Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Ash Wednesday Pilgrimage...to the EDC 2-22-12 : Wells Fargo Is Not Our F...

Please stand in solidarity with us & sign the petition to stop the expansion of immigration detention in NJ and revoke the ICE contract in Essex County http://www.change.org/petitions/people-not-profits-stop-the-expansion-of-immi...

NEW JERSEY RESIDENTS AND FAITH LEADERS WALKING 12 MILES TO PROTEST PROFITEERING FROM INCARCERATION THAT IS DRIVING IMMIGRATION DETENTION EXPANSION IN NJ

Pilgrims Marched from the Footbridge to Ellis Island in Liberty State Park to the Elizabeth Detention Center for the 3rd Consecutive Year on Ash Wednesday.

Jersey City, NJ- Beginning at 10 am on Wednesday, February 22, members from over two dozen faith based, community and immigrant rights groups, including members from Pax Christi NJ, IRATE & First Friends, American Friends Service Committee Immigrant Rights Program- Newark and NJ Advocates for Immigrant Detainees, gathered in Liberty State Park, just off Freedom Way, in front of the footbridge to Ellis Island for a press conference and prayer service before beginning a 12 mile "pilgrimage" that ended at the Elizabeth Detention Center.

Organizers site their outrage over the history of immigration detention in New Jersey which includes a myriad of cases of abuse, including a number of shocking deaths, a culture of secrecy and a lack of transparency in the county jails and the private detention facilities that now hold over 2000 individuals on any given day, as the driving force behind the event. Adding to their outrage is the fact that the increase in the number and the size of the facilities is being driven by financial concerns rather than human rights. NJ recently became home to a second for-profit facility which incarcerates immigrants who are in immigration court proceedings when the Essex County Executive signed a contract with ICE and the Essex County Freeholders approved a sub-contract for immigration detention with the politically connected firm, Community Education Centers, which operates Delaney Hall.

Participants began with Ellis Island, a powerful symbol of our country's ideals of valuing the contribution of immigrants, and walked between the sites that they say are at the root of the misery caused by the current immigration system and prison privatization. The sites include the Essex County Correctional Facility, the ICE Field Office, and the Wells Fargo branch on Broad Street. Organizers site Wells Fargo's investment in private prisons as the reason for adding the bank branch to this year's route.

Pilgrims witnessed with various faith traditions along the way by stopping at Assumption/All Saints Church, the Al-Ghazaly School, Temple Beth-El and St. Stephan's Grace Community ELCA.

Organizers note that since Essex County signed the contract with ICE to expand immigration detention to 1250 people this past fall, Essex County has been in the news almost constantly with the stories of hardship that immigration detention is causing to local residents and their families.

The pilgrimage was the third annual event of its kind held on the Christian feast day of Ash Wednesday which marks the beginning of the season of Lent, 40 days of penance and repentance that are marked by prayer, abstinence and corporal works of mercy. The theme of this year's event was "For Sandals & Silver". It is a reference to a quote from the book of Amos from the Hebrew scriptures: "Because they hand over the just for silver, and the poor for a pair of sandals; they trample the heads of the destitute into the dust of the earth, and force the lowly out of the way."

The event was co-sponsored by: IRATE & First Friends; Pax Christi NJ; AFSC Immigrant Rights Program - Newark; Wind of the Spirit; Felician Sisters of North America; Casa Esperanza; St. Joseph Social Service Center; Elizabeth Coalition to House the Homeless; Reformed Church of Highland Park; Passaic County Coalition for Immigrant Rights; Hudson County Brotherhood/Sisterhood Association; Lutheran Office of Governmental Ministry - NJ Synod; NJ Lutheran Immigration Task Force; St. Stephan's Grace Community- ELCA; Sisters of Charity of St. Elizabeth; Franciscan Sisters of Peace; Community Church of NY, Action for Justice Committee; Witness Against Torture; Sisters of St. Joseph of Chestnut Hill; Ironbound Community Corp.; Jornaleros Unidos de Passaic; Action 21; NJ DREAM Act Coalition; Haiti Solidarity Network of the Northeast; Middlesex County Coalition of Immigrant Rights; NJ Advocates for Immigrant Detainees

The facebook event is archived here: http://www.facebook.com/events/119230314865597/

And the press release from which this information was taken is archived here: http://www.facebook.com/notes/irate-first-friends/activists-to-walk-12-miles-...

Thursday, February 23, 2012

News :: ACLU of New Jersey

County Agrees to Overhaul Passaic County Jail's Inhumane Conditions

February 23, 2012

Agreement comes after years of litigation and awaits approval by judge

passaic county jail:

NEWARK – The American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey (ACLU-NJ) and Seton Hall University School of Law’s Center for Social Justice (CSJ) today announced the preliminary settlement of a class action lawsuit filed in 2008 on behalf of inmates against Passaic County for unconstitutional and inhumane conditions at the Passaic County Jail.

Under the terms of the agreement, the jail will agree to rectify the conditions that led to the lawsuit, including overcrowding, environmental dangers, fire hazards and inadequate medical care. The agreement was reached with input from correctional experts after jail inspections and an exchange of informal discovery. The agreement will be implemented if a federal judge approves of the plan.

“This settlement will be a huge victory for the inmates of Passaic County Jail, which at one time was notorious for its inhumane and degrading conditions.” said Patricia Perlmutter, a CSJ attorney and former professor. “The county has agreed to provide the resources necessary to meet its constitutional obligations.”

As part of the agreement:

A corrections professional will serve as an independent monitor to evaluate the jail’s implementation of remedies and provide technical assistance for up to five years.
The jail will be prohibited from contracting with other jurisdictions to house inmates.
The jail must configure beds (including restrictions on the use of triple bunking) to promote inmate health and safety. These changes, accompanied by efforts to keep the average census below 1022, will insure sufficient space between bunks and toilets and urinals and maximize available floor space.
The jail will complete the planned upgrades to the jail’s heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems and fire prevention infrastructure, which it began during litigation to comply with the New Jersey Uniform Fire Safety Act, and it will ensure plumbing and electrical systems are in working order.
The jail will improve the delivery of its medical services and provide timely access to specialty care and chronic disease treatment, in addition to upgrading its medical records systems and obtaining medical accreditation.
The jail will screen and treat mental illness among inmates more aggressively, including through programs to place inmates on special watch and to prepare mentally ill prisoners for discharge back into the community.
The jail will overhaul its prison management procedures, adding closed-circuit television surveillance to monitor the safety of inmates and staff, modernizing its prison management systems, and rolling out enhanced training and documentation of staff’s use of force.
The federal court will retain jurisdiction during the compliance period of the case.

The Passaic County Freeholders approved the agreement in December. The inmates now have the opportunity to consider and comment on the agreement. A federal judge will determine whether the agreement is fair, reasonable and adequate at a hearing currently scheduled for March 27, 2012.

“As we worked on this settlement, the jail administration began making significant improvements and we commend them for their commitment to upgrade the facility. There is still a lot of work to be done, but we are confident that when the comprehensive plan is implemented, it will be a great outcome for the safety and health of detainees, staff members, and the community,” said Jeanne LoCicero, ACLU-NJ Deputy Legal Director.

In addition to CSJ, a team of attorneys from Dechert LLP, led by Ezra Rosenberg and former partner Chris Michie, serves as the ACLU-NJ’s cooperating attorneys on a pro bono basis.

“Our clients have had to endure serious hazards and deficiencies at an aging facility, but we have already started to see meaningful progress – including a reduction of 40% of the jail population. Reducing that kind of stress on the building and staff now clears the way for environmental safety and management improvements,” said Regan Crotty of Dechert LLP who has worked on the case since it was filed.

“Conditions at Passaic County Jail before the lawsuit were so deplorable as to be called ‘shameful’ by a federal judge and were considered so punitive that U.S. Marshals removed all federal prisoners from the jail. The agreement promises comprehensive changes in the facility and its operations,” said CSJ Associate Professor Jenny-Brooke Condon.

Since 2007, dozens of law students at Seton Hall Law School’s Center for Social Justice, along with a team of attorneys, have played an important role advocating for the inmates, including documenting conditions at the jail.

Lawyers who worked on behalf of the class of plaintiffs include: Condon, Perlmutter, and Rachel Lopez of the Center for Social Justice; Emily Goldberg, formerly of CSJ; Rosenberg, Crotty, and Michael Planell of Dechert; Michie and Jennie Krasner, formerly of Dechert; and LoCicero and Ed Barocas of the ACLU-NJ.

Lawyers and CSJ law students will continue to represent the class of inmates for the duration of the settlement period.

The settlement agreement includes a memorandum of understanding in each of the following areas: correctional management, fire safety, environmental health, medical treatment and mental health care. The documents can be found online at the ACLU-NJ’s website.

Monday, February 6, 2012

Why Did an Asylum Seeker to the US End Up in a Liberian Prison? | The Nation

Why Did an Asylum Seeker to the US End Up in a Liberian Prison?

Deepa Fernandes and Abdulai Bah

January 31, 2012 | This article appeared in the February 20, 2012 edition of The Nation.

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Research support for this article was provided by The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute and the Puffin Foundation.

On a sweltering afternoon in the heart of bustling downtown Monrovia, Moriba Kamara’s bony, chafed hands shake as he talks about his months inside a Liberian maximum-security prison. “I didn’t sleep. I was always afraid.” He feared he would not make it out alive and was constantly thinking, “Maybe this is the place [I’ll] be taken to be assassinated.”

About the Author

Abdulai Bah

Abdulai Bah is an independent reporter and journalism trainer at People’s Production House.

Deepa Fernandes

Deepa Fernandes is a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University and the Executive Producer of content at People's...

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Kamara’s eyes well up as he remembers how “the whole day we [were] locked up, the whole night we [were] locked up. We had no access to go to recreation, nothing.” He and his fellow prisoners were forced to defecate in a bucket inside their cell, which often overflowed. “I got dysentery,” he recalls. “I tried to talk to the prison director to take me to the hospital, but they said no.”

Kamara was one of twenty-two deportees expelled from the United States to Liberia in December 2008 by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Some had served time in US jails for minor offenses. Others, like Kamara, had committed no crime. But for reasons that were unclear to them, all were labeled a security threat upon arriving in Liberia’s capital city. Bedraggled and weak after spending months in immigration detention followed by a long flight to Monrovia during which they were shackled, the deportees were forced onto a bus headed for Zwedru National Corrections Palace, an imposing, isolated structure that is home to convicted murderers, rapists and, occasionally, US deportees.

Video by Carlos Pareja

Zwedru is only 184 miles from Monrovia, but the trip can take days on the unpaved and sometimes hazardous roads. Along the way, “we stopped in every city, whether small or big,” remembers deportee Bill Passawe. “People booed at the vehicle. People screamed ‘criminals coming from America’ and stuff like that.” The public display was meant to show Liberians that their government was taking action to protect them from this group of convicts. But “we really didn’t have no clue why we were in jail,” says Sandra Komai, another deportee who had been jailed in the United States on minor drug charges. “When I left Liberia, I was a small child. I had committed no crime in Liberia.”

Kamara, too, left Liberia as a child, fleeing after his father was murdered by rebels during the civil war. He crossed into neighboring Guinea, only to face years of persecution—jailings and beatings—because he came from the Mandingo ethnic group, which had allegedly backed Liberia’s dictator, Samuel Doe. In 2007 he decided to seek asylum in the United States. Arriving in New Jersey, he was immediately imprisoned at the Elizabeth Detention Center. “It is better for me to be in detention until my death,” he remembers telling officials there. “I can’t be deported to Liberia.”

Video by Carlos Pareja

Kamara is only one of 359,795 people who were deported by the United States in 2008. The number has gone up. For all the rhetoric—particularly on the right—about cracking down on illegal immigration, Americans know relatively little about why people are deported or how. Rarely does anyone question what happens to deportees once they leave.

The numbers tell only part of the story. In 2002, when the Bush administration began to use deportation as a national security tool, 165,168 people were deported. (The Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is a part, was established that year.) In 2009, Obama’s first year in office, deportations peaked at 395,165. In 2010, 387,242 people were removed, the equivalent of deporting almost the entire city of Oakland, California. It is anticipated that figures for 2011 will top 400,000, bringing Obama’s deportation tally to more than 1 million people during his three years in office.

The number of Liberians the United States deports each year is relatively small. Twenty-six were deported in 2008. In 2009 forty people were sent back, and in 2010 the number went down to sixteen. This pales in comparison with the 21,421 Filipinos, 4,417 Ukrainians or 3,951 Burmese deported in 2010 alone. Yet the smaller number of Liberian deportees virtually guarantees that their harsh treatment will go unnoticed. Although Liberia’s mandatory jailing of deportees appears to have ceased after 2008, the experience of Kamara and his fellow prisoners raises troubling questions about a deportation agenda that has been wholly embraced by the Obama White House. Hundreds of thousands of people are labeled criminals and expelled every year; what becomes of them on the other side?

In Liberia, US deportees are still a public target. When President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf spoke at Harvard University, her alma mater, last spring, she described US deportees as one of the “challenges” facing her country. “Our stability is threatened by the thousands of returnees from US prisons,” she said. Although she went on to discuss Liberia’s progress since the civil war, it was this remark that made headlines in the Liberian press.

“Ellen [Sirleaf] has said…that deportees from the US are to blame for most of the armed robberies that have taken place in the country and that deportees are responsible for the high crime rate in Monrovia,” says Garmonyou Wilson, a reporter for the Liberian newspaper the Inquirer.

This perception has made men like Kamara pariahs in Monrovia. With employment opportunities scarce, no one wants to hire a man the United States deported, let alone one who served time in a Liberian maximum-security prison. “My life now is a living hell,” he says. “I have no family here, no job, no place to live. Everyone thinks I’m a vicious criminal.”

* * *

Could Liberia have rejected the planeload of deportees in 2008? It tried.

Under Bush, ICE had first attempted to deport them in September of that year, but it was told by the Sirleaf administration that Liberia would not accept them. Already on board a flight bound for Monrovia, Bill Passawe and the others were taken off the plane, still in shackles, and sent back to jail in Louisiana. It is unclear what negotiations took place—neither ICE nor Liberian officials wished to comment—but on December 2, 2008, the flight took off, with the blessing of the Liberian government.

According to Eric Mullbah, director of prisons in the Ministry of Justice, part of the reluctance likely had to do with the Liberian government being told that “twenty-two hard-core criminals are being returned.” ICE denies using the label “hard-core,” but regardless of the word choice, hearing of the detainees’ impending arrival put local officials in a bind. Such news “filters into our community,” says Mullbah, with many Liberians asking, “Hey, are they going to bring ten armed robbers, and gangsters, and just throw them into the community?”

Video by Carlos Pareja

Given such concerns, Mullbah described the decision to imprison Kamara and his fellow deportees as “prudent.” In a press conference, Chris Massaquoi, commissioner of the Liberian Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, called it a “security measure.”

“Understand that Liberia is evolving from war,” Mullbah says, citing challenges that are more pressing than the reintegration of a few dozen citizens expelled from another country.

Liberia is not alone in its harsh treatment of deportees arriving from the United States, nor are its politicians and press alone in scapegoating them. In Haiti, El Salvador, Nigeria and the Dominican Republic, deportees have been routinely jailed. In the Dominican Republic, which received 753 people in 2010, the media report all arrivals, often focusing on the fact that the deportees have previously been imprisoned in the United States. In a 2002 investigation by the Dominican newspaper Listin Diario, authorities responsible for accepting and reintegrating deportees admitted that they were given very little information about each person aside from his or her criminal conviction. Dominican authorities, like the Liberian government, claim their actions toward deportees are simply to protect their population.

In Haiti the only way a deportee can avoid months or even years of incarceration upon arrival is if a family member successfully applies for his or her release. But most Haitian deportees do not have immediate family in Haiti. And if conditions were horrific before the 2010 earthquake, “in post-earthquake Haiti, detention conditions are even more dire,” according to Michelle Karshan, director of Alternative Chance, an NGO that helps Haitian deportees. Although the Obama administration announced that it would suspend deportations to Haiti immediately following the disaster, less than twelve months later, amid sluggish rebuilding and widespread deaths from cholera, deportations resumed. In the first year after the earthquake, more than 300 Haitian deportees were put into putrid police-station holding cells because the Haitian government believed them to be dangerous.

According to Daniel Kanstroom, director of the International Human Rights Program at Boston College Law School, there is a “widespread misperception that deportees are hard-core criminals,” something he says is simply not true. Under the Secure Communities program, instituted by the Bush administration and expanded by Obama, noncitizens serving jail time for “aggravated felony” offenses are being funneled into removal proceedings with little chance of being allowed to stay in the United States after serving their sentences.

“Recent research has shown…the majority [of deportees] are people who have violated drug laws or other nonviolent offenders,” says Kanstroom. “Before the Supreme Court corrected ICE in a series of cases, many thousands were deported for simple drug possession. Many people convicted of misdemeanors were also deported.” Information obtained by the National Day Laborer Organization, Center for Constitutional Rights and the Cardozo School of Law shows clearly that of those deported through Secure Communities, close to 80 percent had no criminal conviction or were guilty only of traffic violations or other low-level offenses.

“Most people just believe that those who are deported are bad, or dangerous criminals, or must have broken laws and so they deserve to be deported,” says Michele McKenzie, advocacy director at The Advocates for Human Rights, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit. “This is so far from the truth.”

* * *

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request seeking information on why the twenty-two Liberians in Kamara’s group were deported, ICE divulged that five of them were “non-criminal immigration violators” and the rest had been convicted of crimes ranging from drugs to robbery, to sex offenses and fraudulent activities. But it is clear that they were not “hard-core criminals.”

Sandra Komai, for example, who spent her youth in the United States and said she did two stints in prison for drug possession, was arrested years after serving her sentences. She had been renewing her immigration papers when her record popped up in the system. Despite having done her time—for nonviolent crimes—she was detained and deported to a country she barely remembered. At the Zwedru prison, she was terrified of “snakes and lizards” and felt regularly humiliated as a woman alone among male guards and prisoners.

Citing “operational security,” ICE refused to comment on other allegations related to the conditions of the deportation flight, a twenty-four-hour ordeal from Louisiana to Puerto Rico to Cape Verde to Monrovia. Bill Passawe says the deportees were not even unshackled to use the restroom, and were forced to rely on ICE agents to unzip their pants for them. ICE spokesman Temple Black conceded that “ICE regularly uses restraints when transporting detainees.” But an ICE memo available on its website states that “instruments of restraint shall be used only as a precaution against escape during transfer.”

Amy Gottlieb, immigration attorney at the American Friends Service Committee, has heard many stories over the years of ICE’s “overuse” of restraints; she concludes that it seems to be “standard practice.”

It’s a measure of the extent to which undocumented immigrants have been criminalized. “The notion that any person that is unauthorized in the US is a criminal has taken root,” says Donald Kerwin of the Migration Policy Institute, a DC-based think tank. “You don’t just find this on cable TV and talk-radio; you find it in state legislation.” In this climate even asylum seekers like Kamara, who flee persecution and enter the United States without a visa, become criminals.

“There are deep concerns about the human rights issues raised by falsely labeling innocent people as hard-core criminals and then dumping them with this label in another country,” says Kerwin.

ICE maintains that any questions about the treatment of deportees in Liberia can be answered only by the Liberian government. But human rights experts see the United States as partly responsible. Professor Helen Stacy, director of the human rights program at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, points to a 2007 human rights report on Liberia, released by the State Department months before ICE deported the group of twenty-two.

“Prison conditions were harsh and in some cases life threatening,” the report reads. “Women and juveniles were subject to abuse by guards or other inmates.” In Stacy’s opinion, the deportation of noncitizens by the United States “into conditions that are known to be squalid, or unfair, or dangerous” is tantamount to “de facto extraordinary rendition.”

* * *

In the end, Kamara was released from the Zwedru prison through the efforts of a regional NGO, the Foundation for International Dignity, which fought against the prison’s dreadful conditions and petitioned the government to release the deportees. Kamara “was not sent here to be tried, so why detain him?” asks the group’s director, John Adolphus Woods.

Video by Carlos Pareja

Two years after his release, Kamara is still struggling to eke out a living in Monrovia, sleeping on the floor of an Internet cafe where he does voluntary work in exchange for a place to sleep at night.

“I’ve been running after jobs all over,” he says, “but there’s nobody to give me a job because if I go in the community people are pointing at me [and saying] ‘this is the criminal that was deported from America.’ People are afraid of me.”

Kamara says his mistake was to choose the United States as the country to flee to in pursuit of asylum and a safe place to live. “I selected America for its human rights,” he says, slumped on a pile of rubble as traffic in downtown Monrovia whizzes by. “They treated me like I was the worst kind of criminal, and all I did was ask for asylum.”

New Jersey Advocates for Immigrant Detainees

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Ash Wednesday Pilgrimage...to the EDC 2-22-12 : Wells Fargo Is Not Our F...

Sunday, February 26, 2012

Ash Wednesday Pilgrimage from Ellis Island to the Elizabeth Detention Ce...

Ash Wednesday Pilgrimage...to the EDC 2-22-12 : A Call For Justice at th...

Friday, February 24, 2012

Ash Wednesday Pilgrimage...to the EDC 2-22-12 : The Corruption & Cronyis...

Ash Wednesday Pilgrimage...to the EDC : Kathy O'Leary On The Politics Of...

Thursday, February 23, 2012

News :: ACLU of New Jersey

County Agrees to Overhaul Passaic County Jail's Inhumane Conditions

Agreement comes after years of litigation and awaits approval by judge

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Monday, February 6, 2012

Why Did an Asylum Seeker to the US End Up in a Liberian Prison? | The Nation

Why Did an Asylum Seeker to the US End Up in a Liberian Prison?

About the Author

Abdulai Bah

Deepa Fernandes

Also by the Author

Related Topics