Pub­lished by Cam­pus Progress

A year ago, the Obama admin­is­tra­tion touted the newly over­hauled T. Don Hutto Res­i­den­tial Cen­ter as a model deten­tion facility.

Three years ear­lier, the facil­ity, located in Tay­lor, Texas, had come under fire after news broke that a guard had engaged in sex­ual acts with a detainee—while her young son lay sleep­ing in the same small cell. Secu­rity cam­eras had caught the man enter­ing and exit­ing the room. The guard was fired, but he was not prosecuted.

Months later, the Amer­i­can Civil Lib­er­ties Union (ACLU) doc­u­mented the prison-like con­di­tions to which Hutto sub­jected detainees of all ages: Con­fin­ing them in small cells for up to 12 hours a day, forc­ing them to wear prison uni­forms, and rou­tinely depriv­ing them of access to edu­ca­tion, health care, and pri­vacy.  The ACLU, on behalf of pris­on­ers, sued the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity over the issue and won.

Last year, admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials billed the facil­ity as trans­formed from an inhos­pitable prison for fam­i­lies into a “person-centered” facil­ity for women. Hutto was sup­posed to set the stage for the administration’s vision of truly “civil deten­tion reform.” Hutto’s bad rep­u­ta­tion made it a good can­di­date for reform. Cor­rec­tions Cor­po­ra­tion of Amer­ica (CCA), the for-profit com­pany that oper­ates Hutto and most other immi­gra­tion deten­tion cen­ters in this coun­try, worked with the Immi­gra­tion and Cus­toms Enforce­ment (ICE) to reha­bil­i­tate the facil­ity. It was duly relieved of hous­ing fam­i­lies and revamped to pro­vide women detainees with a less puni­tive res­i­den­tial experience.

Then this August another guard at the facil­ity, Don­ald Charles Dunn, was arrested for sex­u­ally assault­ing sev­eral detainees while trans­port­ing them for release. To date, no one knows exactly how many women he assaulted before depor­ta­tion or release. The inci­dent stood out as a remark­able fail­ure of jus­tice and pub­licly revived Hutto’s trou­bling legacy of bad man­age­ment and misconduct.

Now, of course, Hutto is a blight on the administration’s vision for deten­tion reform—an ugly reminder that our deten­tion sys­tem remains woe­fully impaired and any­thing but civil.

“What’s really trou­bling about what hap­pened here is that Hutto is sup­pos­edly a model facil­ity, and yet this indi­vid­ual was able to sub­ject numer­ous women to abuse on numer­ous occa­sions,” says Vanita Gupta, the ACLU deputy legal direc­tor charged with inves­ti­gat­ing the sex­ual abuses at the deten­tion center.

Gupta, who is in the process of track­ing down some of the women Dunn abused, believes that Hutto epit­o­mizes the endemic flaws in our present immi­gra­tion deten­tion sys­tem. While ICE’s patch­work of over­crowded immi­gra­tion deten­tion cen­ters is plagued by a broad range of sys­temic ills, the most per­ni­cious of these, by far, is a wide­spread pat­tern of sex­ual abuse.

Rethink­ing the Deten­tion Experiment

Mass immi­gra­tion deten­tion is a rel­a­tively new phe­nom­e­non in the United States, which accounts for some of the flaws in the sys­tem. Prior to the 1980s, only those immi­grants deemed “a dan­ger to national secu­rity” were detained for any period of time. Mass deten­tion as we know it today evolved under the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion, as a means of deter­ring large influxes of Cuban, Hait­ian, and Cen­tral Amer­i­can refugees.

In the decades since, con­cern over emi­gra­tion from Mex­ico saw new, stricter laws enacted which col­lec­tively expanded the cat­e­gories of aliens that could be sub­ject to deten­tion. The 9/11 ter­ror­ist attacks and the sub­se­quent cre­ation of the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity fur­ther solid­i­fied the com­pul­sory use of the long-term detention.

As a result, the detainee pop­u­la­tion increased at a stag­ger­ing pace—from 7,500 peo­ple per day in 1995 to approx­i­mately 33,000 per day in 2010. With few ded­i­cated immi­gra­tion deten­tion cen­ters avail­able to house the grow­ing num­ber of detainees, author­i­ties began rent­ing out beds in a vari­ety of facil­i­ties pri­mar­ily used for hous­ing crim­i­nal con­victs under very restric­tive con­di­tions. The inter­min­gling and even­tual con­fla­tion of civil and crim­i­nal detainees pushed immi­gra­tion deten­tion towards the highly puni­tive model preva­lent today. Today nearly 400,000 undoc­u­mented immi­grants are detained every year.

Vic­to­ria Lopez, an ACLU immi­gra­tion attor­ney who has worked with detainees in Ari­zona for nine years notes the change. “It was still pretty bad 9 years ago when I first start­ing doing this work, but over the years there has been a way more heavy handed approach to pros­e­cut­ing immi­gra­tion depor­ta­tion cases.” Lopez says of the change in immi­gra­tion pol­icy and prac­tice. “When I first started doing this, there was def­i­nitely more room for nego­ti­at­ing cases. Over the last few years it’s become much more difficult.”

ICE’s deci­sion in 2001 to begin detain­ing large num­bers of immi­grant women posed new chal­lenges. Due to the over­all lack of space, all-women deten­tion quar­ters were cre­ated in facil­i­ties that his­tor­i­cally had only housed men and were not equipped to accom­mo­date two dis­tinct pop­u­la­tions. To date, women in such facil­i­ties are rou­tinely denied (or have only lim­ited access to) some of the resources avail­able for men: Edu­ca­tional ser­vices, court­yards, craft space, and work rooms.

Women and LGBT detainees par­tic­u­larly at risk

As evi­denced by the Hutto inci­dent, sex­ual abuse in deten­tion has become so per­va­sive that Human Rights Watch released a report in August that doc­u­mented sex crimes com­mit­ted in deten­tion cen­ters across eight states.

At the Willacy Deten­tion Cen­ter in Ray­mondville, Texas, detainees told researchers that guards not only per­pe­trated sex­ual assault but, in at least one inci­dent, actu­ally aided a male detainee in rap­ing a woman who was held in the same facility.

In Ari­zona, a woman reported that she was repeat­edly assaulted by a man on the med­ical staff who con­tin­u­ally called her in for vagi­nal exam­i­na­tions, even though she never com­plained of hav­ing gyne­co­log­i­cal problems.

And at the San Pedro Ser­vice Pro­cess­ing Cen­ter in Cal­i­for­nia, a guard forced a trans­gen­der woman to repeat­edly per­form oral sex on him while she waited for her attor­ney in a hold­ing cell. Even after she reported the inci­dent, the staff took so long arrang­ing for evi­dence col­lec­tion that she was forced to wait overnight to wash out her mouth.

Vio­lence against LGBT detainees, in par­tic­u­lar, is a grow­ing prob­lem, as they are espe­cially vul­ner­a­ble within the deten­tion sys­tem. In addi­tion to being sin­gled out for harass­ment as a result of their sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion or gen­der iden­tity, trans­gen­der women often face added risk. They are often housed with male detainees and super­vised by male guards. Under those con­di­tions, trans­gen­der women are even more sus­cep­ti­ble to vio­lence than those held in women-only facilities.

“The [only] sex­ual assaults I have doc­u­mented have been with gay and trans­gen­der pop­u­la­tions in deten­tion,” ACLU attor­ney Lopez says. “Within that pop­u­la­tion, we’ve def­i­nitely noted cases of harass­ment, start­ing with ver­bal harass­ment all the way to phys­i­cal assault. In a more egre­gious case, one of the trans­gen­der detainees we worked with was sex­u­ally assaulted by a guard.”

Unfor­tu­nately, efforts to safe­guard this par­tic­u­larly vul­ner­a­ble pop­u­la­tion have proven dis­tinctly harm­ful as well. For instance, when the Inter-American Com­mis­sion on Human Rights (IACHR) con­ducted site vis­its of seven South­west deten­tion cen­ters last year, they were trou­bled to find that some facil­i­ties attempted to pro­tect LGBT detainees by keep­ing them in soli­tary confinement—a harshly puni­tive mea­sure often used in pris­ons to dis­ci­pline dis­obe­di­ent crim­i­nal inmates. As high­lighted by the IACHR, facil­i­ties that sub­ject LGBT detainees to the prac­tice are effec­tively pun­ish­ing the very indi­vid­u­als they seek to protect.

Poor national stan­dards in place

Many of the inci­dents of sex­ual abuse and mis­treat­ment in the deten­tion sys­tem expe­ri­enced by immi­grant detainees on a daily basis could be pre­vented if fed­eral author­i­ties sim­ply assumed appro­pri­ate respon­si­bil­ity for the peo­ple they detain under fed­eral law.

Of approx­i­mately 350 facil­i­ties that house more than 380,000 detainees per year, only eight are directly owned and oper­ated by Immi­gra­tion and Cus­toms Enforce­ment (ICE). The oth­ers are con­tracted out to pri­vate com­pa­nies or state or local facilities—many of which are also oper­ated by for-profit prison corporations.

Out­sourc­ing civil deten­tion raises a num­ber of eth­i­cal con­cerns about the social costs of detain­ing peo­ple for profit. Not only is it expen­sive (an aver­age $122 per detainee per day, accord­ing to Deten­tion Watch Net­work), it tends to put detainees at increased risk of abuse and mis­treat­ment. The Bureau of Jus­tice has sta­tis­tics that con­firm sex­ual vio­lence is his­tor­i­cally much less preva­lent in federal-run pris­ons than in state pris­ons or local jails. At pri­vately run facil­i­ties, rates of abuse are four to five times higher than they are fed­eral prisons.

And, while ICE does pre­scribe a set of National Deten­tion Stan­dards to its facil­i­ties, they are var­i­ously imple­mented and not legally binding.

“You have these vary­ing con­tracts with ICE, and there are no base­line stan­dards that are enforce­able for all of these immi­gra­tion deten­tion facil­i­ties,” says Lopez. “ ICE has what it calls Per­for­mance Based Stan­dards [which] do not apply in the same way to a county facil­ity that they would apply to a pri­vately con­tracted facil­ity or an ICE-run facil­ity … They aren’t enforce­able, so if there is a vio­la­tion of one of these stan­dards, there really is no recourse to address the violation.”

The com­pli­cated ways in which fed­eral law and ICE stan­dards over­lap with facil­ity poli­cies can be unset­tling. For exam­ple, Human Rights Watch notes that, until 2007, it was not tech­ni­cally ille­gal for a CCA employee at an immi­gra­tion deten­tion facil­ity to have a sex­ual rela­tion­ship with a detainee. Though sex­ual con­tact between guards and inmates is clearly pro­hib­ited by fed­eral law, the CCA facil­ity (though con­tracted by the fed­eral gov­ern­ment) did not fall under DOJ author­ity and was, there­fore, exempt from the pro­vi­sion. While that par­tic­u­lar loop­hole has since closed, fed­eral efforts to ensure that sex­ual assault pre­ven­tion and inter­ven­tion is uni­form across facil­i­ties have been piece­meal, at best.

ICE’s national deten­tion stan­dards did not include a sex­ual assault pro­vi­sion at all until 2008—a full seven years after the agency began manda­to­rily detain­ing women in large num­bers. And even with the pro­vi­sion in place, the like­li­hood of its broad and thor­ough imple­men­ta­tion remains in question.

“I think that [reforms] have been some­what slow to get to the ground,” Lopez says of the Obama administration’s efforts to improve the deten­tion sys­tem. “Frankly, when you’re deal­ing with the num­ber of peo­ple that go through deten­tion facil­i­ties in the U.S., and some of the life or death issues in these cases…I don’t know how much longer folks can wait for reforms to trickle down from Wash­ing­ton, D.C., to Eloy, Ariz.”

The Gen­dered Impact of Detention

Abuse in deten­tion does not occur in a vac­uum. Rather, these prob­lems exist on con­tin­uum of malfea­sance, begin­ning with dis­crim­i­na­tory prac­tices at the low­est level. In the immi­gra­tion deten­tion sys­tem women rou­tinely expe­ri­ence a dif­fer­ent stan­dard of care and con­fine­ment than men. Not only are many facil­i­ties ill-equipped to han­dle the dis­tinct needs of a female pop­u­la­tion, the absence of com­pre­hen­sive and bind­ing indus­try reg­u­la­tions leaves women sus­cep­ti­ble to a vari­ety of prejudices.

San­dra, who asked not to be referred to by her full name, knows this all too well. When she and her hus­band Car­los were arrested in a work­site raid in Ari­zona last year, they were dis­tressed to dis­cover how dif­fer­ently they were treated while in confinement.

San­dra, who was held in an all-women jail not far from the facil­ity where her hus­band was con­fined, was sub­jected to mandatory—and humiliating—strip searches on a rou­tine basis. Dur­ing the three months that she was detained, she and the other women she was housed with were forced to com­pletely dis­robe and bend over for exam­i­na­tion any time they left their cells—no mat­ter if they came from court, church, or the jail’s vis­i­ta­tion room. When she told her hus­band about this, he was appalled. The men in his facil­ity were only sub­jected to cur­sory waist­band frisking.

Rou­tine, unnec­es­sary strip searches of women detainees are com­mon across deten­tion facil­i­ties, even though national deten­tion stan­dards man­date strip searches only when staff has rea­son­able sus­pi­cion to believe that a detainee is con­ceal­ing con­tra­band. The wide­spread use of strip searches in direct vio­la­tion of deten­tion stan­dards high­lights the inef­fi­cacy of ICE reg­u­la­tion, and stands out as yet another exam­ple of harsh prison stan­dards being mis­ap­plied to a largely non-violent, non-criminal population.

The prac­tice is par­tic­u­larly detri­men­tal to women who arrive in deten­tion imme­di­ately following—or as a result of­—sexual vio­lence or trauma. The United Nations esti­mates that up to 60 per­cent of women cross­ing the south­ern Mex­ico bor­der, pre­sum­ably bound for the U.S., expe­ri­ence some form of sex­ual abuse dur­ing their jour­ney.  [PDF]

The Migra­tion Pol­icy Insti­tute notes that the risk of assault is so high among women bor­der crossers that “before [they] start their jour­ney, some of them inject con­tra­cep­tives to pre­vent preg­nancy.” Deten­tion facil­i­ties in bor­der states, which detain a large num­ber of bor­der crossers, are there­fore likely to have in their cus­tody a high num­ber of recent sex­ual assault vic­tims. For these women, unnec­es­sary and inva­sive strip searches only aug­ment pre-existing traumas.

More­over, ICE facil­i­ties are rife with vic­tims of domes­tic and vio­lence. In her 2009 report on women in the Ari­zona immi­gra­tion deten­tion, researcher and direc­tor of the Uni­ver­sity of Ari­zona Bor­der Research Insti­tute Nina Rabin describes sev­eral cases in which immi­grant women were actu­ally turned into ICE by their abu­sive partners.

Maria, a 25-year-old Mex­i­can immi­grant who came to the United States at 17, told Rabin under the con­di­tion her last name wouldn’t be revealed that she entered the sys­tem after endur­ing a phys­i­cally vio­lent rela­tion­ship with a man who “kid­napped her, severely beat her, and turned her over to ICE.” While ICE hos­pi­tal­ized Maria before con­fin­ing her to a deten­tion facil­ity, nobody addressed the cir­cum­stances of her arrival or informed her that she was eli­gi­ble for a spe­cial visa for domes­tic vio­lence victims.

The expe­ri­ences of women like Maria under­score the gen­dered flaws in the deten­tion sys­tem. The wide­spread use of need­lessly penal prac­tices (like strip searches) only serves to fur­ther vic­tim­ize an already bru­tal­ized population.

Things are improv­ing, but too slowly

In recent years, as a result of increas­ing pub­lic aware­ness and Obama admin­is­tra­tion efforts, some of these issues have been addressed. Facil­i­ties in Ari­zona, for exam­ple, revamped detainee accom­mo­da­tions fol­low­ing Rabin’s much-publicized report.

Lopez, too, has noticed some small changes in the facil­i­ties that she mon­i­tors. Since news broke of the sex­ual abuse at Hutto, for instance, the Eloy Deten­tion Cen­ter in south­ern Ari­zona began ensur­ing that women detainees were not left alone with male offi­cers, and instead escorted to vis­i­ta­tions by other women. “We def­i­nitely saw some imme­di­ate, notice­able changes in the way they started doing things at Eloy,” Lopez says, though she adds that there is still a long way to go.

The immi­gra­tion deten­tion sys­tem in the United States is osten­si­bly an ongo­ing exper­i­ment. Under the Obama admin­is­tra­tion, ICE has made some sig­nif­i­cant steps in reform­ing deten­tion, begin­ning with the cre­ation of the Office of Deten­tion Pol­icy and Plan­ning (ODPP)—an agency that would pro­vide greater fed­eral over­sight of the sys­tem and work on cre­at­ing more civil deten­tion facil­i­ties. In recent months, offi­cials have also pro­nounced their com­mit­ment to refo­cus­ing enforce­ment efforts on crim­i­nal aliens instead of immi­grants who had com­mit­ted no crimes. And as recently as last month, ICE announced plans to release up to 17,000 detainees who had rea­son­able grounds for remain­ing in the country.

But the administration’s talk of reform belies the real­ity that more immi­grants have been detained since Obama took office than any other time in his­tory. And as the detainee pop­u­la­tion increases, so do inci­dents of abuse. Cre­at­ing more civil ICE-operated deten­tion facil­i­ties is a step in the right direc­tion but—as evi­denced by the Hutto case—nicer facil­i­ties mean lit­tle with­out legally bind­ing, gender-based deten­tion stan­dards in place to gov­ern them.

“ICE should have more rig­or­ous stan­dards in place to pre­vent [abuses] from hap­pen­ing,” Gupta says, adding that the next major step is to end con­tracts with prison deten­tion com­pa­nies, like CCA, which are guilty of repeat offenses.

“CCA was already sued for the way it was treat­ing chil­dren in its cus­tody at Hutto, and CCA really messed up that time … Yet ICE con­tin­ued to con­tract with CCA, and con­tin­ues to do so in the after­math of this lat­est tragedy,” she says.

What will it take, she won­ders, for ICE to finally learn its lesson?

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