A Costly Move
Flickr Image by Ensie & Matthias
Far and Frequent Transfers Impede Hearings for Immigrant Detainees in the United States
Every year, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detains hundreds of thousands of immigrants, including legal permanent residents, refugees, and undocumented persons, while their asylum or deportation cases move through the immigration courts. Detainees can be held for anywhere from a few weeks to a few years while their cases proceed. With close to 400,000 immigrants in detention each year, space in detention centers, especially near cities where immigrants live, has not kept pace. In addition, ICE has built a detention system, relying on subcontracts with state jails and prisons, which cannot operate without shuffling detainees among hundreds of facilities located throughout the United States.
As a result, most detainees will be loaded at some point during their detention onto a government-contracted car, bus, or airplane and transferred from one detention center to another: 52 percent of detainees experienced at least one such transfer in 2009. And numbers are growing: between 2004 and 2009, the number of transfers tripled. In total, some 2 million detainee transfers occurred between 1998 and 2010.
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