The purpose of this website is to collect information about US Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Family Residential Standards.
Like many other immigration enforcement practices, family detention is not a specifically “post-9/11” phenomena, but began in March of 2001 at the Berks County Family Care Shelter in Pennsylvania. Prior to this, families had been detained in crisis or emergency situations, but never as an institutionalized enforcement practice. In 2006, the new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began detaining families at the T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility in Texas. While Berks was built as a nursing home and is licensed under Pennsylvania child welfare laws, Hutto was built as a medium security prison by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and has never been licensed by any agency dealing with child or family welfare. In 2007, the American Civil Liberties Union and University of Texas Immigration Law Clinic settled a lawsuit with ICE, on the grounds that Hutto violated the rights of the children detained there. The settlement stipulated the development and implementation of Family Residential Standards, and these were published online in January of 2008 (see below). While the Hutto Settlement includes court oversight, the settlement expires in August 2009, leaving the standards as the only remaining policy on ICE custody of families. To make these standards more robust, we are seeking comments from child welfare advocates, social workers, immigration attorneys, law school clinics, sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, psychologists, service providers, and anyone working with immigrant and asylum-seeking families and/or children. Read the Family Residential Standards. Read the Request for Proposals. Note: the RFP's attachments offer detailed descriptions of ICE's vision for NEW family detention facilities. Read "Locking up Family Values," a 2007 report by the Women's Refugee Commission. (Details of conditions of family detention prior to 2007 settlement at T. Don Hutto facility.) Visit the ACLU's website detailing its 2007 lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security on behalf of 26 detained children. We welcome your expertise!
If you are interested in contributing comments, please join the Family Residential Standards Working Group. We will be using this "group" to share information about the policy and the progress of the public comment period. For privacy and copyright reasons, this group is not open to the web. To join, please log in and request membership. Thanks! |
