Varick Street Detention Facility, Manhattan,
New York
November 2, 2009 New York Times
A startling petition arrived at the New York City Bar Association in
October 2008, signed by 100 men, all locked up without criminal charges
in the middle of Manhattan. In vivid if flawed English, it described
cramped, filthy quarters where dire medical needs were ignored and
hungry prisoners were put to work for $1 a day. The petitioners were
among 250 detainees imprisoned in an immigration jail that few New
Yorkers know exists. Above a post office, on the fourth floor of a
federal office building in Greenwich Village, the Varick Street
Detention Facility takes in 11,000 men a year, most of them longtime New
Yorkers facing deportation without a lawyer. Galvanized by the petition,
the bar association sent volunteers into the jail to offer legal counsel
to detainees — a strategy the Obama administration has embraced as it
tries to fix the entire detention system. “Immigration and Customs
Enforcement considers the access to legal services at Varick Street as a
good model,” said Sean Smith, a spokesman for Janet Napolitano,
secretary of homeland security, who oversees immigration enforcement.
But the lawyers doing the work have reached a different conclusion,
after finding that most detainees with a legal claim to stay in the
United States are routinely transferred to more remote jails before they
can be helped. The lawyers say their effort has laid bare the
fundamental unfairness of a system where immigrant detainees, unlike
criminal defendants, can be held without legal representation and moved
from state to state without notice. In a report to be issued on Monday,
the association’s City Bar Justice Center is calling for all immigrant
detainees to be provided with counsel. And an article to be published
this month in The Fordham Law Review treats the Varick jail as a case
study in the systemic barriers to legal representation. The new focus on
Varick highlights the conflict between two forces: the administration’s
plans to revamp detention, and current policies that feed the flow of
detainees through the system as it is now. A disjointed mix of county
jails and privately run prisons, where mistreatment and medical neglect
have been widely documented, the detention network churns roughly
400,000 detainees through 32,000 beds each year. “Any attempt to get
support or services for them is stymied because you don’t know where
they’re going to end up,” said Lynn M. Kelly, the director of the
Justice Center. When she asked that the lawyers’ letters of legal advice
be forwarded to detainees who had been transferred from Varick, she said
the warden balked, saying he had to consider the financial interests of
his private shareholders: 1,200 members of a central Alaskan tribe whose
dividends are linked to Varick’s profits under a $79 million, three-year
federal contract. Federal officials would not discuss their transfer
policies, but asked for patience as they try to make the detention
system more humane and cost-effective. “We inherited an inadequate
detention system from the previous administration that does not meet
ICE’s current priorities or needs,” said Matthew Chandler, a Homeland
Security spokesman. Officials say they are committed to a complete
overhaul, including less-penal detention centers with better access to
lawyers. The volunteer lawyers and the petition’s author, an ailing
refugee from torture in Romania who spent eight months inside Varick,
say many problems persist there, though the added scrutiny has led to
improvements. Detainees who want a Gideon Bible no longer have to pay
the commissary $7. Immigration officials are more responsive when a
lawyer complains that a detainee in pain is not getting treatment. But
most detainees do not have a lawyer, and the few who do include men who
have fallen prey to incompetent or fraudulent practitioners. Recurrent
complaints include frigid temperatures, mildew and meals that leave
detainees hungry and willing to clean for $1 a day to pay for commissary
food. That wage is specified in the contract with the Alaskan company,
which budgeted 23,000 days of such work the first year, and collects a
daily rate of $227.68 for each detainee. The Alaska connection is one of
the stranger twists in the jail’s fitful history. Opened as a federal
immigration detention center in 1984, Varick became chronically
overcrowded after 1998, when new laws mandated the detention of all
noncitizens who had ever committed a crime on a list of deportable
offenses, expanded to include misdemeanors like drug possession. A
Dominican man there died of untreated pneumonia in 1999 — the first
reported death in the nationwide detention system, which now counts 106
since October 2003. The Varick facility, which is on the corner of
Houston Street, fell short of national detention standards adopted in
2000, because it lacks any outdoor recreation space. But under a
grandfather clause, it was allowed to remain open until 9/11, when the
terror attack, blocks away, forced its evacuation. For years, it was
shuttered. It quietly reopened in February 2008, operated by Ahtna
Technical Services Inc., a subsidiary of Ahtna Inc. — still with no
access to fresh air. As an Alaska Native corporation, Ahtna has won
numerous federal contracts without having to compete with other
companies; last year it paid its tribal shareholders about $500 each in
dividends. It hires a Texas subcontractor to supply guards and
transportation, along with the shackles and belly chains routinely used
on detainees being moved in or out. Varick’s population includes illegal
immigrants, asylum-seekers and legal immigrants who face deportation
because they have past criminal convictions. Almost half of those
screened by the volunteer lawyers have already been in detention for
four to six months, according to the bar association report, and nearly
40 percent have legal grounds to contest deportation. A few, the report
says, have a possible claim to citizenship, which would make their
detention unlawful. But the volunteers, including lawyers from 16
corporate firms, say they can offer only rudimentary legal triage to a
handful of detainees a week. The Department of Justice is asking
Congress for money to expand the law project, and Immigration and
Customs Enforcement invites Washington officials to visit the weekly
triage sessions. The agency allowed a reporter to observe a session, but
not to tour the jail. On a recent Thursday, only 11 of 35 detainees who
had signed up made it into one of five glassed-in booths where they
could consult with pairs of legal volunteers. One, a 25-year-old
Mexican, had been delivering food for an Italian restaurant on Madison
Avenue until his detention. After a week in Varick, the government had
not served him with a “notice to appear” telling why he was detained and
setting the date and place where he would be heard by an immigration
judge. Volunteers were researching his case a week later when he was
transferred to Atlanta. It could just as easily have been Louisiana or
Texas, far from any free legal help, said Maria Navarro, a Legal Aid
lawyer who supervises the volunteers. Even in cities, she said, lawyers
are reluctant to represent detainees who may be suddenly moved far away.
Another 25-year-old, who had come to New York as a legal immigrant from
Belize at age 2, told lawyers he had worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken to
support his 5-year-old daughter, a citizen, when his sickle-cell anemia
permitted. After a standing huddle, the lawyers told him that because
his notice listed old convictions for possession of marijuana, he was
ineligible for release on bond or with an electronic monitoring
bracelet. A Haitian, who had served time for at least one drug-related
offense, had a lawyer but wanted a second opinion after being held in
Varick for 16 months. He described himself as a barber, interpreter and
legal resident of Brooklyn for 23 years. “It is double jeopardy,” he
protested, nursing a swollen jaw with teeth missing. “I become a
diabetic here, because of anxiety, stress and suicidal conditions.” Yet
a detainee from the former Soviet Union praised the jail. “Varick is
heaven” compared with some county jails in New Jersey (Bergen and
Monmouth) and Florida, he said, citing abuse by anti-immigrant guards. A
century-long line of Supreme Court decisions holds that immigration
detention is not a punishment or deprivation of liberty, and does not
require legal counsel for fundamental fairness. But Daniel I. Miller,
39, the Romanian whose petition reached the bar association, said his
own case showed how high the stakes can be. Mr. Miller, a chef, fled his
native land in 1994 after the secret police mutilated him for advocating
gay rights. In New York, he had already been paroled for a criminal
conviction — for signing his partner’s name on a contract — when
immigration authorities detained him. To no avail, records show, his
lawyer and an outraged doctor at St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan urged
his release from Varick for treatment of tumors on his liver. Instead,
he was transferred in April to the Orange County Jail in Goshen, N.Y.,
where he said he also circulated a petition. The authorities there
accused him of trying to start a riot and sent him to segregation with a
murder defendant. “These people have no rules, that’s the main problem,”
Mr. Miller said, speaking from the Midtown office where he is starting
an organic catering business. He credits his lawyer, Howard Brill, for
that turnaround: On Sept. 2, after almost a year in custody, an
immigration judge granted him the right to stay in the United States.
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