Detainee conditions a work in progress

A year after President Obama pledged to improve conditions for noncitizens detained for immigration violations, things are about the same, according to some civil rights groups.

Several have joined together to publish the “Year One Report Card: Human Rights & the Obama Administration's Immigration Detention Reforms,” which was released today.

That report - a joint project of the National Immigrant Justice Center, Detention Watch Network and the Midwest Coalition for Human Rights - shows that while immigration officials are talking a more humane game when it comes to detaining undocumented people, their follow-through hasn't been so consistent.

In fact, despite U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials' promises to overhaul the immigration detention system and improve living conditions at detention facilities, improvements have been spotty for the approximately 32,000 immigrants held in U.S. custody, the groups concluded. That includes an unknown number in Iowa's county jails.

They gave policymakers a “D” when it came to realizing their goal of creating alternatives to detention for noncitizens who are no threat to national security or public safety - immigration violators who are, for example, seeking asylum or charged only with administrative violations.

Although ICE had pledged to submit a nationwide implementation plan for alternatives to detention by last fall, no such plan has been developed, the groups found. Just one cog, maybe, in our country's broken immigration system, but it's an important one.

“We have people in our backyards who are subject to this detention process,” Amy Weismann, Deputy Director of the University of Iowa Center for Human Rights, told me this week.

Most immigration violations are civil violations, not criminal - roughly on par with traffic offenses. But civil violators, even those seeking asylum, can wind up in a county jail alongside citizens and noncitizens charged with criminal offenses.

There they wait for weeks, months - sometimes years - for their cases to be heard in administrative court. It's a system that's expensive, arbitrary, and doesn't sound exactly American.

Unfortunately, most people don't know it's how it works. “I think people would be shocked,” Weismann said.

“Iowans are freedom-loving, fair-minded people,” she said.

Not the types to throw people in jail without good reason.

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