Immigrant advocates file urgent requests to save documents scheduled to be destroyed by ICE

Daily Kos Staff

Wednesday February 19, 2020 · 9:52 AM PST

2020/02/19 · 09:52

RIO GRANDE CITY, TX - MARCH 13: A fire alarm and thermometer hang from the walls of a detention center for captured undocumented immigrants stands near-empty at a U.S. Border Patrol station on March 13, 2017 in Rio Grande City, Texas. The Border Patrol has reported that illegal crossings from Mexico have dropped some 40 percent along the southwest border since Donald Trump took office. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

A number of leading civil and immigrant rights groups have filed urgent requests seeking to preserve documents scheduled to be destroyed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, saying “Though agencies are permitted to destroy certain records according to a schedule approved by the National Archives (NARA), the ICE schedule at issue has caused widespread concern because the records slated for destruction include those related to detainee deaths, complaints by detainees about medical treatment and investigations of sexual assault and abuse of detainees.”

The National Archives’ green light allowing ICE to destroy documents from as recently as three years ago “could not come at a worse time,” said the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the groups that filed a Freedom of Information Act request that could protect these documents from destruction.

“Last December, ICE announced new facility standards that lower oversight requirements and weaken what paltry protections exist for people held in detention. Long before that announcement, ICE was already well known for conditions so atrocious they sparked hunger strikes among asylum seekers, instances of sexual assault committed by ICE facility employees, and substandard medical care so bad that it killed people.”

That has more recently included children: Yazmin Juárez told the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties last year that ICE officials consistently failed to provide proper medical treatment for her toddler Mariee after she became sick while in custody at a migrant family jail in Texas in 2018. Juárez, who has since filed a multimillion-dollat wrongful death claim against the government, said she testified “because I don’t want another little angel to suffer like my Mariee. I don’t want other mothers and fathers to lose their children. It can’t be that hard in this great country to make sure that the little children you lock up don’t die from abuse and neglect.”

Officials should have been scrambling to prevent another senseless death, yet they’ve delayed progress on a detailed migrant health screening plan, have ignored a CDC recommendation to give detained kids and families flu shots, and as the ACLU pointed out, lowered standards to even allow detention facility officers to hog-tie people in their custody. ICE’s own track record leading up until this very day should make it clear enough that documents need to be preserved as a matter of accountability and public record, not thrown into the shredder. The groups, which include the American Immigration Council, the National Immigrant Justice Center, and the National Immigration Law Center, hope the FOIA requests can save these documents.

“The Archives suggests several times throughout their December 2019 response to concerns regarding the record destruction, that individuals interested in obtaining the records slated to be destroyed file a FOIA request for the records,” the American Immigration Council said. “If records are the subject of a FOIA request, they can’t be destroyed. The American Civil Liberties Union, National Immigrant Justice Center and the National Immigration Law Center have also filed requests for the same records.”

“The ICE detention system needs further transparency, not even more cover as it commits human rights violations with impunity,” the ACLU said. “Our FOIA request is intended to ensure that records critical to this oversight and accountability do not disappear at ICE's convenience. But ultimately, we hope that Congress is watching—because it will take lawmakers' intervention to fully protect ICE detention records in a systematic, lasting manner from an agency bent on brutalizing people in its custody and then getting away with it.”

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