Detained man lost in shuffle; illegal immigrant's family left worried (San Bernadino County Sun)

Detained man lost in shuffle; illegal immigrant's family left worried

James Rufus Koren, Staff Writer
Posted: 08/01/2010 07:02:54 AM PDT

When Freddy, an illegal immigrant and day laborer, was arrested by immigration officers in San Bernardino, it took his family nearly a week to find out where he'd been taken.

Socorro Qui ones of Central City Lutheran Mission in San Bernardino said several organizations were looking for Freddy before they learned he was in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in New Mexico.

"I feel very bad because we depend on his work," said Freddy's wife, Rubi, through a translator. Their last names are being withheld because Rubi, also an illegal immigrant, fears reprisal from immigration officials. "I don't know what to do with my little children."

Rubi said it's hard to have Freddy behind bars, but it was harder not to know where he was.

On July 23, a few days after Freddy's arrest, ICE officials - who have said they want the agency to be more transparent and humane - launched a new online system to let families track the location of loved ones who have been detained. ICE spokeswoman Gillian Brigham says detainees should be in the system within 20 minutes of being booked, but that wasn't the case for Freddy, and immigration advocates say it's not the case for most ICE detainees.

Rubi said Freddy was arrested on the morning of July 21. That afternoon, she received a call from him, saying he was at an ICE office in San Bernardino.

The following day, Rubi said she went to see him and to drop off clothes for him, but ICE officials told her Freddy was not there.

"They didn't give me any information about him," Rubi said. "They denied he was there."

The following Monday, she got another call from Freddy, but it was only one minute long. It wasn't until the following day, when Rubi received a call from the wife of a man who was detained with Freddy, that Rubi learned her husband's location: an ICE detention facility in Charparral, N.M., about 30 miles northeast of El Paso, Texas.

"Immigration doesn't give you any information," Rubi said. "The girls are the ones who are suffering. They ask me every day for him." She said both daughters are U.S. citizens.

Emilio Amaya, who commonly helps San Bernardino- area residents find loved ones who have been detained by ICE, said this case is not unique.

Before ICE's online detainee locator system, he said it could take as long as three weeks to find information about a detained immigrant. The locator, he said, has cut down time, but it's still not perfect.

"It takes two to three days to get any information on the locator," said Amaya, executive director of the San Bernardino Community Service Center. "In the meantime, they're pretty much in limbo. ... They don't exist. You call and they have not been processed and you have no access to them."

Brigham said that shouldn't be the case. The new system, she said, should list a detainee's information about 20 minutes after the detainee is processed and within eight hours after a detainee has been transferred. She added, though, that the system is new and that ICE employees have just started using it.

"As with any new system that's just been implemented, it may take a while to get the kinks out," she said.

Two or three days down from two or three weeks is a big improvement, Amaya said, but it still means detainees are denied access to legal help for several days.

"For a time, three to seven days, neither family members nor attorneys have access to people who are detained," Amaya said. "By the time they have access to an attorney, they could have already signed a voluntary removal or have given information that is self-incriminating."

And in cases like Freddy's, in which detainees are transferred out of state, it's even more difficult for detainees to get legal help. He said some detainees from San Bernardino have been transferred to ICE facilities in Florida.

Brigham said ICE will soon be announcing a new detainee transfer policy.

"If a detainee has family members in a certain area and has access to counsel in a certain area, we acknowledge it would be better for them to be detained in an area close to them," Brigham said. "We're going to be more thoughtful and more deliberate about where we're going to house a particular detainee."