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For: EFE Updated 10 Feb 2022, 04: 12 pm EST
Electronic surveillance of undocumented immigrants “is not a humane and reasonable alternative” to detention in private prisons, said Thursday Jen Ibáñez Whitlock, of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA).
The administration of President Joe Biden seeks to expand the use of electronic devices to track undocumented immigrants in an effort for reducing incarceration in private centers, according to the Axios publication, which cites a source from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
He explained that the idea is a pilot program in Houston (Texas) and in Baltimore (Maryland) and that the specific requirements for when someone must be at home may vary on a case-by-case basis.
Ibáñez Whitlock underscored that AILA “has proposed other options more along the lines of a It was reasonable and humane that it does not involve that vigilance with which it seems that each immigrant must be tracked“.
Another option is that once the immigrant has been given a date for his hearing before an immigration court, he is left in the community where he can get legal advice.
“People do appear in court, with lawyers, they file applications,” added Ibález Whitlock, who clarified that AILA has not yet seen the official details of the program reported by Axios.
“In our experience, clients want to have the opportunity of a fair hearing in court”, he concluded.
For her part, Nancy Treviño, associate director of Alianza Americas, said that “the expansion of alternatives to detention should not include the broader use of sickening and dehumanizing technologies, such as the shackles”.
“Putting shackles on the migrants’ ankles is rooted in the racist practices that have long guided immigration policy,” he added.
Among his promises of a policy of “fair and humane” immigration, Biden has promised that he would end incarceration in facilities run by private companies that profit from keeping more people incarcerated.
This is a program known as Alternativa Immigrant Detention (ATD) that places undocumented immigrants under a kind of “curfew”.
Immigrants must remain at home for variable periods of up to 12 daily hourss, and the government of Biden will ask Congress for funds to incorporate from 350,000 to 400,02 immigrants in ATD in the remainder of the year.
When the Democrat arrived at the White House in January of 2021, there was some 35, undocumented immigrants whom the government guarded with electronic shackles, mobile phone applications and other devices that report on the user’s whereabouts.
Currently there are almost 180.000 of these immigrants monitored by technological means while waiting for an appointment for a hearing in immigration court.
Others 21,100 people are in the custody of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE) which, at the beginning of 2020 had an average of 17.000 Immigrants held in prisons and detention centers in various parts of the country.
During the fiscal period 2021, which concluded in September, the Office of Customs and Border Protection (CBP, in English) carried out more than 1,518,02 captures of undocumented immigrants, mostly on the southern border and from Central America.
So far in the fiscal period 2022, CBP has already made more than 518,000 arrests of undocumented immigrants and critics of the Biden administration affirm that the United States has lost control of its southern border.
For their part, those who advocate for immigrants have denounced overcrowding and poor conditions in prisons -especially those operated by private companies- that worsened during the covid pandemic-17.
Added to this is the delay in procedures and hearings before the immigration courts that accumulate almost 1.6 million pending cases.
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