Washington, DC - The National Center for Transgender Equality applauds the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) directive issued Sept. 12, which has the potential to meaningfully improve federal oversight of use of solitary confinement in immigration detention.
This development is especially important for transgender detainees and other vulnerable individuals who are regularly subjected to this harsh treatment for their own supposed protection. The new ICE directive is a response to years of advocacy by immigrant, human rights, and LGBT advocates, and indicates a serious effort to hold ICE contract facilities accountable.
"This is a very important step," said Harper Jean Tobin, Director of Policy. "We hope that ICE will move quickly and decisively to implement this directive, and to publish strong, binding regulations under the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) to ensure that its contract facilities comply with stringent limits on this potentially dangerous form of confinement."
The new ICE directive requires all detention facilities that contract with ICE to report when they are using solitary confinement, and why, within certain time periods. The directive makes clear that solitary confinement must only be used as a last resort, and when all other alternatives have been considered, including release from detention when permitted by law. The directive prohibits placing individuals in solitary confinement solely because of personal characteristics such as being LGBT and creates special reporting and review requirements for vulnerable populations including LGBT people and victims of sexual abuse.
"We remain concerned that the directive does not eliminate the use of solitary confinement for extended periods and does not legally bind ICE's contract facilities themselves," said Tobin. "We are also concerned that the reporting period it establishes exceeds the 15 days which the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture has determined can have serious and irreversible effects on an individual's health."
"Despite these concerns, this directive is a clear step in the right direction and sets a good example for prisons systems throughout the country to follow," said Tobin. On Thursday a two-month California hunger strike that had involved tens of thousands of prisons was ended when state legislators announced they would hold public hearings on California's use of solitary confinement. Advocates and legislators across the country are pushing to curtail or end solitary confinement.
Solitary confinement usually involves being held in a small cell for 23 hours a day, with virtually no contact with other human beings. Medical experts have long recognized that this kind of treatment can have dire, lasting consequences for physical and mental health, and under international law it can constitute torture. As both prison systems and the civil immigration detention system have vastly expanded in recent decades, solitary confinement became increasingly common. The federal government estimates that the number of adults in solitary confinement grew from nearly 60,000 in 1995 to well over 80,000 in 2005. Those figures don't even include minors or those held in civil immigration detention. A 2012 report found that solitary for immigrants "is often arbitrarily applied, significantly overused, harmful to detainees' health, and inadequately monitored," and that many people abandon their claims for legal residence just to end their time in "the hole." Recently, ICE's own survey found that 300 immigrant detainees are held in solitary confinement on any given day.
LGBT people, and especially transgender people, are often placed in automatic and indefinite solitary confinement, based on the justification that it is the only way to keep them safe. This automatic and often prolonged use of solitary confinement for LGBT detainees fails to actually prevent abuse, ignores more humane alternatives, and often inflicts grave harm.
