Dannemann: The Illogic Of Asylum Seeker Detention
Triple Spaced Again
About once a month, several volunteers from Albuquerque and Santa Fe travel to one of New Mexico's immigrant detention prisons.
They are from VIDA, Volunteers for Immigrants in Detention Albuquerque (abqvida.org). They go to provide comfort and solace for incarcerated asylum seekers who are mostly abandoned in a prison where conditions are miserable. They are not lawyers and don't provide legal services.
The VIDA members are part of a coalition seeking to end immigrant detention in New Mexico. There will probably be a bill in the upcoming legislative session, similar to legislation previously introduced. In 2024 it was Senate Bill 145.
Two things are seriously wrong with immigrant detention centers.
First: The detainees are not criminals, have not committed a crime and are not held under criminal law. They are there under a civil detention that immigration authorities have the legal power to impose, with no clear conclusion or termination. The detainees have no way of knowing when or under what conditions they will be released.
Second: The prisons are private for-profit prisons, so it's almost a foregone conclusion that inmates will be kept in inhumane conditions to save money so the owners can profit. Observers have seen and reported on those conditions.
Three private prisons in New Mexico keep immigrant detainees: Cibola County Correctional Center (CCCC), Otero County Processing Center (OCPC), and Torrance County Detention Facility (TCDF). These facilities also contain other non-immigration inmates.
Statistics from June 2023 show 1,110 people held in ICE custody in New Mexico. Nationally, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, there were 37,395 in ICE detention as of Sept.8, and 60 percent of them had no criminal record.
I've been reading about these detention centers for several years. Recently I had the chance to ask someone knowledgeable why some immigrants seeking asylum are imprisoned while others have the chance to enter the country while waiting for their asylum hearing.
The very disturbing answer I received is that there does not appear to be a logical reason. Asylum seekers in immigrant detention have done nothing substantially different from what other asylum seekers have done: that is, they followed the legal process in approaching agents at the border asking for asylum.
According to Sophia Genovese, managing attorney at the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center, the number of immigrants held in detention is related to the availability of space to hold them, so if New Mexico were to stop permitting immigrant detention, there would be fewer immigrants nationally in this inhumane condition.
State law cannot directly outlaw federal immigrant detention. But the existing facilities have entered into intergovernmental service agreements with their local county governments. The proposed legislation would prohibit the county governments from entering into these agreements with respect to civil immigration custody.
That would effectively prohibit these prisons from continuing to incarcerate asylum seekers, and, according to Genovese, if there are fewer spaces to house them, fewer of them will be detained. Probably more of them would be admitted temporarily into the US under what is called humanitarian parole authority while awaiting hearings.
This is a controversial approach. Reportedly, it has been tried in other states and appealed to federal courts, with different results in different jurisdictions. The legislative intervention succeeded in some places and failed in others. Perhaps the 2025 version will have technical changes that might overcome the objections.
The election is over and it's time for Congress to act on passing a comprehensive immigration law. Regardless of what that is, and maybe it's sending those individuals back to the countries they tried to escape from, it should not include the deep immorality of private prisons continuing to profit from the misery of the innocent incarcerated.
