Washington, August 26: The Human Rights Watch (HRW) report, however, underlines that the actual number of abuse cases may be much higher since many victims get deported and denied the chance of filing complaints.
According to the report, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “has refused to issue binding legal regulations to address problems with detention conditions.”
“The incidents we know about could easily be the tip of the iceberg because the people who may have been victims of abuse are, more often than not, deported,” said Meghan Rhoad, women’s rights researcher at HRW. “We urgently need ICE to improve the system for taking reports of abuse from detainees and to publish information that will clarify the scope of the problem.”
In its June 2009 report, the congressionally mandated National Prison Rape Elimination Commission said that immigrants in detention face particular challenges in reporting abuse, including a lack of information about rules governing staff conduct and fear of speaking out against the same authority that is seeking their deportation.
The frequency with which sexual assault, abuse, and harassment occur in detention is largely unknown, says the HRW report. The Bureau of Justice Statistics collects some data on the problem that includes incidents in facilities run by or exclusively for ICE. However, the report adds, it does not tabulate the numbers of assaults on immigration detainees held in state and county jails where ICE rents a portion of the bed space.
The HRW calls for policy improvements to limit unnecessary searches of detainees and to ensure that victims of abuse are informed of the availability of visas, allowing them to stay in the US to follow up on criminal cases related to abuse.
“Giving detention standards the force of law is critical for remedying a host of abuses,” Rhoad said. “ICE’s reluctance on this point sends the wrong message to detention facilities, and to the detainees who are at their mercy.”
Based primarily on a review of governmental and nongovernmental studies, media reports, and lawsuit filings, the HRW report compiles documented incidents and allegations of sexual assault, abuse, and harassment in immigration detention since the formation of ICE in 2003.
In one incident, five women detained at the Port Isabel Service Processing Center in Texas were assaulted in 2008 when a guard entered each of their rooms in the detention center infirmary where they were patients. The guard told them that he was operating under physician instructions, ordered them to undress and touched intimate parts of their bodies.
In 2007, according to the report, a human trafficking victim was sexually assaulted in a Florida jail with which ICE had a contract to rent bed space for immigration detainees. Women detained on criminal charges who were housed in the same dormitory assaulted the trafficking victim while she was partially incapacitated by prescribed sedatives.
The HRW report also voices concern about the limited impact of the changes ICE proposes for its standards, emphasizing that ICE has refused to issue binding legal regulations to address problems with detention conditions.
——Agencies