Top Obama administration officials have made much of their concern about the country’s outsized prison population. In 2015, President Obama famously visited a federal penitentiary, the first sitting president to ever do so. In 2013, then-Attorney General Eric Holder championed sentencing reforms targeting low-level drug offenders. And Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates recently announced that the Justice Department would substantially reduce its reliance on private prison operators. But at the same time, the Obama administration has arrested and imprisoned a historically unprecedented [...]
DHS asks for more detention beds, alternatives to detention, prosecutors, & drones
[While all of the information below is accurate regarding the Obama Administration's FY 2016 budget request, it turns out we're already in 2016. I should have written about the FY 2017 budget request (and meant to), but in a late-night blogging oversight I instead wrote about year-old material. My apologies. I'll try to get to the FY 17 budget request next week. I'll leave the FY 16 analysis up as a comparison.] In the last budget request he will make to Congress, President Obama hopes to boost the Department of Homeland Security’s detention network, increase the number of people supervised [...]
ICE’s Failure and Complicity in Immigration Detention Inspections
By Thamys Gaertner In October, the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC), a leading advocacy group based in Chicago, released a detailed report on immigration detention center contracts that illustrates just how inadequate the ICE detention facility inspections are after promises and attempts by the Obama administration to improve the oversight process. President Obama established the Office of Detention Oversight (ODO) within ICE to inspect immigration detention facilities and investigate the deaths of individuals in ICE custody. Despite these efforts, the immigration detention [...]
Vt. Superior Ct: Private prison corporation is subject to state open records law
In another of a string of successful challenges under state law, the Vermont Superior Court announced the private prison company Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) is subject to the state’s Access to Public Records Act. Prison Legal News v. Corrections Corporation of America, No. 332-5-13 Wncv, slip op. (Vt. Sup. Ct. Jan. 21, 2015). This case arose from an attempt by Prison Legal News, an indefatigable news outlet, to obtain records about sexual assault claims brought by two inmates against prison officials. Specifically, PLN sought the settlement agreements that ended the sexual [...]
Ohio students & advocates sue Border Patrol to get immigration policing records
This week students from Ohio State University’s Civil Law Clinic and the Ohio legal services group Advocates for Basic Legal Equality, Inc. (ABLE) jointly sued the Border Patrol in a continued attempt to gather documents about the agency’s immigration policing practices in northern Ohio. The students and advocates are concerned about reports of racially biased policing by the Border Patrol’s Sandusky Bay Station. Sandusky is located on the coast of Lake Erie about one hour west of Cleveland. Their suspicion is buttressed by a statistical analysis of three years of apprehension log data done [...]
AILA Sues for Info About Complaints Against Immigration Judges
By Margaret B. Kwoka The quality of justice individuals receive in immigration court has been the subject of intense criticism by advocacy groups, news media, and even federal judges for the past many years. See, e.g., Jacqueline Stevens, Lawless Courts, The Nation (Nov. 8, 2010). Reports have detailed conduct of immigration judges that has been unprofessional at best and unethical or abusive at worst. See id. Now, the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR), which oversees the immigration courts, refuses to release records detailing complaints that have been submitted about [...]