Prolonged Detention

12/18/2012

U.S. Torture

Shedding Light on the Dark Side – A Call to Congress to Release the SSCI Report

By Amshula Jayaram, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 10:07am

Last week, nearly four years after President Obama closed the CIA’s Detention, Interrogation and Rendition Program, the American public is one step closer to learning the truth about a program that sanctioned the torture of terrorism suspects. To date, it has remained shrouded in secrecy, tarnishing our international reputation and severely damaging our nation’s security. Under the leadership of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has voted to adopt a 6000-plus page report, based on an analysis of more than six million pages of CIA records, detailing the findings of the committee’s three-year investigation into the program. We urge the committee to publicly release the document with as few redactions as possible.

09/14/2012

Immigration Detention

Immigration Detainees Have the Right to Due Process, Too

By Michael Tan, Staff Attorney, Immigrants' Rights Project, ACLU at 2:12pm

Alejandro Rodriguez’s parents brought him from Mexico when he was a baby. Prior to his detention, Alejandro earned his green card and lived near his extended family in Los Angeles, working as a dental assistant to support his two U.S. citizen children. The two convictions that gave rise to his detention and deportation case were minor and non-violent— joyriding when he was 19, and a misdemeanor drug possession when he was 24. Alejandro posed no flight risk or danger to the community and yet, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) locked Alejandro up for more than three years without a bond hearing. Bond hearings are a basic and guaranteed principle of due process in the American judicial system, but thousands of immigrants like Alejandro are denied this fundamental right on a daily basis.

10/20/2011

End ICE Abuse

Ending The Laws That Fuel Mass Detention and Deportation

By Judy Rabinovitz, Immigrants' Rights Project at 3:00pm

The Department of Homeland Security assumes that mass detention is the key to immigration enforcement. But in fact, our detention system locks up thousands of immigrants unnecessarily every year, exposing detainees to brutal and inhumane conditions of confinement at massive costs to American taxpayers. Throughout the next two weeks, check back daily for posts about the costs of immigration detention, both human and fiscal, and what needs to be done to ensure fair and humane policy.

09/01/2011

Prolonged Detention

No Bond, No Bars

By Michael Tan, Staff Attorney, Immigrants' Rights Project, ACLU at 4:53pm

Cheikh Diop was detained for 1,072 days — or nearly three years — while challenging the government's attempt to remove him to Senegal, a country he had fled 20 years earlier after being tortured by Senegalese military forces. Because of his prolonged detention, Mr. Diop lost his longtime job as a cook at TGI Friday's and was separated from his four U.S. citizen children — all because the government refused to grant him the basic due process of a bond hearing.

American Civil Liberties Union