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Forgotten men
Courts say the Immigration and Naturalization Service's growing practice of mandatory detention violates due process. And critics say the worst conditions for New England detainees are at the ACI
BY STEVEN STYCOS

Illustration by Mark Reusch

Aderson Cesar waited nine months before the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) approved the removal of a sand dollar-sized disk of flesh from his back. The lump was sore to touch, caused pain to run down his back, and prevented the 30-year-old Haitian native, who has been in INS custody for 13 months, from sleeping properly. But the INS ignored weekly requests for medical care from Cesar, a former Boston resident, until the agency received letters from his lawyer and inquiries from the Phoenix.

INS detainee Wilfredo Rodriguez Blanco says two of his teeth were loosened when a corrections officer at the Adult Correctional Institutions in Cranston punched him in the mouth. (Department of Corrections spokesman Al Bucci says Rodriguez Blanco had to be forcibly restrained after grabbing an officer and creating a disturbance.) The 45-year-old Cuban immigrant, who has been detained by the INS for 16 months, pulled one tooth himself and the prison dentist pulled the other. Rodriguez Blanco, a former resident of Springfield, Massachusetts, says he was told the INS would pay only for extractions, not false teeth.

Basel Zakkari's identification badge says the 39-year-old former Worcester, Massachusetts, resident is a relatively slim 176 pounds, but he now weighs more than 200 pounds. As a diabetic, the Palestinian immigrant receives insulin at the prison, but he isn't served a diabetic diet, despite repeated requests, he says. Detained by the INS for 16 months, he says he's now experiencing cold and tingly sensations in his feet and lower legs -- a common complication of poorly controlled diabetes.

Cesar, Rodriguez Blanco, and Zakkari were not imprisoned at the ACI's Intake Service Center for violating the law. They are not awaiting trial for any crime. Held by the INS after completing sentences for crimes, these non-citizens are awaiting -- and in most cases, fighting -- deportation to the countries of their birth. As INS detainees, they remain at the ACI with poor medical care, no chance of bail, and almost no opportunity for recreation or education.

Nationally, the number of people detained by the INS on a typical day has increased in the last five years from 8200 to 20,000, according to the Harvard Law Review. The detainees are held at more than 900 facilities around the US, including the ACI's Intake Service Center, which usually houses about 100 INS detainees (Rodriguez Blanco has since been moved to a jail in Greenfield, Massachusetts). Another 400 are held are at some 10 other jails in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire, including the Bristol County Jail and House of Correction in North Dartmouth, Massachusetts, according to Iris Gomez, an immigration lawyer on the staff of the Boston-based Massachusetts Law Reform Institute.

The INS doesn't have its own detention center in New England, so it pays the State of Rhode Island $75 day, or approximately $2.7 million a year, to jail these detainees. But detainees who have spent time in several jails say conditions at the ACI's Intake Service Center are the worst. "The complaints about the ACI exceed those of any other facility," says Gomez, who handles many INS cases.

Most INS detainees can trace their problems to the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress and the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City, which killed more than 150 people. Although American right-winger Timothy McVeigh was convicted of the crime, initial suspicions blamed Arabs for the attack and Congress moved to qualm American fears of foreigners by passing the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996.

The new law greatly expanded the list of crimes that trigger the deportation of non-citizens to include many non-violent offenses, such as theft, forgery, and receipt of stolen property, with at least one-year sentences. Over INS objections, Congress also required the nearly automatic mandatory detention of non-citizens after they complete prison sentences for these crimes (Cesar was convicted in 1992 of assault and battery with a deadly weapon; Zakkari and Rodriguez Blanco say they were convicted, respectively, of assaulting a police officer, and assaulting a police officer and receiving stolen property). As a result, non-citizens who serve time in such cases are usually detained now immediately after their release from prison. And they remain imprisoned until the completion of the often-lengthy deportation process.

Conditions at the ACI haven't worsened since September 11 and the accompanying heightened suspicion of immigrants, detainees say, although some guards occasionally call them terrorists and tell them to return to their native countries. Rushed through Congress as part of the war on terrorism, the USA Patriot Act expands the US Department of Justice's power to detain immigrants with alleged terrorist connections and broadens the definition of deportable offenses to include donations of food, money, or even blankets to a group designated as "terrorist" by the State Department. Civil libertarians have criticized the Patriot Act. But Jeanne Butterfield, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association in Washington, DC, says the act has no effect on the most typical INS detainees -- like those who are subject to deportation because of criminal convictions and have been imprisoned at the ACI for months, even years, waiting for the disposition of their cases.

In April, 28 detainees at Intake sent INS Commissioner James Ziglar a three-page letter complaining about poor health-care, a lack of recreational and educational opportunities, excessive searches and lockdowns, high phone charges, dirty uniforms, and a substandard law library. Some detainees have also filed lawsuits in federal court over conditions.

Meanwhile, immigration lawyers have been attacking mandatory detention in court. As a result, three federal appeals courts have declared that mandatory detention, without the possibility of a hearing or bail, violates the due process guarantees in the US Constitution. The US Supreme Court agreed to hear these cases this fall. Unless the law changes, Interpreter Releases, an immigration law journal, estimates that the INS will ultimately need up to 35,000 beds to handle just the additional detentions triggered by the 1996 law.

In May, an American Bar Association (ABA) delegation toured Intake. Delegation member Chris Nugent, director of the Washington, DC-based Immigration Pro Bono Project, refuses to comment on the group's findings, citing a news blackout negotiated with the INS in return for the tours and ongoing INS-ABA talks about detention conditions.

Denis Riordan, acting district director for the INS' Boston office, says he is investigating after having received the detainees' petition in June. "We do care about conditions there," Riordan says. "We do want people to be treated with respect. We do care about their safety." Riordan adds that he finds it surprising that the detainees did not complain to an INS officer who is stationed at the ACI for four hours every weekday.

Detainees, however, produce an avalanche of copies of complaint letters and assistance requests to support their cries for help.

"INS officers don't care about any one of us," says Trevor Neverson, who has been detained for 28 months. "Their intention is to keep you detained until they have a plane to your country. They don't care about wives, fathers, kids at home." Adds Angel Garcia, a 45-year-old Cuban immigrant who formerly lived in Springfield, Massachusetts, "Nothing happen. Absolutely nothing happen."

EVEN WHEN detainees can get into an INS hearing room, they must overcome major disadvantages. Immigration violations are civil, not criminal offenses, so detainees are not entitled to a public defender or court-appointed lawyer. Consequently, many poor immigrants who don't speak English well are forced to represent themselves in immigration courts. Detainees lucky enough to have lawyers often find themselves transferred from jail to jail in different states, making it difficult to meet with their lawyer and prepare their case.

Detainees at the ACI's Intake Service Center are awoken close to midnight for hearings and transported in shackles to a US Coast Guard facility in Boston. There, relates detainee Cesar, a dozen or more people must sleep together on the floor of a seven-by-10-foot cell with no beds. When a detainee enters the hearing the next day, after being served a frozen Pop-Tart for breakfast, "You look like somebody ran over you," Cesar states, making a successful hearing outcome more unlikely.

Although uncertain about the frozen Pop-Tart, INS district office spokeswoman Paula Grenier confirms the other elements of Cesar's account. "We're looking into that to see if that process can be made easier," Grenier says

The INS hasn't responded to a May 10 request by the Phoenix for a tour of the Intake Service Center and a subsequent request for a joint interview with INS officials and some of the detainees at the ACI. The Phoenix, however, did interview eight detainees held at Intake, most of whom are fighting deportation, hoping to stay in the US, and remain united with their wives and children.

Detainee Steve Morris, who left Jamaica with his family at 14 and attended high school in New Jersey, has abandoned hopes of living in the United States. Morris, 28, is merely waiting for Jamaica to process the paperwork for him to return. He expects his family will be broken apart because his wife of seven years, his five-year-old daughter, and his two-year-old son want to remain in the US.

Living in Framingham, Massachusetts in 2000, Morris says, he was sentenced to two years of probation for distributing cocaine. One of the urine samples required during his probation subsequently tested positive for marijuana and he was ordered to serve six months in prison. When Morris finished his sentence in September 2001, the INS picked him up to begin the deportation process. "I make one mistake, now they want to deport me," he says with despair.

The process moves slowly and Morris has spent 11 months in prison awaiting his removal -- almost twice as long as the sentence for his drug offense. "I'm getting treated like I've done some charge, but I've served my time," he says, echoing a common complaint of many detainees.

Other detainees at Intake face similar circumstances. Trevor Neverson, a Trinidadian native who formerly lived in Springfield, Massachusetts, served nine years and eight months for a manslaughter conviction. Neverson says he's been detained for 28 months while seeking to have the manslaughter conviction overturned.

Aderson Cesar came to the US from Haiti with his family as a teenager. In April 2002, he convinced Immigration Judge Leonard Shapiro to let him remain in the US, despite a 1992 conviction for assault and battery with a deadly weapon. But under immigration law, Cesar must remain at the ACI while the INS appeals Shapiro's decision, says his lawyer, Iris Gomez. Cesar and Neverson might have once been candidates for release with bail while awaiting the outcome of their cases, but the 1996 law eliminated bail for non-citizens with convictions for most deportable crimes.

Like many detainees, Cesar and Neverson might also be happier living overseas while they fight to remain in the US, but reversing a deportation order becomes more difficult once they leave the US, explains Gomez. Reentering the US, even to visit wives and children is "extremely difficult," she says, for people deported because of a criminal conviction.

So with no immediate prospect for release, Neverson and Cesar sit at the Intake Service Center, waiting for the judicial process to grind to a conclusion. After having served out their original sentence, wanting to live in America is their only offense.

BEING IMPRISONED at Intake has been especially painful for Cesar. The 30-year-old earned a bachelor of arts degree from Salem State College while in a Massachusetts prison and he speaks English without an accent. His wife and two-year-old daughter live in Boston's Charlestown section. Cesar was detained by the INS immediately after he completed his sentence in July 2001, and he has remained imprisoned ever since.

During a June interview in a holding room at the ACI, Cesar sat hunched over, holding his handcuffed hands between his knees. Sitting upright would press the mass on his back against his plastic chair, he explained. The mass was next to his spine and sore to touch. An April 2002 review of medical records performed for Cesar by Dr. Karen Lasser, an internist at Cambridge Hospital, indicates that the mass has grown in size since first being documented by Massachusetts prison doctors in April 2000.

The mass also causes lower back pain and makes sleeping difficult, Cesar says. Citing the possibility that it may be cancerous, Lasser wrote the INS, "The mass should be excised immediately."

Cesar's repeated complaints about the mass were apparently ignored for months. He showed the Phoenix copies of 10 separate requests for medical attention that he submitted at Intake, starting in October 2001, plus letters to the INS and the US attorney's office. Despite his pleas, the INS maintained surgery was unnecessary.

On May 14, Cesar says, he was finally seen by a doctor at Rhode Island Hospital, who recommended that he immediately schedule surgery. Once they left the doctor's office, however, Cesar relates, the guard accompanying him refused to make the appointment and, as a result, surgery was delayed more than six weeks, until July 3.

On July 8, apparently unaware of Cesar's surgery five days earlier, INS Acting District Director Riordan still insisted in an interview that Cesar's back problem was cosmetic. "There is no medical need to remove it," Riordan said. Informed that the mass was causing Cesar pain, Riordan responded, "If he's in pain and can't sleep, that's troubling to me." Cesar was slated to return to Rhode Island Hospital on August 6 to learn whether the growth that the INS ignored for months is cancerous.

He is not the only INS detainee with medical complaints.

Domingos Araujo, formerly of New Bedford, Massachusetts, has been at Intake just more than a year, detained by the INS following a narcotics possession conviction. At the time, the 34-year-old says, he was wearing a fiberglass brace on his right knee following anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) surgery. Guards at Intake, Araujo says, confiscated the brace, and, despite his objections, assigned him a top bunk without a ladder.

His knee became painful, and on August 6, 2001, according to a copy of a medical request form, Araujo formally asked for the brace to be returned. According to medical records, it took almost two months before an ACI doctor assigned Araujo a bottom bunk and ordered a knee brace. But despite medical request forms filed in mid-October, November, and December, Araujo was not provided a brace -- a cloth model that he describes as inadequate -- until late December.

Araujo continued to request additional medical attention for his knee, speaking with an INS officer stationed at Intake and writing then-INS District Director Steven Farquharson. On June 28, Araujo says, he was finally taken to Rhode Island Hospital, where a doctor gave him new pain medication and ordered a brace for him. Interviewed in mid-July, almost a year after his brace was taken, Araujo says he has yet to receive a proper knee brace. "They just do what they want with you basically," he says.

Other detainees complain of waiting for weeks to see a doctor and dental care that consists merely of having teeth pulled. They say they've been told that INS will not pay for fillings, bridges, and other more complicated dental work. The state, which is reimbursed for detainees' medical expenses by the INS, does not make dental bridges, says Bucci, the Corrections Department spokesman, but it does fill cavities.

DETAINEES ARE KEPT at the Intake Service Center, rather than one of the seven other prisons at the ACI, because federal law, enforced in the 1980s by US District Court Judge Raymond Pettine, prohibits mixing those awaiting trial with convicted criminals. Some 16,000 people go through the 1100-bed Intake Service Center every year, Bucci says, as they await their trial or spend a month going through the classification process that determines where they will serve their sentence.

But in a catch-22 situation, separating INS detainees makes prison life worse for them. Because Intake serves a largely transient population, it offers fewer services than the other prisons within the ACI. Drug and sex offender counseling is provided, explains Bucci, but Intake provides no educational courses or self-help programs, like Alcoholics Anonymous and anger management.

In addition to helping detainees improve their lives, detainee Araujo comments, educational or personal improvement programs demonstrate to immigration judges that detainees are trying to better themselves and are therefore worthy of being permitted to stay in the US. No courses means deportation is more likely, he says.

Recreational opportunities are also few. Other Rhode Island prisons have pool and ping pong tables, and weight rooms, Bucci relates. Some allow inmates to play horseshoes, handball, and softball. But none of these are offered to the largely transient population at Intake. "All you can do is play cards and some guys go to the yard and play basketball," says Neverson.

Being at Intake also means living with some scary people, detainees say, including some of Rhode Island's worst criminals. "They have nothing to lose," says Cesar, referring to prisoners awaiting long sentences for violent crimes. "That alone, that thought in your mind," he says. "You don't want to come out of your cell."

When police arrest an unusually large number of people, like a recent round-up of 70 fathers for non-payment of child support, conditions get worse and more crowded. Mattresses are hauled out and placed on cell floors as inmates and detainees are forced to "triple up" in cells.

There are other problems, detainees say. The INS' own detention standards require detainees to get a fresh dark blue prison jumper twice a week, to wear over their underwear. But clean outer clothing is provided only once a week at Intake. The prison is temporarily short of clothing, explains acting INS district director Riordan, adding that INS wants two clothing changes per week.

Riordan also agrees with detainees that telephone charges are "excessive." High phone fees discourage detainees from maintaining contact with their wives and children and contribute to the weakening of their families. Cesar's wife, Shivon, produced a bill, for example which shows that his weekly calls to Charlestown, all made after 8 p.m., cost an average of $1 per minute. "That's totally ludicrous," comments Brian Kent, telecommunications analyst for the Rhode Island Division of Public Utilities and Carriers. But because the rates are part of a contract between the Department of Corrections and New Jersey-based Lucent Technologies, he says, "We don't have any control over that."

In state rates are cheaper ($2.15 for a seven-plus minute call, for example), but since most detainees are from other states, they pay the much higher out-of-state rates. Bucci says the Department of Corrections is powerless to correct the problem because the rates are part of a 10-year contract with Lucent. Negotiated in 1997, the cleverly devised agreement gave Lucent high fees for collect calls by inmates -- the only kind they can make -- and in return, the state received a new phone system for $1, plus an annual payment of $470,000.

Detainees have other complaints. Day-long lockdowns, when detainees are barred from leaving their cells, are frequent, especially during holidays, they say, and non-smokers are forced to share cells with smokers. Bucci acknowledges that there are 12 to 14 all-day lockdowns a year in all the state prisons to reduce staffing costs. He adds, "We're in the process of considering going smoke-free [at state prisons] early next year."

The petition from the detainees also complains about the law library. Federal case law is not available, the petition charges, and the library has only one typewriter for 1100 inmates. Riordan, however, claims the library is current with legal materials and equipment.

That simply isn't true, responds Cesar. The two computers used to access federal case law on disk are broken, he says, as is the one typewriter. "They assume," he says, referring to top INS officials. "They don't really know the truth because they're not here."

Issue Date: August 9 - 15, 2002