Punishing Victims We Promised to Help

So you're walking down the street, minding your own business, when suddenly a giant SUV jumps the curb onto the sidewalk and hits you.

Bystanders rush to your side, call 911, chase after the escaping driver. The ambulance arrives and the EMTs load you in it. You've got two broken legs and a concussion.

But they don't take you to the hospital. They take you to jail. You protest, pointing to your injuries, begging for medical attention. Sorry, the jailers say, we have to keep you here until the police finish investigating the accident.

But I'm the victim, you protest. Why should I have to be locked up without help? Those are the rules, they shrug.

Impossible, you say? It's happening right here, right now, to the survivors of the Haitian earthquake.

Blue Girl has the details:

Reading this article in today's New York Times made me shake with rage.

Did you know that there are Haitian refugees whose only crime was surviving the earthquake that devastated Port au Prince on January 12 who were evacuated to the United States when they sought shelter and food at the airport, only to be locked up in immigration detention centers as soon as they arrived in the United States without visas and held for deportation, even though deportations to Haiti were suspended immediately after the quake?

Legal advocates who stumbled on the survivors in February at the Broward County Transitional Center, a privately operated immigration jail in Pompano Beach, Fla., have tried for weeks to persuade government officials to release them to citizen relatives who are eager to take them in, letters and affidavits show.

Meanwhile, the detainees have received little or no mental health care for the trauma they suffered, lawyers at the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center said, despite an offer of free treatment at the jail by a local Creole-speaking psychotherapist.

Their plight is a result of the scramble to cope quickly with the immigration consequences of the quake's destruction and death toll. Some Haitians who arrived without papers were handed tourist visas, only to find that status barred them from working; the more fortunate received humanitarian parole, an open-ended status that permits employment. Those already in the country illegally were allowed to apply for temporary protected status, which shields recipients from deportation for at least 18 months and lets them work.

Almost at random, it seems, immigration jail was the ad hoc solution for these 30 survivors and for others still hidden in pockets of the nation's sprawling detention network. Some of the 30 have already been transferred to more remote immigration jails without explanation.

I blame the system of private jails we have allowed to mushroom in this country.

When the government operates a jail, it is in their best interest to rehabilitate prisoners and reduce recidivism, keeping prison populations as low as possible. This dynamic is reversed with private jails. It is in the best interest of the detention facility owners and operators to keep headcounts high, because they bill the government a set rate for each prisoner. The more people in detention the more money they make.

The cynic in me sees the bean counters for the private detention centers telling their jailers to move the detainees around in a sick and twisted shell game that keeps innocent, already traumatised victims of a natural disaster locked up in hellish conditions so the people who own stock in private prisons can make a few bucks.

When the Times started asking questions, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the detainees in question were "being processed for release."

Advocates for the detainees said they have been waiting for weeks for the policy to be handed down from Washington on how to deal with a group of people, most of whom were ordered deported in February, who have been ordered to be deported, even though deportations to Haiti are suspended for at least 18 months. "Their prolonged and unnecessary detention is only exacerbating their trauma," the advocates wrote to the agency on March 19, after receiving no response to detailed, individual requests for release by two dozen of the detainees. "There is no reason to spend taxpayer dollars detaining traumatized earthquake survivors who cannot be deported and who have demonstrated that they are neither a flight risk nor a danger to the community."

Most of these people have relatives who are legal immigrants to the United States who are willing - eager even - to take them in.

So let them.

This is the real danger of failing to keep a sharp eye and a short leash on government bureaucrats: not mythical black helicopters and death panels, but innocent people locked up for lack of clear instructions and personal accountability.