[Ppnews] America's Secret ICE Castles

[Political Prisoner News]

America's Secret ICE Castles


By

<http://www.thenation.com/directory/bios/jacqueline_stevens>Jacqueline Stevens

This article appeared in the January 4, 2010 edition of The Nation.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100104/stevens


December 16, 2009

"If you don't have enough evidence to charge 
someone criminally but you think he's illegal, we 
can make him disappear." Those chilling words 
were spoken by James Pendergraph, then executive 
director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's 
(ICE) Office of State and Local Coordination, at 
a conference of police and sheriffs in August 
2008. Also present was Amnesty International's 
Sarnata Reynolds, who wrote about the incident in 
the 2009 report "Jailed Without Justice" and said 
in an interview, "It was almost surreal being 
there, particularly being someone from an 
organization that has worked on disappearances 
for decades in other countries. I couldn't 
believe he would say it so boldly, as though it weren't anything wrong."

ICE agents regularly impersonate civilians--OSHA 
inspectors, insurance agents, religious 
workers--in order to arrest longtime US residents 
who have no criminal history. Jacqueline Stevens 
has reported a 
<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100104/stevens1>web-exclusive 
companion piece on ICE agents' ruse operations.

Pendergraph knew that ICE could disappear people, 
because he knew that in addition to the publicly 
listed field offices and detention sites, ICE is 
also confining people in 
<http://www.jacquelinestevens.org/ICEFieldSubfield0909.PDF>186 
unlisted and unmarked subfield offices, many in 
suburban office parks or commercial spaces 
revealing no information about their ICE 
tenants--nary a sign, a marked car or even a US 
flag. (Presumably there is a flag at the Veterans 
Affairs Complex in Castle Point, New York, but no 
one would associate it with the Criminal Alien 
Program ICE is running out of Building 7.) 
Designed for confining individuals in transit, 
with no beds or showers, subfield offices are not 
subject to ICE Detention Standards. The subfield 
office network was mentioned in an October report 
by Dora Schriro, then special adviser to Janet 
Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security, but no locations were provided.

I obtained a partial list of the subfield offices 
from an ICE officer and shared it with immigrant 
advocates in major human and civil rights 
organizations, whose reactions ranged from 
perplexity to outrage. Andrea Black, director of 
Detention Watch Network (DWN), said she was aware 
of some of the subfield offices but not that 
people were held there. ICE never provided DWN a 
list of their locations. "This points to an 
overall lack of transparency and even 
organization on the part of ICE," said Black. ICE 
says temporary facilities in field or subfield 
offices are used for 84 percent of all book-ins. 
There are twenty-four listed field offices. The 
186 unlisted subfield offices tend to be where 
local police and sheriffs have formally or 
informally reached out to ICE. For instance, in 
2007 North Carolina had 629,947 immigrants and at 
least six subfield offices, compared with 
Massachusetts, with 913,957 immigrants and one 
listed field office. Not surprisingly, before 
joining ICE Pendergraph, a sheriff, was the Joe 
Arpaio of North Carolina, his official bio 
stating that he "spearheaded the use of the 
287(g) program," legislation that empowers local 
police to perform immigration law enforcement functions.

A senior attorney at a civil rights organization, 
speaking on background, saw the list and 
exclaimed, "You cannot have secret detention! The 
public has the right to know where detention is happening."

Alison Parker, deputy director of Human Rights 
Watch, wrote a December comprehensive report on 
ICE transit policies, "Locked Up Far Away." Even 
she had never heard of the subfield offices and 
was concerned that the failure to disclose their 
locations violates the UN's Covenant on Civil and 
Political Rights, to which the United States is a 
signatory. She explained that the government must 
provide "an impartial authority to review the 
lawfulness of custody. Part and parcel is the 
ability of somebody to find the person and to 
make their presence known to a court."

The challenge of being unable to find people in 
detention centers, documented in the Human Rights 
Watch report, is worsened when one does not even 
know where to look. The absence of a real-time 
database tracking people in ICE custody means ICE 
has created a network of secret jails. Subfield 
offices enter the time and date of custody after 
the fact, a situation ripe for errors, hinted at 
in the Schriro report, as well as cover-ups.

ICE refused a request for an interview, 
selectively responded to questions sent by e-mail 
and refused to identify the person authorizing 
the reply--another symptom of ICE thwarting 
transparency and hence accountability. The 
anonymous official provided no explanation for 
ICE not posting a list of subfield office 
locations and phone numbers or for its lack of a real-time locator database.

It is not surprising to find that, with no 
detention rules and being off the map spatially 
and otherwise, ICE agents at these locations are 
acting in ways that are unconscionable and 
unlawful. According to Ahilan Arulanantham, 
director of Immigrant Rights for the ACLU of 
Southern California, the Los Angeles subfield 
office called B-18 is a barely converted storage 
space tucked away in a large downtown federal 
building. "You actually walk down the sidewalk 
and into an underground parking lot. Then you 
turn right, open a big door and voilà, you're in 
a detention center," Arulanantham explained. 
Without knowing where you were going, he said, 
"it's not clear to me how anyone would find it. 
What this breeds, not surprisingly, is a whole 
host of problems concerning access to phones, relatives and counsel."

It's also not surprising that if you're putting 
people in a warehouse, the occupants become 
inventory. Inventory does not need showers, beds, 
drinking water, soap, toothbrushes, sanitary 
napkins, mail, attorneys or legal information, 
and can withstand the constant blast of cold air. 
The US residents held in B-18, as many as 100 on 
any given day, were treated likewise. B-18, it 
turned out, was not a transfer area from point A 
to point B but rather an irrationally revolving 
stockroom that would shuttle the same people 
briefly to the local jails, sometimes from 1 to 5 
am, and then bring them back, shackled to one 
another, stooped and crouching in overpacked 
vans. These transfers made it impossible for 
anyone to know their location, as there would be 
no notice to attorneys or relatives when people 
moved. At times the B-18 occupants were left 
overnight, the frigid onslaught of forced air and 
lack of mattresses or bedding defeating sleep. 
The hours of sitting in packed cells on benches 
or the concrete floor meant further physical and mental duress.

Alla Suvorova, 26, a Mission Hills, California, 
resident for almost six years, ended up in B-18 
after she was snared in an ICE raid targeting 
others at a Sherman Oaks apartment building. For 
her, the worst part was not the dirt, the bugs 
flying everywhere or the clogged, stinking toilet 
in their common cell but the panic when ICE 
agents laughed at her requests to understand how 
long she would be held. "No one could visit; they 
couldn't find me. I was thinking these people are 
going to put me and the other people in a grinder 
and make sausages and sell them in the local market."

Sleep deprivation and extreme cold were among the 
"enhanced interrogation" techniques promoted by 
the Bush White House and later set aside by the 
Justice Department because of concerns that they 
amounted to torture. Although without the intent 
to elicit information, ICE under the Obama 
administration was holding people charged with a 
civil infraction in conditions approaching those 
no longer authorized for accused terrorists.

According to Aaron Tarin, an immigration attorney 
in Salt Lake City, "Whenever I have a client in a 
subfield office, it makes me nervous. Their 
procedures are lax. You've got these senior 
agents who have all the authority in the world 
because they're out in the middle of nowhere. 
You've got rogue agents doing whatever they want. 
Most of the buildings are unmarked; the vehicles 
they drive are unmarked." Like other attorneys, 
Tarin was extremely frustrated by ICE not 
releasing its phone numbers. He gave as an 
example a US citizen in Salt Lake City who hired 
him because her husband, in the process of 
applying for a green card, was being held at a 
subfield office in Colorado. By the time Tarin 
tracked down the location of the facility that 
was holding the husband when he had called his 
wife, the man had been moved to another subfield 
office. "I had to become a little sleuth," Tarin 
said, describing the hours he and a paralegal 
spent on the phone, the numerous false leads, 
unanswered phones and unreturned messages until 
the husband, who had been picked up for driving 
without a license or insurance, was found in 
Grand Junction, Colorado, held on a $20,000 bond, 
$10,000 for each infraction. "I argued with the 
guy, 'This is absurd! Whose policy is this?'" 
Tarin said the agent's response was, "That's just our policy here."

Rafael Galvez, an attorney in Maine, explained 
why he would like ICE to release its entire list 
of subfield office addresses and phone numbers. 
"If they're detaining someone, I will need to 
contact the people on the list. If I can advocate 
on a person's behalf and provide documents, a lot 
of complications could be avoided."

Cary, a suburb of Raleigh, North Carolina, has a 
typical subfield office at the rear of CentreWest 
Commons, an office park adjacent to gated 
communities, large artificial ponds and an Oxford 
University Press production plant. ICE's 
low-lying brick building with a bright blue 
awning has darkened windows, no sign and no US 
flag. People in shackles and handcuffs are 
shuffled in from the rear. The office complex has 
perhaps twenty other businesses, all of which do 
have signs. The agents, who are armed, might not 
wear uniforms and drive their passengers in 
unmarked, often windowless white vans. Even Dani 
Martinez-Moore, who lives nearby and coordinates 
the North Carolina Network of Immigrant 
Advocates, did not know people were being held 
there until she read about it on my blog.

In late October 2008, Mark Lyttle, then 31, was 
held in the Cary office for several hours. Lyttle 
was born in North Carolina, and the FBI file ICE 
had obtained on him indicated he was a US 
citizen. Lyttle used his time in the holding tank 
attempting to persuade the agents who had plucked 
him out of the medical misdemeanor section of a 
nearby prison, where he had been held for 
seventy-three days, not to follow through on the 
Cary office's earlier decision to ship him to 
Mexico. Lyttle is cognitively disabled, has 
bipolar disorder, speaks no Spanish and has no 
Mexican relatives. In response to his entreaties, 
a Cary agent "told me to tell it to the judge," 
Lyttle said. But Lyttle's charging document from 
the Cary office includes a box checked next to 
the boilerplate prohibition: "You may not request 
a review of this determination by an immigration judge."

Lyttle made enough of a fuss at the Stewart 
Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, that the 
agents there arranged for him to appear before a 
judge. But the checked box in the Cary paperwork 
meant he never heard from the nonprofit Legal 
Orientation Program attorneys who might have 
picked up on his situation. William Cassidy, a 
former ICE prosecutor working for the Executive 
Office of Immigration Review, ignored Lyttle's 
pleas and in his capacity as immigration judge 
signed Lyttle's removal order. According to 
Lyttle, Cassidy said he had to go by the sworn statements of the ICE officers.

Meanwhile, Lyttle's mother, Jeanne, and his 
brothers, including two in the Army, were 
frantically searching for him, even checking the 
obituaries. They were trying to find Lyttle in 
the North Carolina prison system, but the trail 
went cold after he was transferred to ICE 
custody. Jeanne said, "David showed me the Manila 
envelope [he sent to the prison]--'Refused'--and 
we thought Mark had refused it." Jeanne was 
crying. "We kept trying to find out where he 
was." It never crossed their minds that Mark 
might be spending Christmas in a shelter for los 
deportados on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande.

ICE spokesman Temple Black first told me the list 
was "not releasable" and that it was "law 
enforcement sensitive," but coordinator for 
community outreach Andrew Lorenzen-Strait 
e-mailed me a partial list of addresses and no 
phone numbers. I then obtained a more complete 
list, including telephone numbers, in response to 
a FOIA request. That list, received in November 
and dated September 2009, is about forty 
locations shy of the 186 subfield offices 
mentioned in the Schriro report and omits 
thirty-nine locations listed in an August ICE job 
announcement seeking applicants for immigration 
enforcement agents. These include ICE postings in 
Champlain, New York; Alamosa, Colorado; Pembroke 
Pines, Florida; and Livermore, California. The 
anonymous ICE official neither answered questions 
about why I was sent an incomplete list nor 
accounted for the disparity in official 
explanations of the list's confidentiality.

ICE obscures its presence in other ways as well. 
Everyone knows that detention centers are in 
sparsely populated areas, but according to 
Amnesty International's Reynolds, policy director 
of migrant and refugee rights, "Quite a lot of 
communities don't know they're detaining 
thousands of people, because the signs say 
Service Processing Center," not Detention Center, 
although the latter designation is used for 
privately contracted facilities. The ICE e-mail 
stated that the "service processing" term was 
first used when the centers were run by the 
predecessor agency Immigration and Naturalization 
Service, "because these facilities were used to 
process aliens for deportation," ignoring the 
fact that these structures were and are 
distinctive for confining people and not the Orwellian "processing."

Even the largest complexes, which are usually off 
side roads from small highways, are visible only 
if you drive right up to the entrance. Unlike 
federal prisons, detention centers post no road 
signs to guide travelers. The anonymous ICE 
official would not provide a reason for this disparity.

ICE agents are also working in hidden offices in 
one of the grooviest buildings in one of the 
hottest neighborhoods in Manhattan. Tommy 
Kilbride, an ICE detention and removal officer 
and a star of A&E's reality show Manhunters: 
Fugitive Task Force, is part of the US Marshals 
Fugitive Task Force, housed on the third floor of 
the Chelsea Market, above Fat Witch Bakery and 
alongside Rachael Ray and the Food Network. 
Across the street are Craftsteak and Del Posto, 
both fancy venues for two other Food Network 
stars, Tom Colicchio and Mario Batali. Above 
their restaurants are agents working for the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Someone who had been working in that building for 
about a year said he had heard rumors of FBI 
agents, though he didn't see one until nine 
months later when a guy was openly carrying a gun 
through the lobby. In November, at midday, he saw 
two men in plain clothes walk a third man in 
handcuffs through a side-street door behind 
Craftsteak. "It was weird, creepy," he said, 
adding that the whole arrangement made him 
uncomfortable. "I don't like it. It makes you 
wonder, what are they hiding? Is it for good reasons or bad reasons?"

Natalie Jeremijenko, who lives nearby and is a 
professor of visual arts at New York University, 
pointed out the "twisted genius" of hiding 
federal agents in the "worldwide center of 
visuality and public space," referring to the 
galleries and High Line park among these 
buildings. Jeremijenko was incensed. "For a 
participatory democracy to work, you need to have 
real-time visual evidence of what is going on" 
and not just knowledge by professors who file a 
FOIA request or even readers of a Nation article.

In response to a question about the absence of 
signs at subfield offices, the ICE e-mail stated, 
"ICE attempts to place signs wherever possible, 
however there are many variables to consider such 
as shared buildings, law enforcement activities, 
zoning laws, etc." Except for "law enforcement 
activities," the reasons did not apply to the 
facilities listed here, as evidenced by signs on adjacent businesses.

The Obama administration continued to ignore 
complaints about the LA subfield office known as 
B-18 until April 1, when Napolitano and Attorney 
General Eric Holder, as well as ICE officials, 
were named as defendants in a lawsuit filed by 
the ACLU and the National Immigration Law Center. 
In September, the parties reached a settlement. 
The ACLU's Arulanantham said, "I never understood 
what [ICE] had to gain. The fact that after we 
filed the suit they completely fixed it makes it 
more mysterious" as to why their months of 
earlier negotiation brought few results. At the 
time of the lawsuit, he said, the nearby Mira 
Loma Detention Center had space. When I asked if 
ICE was trying to punish people by bringing them 
to B-18, Arulanantham said, "No, no one was 
targeted," adding, "If it were punitive, it would be less disturbing."

Arulanantham's response is, alas, more than 
fodder for a law school hypothetical about 
whether intentional or unintentional rights 
violations are more egregious. In 2006 ICE 
punished several Iraqi hunger strikers in 
Virginia--they were protesting being unlawfully 
held for more than six months after agreeing to 
deportation--by shuffling them between a variety 
of different facilities, ensuring that they would 
not encounter lawyers or be found by loved ones. 
This went on from weeks to months, according to 
Brittney Nystrom, senior legal adviser for the 
National Immigration Forum. "The message was, 
We're going to make you disappear."

As an alternative to the system of unmarked 
subfield offices and unaccountable agents, 
consider the approach of neighborhood police 
precincts, where dangerous criminals are held 
every day and police carry out their work in full 
view of their neighbors. Not only can citizens 
watch out for strange police actions, and know 
where to look if a family member is missing; 
local accountability helps discourage misconduct. 
ICE agents' persistent flouting of rules and laws 
is abetted by their ability to scurry back to 
secret dens, avoiding the scrutiny and resulting 
inhibitions that arise when law enforcement 
officers develop relationships with the communities they serve.

Indeed, the jacket Kilbride wears during arrests 
says POLICE in large letters. Working out of a 
heretofore secret location--Manhunters has no 
exterior shots--one that his supervisor had 
requested I not reveal, gives their operation the 
trappings of a secret police. An attorney who had 
a client held in a subfield office said on 
background, "The president released in January a 
memorandum about transparency, but that's not 
happening. He says one thing, but we have these 
clandestine operations, akin to extraordinary 
renditions within the United States. They're 
misguided as to what their true mission is, and 
they are doing things contrary to the best interests of the country."


About Jacqueline Stevens

<http://jacquelinestevens.org>Jacqueline Stevens, 
a political theorist, is the author of the 
recently published 
<http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14876-4/states-without-nations>States 
Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals 
(Columbia). 
<http://www.thenation.com/directory/bios/jacqueline_stevens>more...




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