Reports & Other Publications

A new report, Anthology of Abuse: The Case for Permanent Closure of the Torrance County Detention Facility, from Detention Watch Network, Innovation Law Lab, Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, New Mexico Dream Team, and New Mexico Immigrant Law Center, details the longstanding and systemic abuse issues at the Torrance County Detention Facility (TCDF) in New Mexico. Since 1990, TCDF has been plagued by inhumane living conditions, inadequate healthcare, restricted legal access, and numerous deaths. Despite recommendations from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General (DHS OIG) and advocates to cease operations due to its chronic deficiencies, ICE continues to use TCDF. The report highlights the facility's failure to protect people detained. The facility's contract is set to expire on May 14, 2024.

This ‘Anthology of Abuse’ outlines extensive documentation of abuses that have occurred at ICA-Farmville Detention Center in its 13 year history. ICE’s contract with the town of Farmville is set to expire on September, 15 2023. We ask that ICE allow this contract to expire and shut down operations at ICE-Farmville for good.

Descargar el PDF: Antología de abuso-13 años en el centro de detención de Farmville

The prison industrial complex is a highly adaptive mechanism that is constantly shifting to sustain itself. In recent years, the movement against mass incarceration has gained traction in reducing penal incarceration in the United States. In this report in collaboration with the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, we detail select case examples of jails and prisons that closed for one purpose, only to cage a different group of people. The case studies demonstrate how sustained pressure and community organizing can lead to transformative wins that can help free people and keep cages shut down for good. Read Carceral Carousel here.

The Biden administration has failed to deliver on the promise to end the use of private prisons in federal incarceration and immigration detention, according to Broken Promises: Limits of Biden's Executive Order on Private Prisons a new report released by Detention Watch Network and Project South. The report provides an overview of progress towards that unfulfilled promise, explores a troubling trend of detention expansion, and outlines the steps the administration must take to end the federal use of private prisons and phase out the use of immigration detention entirely.

Descargar el resumen ejecutivo como PDF:  Promesas Rotas: Límites de la Orden Ejecutiva de Biden Sobre Prisiones Privadas

“First Ten to Communities Not Cages” campaign is demanding the shut down of 10 immigration detention facilities in the first year of the Biden administration. The ‘First Ten’ detention centers are emblematic of how the immigration detention system as a whole is inherently abusive, unjust and fatally flawed beyond repair.

Descargar como PDF: Los Primeros Dies de Comunidades Si, Jaulas No

Under ordinary circumstances, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody has proven to be deadly for the people detained at the agency’s network of over 200 jails and detention centers across the country. Now facing a global health crisis, ICE’s shameful record of medical negligence, limited and rotten food provisions, poor sanitation, and demonstrated inability to properly respond to past infectious disease outbreaks means that there is a serious risk of COVID-19 outbreaks at immigration detention centers.

Descargar como PDF: Cortejando catástrofe: cómo ICE está arriesgando las vidas de inmigrantes durante una pandemia global

A Toxic Relationship: Private Prisons and U.S. Immigration Detention, builds on the overwhelming evidence that the privatization of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention exacerbates due process violations, egregious conditions and transparency concerns that are endemic to the immigration detention system. In addition, the report amplifies the experiences of 42 individuals who were or are held in privately-run detention centers.

This report examines egregious violations of medical standards by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that played a significant role in the deaths of people in detention centers across the country. The report focuses on eight deaths during a three-year period (2010 to 2012). Based on documentation from ICE investigations conducted after each death, which the ACLU received through a Freedom of Information Act request, the report shows that violations of ICE’s medical standards contributed to the deaths. More perniciously, additional research shows that ICE inspections of the detention facilities before and after these deaths failed to acknowledge — or sometimes dismissed — the substandard medical care.

Descargar como PDF: Negligencia Mortal: El ICE pasa por alto las muertes en el sistema de detención

This report exposes how Immigration Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) inspections process for immigration detention obscures and perpetuates widespread abuses of detained immigrants. The lack of accountability for the operators and service-providers of immigration detention facilities has led to egregious conditions, medically negligent deaths, and abuses that violate the most basic of human and constitutional rights. The report draws on information obtained from contracts and audits of the most populated immigration detention facilities through a Freedom of Information Act request filed by NIJC in 2011.