ATLANTA — On Friday, March 6, the ACLU of Georgia, Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Atlanta, and Project South sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement regarding inhumane detention conditions at ICE’s Atlanta Field Office. The field office has a hold room designed to detain people for no more than 12 hours, but it is being used to detain people for days or weeks at a time.
Reports from people who have been detained in the hold room and their family members paint a disturbing picture: dozens of people sleeping on the floor because there are no beds; no access to medical care, including necessary prescription medication; one shared, open toilet; insufficient food; and little or no access to communications with family members or attorneys. These conditions are in violation of ICE’s own policies and the U.S. Constitution.
The letter demands ICE stop holding people at the field office. If the agency insists on continuing to use the office for detention, advocates urge that ICE only hold people there temporarily – as intended – and that they improve the conditions now. Courts in other states have ordered ICE to immediately remedy similar conditions at other field offices.
“ICE is detaining people for days and weeks in a room meant to hold people for hours,” said Cory Isaacson, legal director, ACLU of Georgia. “The result is conditions that are inhumane and unconstitutional. This is another example of ICE placing its own agenda above its obligations to follow the law.”
“For days and weeks on end, ICE is detaining people in crowded, unsanitary conditions, without beds, sufficient food, access to medical care, showers, or the ability to communicate with family members or attorneys,” said Meredyth Yoon, litigation director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta. “This is an unacceptable and foreseeable result of detaining large numbers of people unnecessarily. ICE detention facilities are operating in open defiance of constitutional requirements and ICE’s own standards. The conditions at this facility is not just a failure of policy; it is a blatant violation of human rights that must end now.”
“This abuse of hold rooms for the sake of maximizing detention figures is the latest display in a centuries-long campaign to dehumanize and harm our immigrant communities,” said Sofía Verónica Montez, staff attorney at Project South. “Such continued escalation and disregard for established processes betrays a brazen animosity for the human and constitutional rights of our communities. Project South vociferously condemns it and calls on all advocates to join in as well.”
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