By Quanny Carr
For The Diamondback
About five years after being convicted of a misdemeanor theft, a woman in her late 50s was arrested.
Officers put the woman, Sara, in mandatory detention for almost a year, causing her to lose her home and job and harming her mental health.
This is one of several immigrants’ stories that were featured in a report released Aug. 4 by the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland. The report gave its readers an overview of a flawed court system, noting how many taxpayer dollars are spent annually on wrongful detentions and presenting an emotional view of what it feels like to be detained in the U.S.
Robert Koulish, a professor and the director of the undergraduate law programming at the University of Maryland, wrote the report with Sirine Shebaya, a civil rights attorney and immigrants’ rights advocate.
“Every individual in [Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s] custody gets determined whether or not they’re going to be put in jail — the detention facility — or set free,” Koulish said. “They go through the risk classification assessment. And that spits out a recommendation for whether or not they should be detained.”
This recommendation stems from a provision enacted by Congress in 1996, which required certain immigrants serve in detention based on criminal convictions. Immigrants who went through the risk classification assessment and were labeled “high risk” to the public would be put in mandatory detention without bond.
The data revealed that ICE is over-detaining immigrants, and the immigrants that aren’t given a bond hearing and labeled “high risk” do not pose any “heightened risk of flight or danger” to the public, Koulish said.
Shebaya, who used to work for the ACLU, now represents clients in Maryland going through this issue.
“Immigrants are over-incarcerated, [and] it goes under the radar,” she said. “And yet you have, on any given day, around 3,000 people who are in immigration detention with tons of money being spent on it. It’s an abusive system.”
Cases like Sara’s are very common in the data findings, where a case-by-case analysis isn’t given and the person is automatically put in detention because of a small, minor conviction, the report said.
In the report, Shebaya and Koulish proposed ways to ensure that detainees maintain their rights, such as giving them a bond hearing after six months of detention.
“We should really scrutinize how we treat immigrants and how much money we spend on detaining people who don’t need to be in jail,” Shebaya said.
Maureen Sweeney, an associate professor and director of the immigration clinic at the university’s law school, contributed to the brainstorming process of the report and suggested alternative methods for detention structure.
“You can have someone call in every month … you can have officials visit their house, you can even put them on ankle monitors, which is much, much less expensive than jailing them,” Sweeney said. “It makes absolutely no sense to spend millions and millions of dollars every year to keep people locked up.”
Koulish and Shebaya plan to continue their research and publish more reports, and the next report will be comparing Maryland and New York data, Koulish said.
“Immigrant lives matter,” Koulish said. “These are human beings, these are neighbors, these are members of our own family, [and] these are people who have lived very upstanding and successful lives in our country.”
