The American Immigration Council does not endorse or oppose candidates for elected office. We aim to provide an analysis of the election’s impact on the U.S. immigration system.
The Torrance County Detention Facility, located in the remote desert of New Mexico, is notorious for mistreatment of immigrants. The facility’s problems are further complicated by the fact that Torrance has operated in near secrecy. However, documents and data revealed through FOIA requests provided a glimpse into detention practices within ICE facilities.
On October 24, the American Immigration Council released a report highlighting trends in detention stays in Torrance and gaps in data that may indicate disparities in the treatment of vulnerable populations. Researchers analyzed racial and ethnic data and book-in and book-out information obtained from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests submitted by the council. The data generated covered January 1, 2021, to November 17, 2022, and the researchers used it to construct a two-year timeline for the facility.
Background to FOIA requests
In September 2021, tens of thousands of Haitian immigrants began arriving in Del Rio, Texas, seeking asylum in the United States. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) repatriated or deported thousands of these immigrants before they had a chance to apply for asylum, while ICE held the remaining hundreds in detention centers across the country. In particular, ICE sent dozens of Haitian immigrants to Torrance, where they failed annual inspections due to unsanitary conditions and severe staffing shortages. Additionally, nine cases of operational deficiencies related to school lunches and medical care were pointed out, and dozens of cases of long-term detention after orders were reported. Shortly thereafter, media and advocacy groups began reporting on the barriers Haitian immigrants faced in Torrance related to access to legal counsel and due process violations.
This lack of transparency into the treatment of vulnerable people led the Council to file a FOIA request for records regarding ICE’s treatment of people detained in Torrance. The Council sought to analyze trends in ICE placement within facilities and determine whether disparities exist for Haitian nationals in custody. In August 2022, the Council filed a lawsuit to force the agency to respond to the agency’s FOIA requests. ICE finally released data on detention stays in Torrance in June 2023.
The transparency gap around race and ethnicity
The researchers sought to determine whether disparities existed among racial and ethnic minorities detained in Torrance. But the report ultimately found that ICE did not properly store data on race and ethnicity.
This posed a challenge for investigating unfair treatment among immigrants. On the one hand, ICE maintains little data on ethnicity, with only 4% of individuals in the dataset having information on ethnicity. Due to the overwhelming lack of data, researchers were unable to conduct further analysis on this category.
Regarding race, data shows that those in custody represent more than 50 different countries across five continents, but ICE classifies the vast majority racially as “white.” . Initially, data showed that blacks and whites were incarcerated for about the same length of time. However, the researchers noted that ICE’s broad racial classification of individuals as “white” may skew analyzes of racial disparities.
By grouping individuals based on geographic location, the data yielded four main findings:
Non-Europeans racially marked as “white” were some of the people detained the longest. Africans overall were detained for the longest period of time. In terms of geographical origin, those detained in Torrance were most often from North America (mainly Central American and Caribbean countries). There were almost no Europeans in the facility.
The lack of a consistent method of recording the race and ethnicity of detained individuals contributes to the difficulty in identifying whether disparities in detention exist.
ICE places vulnerable people in Torrance despite red flags
Documents and data reveal that ICE job trends in Torrance from 2021 to 2022 show a troubling pattern of apathy. Throughout 2021, numerous watchdog groups, government agencies, and inspectors noted ongoing abuses within facilities. Specifically, the city of Torrance failed a notoriously lax inspection in July 2021, citing unsanitary conditions and severe staffing issues. Despite red flags and continued calls to depopulate the facility, data showed Torrance’s population was growing.
ICE placed more than 50 Haitians in Torrance in September 2021, less than two months after Torrance failed its annual inspection in July. A series of emails over a six-week period illustrated the difficulties lawyers face in communicating with their clients. Despite documented continued pressure from human rights groups to address access to counsel issues, due process violations, and access to counsel issues, ICE continues to infect even more Haitians and others. Vulnerable people continued to be transferred to institutions. After months of advocacy by the Council and other human rights groups, ICE finally began releasing Haitians from Torrance. However, the data showed a disparity in the length of detention among Haitians arrested in Del Rio compared to other immigrants in Torrance.
In 2022, the ICE deployment pattern in Torrance has changed. Rather than ignoring red flags, ICE appears to have begun to recognize problems within the facility, but that was only temporary. Earlier this year, the government issued an unprecedented administrative alert calling for the city of Torrance to reduce its population after inspectors found “unsanitary living conditions” inside the facility. As a result, Torrance’s population decreased dramatically. But just one month later, Torrance’s population began to grow rapidly again. The data shows a similar pattern from August to September 2022, when asylum seekers died by suicide, and the government released a new report on violations of ICE detention standards at the facility. After these events, Torrance’s population quickly began to decline. But before the numbers reached zero, ICE reversed course and began rapidly reassigning people to facilities.
transparency in detention centers
The report’s findings highlight the importance of transparency in ICE detention centers.
The Torrance issue is a microcosm of what immigration detention looks like. In addition to the problems previously identified in Torrance, this analysis provides worrying indications of potentially disparate treatment of detainees.
As ICE continues to detain immigrants across the country, and as mass detention remains part of the political debate, it is imperative that, at the very least, ICE becomes more visible in its practices.
Field: Immigration and Customs Enforcement
