For the second year in a row, organizations are uniting to free hundreds of people from dangerous and inhumane immigration detention conditions. Immigrant rights groups, in coordination with the National Bail Fund Network and Detention Watch Network, have begun posting $3 million in bond to free hundreds from over 20 immigration prisons across the United States, advocates said in a statement received by Daily Kos.
The coalition’s “Fall Freedom Day” this year far exceeds its historic action last year, when it secured the freedom of 200 people after posting over $2 million in bond. One year later, what the network calls the “largest collective act of freedom” yet has never been more urgent: fiscal year 2020 marked Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) deadliest year since 2005. “Today’s action,” Detention Watch Network advocacy manager Setareh Ghandehari said in the statement, “underscores the urgent need to free all people from immigration detention.”
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According to the network, “[u]nder the Trump administration, the average amount for the ransom of immigration bond has increased.” While average bond is $10,000 (an exorbitant amount of money), groups under a partnership of National Bail Fund Network, Detention Watch Network, Minnesota Freedom Fund, and Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights expect to see bonds going as high as $80,000 (an absolutely astronomical amount of money).
Unable to pay what the network call in effect “ransom,” detained immigrants have been left to languish in conditions only worsened by the novel coronavirus pandemic.
“We have seen in the detention centers in our region that the few people that are eligible for bond are prevented from accessing this resource, instead put into a medical quarantine, unable to leave because of exposure to a deadly disease, an exposure they have not consented to, but must deal with while they languish in prison,” Fronterizo Fianza Fund’s Nina Ebner said. “Covid-19 exposes a truth we already know, that detention and prisons only shorten peoples' lives.”
“The Trump administration’s current policies have expelled more than 150,000 people at the southern border since March while simultaneously implementing ICE raids in communities across the country,” the network said in the statement. “Individuals subjected to detention have been put in extreme danger as ICE detention jails are COVID-19 hotspots—21 people died in immigration detention centers in FY 2020 alone.”
Not only has ICE flat-out refused to release larger numbers of detained people amid the pandemic even though it has every power to do so today, it’s been forced by the courts to do the bare minimum to protect immigrants in its custody, like distributing soap and masks. But then in other instances, the out-of-control agency has violated those court orders. Immigrants are not safe under ICE’s watch, period.
“At a time when the Trump administration has made the destruction of immigrant communities a top political priority by focusing on expanding the web of policing, detention, and deportations across the country, communities are fighting back,” National Bail Fund Network immigration bond fund organizer Ana Maria Rivera-Forastieri said.
The network said the effort is expected to free immigrants from over 25 nations, including many Black immigrants who face added abuses while in immigration detention. Earlier this month, a civil rights complaint alleged federal immigration agents and private prison officers tortured a number of Cameroonian men to coerce them into signing their own deportation orders, including leaving one with several broken fingers. While ICE’s attempt to then deport two of those men failed, it deported 100 other Black asylum-seekers anyway.
“We are paying millions in bond ransom as an act of radical defiance against a system that is intent on curtailing any possible path to freedom,” Rivera-Forastieri continued, “as we commit to ending all forms of incarceration and surveillance.”