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LOS ANGELES, Calif. – A team of legal
organizations announced today that it is suing the U.S. Immigration and
Customs Enforcement agency in federal district court for detaining
immigrants in egregious, unsanitary conditions in a downtown Los Angeles
facility without soap, drinking water, toothpaste, toothbrushes,
sanitary napkins, changes of clothing or showers. The lawsuit -- filed
by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, the
National Immigration Law Center, and the law firm of Paul, Hastings,
Janofsky and Walker LLP -- also charges that the unsanitary conditions
have led ICE to deprive immigrants of due-process rights such as access
to mail or attorneys while in detention.
The facility,
known as “B-18,” was intended to temporarily house detainees for no more
than 12 hours. But in a perverse distortion of its original purpose,
immigration officials have kept detainees in this basement facility for
weeks by shuttling them to local jails in the evening and on weekends,
and returning them to the facility the next business day.
Under these
intolerable conditions, immigration officials often fail to notify
detainees that they have the right to obtain release on bond while their
cases remain pending. Meanwhile, immigration officials deny detainees
any mail correspondence, writing materials or access to other materials
that would enable them to defend themselves – all of which are required
by law.
“It’s shameful that
immigration officers are treating detainees like animals, apparently
because the immigration bureaucracy cannot seem to send detainees to the
right place,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, ACLU/SC director of immigrant
rights and national security. “Officers routinely crowd detainees into
dirty cells under grossly unsanitary conditions. They then deny them
access to basic constitutional necessities like the use of the mail,
making it impossible for them to defend themselves.”
“There is no good reason why authorities cannot simply
send the detainees to the right place and release those who are eligible
for bond, rather than shuttling them back and forth for days or weeks on
end. The B-18 fiasco is yet another example of how our immigration
detention system has completely broken down,” Arulanantham added.
The lawsuit also
contends that the conditions at issue violate an order from a federal
court in Los Angeles in another case which involved similarly egregious
abuses.
“The shell game
officials are playing with human lives has left detainees without the
ability to access basic services that any detention center must provide.
Detainees at B-18 have no access to outdoor recreation and cannot send
or receive mail, even for legal purposes,” said Karen Tumlin, a staff
attorney with the National Immigration Law Center. “They cannot make
private phone calls to attorneys and have no ability to learn their
rights because officials deny them access to a law library and create
barriers to their access to counsel.”
“The plain fact is
that B-18 was never intended to be used as a detention facility,” Tumlin
continued. “The facility fails on every level to house detainees in a
way that comports with basic notions of dignity. B-18 does not provide
soap or a change of clothes to detainees and routinely denies
menstruating women sanitary napkins. Detention under such conditions is
not only unlawful, but downright cruel.”
While in B-18,
detainees are crowded into a cell with as many as 50 other people. In
the cell, there is a single phone, a bench and one or two exposed
toilets, but no soap or drinking water. Detainees are often forced to
sleep on the floor. Menstruating women who ask for sanitary napkins are
routinely ignored. And there is no access to medical attention. On some
occasions, it has taken ICE officials more than a day to fix a clogged
toilet.
Despite these heinous
conditions, there is no mechanism for detainees to lodge a complaint.
According to Toliver
Besson, a partner at Paul Hastings, the lawsuit gives the new
administration of President Barack Obama a way to demonstrate its
commitment to immigrants’ rights. "The Obama administration has
indicated that it wants all immigrant detention facilities to be
operated in a clean, safe and constitutional manner. B-18 fails
miserably to meet this standard, but the administration's response to
this lawsuit is an opportunity to rectify this injustice and show that
it is moving in a new direction," Besson said.
The National ACLU
Immigrants’ Rights Project also serves as co-counsel in the case.
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A copy of the
complaint is available here.
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