By Michael Kaufman and Carmen Iguina
In 2009, the Obama administration announced plans to transform the immigration detention system to make it “truly civil” – a recognition that detainees are being held for civil immigration violations, not as punishment for a crime.

Nonetheless, nearly four years later, the federal government continues to detain hundreds of thousands of people each year in a patchwork of local jails, privately run and federal facilities that have been roundly criticized for substandard conditions, poor medical care and abusive treatment. The Detention Watch Network’s Expose and Close campaign has called on the Obama administration to put an end to these shameful practices by closing the 10worst immigration detention centers, and the ACLU has sent a letter to the president urging him to take steps to reform the detention system.
Among the 10 worst is the Theo Lacy facility in Orange County, Calif. Operated by the county sheriff’s office, it was designed as a “maximum-security jail” to house individuals in the criminal justice system. But the jail has now been partitioned, with one section housing up to 408 minimum security and 64 medium or maximum security immigration detainees.
That partition has not masked the reality that Theo Lacy is an extraordinarily harsh and punitive environment unfit to house immigration detainees. The DWN report details a widespread pattern of abuse and substandard conditions at Theo Lacy, including staff who kick and shove detainees, staff who subject detainees to racial epithets including "nigger" and "camel," and staff who neglect detainees’ medical needs. The report also documents overuse of solitary confinement for minor rule infractions, a punishment that can cause permanent damage to mental health.
Rodolfo Garcia-Santos is one of many detainees who have received shockingly poor medical care at Theo Lacy. Garcia-Santos had a painful, and potentially life-threatening, kidney condition that doctors had told him would require surgery. However, , the medical staff at Theo Lacy treated him with nothing more than pain medication, despite three different consultations at which Garcia-Santos pleaded for adequate care. The staff permitted Garcia-Santos to continue to use a temporary drainage tube for his kidney – which was intended to last a week – for months until he suffered a painful infection. Only after the ACLU intervened on his behalf did ICE officials arrange for Garcia-Santos to finally have the surgery.
No one should have to suffer woefully inadequate care medical care or Theo Lacy’s other deplorable conditions. The time has come for the Obama administration to live up to its promise of establishing a “truly civil” detention system by terminating its contract at Theo Lacy and other worst-offending facilities. Ending the reliance on mass immigration lockup is not only the right thing to do from a human rights perspective: doing so would save taxpayers more than $1.6 billion a year, a key benefit in this time of fiscal crisis.
This post was originally published on December 2, 2012, and republished on International Human Rights Day.

By Jason Howe
The passport control agent almost seemed apologetic.
“Sir, he has to fill out a separate family entry card,” he told me, “he” meaning my husband, Adrián. And then, he mumbled “DOMA.”
Jetlagged and groggy after an overnight flight from Dublin, I was not in the mood. But following a silent glare from Adrián, I stood by, fuming, as he filled out a separate card. Even though we’re married -- twice -- and now have two daughters, we don’t constitute a family to the U.S. government. The reason is the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, passed by Congress and signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1996. That set us up for a decidedly second-class status -- the long wait and thousands of dollars we paid an immigration attorney to get his green card, instead of the automatic residency he would have received if we had been a heterosexual married couple; the thousands of dollars more we pay in federal taxes each year because we can’t file jointly; even a tax on the healthcare insurance I receive through his employer. It doesn’t get easier.
So, like other married same-sex couples across the country, we anxiously awaited today’s announcement from the Supreme Court that it will hear two of the marriage cases currently before it. The first, the ACLU’s Windsor v. United States, could finally end the injuries and insults, some grave and some minor, that couples like us endure every day by removing the federal nose from our business and allowing states to determine a marriage’s validity, as in fact has traditionally been the case.
The second, Hollingsworth v. Perry, is the federal challenge to California’s Proposition 8. We’re lucky to count ourselves among the roughly 18,000 same-sex couples who married during the “Summer of Love,” the five-month window in 2008 during which marriage was legal for California’s gay and lesbian couples. A ruling in that case could be narrowly tailored, ending marriage discrimination only in California, or broad, deeming that denying same-sex couples the right to marry violates the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. A narrow ruling in that case wouldn’t affect my husband and me, but we’d cease being oddities of “marriage island,” one couple among the fortunate few whom California recognizes as a family.
And those words, “marriage” and “family” matter. It’s easy to enumerate the 1,138 federal benefits we don’t receive from the federal government. What’s less tangible are the status and respect that marriage confers -- the security agent at Madrid’s cavernous Barajas Airport who stopped questioning me when I told her my marido, “husband,” had packed the suitcase, instead of my pareja, or “partner;” the excitement of our families when they met for the first time at our wedding in his hometown of Alicante, Spain (which had no problem marrying us, by the way); the security and stability our daughters will enjoy knowing that their fathers relationship is respected the same as their friends’ parents. None of that comes with civil unions or domestic partnerships. We’re hoping it comes soon from the Supreme Court.

By Jason Howe
You have to hand it to Sheriff Lee Baca. He sometimes arrives at the correct conclusion. It’s just not very often that he does it quickly, easily or without a lot of coercion – i.e. being sued.
The latest case in point is his announcement this week that he will no longer turn over low-level, non-U.S. citizen offenders to the custody of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials. Just like the LAPD. Just like other local agencies across the state. Just like California Attorney General Kamala Harris finally announced that no agency is required to do.
We at the ACLU of Southern California have been trying to get that message to Baca for years, but to date, he has been one of the most adamant supporters of complying with the federal “Secure Communities” program, or S-Comm for short, insisting adamantly, but incorrectly, that the sheriff’s department was legally obligated to comply with all detainer requests. In theory, the program targets illegal immigrants arrested for serious crimes for deportation. In practice, S-Comm sweeps up those arrested for minor offenses, crime victims, even U.S. citizens. Under S-Comm, ICE agents send a request – a “detainer” or hold – to local law enforcement officials asking them to detain someone in their custody while ICE mulls over possible transfer to federal custody – and deportation proceedings. The program has led to the deportations of more than 80,000 California residents in less than three years, most of whom represented no threat to public safety.
But many law enforcement agencies go far beyond the requirements of S-Comm, holding detainees much longer than the 48 hours mandated by ICE – even when they have yet to be accused of a crime or when a judge has ordered their release. In October, we filed suit on behalf of British filmmaker Duncan Roy and a number of others illegally detained by the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. Roy spent nearly three months in detention; like many other detainees, deputies did not allow him to post bail even though a judge had ordered his release. Policies like that have resulted in the detentions of thousands of people who pose little or no threat to our communities, clogging jails that are already bursting at the seams and at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars to local law enforcement agencies. And while any change to S-Comm rules would certainly help, the fact remains that detainers are not a warrant and are almost always unconstitutional. The correct response is for those local agencies to recognize that complying with ICE holds is voluntary -- and to decline to honor them.
So we welcome Baca’s Sacramento-induced epiphany. We really do. He joins LAPD Chief Charlie Beck and other law enforcement agencies across the state who agree with the attorney general that local agencies can craft their own response to S-Comm. But there’s a better way than the patchwork of policies this creates -- a bill vetoed by Governor Brown in September and reintroduced in the legislature this week. The TRUST Act would limit action on ICE holds to those convicted of a serious or violent felony. It would prevent local agencies from spending scarce resources to foot the bill for federal detentions and would improve public safety by encouraging community members to work with police to investigate crimes. A coherent statewide police serves all of us better. Baca has been a harsh critic of the TRUST Act – we’re hopeful his recent conversion on S-Comm will help him see it in a new light.