WASHINGTON, D.C., on International Day of the Disappeared –– In violation of international law, the United States is engaged in a pattern and practice of regularly disappearing immigrants in its federal immigration detention system, according to a startling report published today [link final report] by Freedom for Immigrants (FFI).

GLADES COUNTY, Fla. – Today, seven immigrant women held at a remote immigration detention center in Florida filed a complaint with federal officials, shedding light on an appalling pattern of abuses including sexual abuse by guards and a psychiatrist amounting to violations of the Prison Rape Elimination Acts (PREA), exposure to a highly toxic chemical spray, life-threatening medical neglect, violations of COVID-19 safety protocols, and racist and degrading treatment.

TRENTON, N.J. – New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy today signed into law legislation that prohibits the state from entering into or renewing local and private contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), marking a momentous victory in the movement to end the detention of immigrants.

Eight members of Congress join communities and advocates’ call to shut down immigration detention center in Florida with troubling pattern of abuse

WASHINGTON, D.C. – A group of eight members of Congress led by Representative Debbie Wasserman Shultz today delivered a letter to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, calling for the Department to immediately terminate its detention contract with Glades County and close the Glades County Detention Center (GCDC) in Moore Haven, Florida.

Groups call for civil rights investigation, termination of federal ICE contract, and releases amid human rights abuses at New Jersey immigrant detention center

NEWARK, N.J. – 15 immigrants in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody today lodged a multi-individual complaint with the Department for Homeland Security (DHS) Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL), calling for an investigation into ongoing abuses including medical neglect, violent retaliation, COVID-19 negligence, religious discrimination, sexual assault and overall intolerable conditions at the Bergen County Jail (BCJ) in Bergen County, New Jersey.

In new study, hundreds of immigrants reveal how electronic ankle shackling is experienced as another form of detention

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The federal government’s use of electronic ankle “monitoring,” or shackling, subjects immigrants to many of the same harms as incarceration and is experienced as another form of detention, according to a new report from Freedom for Immigrants, Immigrant Defense Project and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.

The newly released report, “Immigration Cyber Prisons: Ending the Use of Electronic Ankle Shackles,” leverages surveys of approximately 150 immigrants subject to shackling, data from immigration legal service providers related to nearly 1,000 cases, and qualitative interviews with immigrants subject to shackling. The result is the first empirical study to document the nature and scale of the harms, racial disparities and lack of efficacy of ICE’s massive electronic shackling program.

OAKLAND, Calif. – Freedom for Immigrants (FFI), a national organization working to abolish the immigration detention system, settled its lawsuit against the federal government last week, winning a guarantee of continued use of its National Immigration Detention Hotline for at least a five-year period.

Under the settlement, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agreed to provide uninterrupted access to FFI’s National Immigration Detention Hotline for people in the immigration detention system across more than 150 detention centers and jails across the country.

Freedom for Immigrants filed a lawsuit against ICE in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California in 2019 in response to the agency shutting down its hotline in a Florida detention facility after the hotline gained public attention for being featured on several episodes of “Orange is the New Black.”