ICE Is Shipping Detainees to Hawaii as Bed Space on the U.S. Mainland Fills Up
As the Trump administration moves to alleviate overcrowding in immigration detention centers, immigrant detainees are being transferred around the country, potentially thousands of miles from their families. Now, immigration attorneys in Honolulu are serving a new kind of client: immigrants arrested on the U.S. mainland with no connection to the island, Honolulu Civil Beat reports.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reached a record-high number of 57,861 detainees in late June amid President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. To meet Trump’s deportation goals, the administration has experimented with controversial methods of detaining immigrants in both state-run detention facilities, like Florida’s Alligator Alcatraz, and other countries, like El Salvador. Another option is the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), which agreed in February to set aside bed space across nine facilities, including at Federal Detention Center (FDC) Honolulu.
Data show that FDC Honolulu, along with facilities in Miami, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Leavenworth, Kansas, have seen an increasing number of ICE detainees since the agreement. No data is currently available for the other four facilities in Los Angeles, Berlin, New Hampshire, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and Brooklyn, New York.Â
Once detained, ICE has broad discretionary authority to transfer immigrants to any detention facility, regardless of where the initial arrest took place. Although immigrants have the right to legal representation in immigration court, they do not receive a court-appointed attorney and must retain their own counsel. Transfers between detention facilities—like a 4,500-mile move from Florida to Hawaii—make it difficult for immigration lawyers to represent their clients.
“You can’t video conference with them. They can’t sign things. They can’t review ap
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