Held in Purgatory
Federal detention is shockingly punitive to women immigrants

By BETH SCHWARTZAPFEL

THE PAIN AND NUMBNESS ON Catherine F.’s left side was so bad that each morning she asked someone to step on her. “You had somebody step on you?” I asked. “Yeah, to get the sensation back so I can get up walking. I have to pinch myself, or have someone step on me.”

For nine months in 2007 and 2008, Catherine was among the 3,000 women held in detention on any given
day by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a division of the Department of Homeland Security. ICE detains and deports those who break U.S. immigration law, including those like Catherine who were in the country legally but convicted of certain crimes.

Immigration detention is meant to be administrative, not punitive: Its purpose is to ensure that people do not flee while their cases wind through immigration courts. Yet some two-thirds of detainees are held alongside inmates in state and local
prisons and jails (the rest in facilities run by ICE or private contractors). Recent reports by Human Rights Watch, the University of Arizona and Amnesty International are shocking: Women in detention are afraid to leave their cells for meals because they
are bullied by other inmates; they’re separated from their children, many of whom are U.S. citizens; and they have extremely little access to emergency contraception or abortion, although they may have been sexually assaulted during a border crossing. “We met women who had to beg, plead…just to get enough sanitary pads not to bleed through their clothes,” wrote Human Rights Watch in their report “Detained and Dismissed.” “One woman…sat on a toilet for hours when the facility would not give her the pads she needed.”

Catherine, who moved to the U.S. from her native Haiti as a teenager to study accounting and had been here almost 25 years, landed in detention after she fudged her best friend’s tax return to make her appear eligible for a mortgage. She was serving a California state prison sentence for fraud when the pain in her side prompted her to get an X-ray, where doctors found a mass. Before she could receive further evaluation, ICE transferred her to immigration detention. Every single day there, she submitted a request to get the follow-up care that had been recommended The doctors instead told her to drink lots of water. (ICE was unable to respond to Catherine’s allegations by press time.)

Fortunately, the Obama administration is offering a fresh perspective on detention. Dora Schriro, a special advisor on ICE and detention and removal, says that within the next year ICE plans to move thousands of detainees to community facilities that
are less like prison and more like halfway houses. They are also hiring a health-care expert to design a coherent care strategy.
That hire will come too late for Catherine. Seven months after she arrived in detention, ICE finally sent her to a specialist. He diagnosed a spinal problem and recommended surgery or physical therapy. She got neither. So she stopped fighting deportation
and allowed ICE to deport her to Port-au-Prince, leaving her two young U.S.-citizen sons behind with their aunt. “How could I be patient?” she asked. “I’m not getting the medical care. …I don’t want to die here.”

You can read the rest of this story in the Summer 2009 issue of Ms. Pick up a copy on newsstands, or have it sent to your door by joining the Ms. Community.