ICE is using solitary confinement to coerce immigrants into self-deporting, a new report says

The number of people being held in immigration detention centers across the country has gone way up under the Trump administration — and so have the number of people being held who have no criminal record.

And now, a new investigation shows more of them are being held in solitary confinement often as a tactic to try to coerce immigrants into giving up their claims and self-deporting.

Emily Bregel reported the story for the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson and she joined The Show to talk about it.

Full conversation

LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, Emily.

EMILY BREGEL: Hi. Good morning.

LAUREN GILGER: Thank you for coming on. So, I know you and your team spoke with a lot of immigrants who are being held here in Arizona at the Eloy Detention Center. And you talked to them about their experience, and many of them said they had been held in solitary confinement. What did they say?

EMILY BREGEL: That’s right. What we heard from just detainee after detainee is that solitary confinement was used in ways that — certainly overused, misused and ways that experts told us could be unconstitutional or violating detainees’ rights. And that example you gave of using either the threat of solitary or a placement in solitary to coerce someone into really abandoning their immigration claim and self-deporting, that’s a practice experts say is unconstitutional.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. So that’s one reason these folks told you they thought they had been put into solitary confinement. But there were others, right? Like minor infractions. There were instances in which people would say that they had mental health concerns or suicidal thoughts, and they would be put into solitary confinement.

EMILY BREGEL: Absolutely. We spoke to — well we’ve spoken to dozens of detainees over the past about seven months, but 10 detainees who spent significant amounts of time in solitary told us that some of those reasons were things such as language misunderstanding sometimes, complaining about conditions in detention, refusing to self-deport, minor infractions that experts say don’t rise to the level of the type of punishment that solitary is. Actually, the UN considers 15 days in solitary confinement to be tantamount to torture.

And so some of the minor violations include not cleaning up their cells, hanging clothes on a bunk bed, or trying to cover up the air conditioning vents because it’s too cold. And finally, we also talked to a number of people dealing with suicidal thoughts, depression, for some due to the trauma they experienced in their home country. And one woman in particular that I talked with regularly over the last seven months, she spent three days, 24 hours a day, in a cell the size of a parking space after she admitted to having suicidal thoughts right after she arrived at Eloy.

Now, that trauma of being locked in a small room like that with only a box to sleep in and a toilet, that for her, she said, was another trauma. She had fled Iran after she was basically kidnapped off the streets by government agents, held in a cold cell for days while she was violently interrogated and sexually assaulted. So, being basically exposed to a very similar situation in the country she fled to, that was another trauma for her.

LAUREN GILGER: Wow. Yeah, her story is so striking. I was interested in that as well because of the back story, right? She was a dissident. She came here. She said she was sexually assaulted by government agents there, and then comes here. She was screened by a psychologist when she got to Eloy, right? Is that common practice?

EMILY BREGEL: Yes, everyone is supposed to get an intake medical and mental health exam, at least soon after arriving at Eloy. That doesn’t always seem to happen. But in this case, she met with a psychologist right after arriving and said what how she described to me was that, "I finally felt that maybe this is a professional, maybe this is someone I can trust and feel safe with." She hadn’t told anyone about the sexual assault yet. And so she was honest about what she was going through. But she said the "treatment" was definitely felt like a punishment to her that harmed her far more than helping her.

And that’s one thing I want to point out, too, that I think there’s a kind of broad misconception that people in ICE detention are there for some crime they committed. But this is civil detention. It legally is not supposed to be a punishment. ICE says itself no one is there as punishment for a crime. And in fact, more than two-thirds of people in immigration detention have never been convicted of a crime. ICE itself says that 75% of detainees at Eloy have no threat level.

So, this idea that, you know, this is a punishment that people deserve, it’s just not — you know, maybe you try to make that argument for prisons, although many people would argue there’s no cruel and unusual punishment anywhere. But in ICE detention, no one is supposed to be getting a punishment in that setting.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, that is something that gets lost in this conversation about immigration detention and immigration proceedings in general, right? They are civil, not criminal. ... That also means, right, Emily, that the immigrants who are being held there have to be treated in a certain way. You said ICE recognizes that, but what does the law say?

EMILY BREGEL: Yes, so the law says, and the ACLU is actually filing a lawsuit over this regarding a California detention center, but the conditions in ICE detention cannot amount to a punishment. And in their case, they were saying solitary confinement was being used to punish people for those types of minor infractions that we also heard from people at Eloy.

And the United Nations says that if someone is confined alone in a cell for at least 22 hours a day without meaningful human contact, that is solitary confinement. I should say that ICE and CoreCivic deny using solitary confinement. They call it segregation, and they say that it’s distinct from solitary because detainees still have all the privileges that they would have outside of solitary.

.. Experts certainly say this is solitary, this meets the definition by any standard of what solitary confinement is. And detainees all told us that they have restricted privileges while they’re in solitary, often communication devices, they can only shower three days a week. For Narges, the Iranian dissident we talked about earlier, she didn’t get any shower. ... She spent 24 hours a day in that tiny cell. So, people would argue that solitary is not happening in ICE detention.

LAUREN GILGER: Last minute here, Emily. Tell us a little bit about the oversight mechanisms that should be in place and maybe are not anymore.

EMILY BREGEL: That’s one of the main reasons for concern here that at the same time as we see the number of people, and again, largely people without any criminal history, being held in detention, we see the oversight going away.

There are three DHS internal oversight agencies that already were problematic but at least provided some kind of check, some sort of opportunity for people to file complaints from detention. Those have all — actually one has been completely shut down and the others basically gutted with just a handful of staff left.

So, the concern is that as we see more and more people going into ICE detention with far less oversight, that we’ll see people unnecessarily put into solitary with real risks to their mental health and physical health.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. OK, we’ll leave it there. Emily Bregel reported the story for the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson. Emily, thank you very much for your reporting here. I appreciate it.

EMILY BREGEL: Thank you for having me.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio record.

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