Sunita Patel

New America Media, Commentary, Michele Deitch and Sunita Patel, Posted: Jun 14, 2007

Editor’s Note: When the U.S. government denied a United Nations expert access to two immigrant detention lock-ups it sent a worrying message about secrecy and lack of transparency in a system already being condemned as woefully inadequate. Michele Deitch teaches at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin and is an expert on independent oversight of prisons and jails. Sunita Patel, a Soros Justice Fellow with the New York Legal Aid Society, is a human rights attorney focusing on immigrant detention issues. She is a member of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition working to reform the U.S. immigration detention system. IMMIGRATION MATTERS regularly features the views of the nation's leading immigrant rights advocates.

Lost in the news about the immigration reform package was an incident with diplomatic implications. Recently the U.S. government shamefully denied a United Nations expert access to two immigrant detention lock-ups during the expert’s three-week fact-finding mission to the United States.

Jorge Bustamante, U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, was invited by the U.S. State Department to observe and investigate immigrant detention in the United States. Yet on April 30, he was denied access to the T. Don Hutto detention facility, a private Texas prison that holds entire families, even small children, behind bars. Then, on May 14, the official was refused access to the Monmouth County jail in New Jersey, which houses almost 150 immigrant men and women pursuant to a contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a division of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).