Drawing a Picture of Immigration Detention

CHICAGO, Ill. — Time seemed endless for Luis León Ortega, who spent nearly seven months in various Illinois detention centers after being caught by immigration officials and scheduled for deportation hearings.

Leon The shadowy world of immigration detention has been in the spotlight lately with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials being forced to make public a series of reports about conditions at numerous detention centers throughout the country. The reports tell the stories.

Luis León Ortega has the pictures. “I used to draw to pass the time,” says León, a native of Guanajuato, Mexico. “There was a Hispanic guard who always had pencils, so I asked her to lend me one and she did.”

León’s drawings are simple, yet provocative. One traces the very symbols often used to highlight this country’s greatest attributes: an august bald eagle, the prominent Statue of Liberty, a bold Sears Tower, the nation’s stately capitol dome.

But these images are ominously juxtaposed against a symbolic wall — the U.S.-Mexican border wall — that twists into a serpent bearing its sharp jaws, mouth wide open and ready to strike. In the drawing the serpent is poised to devour a man trapped in its mouth, presumably the artist.

Images of Stability

Immigration Detention Sketch There are 35 sketches in all. Some of them depict innocent childhood subjects like Disney characters, a dog with a Chicago White Sox baseball cap. Others are more conceptual, like the one depicting a tree whose vine-like branches covered in spines twist around a heart – a common image in Mexican culture that could either reflect a loss of faith in God, or suffering of the heart. There is also the famous crime-fighter Batman – one of his son’s favorite drawings — and an eerily simple depiction of his own isolation in jail cell number 115.

To add a bit of color to his drawings, León purchased Kool-Aid packets and mixed in a little water.

Six Months, Five Transfers

León’s journey through the murky world of U.S. immigration detention centers began on a normal Chicago winter day, back in February 2008. He was pulled over by police and charged with driving without a valid driver’s license. Authorities quickly discovered his undocumented status, and he would spend the next 30 weeks rotating between five different Illinois correctional centers. He only remembers the names of two – the McHenry County Adult Correctional Facility and the Pontiac Correctional Center.

Every day, officers would try to get him to sign a voluntary deportation order.

“The first thing they do when you go to breakfast is try to convince you to sign your deportation papers. They did this every single day,” León recalls.

“We weren’t allowed to have anything in our cells. Masked guards armed with large, rubber-bullet guns would search our cells. They swarmed in as if they were the SWAT team. If they found even a packet of sugar, we were confined to our cells for 15 consecutive days,” he says.

His cell was just large enough for two beds, a shared toilet and a sink.

During meals, detainees were forbidden from speaking, so León would look forward to the little time he could talk on the telephone with his wife and children. But even that was complicated, as phone calls were limited to 20 minutes each day and phone cards were costly. A $20 card yielded only three calls.

“Once they told me a lawyer was coming to meet with us. But there wasn’t enough time. There was only one lawyer for 300 people. He managed to speak with only 10 people, and I wasn’t one of them.”

If access to legal help was nearly impossible, so too was León’s ability to turn to religion for comfort. In order to visit the chapel, detainees had to add their names to a list two or three days in advance. They were forbidden from having religious items in their cells, except for a Bible. A prayer card sent by his wife was intercepted and confiscated. The chaplains who did visit detainees spoke only English.

“Once a week they would allow us to see our families for 30 minutes. But we didn’t get to see them in person. We had to look at each other projected on a screen and we had to speak to each other on a telephone. I would go to a room where the telephone was, and my family would be in another room below me,” León said.

After six months, he was released on bond. The six-foot-tall, 43-year-old had lost a significant amount of weight. Pictures of León before his arrest show a much heavier and healthier man. Today, his hands sweat when he recalls those months spent behind bars, where he was isolated from his wife and two children who lived at the family’s Southside Chicago home.

Authorities have begun the deportation process against León. His two U.S.-born children wonder if they’ll have to live in a country they know little about, or face living without a father at home. León’s next hearing isn’t until 2011, perhaps enough time, he hopes, for something to be done by President Barack Obama, who as a candidate promised swift immigration reform.

In the meantime, León holds down a job and provides for his family by working six days a week at a local supermarket.

Pulling Back the Veil

For years, ICE officials fought to keep the treatment of immigration detainees a secret. Last month, a three-year legal battle ended with an order for ICE officials to make public a series of reports that documented inspections at numerous detention centers throughout the country. On August 6, ICE Director John Morton announced that one center, the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, Texas, which held up to 400 detainees, would no longer be used for detaining families.

The reports, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and lawsuits brought by rights groups, confirm many of León’s allegations of ill treatment at the hands of authorities.

In Illinois, a report by delegates from the American Bar Association, who visited the DuPage County Jail in 2003 and the McHenry County Correctional Facility in 2006 (one of the centers where León was held), found that detainees could not speak to legal assistants without an attorney present; could not see a doctor without a judge’s order; were denied dental care; and in at least one incident suffered physical abuse. The report also confirmed León’s allegation that detainees were unable to freely practice their religion.

Mary Meg McCarthy, director of the National Immigration Justice Center – one of the groups that successfully sued ICE for public access to documents describing detainee conditions — says she is happy the documents were finally made public. But she recognizes that many conditions detainees face remain unchanged.

“When the telephones don’t work properly and visiting time is strictly limited, the individual rights of detainees continue to be violated,” McCarthy says.

According to Gail Montenegro, regional spokesperson for ICE in Chicago, in 2007 ICE contracted the private companies Creative Corrections and the Nakamoto Group to inspect the centers where detainees were held.

Creative Corrections issued reports annually through June 2009 before being replaced by another company, MGT of America. According to Montenegro, Nakamoto continues functioning as an “on-site” monitor of conditions to guarantee that detainees’ rights are not violated.

ICE stopped sending detainees to DuPage County Jail in August 2004, but ICE officials say the decision was unrelated to the 2003 inspection by the American Bar Association delegation.

In a statement, Montenegro wrote that ICE officials learned of the attorneys’ delegation report on McHenry County Jail in early 2007 and quickly began addressing the report’s criticisms of detainee treatment.

“(McHenry County Jail) currently complies with ICE detention standards and was recently rated ‘Good’ by Creative Corrections in its most recent 2008 annual inspection,” Montenegro wrote.

One key issue left unresolved, however, is whether Congress and the Obama administration are willing to pass laws that protect detainees’ rights. Advocacy groups representing former detainees are lobbying for these laws, and at least two bills are under discussion in Senate committees.

But Homeland Security authorities acknowledged that a complete overhaul of the U.S. immigration detention system could take years. In the meantime, tens of thousand of undocumented immigrants remain in detention, their fates as uncertain as León’s.

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This article originally appeared on La Raza and New America Media.

U.S. Citizens Detained in Immigration Raids

The son of a WWII veteran, La Puente resident Frank Ponce de Leon was held in a San Diego immigration detention center for three months last year. He insisted he was a United States citizen all the while facing the possibility of being deported.

“I kept telling them I was a citizen, but they wouldn’t believe me,” he said. “Little did I know that this would happen to me and that I would be sent to an INS detention center.”

Ponce de Leon, 47, was born in Mexico in 1961 and moved to California in 1977. Despite being born abroad to an American parent, he automatically acquired U.S. citizenship by law.

However, he never obtained a Certificate of Citizenship, which would have officially proven he was a citizen at birth.

In 2007, more than 300,000 illegal immigrants were detained by the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), with 30,000 held in detention centers daily.

Neither agencies have data on how many U.S. citizens have been deported or detained on suspicion of being non-citizens.

However, Ponce de Leon is just one of thousands of citizens who have been rounded up and sent to immigration centers with their status in question, according to Jacqueline Stevens, associate professor of Law and Society at UC Santa Barbara.

Stevens claims ICE has been unlawfully detaining U.S. citizens after researching and compiling information since 2008 from government officials, immigration attorneys, criminal public defense attorneys and intake interviews with detainees.

Working with an Arizona nonprofit legal service organization called the Florence Immigrant and Refugees Rights Project, she says one percent of their more than 2,000 cases are for detainees who have potential claims to U.S. citizenship.

“It happens one percent of the time but that’s still thousands of cases,” Stevens said. “In absolute numbers, it’s intolerably too frequent.”

In reviewing the organization’s cases, Stevens claims to have seen enough files of citizens in Arizona detention centers to estimate that since 2004, between 3,500 and 10,000 citizens nationwide have been detained.

But ICE spokeswoman Lori Haley said, “ICE only processes individuals for removal when all the available facts indicate that the individual is an alien. We have no interest in deporting U.S. citizens.”

Committed to enforcing the law fairly, ICE thoroughly investigates all claims, she said.

“After careful questioning, if somebody is erroneously detained they’re immediately released,” Haley said.

However, Ponce de Leon’s release wasn’t as immediate.

Two months before being released from jail for an aggravated felony, he was sent to the Otay Detention Facility where he would spend the next three months trying to prove his citizenship.

“I was representing myself and getting slammed down in court,” he said. “The judge didn’t give me the light of day.”

Since detainees are not provided legal representation, the American Bar Association Immigration Justice Project in San Diego offered him pro bono legal services.

“A significant number of people go through the immigration process without a lawyer,” Attorney Allegra McLeod said. “Without a lawyer it can be very hard to establish your rights under the law even if you are a U.S. citizen.”

Trying to Prove Citizenship

But there was sound evidence of his citizenship, including his father’s birth certificate, military service showing the family’s allegiance to the U.S. and a marriage certificate showing he was in the U.S. 10 years prior to Ponce de Leon’s birth, she said.

There was also the fact that his older brother, Fernando, had the same problem the year before, McLeod said. His case was terminated when the court found out he was a U.S. citizen, she said.

Despite the claim and evidence being identical to Fernando’s, Ponce de Leon was held longer, costing U.S. tax payers $90 a day, McLeod said.

Others who have gone through similar circumstances haven’t come forward because they don’t know who to trust, Stevens said.

“The government has unlawfully imprisoned them and … treated them in a way that’s fundamentally unfair,” she said

Attorney Veronica Villegas represented a West Covina resident named Robert, who was deported twice by ICE to Tijuana.

Robert was born in Mexico in 1970 and was orphaned with his five siblings after his parents were killed, she said.

After being adopted in 1983 by his legal resident aunt and his U.S. citizen uncle from Baldwin Park, Robert became a legal permanent resident.

“The minute he became a resident he automatically became a citizen,” Villegas said.

After serving a 16-month jail sentence, Robert was sent to El Centro Detention Facility in San Diego where he spent a year in detention. He was deported to Tijuana as a criminal alien.

He went back to California the next day, but was caught and deported to Tijuana again, Villegas said. In attempting to get back to the United States, Robert was caught by border agents who accused him of falsely claiming citizenship. He served three years in federal prison.

“Robert had a legitimate claim to citizenship,” Villegas said. “The law automatically made him a citizen but ICE is not going to verify that.”

It’s up to the detainees to prove their status, she said.

“They set it up in a way that’s nobody’s responsibility but yours and if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re screwed,” she said.

He was released from a San Pedro detention facility, where he was told “Congratulations, you’ve been a citizen since 1983,” Villegas said.

Although the claim to U.S. citizenship is there, it’s difficult to prove, especially when detainees can’t obtain the documents proving their citizenship, Sheila Neville, Senior Attorney for the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles said.

Immigration officials “should work with that person and the family to figure out what is going on,” she said.

David Hernandez, an assistant professor of Chicano and Chicana Studies at UCLA, has studied the detention of immigrants and attributes the detention of citizens and potential aliens to racial profiling.

”If people are using racial profiling to capture immigrants, citizens are sure to get detained,” he said. “When you rely on racial profiling and picking up whoever is next to the person that you’re trying to arrest  that’s going to cause terrible mistakes.”

Ponce de Leon was released from the detention center Dec. 31, 2008 and has applied for his Certificate of Citizenship.

However, he isn’t in the clear yet.

“Until he has his Certificate of Citizenship in hand, which can take a long time, the problem hasn’t yet been solved,” Mcleod said. “He could find himself back in the same situation.”

Still, Ponce de Leon is hopeful.

“Little by little, I look up at God and know that everything will be all right,” he said. “Eventually I’ll get my break.”

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Credit: Juliette Funes will be graduating from Cal State Fullerton in May with a B.A. in Communication - Print journalism. This summer she has an internship at the L.A. Times writing for the Calendar Section. She likes writing about minority, social and women’s issues and eventually would like to focus her writing on immigration.