Justice Strategies

By Getahn Ward • The Tennessean • June 25, 2010

Eight Corrections Corporation of America detention centers that house asylum seekers and immigrants awaiting deportation may be line for makeovers to create a less prison-like feel.

The move by Nashville-based CCA to spruce up eight facilities – half of them in California and Texas – drew sharp reactions from both sides of the debate over U.S. immigration policies.

Read the full article here.

A new Christian Science Monitor article cites Justice Strategies’ research on the federal immigration act, 287(g), which may have served as a precursor to the widely denounced Arizona immigration law. “Democracy on Ice” is an in-depth investigation of the 287(g) program, which deputizes state and local law enforcement agencies to enforce federal immigration laws. Aarti Shahani is quoted in the article as concluding that “the 287(g) program has failed.… It has harmed, not served our public safety.”

287(g) is a tiny provision in federal immigration law that allows Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to take local police away from their mission of fighting crime, and pull them into the murky territory of targeting immigrants for arrest without suspicion of crime. ICE described the 287(g) program as a public safety measure to target “criminal illegal aliens,” but its largest impact has been on law-abiding immigrant communities. Rather than focusing on serious crime, police resources are spent targeting day-laborers, corn-vendors and people with broken tail-lights. This report details findings from a year-long investigation of 287(g) by Justice Strategies, and recommends that the ICE program be terminated.