Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

In America's Secret ICE Castles, the Nation magazine claims that our immigration police has 186 secret detention facilities scattered around the country.

Among the more hair-raising allegations:

• A year ago, a top ICE official boasted, “If you don't have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but you think he's illegal, we can make him disappear.”
• The 186 are mostly unmarked, and locals don't know about them.
• People sent to these offices are kept off ICE's registry system so that people looking for them cannot find them.
• Although ICE is not supposed to incarcerate US citizens, it has; they (like the immigrants ICE processes) are denied access to counsel.
• At least one US citizen was deported as a result of this system.
• One purpose of the system is to make it more difficult for lawyers to find prisoners before they are deported.

Much of the info concerns activities of the Bush admin; some of it clearly is still happening. The article is maddeningly unclear about how many.

Glenn Beck got a lot of ink a while back for claiming that Obama planned to build a network of secret detention centers in the US in order to lock up Republicans. Who knew that they already existed and were used to deny process of law to suspected undocumented foreigners? Add these to the secret camps in Afghanistan, Lithuania and elsewhere.