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Immigration and Naturalisation Service draws flak for torture of detained immigrants

Two years ago when over 100 illegal immigrants held in Elizabeth, New Jersey, rioted against primitive jail conditions and alleged inhumanity of the jailors, the Immigration and Naturalisation Service promised reforms not only at the New Jersey facility but throughout the country.

INS officials said the agency would spend over $ 25 million to improve the condition of the holding facilities (transitional jails). At least 25 per cent of the rioting inmates in Elizabeth were from India and Sri Lanka.

But a recent study by a human rights group paints a bleak and harrowing picture. Thousands of immigrants and political refugees are mixed with criminals and often treated as such, asserts a Human Rights Watch report released last week.

The number of immigrants from South Asia in such jails is not known, but immigration lawyers estimate there are at least 1,000 men mostly from the Tamil areas in Sri Lanka, and groups of Sikhs and Muslims from India.

A number of them have entered the United States in a tortuous journey from Mexico or a central American country.

Human Rights Watch researchers, who visited 14 jails and communicated with hundreds of detainees over 18 months, say the INS is to blame for the conditions because, in its desperate search for places to hold immigrants, the agency ships them to city and county jails over which it has no control, the New York Times reports. INS says it has about 16,000 people under detention.

The report stresses that detainees in Jackson County Jail in Florida have accused jail officials of administering electric shocks on shackled detainees in July.

It outlines the cases in which early this year nine guards pleaded guilty or were convicted of abusing detainees in Elizabeth two years ago, and the recent hunger strikes by detainees across the country who were protesting what they contend was mistreatment or poor conditions.

A spokesperson for the rights group said its researchers visited jails in Pennsylvania, Florida, Virginia, Texas, Illinois, and Louisiana.

The report found that detainees receive poor medical and dental care, have little access to lawyers and virtually no communication with jailers because of language barriers, the New York Times said.

Many of the detention centres are run by private agencies. ''They want to make maximum amount of money in the shortest time,'' says Rohit Turkhud, a New York immigration attorney, who had clients in the Elizabeth detention facility. ''The kind of language the security guards use is horrifying. Many of them seem to have no respect for human life.''

Human Rights Watch says INS cannot wash its hands off and blame other agencies.

''The fact that INS is handing over its administrative duties to facilities for convicted criminals is unacceptable,'' said Jennifer Bailey, who wrote the report and is a research associate in the Washington office of Human Rights Watch. ''It's a violation of international standards and a violation of basic human rights.''

''INS has failed to provide oversight or insist on humane conditions and treatment for its detainees, even though many jail officials have repeatedly said that, in their facilities, immigrants and refugees are treated just as if they were regular inmates,'' Bailey said.

In a rare gesture, INS Commissioner Doris Meissner welcomed the group's recommendations, particularly the one to separate detainees from criminals and to stop detaining people seeking asylum.

''If a facility does not meet our standards and does not take necessary corrective action, we will not use it,'' she promised soon after publication of the report.

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