LITTLE ROCK — Nearly 80 people came out Sunday afternoon to criticize federal immigration detention policy and demand the shutdown of some facilities, saying conditions are deplorable and due process is lacking.
The group lit candles and sang songs on the front steps of St. Edward Catholic Church in downtown Little Rock to stand in solidarity in opposition to what one organizer, Sara Mullally, described as a “cruel” practice of limitless incarceration of immigrants that they say often subjects detainees to inhumane working conditions.
“These individuals [detained by federal immigration officials] are neighbors, business owners, soccer coaches, workers, fathers, mothers and children,” Mullally said. “This immigrant detention system is so plagued with problems ... it’s no good.”
The group’s complaints were written in a letter to the Obama administration sent Nov. 28 by the Detention Watch Network, a coalition of civil- and human-rights organizations, demanding that President Barack Obama shut down 10 detention facilities that the group claims are the worst of a system that detains roughly 400,000 aliens a year.
None of those facilities are in Arkansas, but Mullally said that doesn’t diminish the need to draw attention to a system that she says has no accountability and robs individuals of basic human and legal rights.
“You don’t want to create a second class of citizens in society that the Constitution doesn’t apply to and that’s exactly what’s happening here,” Mullally said. “[These individuals] get preyed upon. They don’t have a relationship with authority like police and schoolteachers. They will live in the shadows of society and they’ll pass that on to their children.”
One woman present, Wende D’Andrea, said she has been “shocked” by the way immigrants are treated after her struggles to see her boyfriend, Salman Alkhaldi, released from federal custody.
Alkhaldi, who was in Little Rock on a student visa, was arrested on charges of aggravated assault, detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and sent to a center in Louisiana.
He has been transferred to three different centers without announcement or cause, D’Andrea said, each transfer causing more and more delays in immigration hearings, which leave him to languish in facilities that she said are inhumane.
“If you say you’re sick, they’ll tell you ‘that’s your problem,’” D’Andrea said. “We don’t let [immigrants] have the same rights as our citizens, but we do want their money. He paid tuition, attended classes, he shopped, he was a participant in society. He will be there for years, longer than a citizen [charged with the same crime].”
No Immigration and Customs Enforcement representative was available for comment on Sunday.
A similar rally is scheduled for Dec. 21 in Springdale with the Northwest Arkansas Worker Justice Center.
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 12/10/2012