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R E C O M M E N DAT I O N S A N D ACTION ITEMS This report demonstrates that detention at Karnes produces inconsistent, inadequate, and discriminatory outcomes. ICE is either unwilling or unable to provide the minimum level of care required by its own standards. ICE is not equipped to provide meaningful access to counsel, even in the setting of Expedited Removal proceedings in which an attorney’s role is limited. These issues extend beyond the time period covered in this report and become evident in different ways with each change in the population that ICE detains at Karnes. ICE must altogether end its use of Karnes as an immigrant detention facility, end the practice of imprisoning migrant families, and end the use of Expedited Removal. ICE’s deficiencies are not due to a lack of funding or available expertise, but rather they are fundamental to the way in which the U.S. government approaches immigration policy.71 The conditions ICE subjects people to at detention facilities generally, and at Karnes in particular, cause life-altering harm, further compounded by the arbitrariness with which DHS decides who to imprison and who to leave free, even among people with the same type of case. The immigrant prison system is utterly unnecessary. Community-based alternatives to detention already exist and have been utilized for years, at far less human and financial cost.
RAICES believes in the abolition of ICE, CBP, and, ultimately, DHS. In the interim, the government must end the practice of Expedited Removal and Title 42 and end ALL detained immigration proceedings. Further, DHS must end contracts with private prison companies, such as the GEO Group. RAICES recognizes that the fights to abolish ICE and the police are inherently intertwined. “...as we begin to turn our attention to immigrant populations, we find that the same racist policing that incarcerates Black people in America also affects Black immigrants, as well as immigrants of other ethnic backgrounds.”72
71. Hassan Kanu, Courts Are Beginning To Admit That Some Immigration Laws Are Racist, Reuters, Aug. 23, 2021, https://www. reuters.com/legal/litigation/courts-are-beginning-admit-that-some-immigration-laws-are-racist-2021-08-23/. See also Kavitha Surana, How Racial Profiling Goes Unchecked in Immigration Enforcement, Pro Publica, June 8, 2018. https://www.propublica. org/article/racial-profiling-ice-immigration-enforcement-pennsylvania 72. Tsion Gurmu, Rinku Sen & Sejal Zota, The Convergence of Movements to Abolish ICE and Defund the Police, Duke Law (2020).
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