The Obama administration's decision to improve the United State's immigration detention system, including ending family detention at the T Don Hutto Residential Center, an erstwhile state penitentiary in Taylor, Texas, is being hailed as a major victory for attorney Vanita Gupta.
Gupta, a staff attorney with the Racial Justice Program of the American Civil Liberties Union, led the lawsuit against Hutto over two years ago and exposed the inhumane conditions under which immigrant detainees, especially children of mostly asylum seekers, were incarcerated.
"I am elated -- I am really happy about it," Gupta told Rediff India Abroad.
"As you know, it's a case that I've worked on for the last few years, and so it's a big development that the government is closing this family center down. I filed the first complaint in federal court back in March 2007 and got the settlement in August of 2007, but since then I've been very actively engaged in the monitoring the compliance in the facility. Our settlement was about to expire in three weeks. So this was very welcome news, that the government's actually closing the facility down."
The Department of Homeland Security says plans are there to consolidate detainees in facilities with conditions that reflect their status as non-criminals, establish more centralized authority over the system and create more direct oversight of detention centers.
The suit filed by Gupta on behalf of 26 children, many under the age of 10, charged the facility with illegally incarcerating them in inhuman conditions, in cells with open toilets, and with no provision for schooling while their parents awaited immigration decisions. The children, the suit had charged, were often intimidated and threatened by the guards.
The settlement agreement of August 2007 required Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to make a number of significant improvements to the conditions inside the facility, and subjected ICE to external oversight.
The ACLU had also called for the overhaul of the massive immigration detention system, which has produced over 90 detainee deaths since 2003. It has been estimated that DHS locks up about 32,000 civil immigration detainees each day, including several hundred immigrants from South Asia, who are pursuing their immigration cases in the courts.
"I don't think that this would have happened in the previous administration, and so it's testament to the Obama administration," Gupta said.
"However, I will say that Hutto was just one piece of a major announcement that the government made about immigration detention reform, and so I'm really excited to see that the Obama administration wants to engage in reform, and acknowledges that the immigration system is broken. We had over 90 men and women who have died in immigration detention since 2003, and there's been a real crisis in access to medical care these facilities. And, so, reforms were very, very badly needed."
What still remains to be addressed, Gupta said, are the details. "There are still some pretty glaring holes in what's been proposed, and so the ACLU wants to work with the Obama administration to make sure that the reforms that they are proposing are really meaningful.
"For instance," she said, "we're really concerned about the lack of findings and legally enforceable detention conditions standards, because without enforcement the standards themselves are meaningless. And then we are concerned about the fact that there are over 32,000 immigrants in detention every day, and we could remove some of these folks from out of detention and place them in alternative programs such as electronic monitors and ankle bracelets and things that would allow them to be with their families, but still ICE would be able to track them."
Such alternative programmes would be better, Gupta said, than simply throwing thousands into detention centers. "And the third thing is that immigrants sometimes are put into detention for very long periods of time without a hearing. So there are certain basic procedural protections that need to be in place."
ACLU attorneys have often been ridiculed as bleeding heart liberals. Gupta says the characterization is not correct. "None of these people that we're talking about have been convicted of any crime. They are non-criminal people and a large number of them are actually in this country seeking asylum -- they are fleeing persecution in their home countries. They have valid claims, legitimate claims to be in this country and they are seeking to get legal status in this country."
It is a tragic irony, she pointed out, that people fleeing inhuman conditions in their home countries arrive in the US and are detained in conditions that are even more inhuman. "In Hutto, for example, whatever you say about the parents, it's their children we are talking about and America is a beacon of human rights and values and we want to make sure that people within our borders are treated in accordance with the law."
She said the ICE itself was unaware that so many people had died in its custody, and blamed a patchwork system with lack of central accountability for the problem.
"We are saying that the government can have immigration policies but when it comes to detention, they need to be detaining people in a humane way that is in accordance with the law and existing standards," Gupta said. "What we want to do is to make sure those standards are actually enforceable. We want to work with DHS to make sure that's what is going to happen in this administration."
The latest victory consolidates Gupta's reputation as one of the stars of civil liberties advocacy. Earlier, when fresh out of college, she had fought to procure the release of 46 wrongly accused African Americans in Tulia, Texas a victory that resulted in her winning a Soros Justice Fellowship and the India Abroad Publisher's first Award for Excellence 2003, among other honors.