Unmarked detention centers, no American flag, no oversight, no visitations or public records of inmates whereabouts, no judicial appeal process or access to lawyers, no climate control, inadequate plumbing...just another day for people who look mexican in the Triangle.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100104/stevens/single

140 Centrewest Court, Suite 100, Cary NC 27513
330 S. Salisbury Street, Raleigh, NC 27602
300 Fayetteville Street Mall, Suite 121, Raleigh NC 27601

"If you don't have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but you think he's illegal, we can make him disappear." - James Pendergraph, ICE director and former NC sheriff.

12/27/2009 7:02:24 PM

That's a risk you take imho if you come here illegally and start causing trouble. If you are concerned about "disappearing" then go back to [insert country here] and arrange to come over legally.

I think it is economically unfeasible to remove illegals or to erect some 40 ft wall at the border of Mexico. Otherwise I think you are here at your own risk if you want to sneak in to get $$$$.

12/27/2009 7:15:37 PM

ibt "so much for transparency" statement

Quote :

"That's a risk you take imho if you come here illegally and start causing trouble."

To be fair, you might want the read the article and see how they used this system to ferry around a US citizen for a couple of months. A US citizen who speaks no Spanish.

the article might be biased or leaving stuff out, but it certainly paints a nasty picture of the operation, one that crosses the "came here illegally" line by several miles.

12/27/2009 7:18:11 PM

Yeah my concern is less with illegal immigration than the idea that this system is used to skirt due process and hide detainees(sometimes legit american citizens) from the protections that the prison/legal system provides(such as they are). If you can't see how this practice is ripe for abuse, then you're simply not imaginative.

We condemn the use of secret police, black prisons and shady backroom justice elsewhere, but tolerate it in our own neighborhood.

12/27/2009 9:17:01 PM

These locations were only discovered due to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&source=hp&ie=UTF8&q=140+Centrewest+Court,+Suite+100,+Cary+NC+27513&fb=1&gl=us&hnear=&cid=0,0,4590295741094587952&ei=6Rc4S5rPA5LSlAfTt_WcBw&ved=0CAgQnwIwAA&hq=140+Centrewest+Court,+Suite+100,+Cary+NC+27513&z=16&layer=c&cbll=35.819416,-78.804815&panoid=EiQC5-kQfmSvuCvgG6QwKg&cbp=12,284.76,,0,5

The salisbury street one is of course the old office building beside the courthouse that is used as a jail. The cary office above is more concerning. Note the blacked out windows.

Quote :

"We're local and knew some about the Cary/Raleigh-area office described here. A few years ago, we sought a permit to hand-deliver a letter there and speak to the media about our efforts to communicate with ICE. The permit request for the sidewalk in the industrial park was denied. Furthermore, we were told by Cary Police that we would all be arrested for trespassing if we attempted to hand-deliver any materials or assemble outside their office. I was not aware before today, though, that detainees are held at this location."

Quote :

"...the next thing I know, I'm in a white minivan and they drive me all the way Raleigh. Then after that they fly me all the way to the ACC and I stayed there for a month. They were calling me Jose Thomas. They were trying to say that's my real name. I told them my name is Mark Daniel Lyttle, I was born in North Carolina." Mark started speaking rapidly, saying a phrase that he repeated at several points, and I felt the urgency that, shockingly, was belittled and ignored in his encounters with the people sending him away, "My mother's Jeanne Lyttle, here's my social security number, my brother's in the army, please call someone!" He told this to several ICE agents. He told this to William Cassidy, the immigration judge who ordered him removed on December 9, 2008. Mark told this to the U.S. border patrol in Texas after he was dumped in Mexico. "No one checked. No one believed me." Mark was dropped off somewhere near the Texas border with between five to ten pesos, Jeanne said. The only piece of identification he had was a deportation order for Jose Thomas. Mark told them his full name, that his mother was Jeanne Lyttle, that he was born in North Carolina, and his brother was in the army. He asked them to call his mother, his brother, to check his social security number. The border patrol guard looked at his paper and said he "was illegal." Mark, defeated, headed south and was wandering around Mexico until he found some missionaries who gave him shelter and fed him after he hadn't eaten for two weeks. At some point, two months after being kidnapped by ICE, tried in a fake court, rendered stateless and dropped off in foreign country where he did not know a single person and could not speak the language, Mark crossed paths with the Mexican police, who confiscated his deportation order for Jose Thomas and put him on a bus to Honduras. When Mark couldn't produce a passport for the border guards in Honduras, they "drove me three hours to San Pedro and left me in a jail with robbers and killers." Jeanne added, "A woman jailer named Sonia would spit at him and stick her tongue out. She hit the doors while he was sleeping so he couldn't sleep, and told two inmates to take him out so they could shoot him. One of them was bilingual and told Mark what was happening and he wouldn't do it." After a month and two days, the Honduran immigration officials wanted to ship him to Guatemala, but for some reason the van stopped in Nicaragua, and then Mark was dropped off in Guatemala. The Guatemalan police pointed him the direction of the U.S. embassy. Once they spoke with his brother and were convinced he was a U.S. citizen, the embassy staff bought him a hamburger at the McDonald's across the street. "

[Edited on December 27, 2009 at 9:58 PM. Reason : .]

12/27/2009 9:35:49 PM

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/local/story/917007.html

12/27/2009 10:06:15 PM

Wow. That's almost unbelievable. I could see that type of shit in the USSR or Nazi Germany.

I thought we were supposed to better than this...

12/27/2009 10:18:48 PM

Quote :

"Wow. That's almost unbelievable. I thought we were supposed to better than this..."

12/27/2009 11:05:19 PM

Awesome, one of these is about a mile from my house. I'm going to go say Hi.

12/27/2009 11:37:20 PM

Quote :

"Lyttle says he claimed to be Mexican at the first interview because he thought it was pointless to argue with the agent, who was convinced that he was an illegal immigrant. His birth father was Puerto Rican, and Lyttle says he is often mistaken for Mexican. He says he figured he would take a free trip to Mexico."

still a horrible thing but he did get a free trip to Mexico.

12/27/2009 11:46:42 PM

^^ Ask for a tour of the facilities.

12/28/2009 12:02:32 AM

This is the first issue that has caused me to write my representatives in Congress in a long time.

I managed to restrain myself from demanding that we hang James Pendergraph by the neck until he is dead.

12/28/2009 1:55:19 AM

I guess this shouldn't be too surprising. We treat other groups of non-citizens in a similar manner when convenient.

Quote :

"That's a risk you take imho if you come here illegally and start causing trouble."

Abuse by the government is a risk you take when doing something illegal. Is that what you really believe?

12/28/2009 8:11:49 AM

I don't mean to bang a repetitious drum or just score rhetorical points here, but this is why the Constitution matters. It might be quaint and obstructionist when it opposes your political goals but we ignore it at our own peril.


I'm the absolute last to play the race card, but I think the Federal policy towards illegal Hispanic immigrants is about the closest thing to institutionalized racism that you're going to find today. ICE is simply an organization which exists to catch enough illegal immigrants to justify it's continued existence but not enough to actually disrupt the flow of cheap labor to the tax cows in rural districts.

I am comfortable with the fact that non-citizen immigrants have no right to be in the United States and that they are here at our convenience. Simply stated, that is one of the benefits of being a United States Citizen that isn't extended to immigrants who are, in fact, guests. But the right of due process (albeit abbreviated for illegal immigrants who are not being incarcerated, fined, or executed, but only deported) is universal.


This will probably be the first time I call David Price on an issue he might pretend to care about.

12/28/2009 9:30:33 AM

Quote :

"JCASHFAN: ICE is simply an organization which exists to catch enough illegal immigrants to justify it's continued existence but not enough to actually disrupt the flow of cheap labor to the tax cows in rural districts."

Seriously.

Their approach has clearly failed...why do we even have them?

I'd like to know the dynamic that keeps them afloat.

12/28/2009 10:03:11 AM

Quote :

"I'd like to know the dynamic that keeps them afloat."

DEY TOOK UR JERBS!!!!!

12/28/2009 10:04:47 AM

Quote :

"I'd like to know the dynamic that keeps them afloat."

The same dynamic that keeps almost every other Federal organization afloat. 1) They only account for a "small" part of the budget. 2) For most Americans, ICE only affects "other people" 3) SEIU.


Every Federal program, once created, will become the pet of someone just powerful enough to keep it from being killed. Unless it pisses off a big enough majority in enough Congressional districts to start threatening a majority of Congressmen with electoral defeat, nothing is going to happen.


This issue will probably register with the Democratic Party because they're still courting the Hispanic electorate. The GOP can't do anything because it's most rabid base is all about some secret prisons for "terrorists" and will revolt if there is any appearance of being soft on immigration.

If Mexican immigrants were as in the bag for the DP as the black vote is, you probably wouldn't see anything beyond calls for investigation and a few speeches.

[Edited on December 28, 2009 at 10:23 AM. Reason : seriously, the GOP is long-term fucked]

12/28/2009 10:17:39 AM

Quote :

"Wow. That's almost unbelievable. I could see that type of shit in the USSR or Nazi Germany. I thought we were supposed to better than this..."

This is completely believable. Habeas corpus stopped meaning something about 8 years ago.

Our reputation internationally is basically the same as Iran's reputation here -- secret detention, torture, rendition, pervasive domestic spying, jailing journalists, unjust, racist. The American brand really isn't what it used to be.


[Edited on December 28, 2009 at 2:21 PM. Reason : .]

12/28/2009 2:16:14 PM

This is completely believable. Habeas corpus stopped meaning something about 8150 years ago.

12/28/2009 2:51:52 PM

USA #1
Freedums and demoncranacies for all!

12/28/2009 3:15:48 PM

I am totally going to go drive by that building in Cary sometime this week while I am in town.

12/28/2009 3:22:28 PM

I'm trying to get up the nerve to go there and ask for a tour for my cousin's Boy Scout troop like we did of the local law enforcement office when I was a kid. (It was a great experience, very professional cops, we talked about all sorts of issues with them. The military did the same thing during national jamborees...probably their greatest recruiting tool.)

Anyone have a camera that could be hidden on me?

12/28/2009 11:24:02 PM

If you keep voting for people who are in love with gov't..and want to ever expand it's power and control...you're gonna end up with this kind of stuff.

12/29/2009 12:52:59 AM

But, but, but...we want them to abuse government power in good ways, like free stuff for everybody.

12/29/2009 9:23:45 AM

Everyone agreeing on this means that it won't get much attention. Until hispanics dominate us all at the polls. Then we'll have to worry about state-mandated siestas and sombreros

12/30/2009 12:58:02 AM

Wait so the article is mainly complaining that ICE has unmarked field offices? I only skimmed the article but that doesn't seem like a big deal. A lot of these agencies do undercover and sensitive operations that demand a little privacy. Ever been to an ALE office? The one in Wake Co is in the back of an office park w/ the letters blacked out; you can only see it when you get close.

Again, I didn't read the article so if I totally missed the point - flame on.

12/30/2009 1:58:16 AM

oh, you totally missed the point. They have unmarked offices, yes. But they also have no real way to document who is where, when they were moved, where they were moved, etc. And, according to the article, it is used to make it hard to track people who enter the system.

12/30/2009 8:37:58 PM

The unmarked offices themselves are something of an issue as well. For interested parties trying to sort matters out, the only contact info listed on their website takes you to Atlanta. Maybe they'd connect you to someone in Raleigh, maybe not. This type of obfuscation is the same thing a company like Paypal does to keep customers from contacting a real person to discuss real issues.

We may not always agree with city hall or the county mounties, but at least there's a place we can go to file a complaint or request information(I'll ignore for a moment the threatening techniques cops use to discourage complaints) and everything is a matter of public record. Open communication is expected of any business and imperative to the function of democracy.

While discretion may be necessary to undercover operations, undercover cops seem to operate just fine with the existence of of a public police station. Undercover arrest and imprisonment, however, is absolutely abhorrent to the success of a just society.

[Edited on December 30, 2009 at 10:54 PM. Reason : .]

12/30/2009 10:53:26 PM

The other day I was talking to a friend about this. My friend had interned with the DA's office in Raleigh over the summer, and became familiar with a number of cases. And he said that whenever the accused was an immigrant, they had to move fast and work hard to keep ICE from grabbing them, because then they'd disappear.

For a split second I was impressed with the DA's humanitarian bent, until my friend pointed out that a lot of these people were very serious offenders who ought to do long prison terms, but who instead would be deported, usually dumped in an unsecured camp for deportees just over the border.

So if you don't care about the abhorrent secret-police aspect to this whole thing, maybe you care about the part where serious, violent criminals are getting pulled from the justice system and set free right across our not-terribly-secure border.

1/3/2010 1:45:41 PM

Quote :

"who confiscated his deportation order for Jose Thomas"

I think the first thing I would do if I had a fake document like that is...drop it?

1/3/2010 3:14:17 PM

Front page of today's N&O:

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/nation_world/story/277034.html

Quote :

"Silence has long shrouded the men and women who die in the nation's immigration jails. For years, they went uncounted and unnamed in the public record. Even in 2008, when The New York Times obtained and published a federal government list of such deaths, few facts were available about who these people were and how they died. But behind the scenes, it is now clear, the deaths had already generated thousands of pages of government documents, including scathing investigative reports that were kept under wraps, and a trail of confidential memos and BlackBerry messages that show officials working to stymie outside inquiry. The documents, obtained over recent months by The Times and the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act, concern most of the 107 deaths in detention counted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement since October 2003, after the agency was created within the Department of Homeland Security. The Obama administration has vowed to overhaul immigration detention, a haphazard network of privately run jails, federal centers and county cells where the government holds noncitizens while it tries to deport them. But as the administration moves to increase oversight within the agency, the documents show how officials - some still in key positions - used their role as overseers to cover up evidence of mistreatment, deflect scrutiny by the news media or prepare exculpatory public statements after gathering facts that pointed to substandard care or abuse. [...] In another case that year, investigators from the agency's Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that unbearable, untreated pain had been a significant factor in the suicide of a 22-year-old detainee at the Bergen County jail in New Jersey, and that the medical unit was so poorly run that other detainees were at risk. The investigation found that jail medical personnel had falsified a medication log to show that the detainee, a Salvadoran named Nery Romero, had been given Motrin. The fake entry was easy to detect: When the drug was supposedly administered, Romero was already dead. Yet those findings were never disclosed to the public or to Romero's relatives on Long Island, who had accused the jail of abruptly depriving him of his prescription painkiller for a broken leg. And an agency supervisor wrote that because other jails were "finicky" about accepting detainees with known medical problems like Romero's, such people would continue to be placed at the Bergen jail as "a last resort." In a recent interview, Benjamin Feldman, a spokesman for the jail, which housed 1,503 immigration detainees last year, would not say whether any changes had been made since the death."

Quote :

"As one man lay dying of head injuries suffered in a New Jersey immigration jail in 2007, for example, a spokesman for the federal agency told The Times that he could learn nothing about the case from government authorities. In fact, the records show, the spokesman had alerted those officials to the reporter's inquiry, and they conferred at length about sending the man back to Africa to avoid embarrassing publicity. [...] In February 2007, in the case of the dying African man, the immigration agency's spokesman for the Northeast, Michael Gilhooly, rebuffed the Times' questions about the detainee, who had suffered a skull fracture at the privately run Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey. Gilhooly said that without a full name and alien registration number for the man, he could not check on the case. But, records show, he had already filed a report warning top managers at the federal agency about the reporter's interest and sharing information about the injured man, a Guinean tailor named Boubacar Bah. Bah, 52, had been left in an isolation cell without treatment for more than 13 hours before an ambulance was called. While he lay in the hospital in a coma after emergency brain surgery, 10 agency managers in Washington and Newark conferred by telephone and e-mail about how to avoid the cost of his care and the likelihood of "increased scrutiny and/or media exposure," according to a memo summarizing the discussion. Eventually, faced with paying $10,000 a month for nursing home care, officials settled on "humanitarian release" to cousins in New York who had protested that they had no way to care for him. But days before the planned release, Bah died. Among the participants in the conferences was Nina Dozoretz, a longtime manager in the agency's Division of Immigration Health Services who had won an award for cutting detainee health care costs. Later, she was vice president of the Nakamoto Group, a company hired by the Bush administration to monitor detention. The Obama administration recently rehired her to lead its overhaul of detainee health care. Asked about the conference call on Bah, Dozoretz said: "How many years ago was that? I don't recall all the specifics if indeed there was a call." She added, "I advise you to contact our public affairs office." Gilhooly, the spokesman who had said he had no information on the case, would not comment. On the day after Bah's death in May 2007, Scott Weber, director of the Newark field office of the immigration enforcement agency, recommended in a memo that the agency take the unusual step of paying to send the body to Guinea for burial to prevent his widow from showing up in the United States for a funeral and drawing news coverage. Weber wrote that he believed the agency had handled Bah's case appropriately. "However," he added, "I also don't want to stir up any media interest where none is warranted." Helping to bury Bah overseas, he wrote, "will go a long way to putting this matter to rest." [...] In the agency's confidential files was a jail video showing Bah facedown in the medical unit, hands cuffed behind his back, just before medical personnel sent him to a disciplinary cell. The tape shows him crying out repeatedly in his native Fulani, "Help, they are killing me!""

Quote :

"Brian P. Hale, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in an interview that the newly disclosed records represented the past, and that the agency's new leaders were committed to transparency and greater oversight, including prompt public disclosure and investigation of every death and more attention to detainee care in a better-managed system. But the most recent documents show that the culture of secrecy has endured. And the past cover-ups underscore what some of the agency's own employees say is a central flaw in the proposed overhaul: a reliance on the agency to oversee itself. "Because ICE investigates itself, there is no transparency, and there is no reform or improvement," Chris Crane, a vice president in the union that represents employees of the agency's detention and removal operations, told a congressional subcommittee on Dec. 10."

Pretty sure that if I allowed someone to die in my care and then attempted to cover it up, I'd end up in jail.



[Edited on January 10, 2010 at 1:38 PM. Reason : ]

1/10/2010 1:33:25 PM

Nah, not if the person is black/brown/maybe an illegal immigrant.

1/10/2010 6:44:36 PM

So I'm guessing that would be a "No." on the boy scout tour.

1/10/2010 7:00:04 PM

Tell them it's predominately an Hispanic troop.

1/10/2010 9:13:55 PM

Just sent letters to Price and Hagan about this. We are very quickly turning into (or maybe already have) a nation that bases decisions primarily on fear instead of the hope we were founded on.

1/12/2010 3:04:05 PM

http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/04/02/417665/dozens-protest-at-jail-for-aliens.html


Unlike previous protests at this location, these protesters were not threatened with arrest because they were white.

4/2/2010 11:31:07 PM

many homos and reverse racists ITT

4/3/2010 12:16:11 AM

once again, if you disagree with pack_fudge, you're a homo. you'd think he'd have come up with something a bit more derogatory after trying so hard all this time.

4/3/2010 12:17:45 AM

+1 to the homo list^

4/3/2010 12:18:13 AM

and proud to be a homosexual, Bryan. what's your excuse for being a bigot?

4/3/2010 12:18:49 AM

these centers sound like better living conditions than they would experience in a Mexican prison. Immigration is a matter of administrative law, not criminal law. The detainees being processed for illegal immigration don't have to be given the same treatment that a person facing criminal prosecution does.


We still torture federal prisoners with Diesel Therapy on a regular basis, so I have a hard time feeling sympathy for illegals that are getting shuttled out of this country in less than desireable conditions.

4/3/2010 11:26:59 PM

Yeah, well at least in the case of the AMERICAN CITIZEN listed above, what's your bullshit excuse then? And how far does your theory go? Apparently you are fine with the fact that they let an African guy DIE, and seriously, how do you think he got the head injury?

With this mindset, is it okay to just shoot them in the head and then throw the bodies out back? Maybe that's a bit much, but where do you draw the line? Did you ever think that maybe we treat all detainees fairly not necessarily to protect them and because they are so deserving, but just because it reflects who we are as a people?

4/3/2010 11:43:32 PM

LOL... Just read up on "diesel therapy"... I had never heard of it.

If that's "torture" then god help us, we'll be housing inmates at 5-star hotels by the time I'm an old man.


You break the law, you go to prison. Sorry they gave you a shitty balogna sandwich and made you ride a bus. Maybe you should look into not breaking the law in the future.

4/3/2010 11:51:54 PM

"Diesel Therapy" is when they leave you in the transit sytem for a month to a year with no actual destination. They keep prisoners bound in shackles for so long that they develop open sores that get infected, yet the shackles keep getting put on. They develop circulatory problems and nervous system problems, on top of being subjected to the mental torture of being bound in place. They may stay overnight at a prison, or they may just be left on the bus or plane overnight. They don't get handed over from the federal marshalls to the board of prisons until they feel the prisoner has been taught enough of a lesson.

4/4/2010 12:04:36 AM

4/4/2010 12:13:27 AM

what, you condone this type of treatment yet you have a problem with illegals getting hauled out of the country?

4/4/2010 12:39:23 AM

I'm sure they keep someone on a bus for "years"


If you want new information to be taken seriously, try avoiding blatant exaggeration in your first telling of it

4/4/2010 8:33:22 AM

I never said someone has been left on for "years", and the time frames I mentioned are legitimate.

4/4/2010 11:26:41 AM

^ Solinari just believes that people should face the punishment for their crimes as prescribed by law, unless they are white males committing hate crimes, in which case they didn’t do anything wrong.

4/4/2010 11:30:46 AM

say what? quote plz. i think you read someone else's post and thought it was mine. if you have been convicted of breaking a hate crime law, then you should be penalized under its provisions


eleusis, do you have any proof of someone being left in "diesel therapy" for a year? If not, STFU hyperbolist.

[Edited on April 4, 2010 at 11:35 AM. Reason : s]

4/4/2010 11:34:03 AM