations violates the UN's
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the United States is a
signatory. She explained that the government must provide "an impartial
authority to review the lawfulness of custody. Part and parcel is the
ability of somebody to find the person and to make their presence known
to a court."
The challenge of being unable to find people in detention centers,
documented in the Human Rights Watch report, is worsened when one does
not even know where to look. The absence of a real-time database
tracking people in ICE custody means ICE has created a network of secret
jails. Subfield offices enter the time and date of custody after the
fact, a situation ripe for errors, hinted at in the Schriro report, as
well as cover-ups.
ICE refused a request for an interview, selectively responded to
questions sent by e-mail and refused to identify the person authorizing
the reply--another symptom of ICE thwarting transparency and hence
accountability. The anonymous official provided no explanation for ICE
not posting a list of subfield office locations and phone numbers or for
its lack of a real-time locator database.
It is not surprising to find that, with no detention rules and being
off the map spatially and otherwise, ICE agents at these locations are
acting in ways that are unconscionable and unlawful. According to Ahilan
Arulanantham, director of Immigrant Rights for the ACLU of Southern
California, the Los Angeles subfield office called B-18 is a barely
converted storage space tucked away in a large downtown federal
building. "You actually walk down the sidewalk and into an underground
parking lot. Then you turn right, open a big door and voilà,
you're in a detention center," Arulanantham explained. Without knowing
where you were going, he said, "it's not clear to me how anyone would
find it. What this breeds, not surprisingly, is a whole host of problems
concerning access to phones, relatives and counsel."
It's also not surprising that if you're putting people in a
warehouse, the occupants become inventory. Inventory does not need
showers, beds, drinking water, soap, toothbrushes, sanitary napkins,
mail, attorneys or legal information, and can withstand the constant
blast of cold air. The US residents held in B-18, as many as 100 on any
given day, were treated likewise. B-18, it turned out, was not a
transfer area from point A to point B but rather an irrationally
revolving stockroom that would shuttle the same people briefly to the
local jails, sometimes from 1 to 5 am, and then bring them back,
shackled to one another, stooped and crouching in overpacked vans. These
transfers made it impossible for anyone to know their location, as
there would be no notice to attorneys or relatives when people moved. At
times the B-18 occupants were left overnight, the frigid onslaught of
forced air and lack of mattresses or bedding defeating sleep. The hours
of sitting in packed cells on benches or the concrete floor meant
further physical and mental duress.
Alla Suvorova, 26, a Mission Hills, California, resident for almost
six years, ended up in B-18 after she was snared in an ICE raid
targeting others at a Sherman Oaks apartment building. For her, the
worst part was not the dirt, the bugs flying everywhere or the clogged,
stinking toilet in their common cell but the panic when ICE agents
laughed at her requests to understand how long she would be held. "No
one could visit; they couldn't find me. I was thinking these people are
going to put me and the other people in a grinder and make sausages and
sell them in the local market."
Sleep deprivation and extreme cold were among the "enhanced
interrogation" techniques promoted by the Bush White House and later set
aside by the Justice Department because of concerns that they amounted
to torture. Although without the intent to elicit information, ICE under
the Obama administration was holding people charged with a civil
infraction in conditions approaching those no longer authorized for
accused terrorists.
According to Aaron Tarin, an immigration attorney in Salt Lake City,
"Whenever I have a client in a subfield office, it makes me nervous.
Their procedures are lax. You've got these senior agents who have all
the authority in the world because they're out in the middle of nowhere.
You've got rogue agents doing whatever they want. Most of the buildings
are unmarked; the vehicles they drive are unmarked." Like other
attorneys, Tarin was extremely frustrated by ICE not releasing its phone
numbers. He gave as an example a US citizen in Salt Lake City who hired
him because her husband, in the process of applying for a green card,
was being held at a subfield office in Colorado. By the time Tarin
tracked down the location of the facility that was holding the husband
when he had called his wife, the man had been moved to another subfield
office. "I had to become a little sleuth," Tarin said, describing the
hours he and a paralegal spent on the phone, the numerous false leads,
unanswered phones and unreturned messages until the husband, who had
been picked up for driving without a license or insurance, was found in
Grand Junction, Colorado, held on a $20,000 bond, $10,000 for each
infraction. "I argued with the guy, 'This is absurd! Whose policy is
this?'" Tarin said the agent's response was, "That's just our policy
here."
Rafael Galvez, an attorney in Maine, explained why he would like ICE
to release its entire list of subfield office addresses and phone
numbers. "If they're detaining someone, I will need to contact the
people on the list. If I can advocate on a person's behalf and provide
documents, a lot of complications could be avoided."
Cary, a suburb of Raleigh, North Carolina, has a typical subfield
office at the rear of CentreWest Commons, an office park adjacent to
gated communities, large artificial ponds and an Oxford University Press
production plant. ICE's low-lying brick building with a bright blue
awning has darkened windows, no sign and no US flag. People in shackles
and handcuffs are shuffled in from the rear. The office complex has
perhaps twenty other businesses, all of which do have signs. The agents,
who are armed, might not wear uniforms and drive their passengers in
unmarked, often windowless white vans. Even Dani Martinez-Moore, who
lives nearby and coordinates the North Carolina Network of Immigrant
Advocates, did not know people were being held there until she read
about it on my blog.
In late October 2008, Mark Lyttle, then 31, was held in the Cary
office for several hours. Lyttle was born in North Carolina, and the FBI
file ICE had obtained on him indicated he was a US citizen. Lyttle used
his time in the holding tank attempting to persuade the agents who had
plucked him out of the medical misdemeanor section of a nearby prison,
where he had been held for seventy-three days, not to follow through on
the Cary office's earlier decision to ship him to Mexico. Lyttle is
cognitively disabled, has bipolar disorder, speaks no Spanish and has no
Mexican relatives. In response to his entreaties, a Cary agent "told me
to tell it to the judge," Lyttle said. But Lyttle's charging document
from the Cary office includes a box checked next to the boilerplate
prohibition: "You may not request a review of this determination by an
immigration judge."
Lyttle made enough of a fuss at the Stewart Detention Center in
Lumpkin, Georgia, that the agents there arranged for him to appear
before a judge. But the checked box in the Cary paperwork meant he never
heard from the nonprofit Legal Orientation Program attorneys who might
have picked up on his situation. William Cassidy, a former ICE
prosecutor working for the Executive Office of Immigration Review,
ignored Lyttle's pleas and in his capacity as immigration judge signed
Lyttle's removal order. According to Lyttle, Cassidy said he had to go
by the sworn statements of the ICE officers.
Meanwhile, Lyttle's mother, Jeanne, and his brothers, including two
in the Army, were frantically searching for him, even checking the
obituaries. They were trying to find Lyttle in the North Carolina prison
system, but the trail went cold after he was transferred to ICE
custody. Jeanne said, "David showed me the Manila envelope [he sent to
the prison]--'Refused'--and we thought Mark had refused it." Jeanne was
crying. "We kept trying to find out where he was." It never crossed
their minds that Mark might be spending Christmas in a shelter for los
deportados on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande.
ICE spokesman Temple Black first told me the list was "not
releasable" and that it was "law enforcement sensitive," but coordinator
for community outreach Andrew Lorenzen-Strait e-mailed me a partial
list of addresses and no phone numbers. I then obtained a more complete
list, including telephone numbers, in response to a FOIA request. That
list, received in November and dated September 2009, is about forty
locations shy of the 186 subfield offices mentioned in the Schriro
report and omits thirty-nine locations listed in an August ICE job
announcement seeking applicants for immigration enforcement agents.
These include ICE postings in Champlain, New York; Alamosa, Colorado;
Pembroke Pines, Florida; and Livermore, California. The anonymous ICE
official neither answered questions about why I was sent an incomplete
list nor accounted for the disparity in official explanations of the
list's confidentiality.
ICE obscures its presence in other ways as well. Everyone knows that
detention centers are in sparsely populated areas, but according to
Amnesty International's Reynolds, policy director of migrant and refugee
rights, "Quite a lot of communities don't know they're detaining
thousands of people, because the signs say Service
Processing Center," not Detention
Center, although the latter designation is used for privately
contracted facilities. The ICE e-mail stated that the "service
processing" term was first used when the centers were run by the
predecessor agency Immigration and Naturalization Service, "because
these facilities were used to process aliens for deportation," ignoring
the fact that these structures were and are distinctive for confining
people and not the Orwellian "processing."
Even the largest complexes, which are usually off side roads from
small highways, are visible only if you drive right up to the entrance.
Unlike federal prisons, detention centers post no road signs to guide
travelers. The anonymous ICE official would not provide a reason for
this disparity.
ICE agents are also working in hidden offices in one of the
grooviest buildings in one of the hottest neighborhoods in Manhattan.
Tommy Kilbride, an ICE detention and removal officer and a star of
A&E's reality show Manhunters: Fugitive Task Force, is part
of the US Marshals Fugitive Task Force, housed on the third floor of the
Chelsea Market, above Fat Witch Bakery and alongside Rachael Ray and
the Food Network. Across the street are Craftsteak and Del Posto, both
fancy venues for two other Food Network stars, Tom Colicchio and Mario
Batali. Above their restaurants are agents working for the FBI's Joint
Terrorism Task Force.
Someone who had been working in that building for about a year said
he had heard rumors of FBI agents, though he didn't see one until nine
months later when a guy was openly carrying a gun through the lobby. In
November, at midday, he saw two men in plain clothes walk a third man in
handcuffs through a side-street door behind Craftsteak. "It was weird,
creepy," he said, adding that the whole arrangement made him
uncomfortable. "I don't like it. It makes you wonder, what are they
hiding? Is it for good reasons or bad reasons?"
Natalie Jeremijenko, who lives nearby and is a professor of visual
arts at New York University, pointed out the "twisted genius" of hiding
federal agents in the "worldwide center of visuality and public space,"
referring to the galleries and High Line park among these buildings.
Jeremijenko was incensed. "For a participatory democracy to work, you
need to have real-time visual evidence of what is going on" and not just
knowledge by professors who file a FOIA request or even readers of a Nation
article.
In response to a question about the absence of signs at subfield
offices, the ICE e-mail stated, "ICE attempts to place signs wherever
possible, however there are many variables to consider such as shared
buildings, law enforcement activities, zoning laws, etc." Except for
"law enforcement activities," the reasons did not apply to the
facilities listed here, as evidenced by signs on adjacent businesses.
The Obama administration continued to ignore complaints about the LA
subfield office known as B-18 until April 1, when Napolitano and
Attorney General Eric Holder, as well as ICE officials, were named as
defendants in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and the National Immigration
Law Center. In September, the parties reached a settlement. The ACLU's
Arulanantham said, "I never understood what [ICE] had to gain. The fact
that after we filed the suit they completely fixed it makes it more
mysterious" as to why their months of earlier negotiation brought few
results. At the time of the lawsuit, he said, the nearby Mira Loma
Detention Center had space. When I asked if ICE was trying to punish
people by bringing them to B-18, Arulanantham said, "No, no one was
targeted," adding, "If it were punitive, it would be less disturbing."
Arulanantham's response is, alas, more than fodder for a law school
hypothetical about whether intentional or unintentional rights
violations are more egregious. In 2006 ICE punished several Iraqi hunger
strikers in Virginia--they were protesting being unlawfully held for
more than six months after agreeing to deportation--by shuffling them
between a variety of different facilities, ensuring that they would not
encounter lawyers or be found by loved ones. This went on from weeks to
months, according to Brittney Nystrom, senior legal adviser for the
National Immigration Forum. "The message was, We're going to make you
disappear."
As an alternative to the system of unmarked subfield offices and
unaccountable agents, consider the approach of neighborhood police
precincts, where dangerous criminals are held every day and police carry
out their work in full view of their neighbors. Not only can citizens
watch out for strange police actions, and know where to look if a family
member is missing; local accountability helps discourage misconduct.
ICE agents' persistent flouting of rules and laws is abetted by their
ability to scurry back to secret dens, avoiding the scrutiny and
resulting inhibitions that arise when law enforcement officers develop
relationships with the communities they serve.
Indeed, the jacket Kilbride wears during arrests says POLICE in
large letters. Working out of a heretofore secret location--Manhunters
has no exterior shots--one that his supervisor had requested I not
reveal, gives their operation the trappings of a secret police. An
attorney who had a client held in a subfield office said on background,
"The president released in January a memorandum about transparency, but
that's not happening. He says one thing, but we have these clandestine
operations, akin to extraordinary renditions within the United States.
They're misguided as to what their true mission is, and they are doing
things contrary to the best interests of the country."
SN: U.S. Immigration has secret prisons, and can detain anyone for however long they want without any legal process.
America's Secret ICE Castles
"If you don't have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but
you think he's illegal, we can make him disappear." Those chilling words
were spoken by James Pendergraph, then executive director of
Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Office of State and Local
Coordination, at a conference of police and sheriffs in August 2008.
Also present was Amnesty International's Sarnata Reynolds, who wrote
about the incident in the 2009 report "Jailed Without Justice" and said
in an interview, "It was almost surreal being there, particularly being
someone from an organization that has worked on disappearances for
decades in other countries. I couldn't believe he would say it so
boldly, as though it weren't anything wrong."
Pendergraph knew that ICE could disappear people, because he knew
that in addition to the publicly listed field offices and detention
sites, ICE is also confining people in 186
unlisted and unmarked subfield offices [1],
many in suburban office parks or commercial spaces revealing no
information about their ICE tenants--nary a sign, a marked car or even a
US flag. (Presumably there is a flag at the Veterans Affairs Complex in
Castle Point, New York, but no one would associate it with the Criminal
Alien Program ICE is running out of Building 7.) Designed for confining
individuals in transit, with no beds or showers, subfield offices are
not subject to ICE Detention Standards. The subfield office network was
mentioned in an October report by Dora Schriro, then special adviser to
Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security, but no locations were
provided.
I obtained a partial list of the subfield offices from an ICE
officer and shared it with immigrant advocates in major human and civil
rights organizations, whose reactions ranged from perplexity to outrage.
Andrea Black, director of Detention Watch Network (DWN), said she was
aware of some of the subfield offices but not that people were held
there. ICE never provided DWN a list of their locations. "This points to
an overall lack of transparency and even organization on the part of
ICE," said Black. ICE says temporary facilities in field or subfield
offices are used for 84 percent of all book-ins. There are twenty-four
listed field offices. The 186 unlisted subfield offices tend to be where
local police and sheriffs have formally or informally reached out to
ICE. For instance, in 2007 North Carolina had 629,947 immigrants and at
least six subfield offices, compared with Massachusetts, with 913,957
immigrants and one listed field office. Not surprisingly, before joining
ICE Pendergraph, a sheriff, was the Joe Arpaio of North Carolina, his
official bio stating that he "spearheaded the use of the 287(g)
program," legislation that empowers local police to perform immigration
law enforcement functions.
A senior attorney at a civil rights organization, speaking on
background, saw the list and exclaimed, "You cannot have secret
detention! The public has the right to know where detention is
happening."
Alison Parker, deputy director of Human Rights Watch, wrote a
December comprehensive report on ICE transit policies, "Locked Up Far
Away." Even she had never heard of the subfield offices and was
concerned that the failure to disclose their locations violates the UN's
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the United States is a
signatory. She explained that the government must provide "an impartial
authority to review the lawfulness of custody. Part and parcel is the
ability of somebody to find the person and to make their presence known
to a court."
The challenge of being unable to find people in detention centers,
documented in the Human Rights Watch report, is worsened when one does
not even know where to look. The absence of a real-time database
tracking people in ICE custody means ICE has created a network of secret
jails. Subfield offices enter the time and date of custody after the
fact, a situation ripe for errors, hinted at in the Schriro report, as
well as cover-ups.
ICE refused a request for an interview, selectively responded to
questions sent by e-mail and refused to identify the person authorizing
the reply--another symptom of ICE thwarting transparency and hence
accountability. The anonymous official provided no explanation for ICE
not posting a list of subfield office locations and phone numbers or for
its lack of a real-time locator database.
It is not surprising to find that, with no detention rules and being
off the map spatially and otherwise, ICE agents at these locations are
acting in ways that are unconscionable and unlawful. According to Ahilan
Arulanantham, director of Immigrant Rights for the ACLU of Southern
California, the Los Angeles subfield office called B-18 is a barely
converted storage space tucked away in a large downtown federal
building. "You actually walk down the sidewalk and into an underground
parking lot. Then you turn right, open a big door and voilà,
you're in a detention center," Arulanantham explained. Without knowing
where you were going, he said, "it's not clear to me how anyone would
find it. What this breeds, not surprisingly, is a whole host of problems
concerning access to phones, relatives and counsel."
It's also not surprising that if you're putting people in a
warehouse, the occupants become inventory. Inventory does not need
showers, beds, drinking water, soap, toothbrushes, sanitary napkins,
mail, attorneys or legal information, and can withstand the constant
blast of cold air. The US residents held in B-18, as many as 100 on any
given day, were treated likewise. B-18, it turned out, was not a
transfer area from point A to point B but rather an irrationally
revolving stockroom that would shuttle the same people briefly to the
local jails, sometimes from 1 to 5 am, and then bring them back,
shackled to one another, stooped and crouching in overpacked vans. These
transfers made it impossible for anyone to know their location, as
there would be no notice to attorneys or relatives when people moved. At
times the B-18 occupants were left overnight, the frigid onslaught of
forced air and lack of mattresses or bedding defeating sleep. The hours
of sitting in packed cells on benches or the concrete floor meant
further physical and mental duress.
Alla Suvorova, 26, a Mission Hills, California, resident for almost
six years, ended up in B-18 after she was snared in an ICE raid
targeting others at a Sherman Oaks apartment building. For her, the
worst part was not the dirt, the bugs flying everywhere or the clogged,
stinking toilet in their common cell but the panic when ICE agents
laughed at her requests to understand how long she would be held. "No
one could visit; they couldn't find me. I was thinking these people are
going to put me and the other people in a grinder and make sausages and
sell them in the local market."
Sleep deprivation and extreme cold were among the "enhanced
interrogation" techniques promoted by the Bush White House and later set
aside by the Justice Department because of concerns that they amounted
to torture. Although without the intent to elicit information, ICE under
the Obama administration was holding people charged with a civil
infraction in conditions approaching those no longer authorized for
accused terrorists.
According to Aaron Tarin, an immigration attorney in Salt Lake City,
"Whenever I have a client in a subfield office, it makes me nervous.
Their procedures are lax. You've got these senior agents who have all
the authority in the world because they're out in the middle of nowhere.
You've got rogue agents doing whatever they want. Most of the buildings
are unmarked; the vehicles they drive are unmarked." Like other
attorneys, Tarin was extremely frustrated by ICE not releasing its phone
numbers. He gave as an example a US citizen in Salt Lake City who hired
him because her husband, in the process of applying for a green card,
was being held at a subfield office in Colorado. By the time Tarin
tracked down the location of the facility that was holding the husband
when he had called his wife, the man had been moved to another subfield
office. "I had to become a little sleuth," Tarin said, describing the
hours he and a paralegal spent on the phone, the numerous false leads,
unanswered phones and unreturned messages until the husband, who had
been picked up for driving without a license or insurance, was found in
Grand Junction, Colorado, held on a $20,000 bond, $10,000 for each
infraction. "I argued with the guy, 'This is absurd! Whose policy is
this?'" Tarin said the agent's response was, "That's just our policy
here."
Rafael Galvez, an attorney in Maine, explained why he would like ICE
to release its entire list of subfield office addresses and phone
numbers. "If they're detaining someone, I will need to contact the
people on the list. If I can advocate on a person's behalf and provide
documents, a lot of complications could be avoided."
Cary, a suburb of Raleigh, North Carolina, has a typical subfield
office at the rear of CentreWest Commons, an office park adjacent to
gated communities, large artificial ponds and an Oxford University Press
production plant. ICE's low-lying brick building with a bright blue
awning has darkened windows, no sign and no US flag. People in shackles
and handcuffs are shuffled in from the rear. The office complex has
perhaps twenty other businesses, all of which do have signs. The agents,
who are armed, might not wear uniforms and drive their passengers in
unmarked, often windowless white vans. Even Dani Martinez-Moore, who
lives nearby and coordinates the North Carolina Network of Immigrant
Advocates, did not know people were being held there until she read
about it on my blog.
In late October 2008, Mark Lyttle, then 31, was held in the Cary
office for several hours. Lyttle was born in North Carolina, and the FBI
file ICE had obtained on him indicated he was a US citizen. Lyttle used
his time in the holding tank attempting to persuade the agents who had
plucked him out of the medical misdemeanor section of a nearby prison,
where he had been held for seventy-three days, not to follow through on
the Cary office's earlier decision to ship him to Mexico. Lyttle is
cognitively disabled, has bipolar disorder, speaks no Spanish and has no
Mexican relatives. In response to his entreaties, a Cary agent "told me
to tell it to the judge," Lyttle said. But Lyttle's charging document
from the Cary office includes a box checked next to the boilerplate
prohibition: "You may not request a review of this determination by an
immigration judge."
Lyttle made enough of a fuss at the Stewart Detention Center in
Lumpkin, Georgia, that the agents there arranged for him to appear
before a judge. But the checked box in the Cary paperwork meant he never
heard from the nonprofit Legal Orientation Program attorneys who might
have picked up on his situation. William Cassidy, a former ICE
prosecutor working for the Executive Office of Immigration Review,
ignored Lyttle's pleas and in his capacity as immigration judge signed
Lyttle's removal order. According to Lyttle, Cassidy said he had to go
by the sworn statements of the ICE officers.
Meanwhile, Lyttle's mother, Jeanne, and his brothers, including two
in the Army, were frantically searching for him, even checking the
obituaries. They were trying to find Lyttle in the North Carolina prison
system, but the trail went cold after he was transferred to ICE
custody. Jeanne said, "David showed me the Manila envelope [he sent to
the prison]--'Refused'--and we thought Mark had refused it." Jeanne was
crying. "We kept trying to find out where he was." It never crossed
their minds that Mark might be spending Christmas in a shelter for los
deportados on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande.
ICE spokesman Temple Black first told me the list was "not
releasable" and that it was "law enforcement sensitive," but coordinator
for community outreach Andrew Lorenzen-Strait e-mailed me a partial
list of addresses and no phone numbers. I then obtained a more complete
list, including telephone numbers, in response to a FOIA request. That
list, received in November and dated September 2009, is about forty
locations shy of the 186 subfield offices mentioned in the Schriro
report and omits thirty-nine locations listed in an August ICE job
announcement seeking applicants for immigration enforcement agents.
These include ICE postings in Champlain, New York; Alamosa, Colorado;
Pembroke Pines, Florida; and Livermore, California. The anonymous ICE
official neither answered questions about why I was sent an incomplete
list nor accounted for the disparity in official explanations of the
list's confidentiality.
ICE obscures its presence in other ways as well. Everyone knows that
detention centers are in sparsely populated areas, but according to
Amnesty International's Reynolds, policy director of migrant and refugee
rights, "Quite a lot of communities don't know they're detaining
thousands of people, because the signs say Service
Processing Center," not Detention
Center, although the latter designation is used for privately
contracted facilities. The ICE e-mail stated that the "service
processing" term was first used when the centers were run by the
predecessor agency Immigration and Naturalization Service, "because
these facilities were used to process aliens for deportation," ignoring
the fact that these structures were and are distinctive for confining
people and not the Orwellian "processing."
Even the largest complexes, which are usually off side roads from
small highways, are visible only if you drive right up to the entrance.
Unlike federal prisons, detention centers post no road signs to guide
travelers. The anonymous ICE official would not provide a reason for
this disparity.
ICE agents are also working in hidden offices in one of the
grooviest buildings in one of the hottest neighborhoods in Manhattan.
Tommy Kilbride, an ICE detention and removal officer and a star of
A&E's reality show Manhunters: Fugitive Task Force, is part
of the US Marshals Fugitive Task Force, housed on the third floor of the
Chelsea Market, above Fat Witch Bakery and alongside Rachael Ray and
the Food Network. Across the street are Craftsteak and Del Posto, both
fancy venues for two other Food Network stars, Tom Colicchio and Mario
Batali. Above their restaurants are agents working for the FBI's Joint
Terrorism Task Force.
Someone who had been working in that building for about a year said
he had heard rumors of FBI agents, though he didn't see one until nine
months later when a guy was openly carrying a gun through the lobby. In
November, at midday, he saw two men in plain clothes walk a third man in
handcuffs through a side-street door behind Craftsteak. "It was weird,
creepy," he said, adding that the whole arrangement made him
uncomfortable. "I don't like it. It makes you wonder, what are they
hiding? Is it for good reasons or bad reasons?"
Natalie Jeremijenko, who lives nearby and is a professor of visual
arts at New York University, pointed out the "twisted genius" of hiding
federal agents in the "worldwide center of visuality and public space,"
referring to the galleries and High Line park among these buildings.
Jeremijenko was incensed. "For a participatory democracy to work, you
need to have real-time visual evidence of what is going on" and not just
knowledge by professors who file a FOIA request or even readers of a Nation
article.
In response to a question about the absence of signs at subfield
offices, the ICE e-mail stated, "ICE attempts to place signs wherever
possible, however there are many variables to consider such as shared
buildings, law enforcement activities, zoning laws, etc." Except for
"law enforcement activities," the reasons did not apply to the
facilities listed here, as evidenced by signs on adjacent businesses.
The Obama administration continued to ignore complaints about the LA
subfield office known as B-18 until April 1, when Napolitano and
Attorney General Eric Holder, as well as ICE officials, were named as
defendants in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and the National Immigration
Law Center. In September, the parties reached a settlement. The ACLU's
Arulanantham said, "I never understood what [ICE] had to gain. The fact
that after we filed the suit they completely fixed it makes it more
mysterious" as to why their months of earlier negotiation brought few
results. At the time of the lawsuit, he said, the nearby Mira Loma
Detention Center had space. When I asked if ICE was trying to punish
people by bringing them to B-18, Arulanantham said, "No, no one was
targeted," adding, "If it were punitive, it would be less disturbing."
Arulanantham's response is, alas, more than fodder for a law school
hypothetical about whether intentional or unintentional rights
violations are more egregious. In 2006 ICE punished several Iraqi hunger
strikers in Virginia--they were protesting being unlawfully held for
more than six months after agreeing to deportation--by shuffling them
between a variety of different facilities, ensuring that they would not
encounter lawyers or be found by loved ones. This went on from weeks to
months, according to Brittney Nystrom, senior legal adviser for the
National Immigration Forum. "The message was, We're going to make you
disappear."
As an alternative to the system of unmarked subfield offices and
unaccountable agents, consider the approach of neighborhood police
precincts, where dangerous criminals are held every day and police carry
out their work in full view of their neighbors. Not only can citizens
watch out for strange police actions, and know where to look if a family
member is missing; local accountability helps discourage misconduct.
ICE agents' persistent flouting of rules and laws is abetted by their
ability to scurry back to secret dens, avoiding the scrutiny and
resulting inhibitions that arise when law enforcement officers develop
relationships with the communities they serve.
Indeed, the jacket Kilbride wears during arrests says POLICE in
large letters. Working out of a heretofore secret location--Manhunters
has no exterior shots--one that his supervisor had requested I not
reveal, gives their operation the trappings of a secret police. An
attorney who had a client held in a subfield office said on background,
"The president released in January a memorandum about transparency, but
that's not happening. He says one thing, but we have these clandestine
operations, akin to extraordinary renditions within the United States.
They're misguided as to what their true mission is, and they are doing
things contrary to the best interests of the country."
SN: U.S. Immigration has secret prisons, and can detain anyone for however long they want without any legal process.
