U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is responsible for ensuring that immigrants who are detained are provided safe and human conditions of confinement while their cases are in immigration proceedings or are awaiting deportation to their home countries. Due to an increase in Detention and Removal proceedings since the 1990s, it quickly became clear that oversight was needed to ensure that immigrant detention was meeting the needs of detainees and facility personnel along with maintaining a safe and humane environment. As a result, 36 national Detention Standards were introduced in 2000.
In fall 2007, a group of more than three dozen legal aid, advocacy, and community and faith-based immigrant rights organizations, co-chaired by Heartland Alliance's National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) and the Chicago Bar Foundation, negotiated with ICE for the opportunity to review and comment on the draft performance-based standards. This group of non-governmental organizations, called the DHS-NGO Enforcement Working Group, submitted comments to ICE in March 2008, which the agency considered before preparing the final set of standards.
On September 12, 2008, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) released a new set of detention standards to govern the treatment of detained immigrants.
The new "performance-based" standards, posted on the ICE website, replace the original detention standards that were negotiated in 2000.
This set of standards identifies a minimum level of custody conditions acceptable to ICE. The primary purpose is to have uniformity in treatment of detainees and the conditions of their confinement. However, despite these basic requirements, they are not legally enforceable, unlike the standards for criminal detainees. As a result, many detainees are unable to win their cases due to these obstacles, such as a lack of phones, access to legal counsel, and basic legal materials. In addition, recent reports have cited widespread problems with medical treatment provided to detainees and deaths that have resulted from improper detention conditions.
View the ICE Performance-Based Detention Standards at http://www.ice.gov/pi/icedetaineeinfo.htm.
