U.S. immigration authorities locked thousands of people in solitary confinement in 2023 as the United States continues to flout international human rights standards in its sprawling network of immigration detention facilities.
A new report by Harvard University-affiliated researchers and the non-profit group Physicians for Human Rights found the dangerous confinements have not only persisted over the past decade, but also increased in frequency and duration under the Biden administration.
The report highlights the gap between President Joe Biden’s campaign rhetoric and the lived reality of an estimated 3,000 immigrant detainees held in isolation last year, often for prolonged periods — a practice that the United Nations warned can amount to torture.
“This is a sheer failure of the Biden administration to stop egregious human rights abuses,” Tessa Wilson, a senior program officer for Physicians for Human Rights and a co-author of the report, told the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, or ICIJ. “The use of solitary confinement is actually only increasing.”
In the U.S., home to the world’s largest immigration detention system, solitary confinement has become a go-to tool to manage the swelling number of detained immigrants. More than 38,000 people, including long-term U.S. residents and people seeking asylum, were in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody as of January 28, 2024.
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Article URL : https://theintercept.com/2024/02/06/ice-solitary-confinement-detention-immigration/