Sen. Menendez demands immigration reform at conference on detainees
Published: Saturday, March 24, 2012, 9:00 AM Updated: Saturday, March 24, 2012, 2:08 PM
U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) is pictured in this December 2011 Star-Ledger file photo. On Friday, Menendez called for immigration reform in a combative speech at a conference on the treatment of immigrant detainees.NEWARK — Addressing lawyers and advocates who fight for the rights of detained immigrants, U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez delivered a combative speech Friday in which he pounded home his calls for reform of a system that he said has "no laws on the books about how the government treats people in detention, only nonbinding standards."
"I appreciate what so many of you do for immigrants in our country," Menendez (D-N.J.) told a lecture-hall audience at a conference on the treatment of immigrant detainees that was held at Rutgers-Newark law school. "I know that we all agree that immigrants living and working in our communities should be treated with basic human dignity," the senator from Hudson County said as he looked out at rows of area law professors, students, lawyers and immigrant-detention reform advocates, among others.
The bespectacled Menendez, standing at a podium in a dark blue suit and maroon tie, added, "I have often said in the Senate that immigration issues are the civil rights issue of our time."
Menendez’s speech came after various symposiums that tackled subjects such as the purported "jail-like and inhumane conditions of civil immigration detention," "alternatives to detention" for immigrants," "access to justice to detainees in immigration proceedings" and a "call to action" that asked more attorneys in the New Jersey and New York area to take on pro bono work on behalf of detainees.
The pre-planned conference was held just a day after an explosive report was released by New York University’s law school’s immigrant-rights clinic. The report claimed Essex County is holding some 1,200 immigrants, many of whom it says are suffering through abusive, unsafe and unclean conditions that fail to meet the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s own standards for such detention.
ICE responded swiftly on Thursday, saying it had not yet had a chance to read the NYU report, but adding that, "Since ICE initiated detention reform in August of 2009, the agency has made tremendous strides in our ongoing efforts to reform the immigration detention system, prioritizing the health and safety of detainees in our custody."
The agency, which declined Friday to comment in response to Menendez’s speech, also said, "ICE has taken aggressive steps to increase oversight through announced and unannounced inspections … and by hiring more than 40 Detention Services Managers, who work to ensure appropriate conditions exist at detention facilities."
Noting the immigrant-detention system now handles more than 400,000 people a year, Menendez used moving examples of the mistreatment and, even death, of immigrants who had been held in New Jersey facilities and elsewhere.
In one example, Menendez said about a year and a half ago, he felt compelled to visit a detention facility in Elizabeth after learning about the "tragic story" of a Ghanaian tailor who’d died in custody because "he didn’t get the medical attention that he needed and that would have saved his life." He said since October, six detainees have died in custody in the country, and in recent years more than 100 have been lost.
"I have been and will continue to be a vocal advocate with the Department of Homeland Security," he said, referring to the federal agency that routinely handles immigration issues and detention. He said he will "continue to push them time and time again, to improve conditions at detention facilities" and "to reform the process: to bring fairness, decency and dignity to those citizens who have been detained, who have families."
Menendez also touted his pushing of various immigration bills in Congress, including the Dream Act, which would give some children brought into the U.S. illegally a path to citizenship.
Menendez also said he’d never forget being raised in a tenement building, the son of immigrants, and then coming to the Senate during a time of great immigration debates.
"I’d come to greatest democratic institution in the world," he began, "and some of my colleagues … on the Senate floor (said), ‘We can’t have any more of those people.’
"I went to the Senate floor and I said, ‘Wait a minute, I said, I think you might be talking about me," Menendez said. "It’s an amazing thing to me, the mindset that there is a fear about who these people are."
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