Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing entitled "Building an Immigration System Worthy of American Values," where I will testify. The hearing will address how our immigration system currently fails to live up to our Constitution because it does not ensure the due process right to a fair day in court before locking someone away for months in an immigration prison or permanently banishing them from our country. Furthermore, although immigration law is formally termed as "civil," this is legal fiction; in reality, it has the hallmark harshness of the criminal justice system. The outcomes of this system are often devastating, not only for the immigrants themselves, but also for their families.
Consider the case of Melida Ruiz, a 52-year old grandmother who was imprisoned for seven months in New Jersey. Melida is a longtime green card holder with three U.S. citizen children and two U.S. citizen grandchildren. Immigration officers came to her home and arrested her in the spring of 2011. Under draconian "mandatory custody" provisions enacted in 1996, Melida could not be released from immigration prison because she had a nine-year-old minor drug possession offense. Although she had not been sentenced to any jail time for that offense, and although it was her only conviction during the thirty years she had lived in the United States, the federal government did not permit her simply to ask a judge for release on bond because of that old conviction. Melida obviously posed no danger to anyone and was not a flight risk.
Melida is but one of the many immigrants who are incarcerated while their cases remain pending in immigration courts. If we are to have an immigration system that's truly worthy of America's values, four critical reforms are in order, which I will be discussing at today's hearing:
- Legal representation for people who can't adequately represent themselves: Currently, immigrants never have the right to an appointed attorney in deportation proceedings - no matter how complex their case, how serious the consequences of deportation, or how obviously unable they are to represent themselves. Every day, immigrants with serious mental disabilities who can't even understand the charges against them face deportation without the assistance of a lawyer. Even children suffer this fate--going before immigration judges with no attorney while trained DHS prosecutors argue for their deportation. A fair immigration system would give judges the power to appoint attorneys in cases like these, rather than allowing 84% of prisoners in immigration jails to go unrepresented.