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In Suzanne Gamboa and Gwen Aviles
The Democrats are about to occupy positions in Congress that will allow them to sit on the agencies charged with keeping immigrants alive. Detention, especially children, said Thursday that they planned to tighten control of immigration detention next year.
The Democrats took control of the House in the November elections, which means that members of the House of Commons will now assume the chairmanship of the committee and subcommittees at the next Congress starting in January. 19659004] "There is still a lot of work to be done," said Lucille Roybal-Allard (19459011), the representative of the French Republic (19459011), who will probably chair the House of Commons Subcommittee on Homeland Security. . Roybal-Allard now occupies the first position of the subcommittee, the place reserved for the member of the oldest party of the minority party.
On his list of steps to be taken, improve access to legal advice, using alternatives to detention, especially for families, ensuring that immigration facilities are inspected more regularly and that additional funds be allocated to hiring social workers to work with unaccompanied migrant children, she said.
"It will be mainly about monitoring, promoting fairness and justice for these immigrants," Roybal said.
Although illegal immigration has declined significantly in recent years, the Trump administration has intensified its detention, including holding parents and children from Central America, more likely to cross the border and to surrender to the forces of asylum order.
Rep. Connecticut's Rosa DeLauro is about to become chair of the House's budget subcommittee on labor, health and human services and education. She is the Democrat of rank in this subcommittee right now. She pledged to "hold accounts for taxpayers money" intended to keep immigrant children in tents in Tornillo, Texas.
She criticized a request from the White House asking for an additional $ 190 million for the unaccompanied children program. Congress is negotiating, which, she said, would prolong the detention of immigrant children, which already lasts about 70 days on average.
"I will do everything in my power to stop them from touching one more room," said DeLauro.
is trying to finish the spending stream this year and there is a debate about how much will be spent on the enforcement of immigration legislation, including the detention of migrants and the president of the border, Donald Trump, had promised to build at the expense of Mexico.
put pressure on Democrats to prevent them from increasing immigration law enforcement spending and any additional spending on the wall.
The US Council of Immigration, a group of jurists who advocate for immigrant rights, released this week a study that found that nearly two-thirds of those detained in recent years in were locked up in private jails located in remote areas far from their community and with legal support.
The analysis was based on the records of 355,729 persons detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2015. According to the council report, the federal government also regularly moved people from its 638 institutions in its network. .
The report titled "The Immigration Detention Landscape in the United States." Was released Wednesday with the aim of negatively influencing the negotiations on Capitol Hill.
"While Congress weighs in on the repeated demands of the administration for a sizeable budget for immigration enforcement, these findings should be at the center political discussions on the financing of detention, supervision and Kathryn Shepherd, national counsel of the Immigration Council of the US Council of Immigration .
According to the analysis of the American Council of Immigration, 67% of the 355,729 people arrested in 2015 were held in private institutions and 64% The average length of detention among over 260,000 adults released from detention centers for immigrants in 2015 was 38 days.
The study shows that the majority of adults who were detained were transferred at least once during their detention, which led
The report's researchers found that 48% of the detainees were locked at least once in an institution located more than 100 km from the nearest non-profit immigration defense lawyer specializing in the defense of immigrants threatened with eviction.
In addition, 26% of inmates were detained in a place located 90 miles and 22%, 120 km from this legal aid, according to the report of Dr. Emily Ryo, associate professor at the university. Gould School of Law of Southern California and Ian Peacock, M.Sc. student in sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles.
"Giving access to legal advice will be one of my priorities," said Roybal-Allard. "We will do everything in our power to ensure easy access and get help from a lawyer." Under US law, immigrants in detention are not entitled to a lawyer under US law.
The Migration Policy Institute in a report released in May, reported that three-quarters of the immigration detainees in 2016 were held in privately run premises
. institute, the Department of Homeland Security spent $ 126 per day and per person held during fiscal 2017, at a cost of up to $ 2 billion per year. This has also resulted in increased profits for private companies operating the facilities.
The analysis of the American Immigration Council showed that private establishments located outside major urban areas had a higher number of grievances.
In 2015, nearly 50,000 people were in detention. The detainee and public complaints were formulated via the ECI detention report and information line (a telephone complaint and a line of questions), the report says. Access to legal advice and basic information on immigration cases was the most common type of grievance.
"In the United States, the use of immigration detention has increased dramatically in recent decades, while allegations of violations of civil and human rights in places of detention have persisted. "Ryo said.The issues raised in the report" could be exacerbated if the government increased the use of detention, "she said.
The author and professor of Stanford's story, Ana Raquel Minian, recently wrote in an opinion piece published by the New York Times that immigration detention has a short history in the country.The move to greater detention of 39, immigrants after a fall in the 50s came with the arrival of Cubans and Haitians in the 1980s and later, the influence of for-profit companies that helped to build a massive detention infrastructure, wrote Minian.
Roybal-Allard, De Lauro and the elected representative Veronica Escobar D-Texas, said at the teleconference Thursday that they would also encourage training increased guardians and penitentiary staff e.
"Most of these contracted institutions are run by people who have the habit of dealing with hardened criminals and who have no sensitivity or understanding about the fact that they are dealing with a different population, "said Roybal-Allard.
Escobar called for more accountability and transparency in contracts awarded to private companies.
"What we have seen with these huge untendered contracts is that they are going on," Escobar said. "They continue to be renewed and … the amount of money and taxpayer money is probably greater than we even know.
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