The Department of Homeland Security is known far and wide for their excellent human rights record, especially ICE. So it makes perfect sense that President Obama would put 23 Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials inside large immigrant detention centers to monitor management in light of growing complaints of abuse in the privately run institutions.

ICE, which is part of Homeland Security, intends to hire a medical expert to review the health care protocols for the detention centers and give an independent review of medical complaints, according to the people briefed on the plan. They spoke only on condition of anonymity ahead of an announcement expected Thursday [today].

Immigration and Customs Enforcement gave details of its plan to immigration advocates in a conference call Wednesday evening. One person on the call, who also spoke on condition of anonymity because ICE had not made a formal announcement, said the plan includes turning a detention center in Texas for parents and their children into a women’s facility and no longer placing families there. However, a separate facility in Pennsylvania will continue housing families.

When I wrote up the post last night, the only story I could find on the upcoming announcement came from AP. This morning, the story is in the New York Times and it’s massaged in Obama’s favor.

The Obama administration intends to announce an ambitious plan on Thursday to overhaul the much-criticized way the nation detains immigration violators, trying to transform it from a patchwork of jail and prison cells to what its new chief called a “truly civil detention system.”

The NYT’s article highlights that no more families will be sent to T. Don Hutto. pero not saying that it will remain a detention center for one of the largest growing prison populations, women. And read this little gem from ICE before you start tirando flores at Obama:

“We’re trying to move away from ‘one size fits all,’ ” John Morton, who heads the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency as assistant secretary of homeland security, said in an interview on Wednesday. Detention on a large scale must continue, he said, “but it needs to be done thoughtfully and humanely.”

Large scale detention and human rights tend not to go hand in hand, especially if you look critically at the huge racial disparities that happen from law enforcement, through sentencing and up into incarceration.

The head of ICE says that the agency has a new philosophy focused on deportation.

Asked if his vision could include building new civil detention centers, he said yes. The current 32,000-bed network costs $2.4 billion a year, but the agency is not ready to calculate the cost of a revamped system.

Again, the demand cannot be that the Obama administration and legislators move immigration reform forward while Homeland Security and ICE play shell games making it look like they are fixing things while remaining more committed to detentions and deportations. Yes, we need the human rights violations inside detention centers to stop, but it has to be acknowledged that a real discussion on immigration cannot happen when millions of people are living in fear.

Via / AP