If you weren’t concerned before about the private immigrant detention center on the Tacoma tide flats, a recent report from Seattle University and human rights advocates One America should give you pause. The report —Voices from Detention: A Report on Human Rights Violations at the Northwest Detention Center — confirms reports of human rights abuses taking place at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility, including supposed abuse by guards and federal marshals, insufficient medical and mental health care, lack of legal due process, and poor living conditions attributed to overcrowding.



Immigration detention currently is the fastest growing form of incarceration in the United States, according to a recent New York Times article. In 2007, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement budget for detention space was just short of one billion dollars, a 50 percent increase since 2005. At any point, 30,000 immigrants are detained daily nationwide. Many are held in privately run facilities such as the Northwest Detention Center, which is within short walking distance of downtown Tacoma. Recently, reports have begun to emerge indicating that the care of people dragged into detention centers such as the one in Tacoma is possibly inhumane.



At a press conference in Seattle, Jackie O’Ryan, communications director for One America, said, “There is emerging clear and alarming evidence of overcrowding, shoddy care, inadequate staffing, lax standards, secrecy and chronic ineptitude.”



The report, composed of reports from inmates, relays that detainees were apparently pressured to sign papers whether they understood them or not, for example. A quarter of detainees said if they refused to sign, guards exerted psychological pressure with verbal threats and physical intimidation. An interviewed attorney said that Immigration and Custom Enforcement officials improperly advised many arriving prisoners to take voluntary deportation, which eliminates prisoners’ rights to counsel. Other prisoners reported repeated physical and verbal abuse.



Five prisoners provided disturbing accounts of strip searches. One prisoner estimated that he was strip searched five to 10 times during a two-to-three-month period. The strip searches always coincided with attorney visits, the  report indicates.



A female prisoner describes her post-attorney visit strip searches thusly: “We were stripped completely naked, a female officer told me to open my legs wide and she peeped into my vagina and later, she asked me to turn my backside and expose my anus [by separating the cheeks with her hands]. I was told to cough several times while in this position — with the officer looking at my private parts. We were forced to subject ourselves to this dehumanizing treatment. For several days afterward, I wept and have continued to have nightmares about this treatment.”



One section of the report provides a detailed account of six prisoners en route to a facility in Alabama from Tacoma. According to the report, U.S. marshals hit and punched prisoners, put a hood on a mentally ill prisoner, and refused to allow prisoners to use the restroom for more than seven hours. Several prisoners defecated in their seats and completed their journey sitting in their own feces.



Representatives from the Geo Group, which operates the facility in Tacoma, called these stories “works of fiction.”



Perhaps most alarming is the fact that there are no legally-binding or enforceable standards to protect the 30,000 estimated, and growing, population of prisoners.



“The question is this — where is the accountability surrounding this dramatic increase of enforcement?” says One America founder and executive director Pramila Jayapal. “Then we need to understand what’s being done in our names. We have asked that Homeland Security to stop these enforcement measures, at least temporarily, to make sure we’re conducting enforcement in a way that upholds our values and our laws.”



Report at www.hatefreezone.org