By Dan GoodingShareNewsweek is a Trust Project memberA leading Democrat in Congress is introducing a bill that would stop automatic ICE detention for multiple immigrant groups, bring in higher standards of care, and phase out private prison companies, Newsweek can reveal.
In an exclusive interview ahead of the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act’s (DDIA) reintroduction, Washington Representative Pramila Jayapal said that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) system would work under a “presumption of release," rather than automatically detaining low-risk immigrants, such as caregivers or those without criminal convictions.
“People are being held now at unprecedented rates,” Jayapal told Newsweek on Tuesday. “And the amount of money that is going into private for-profit detention facilities, or private for-profit immigrant incarceration facilities, has just skyrocketed.”
As the leading Democrat on the House Immigration Subcommittee, Jayapal said she had tracked the issues around ICE detention centers for several years and had become increasingly concerned about conditions since January, when President Donald Trump returned to office.
...Soaring ICE Detention Rates
Before January, ICE detention rates sat at around 47,000, already over the capacity Congress had approved and funded. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed and signed into law in July, the agency’s budget soared, allowing a rapid expansion of detention facilities. The current detained population is around 65,000, per ICE’s latest data published on November 21.
Numbers have surged for a variety of reasons, including Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdowns in cities across the U.S., as well as new rules that mean ICE must detain immigrants as the first priority over keeping them tracked within communities.
“We’re saying you can't just mass detain people and not have due process,” Jayapal said. “We're including alternatives to detention, and we are saying we're going to phase out these private for-profit detention centers over the course of three years because this is where a lot of the problem happens, people are just profiting off of this.”
The bill being introduced in both the House and Senate would create a “higher burden of proof” for ICE when it comes to detaining vulnerable populations, including pregnant women, survivors of torture, people with serious mental or physical illness or disability, and those within the LGBTQ+ community.
Many of the reports of poor care or mistreatment within ICE detention centers in recent months have focused on these groups, along with families and children.
“There's no standards of care, there's no accountability,” Jayapal said. “And that is very different than even our federal prisons, where there is a different level of accountability, despite the fact that [there are] lots of problems there too."
“Twenty-three people have died in ICE custody since Donald Trump took office, but the publicly reported statistics don't match,” Jayapal continued. “That has never been the case. And that number alone, 23, is such a horrific, unbelievable number.”
...Is the Trump Admin Detaining the 'Worst of the Worst'?
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which runs ICE, has repeatedly said that detention centers meet higher standards than most U.S. prisons, with detainees provided with full meals, adequate medical care, and ample opportunities to communicate with loved ones and attorneys.
“ICE takes its commitment to promoting safe, secure, humane environments for those in our custody very seriously,” Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told Newsweek following the death of a detainee in October.
It was a similar message to others issued by DHS when approached by Newsweek, following concerns raised by those in Congress, human rights organizations, and immigrants themselves.
DHS has also insisted that it is necessary to detain the number of immigrants it currently holds, because federal agents are seeking out the “worst of the worst," citing figures which state that around 70 percent of those in ICE detention have criminal charges or convictions.
Recent data from ICE itself, and further information from the agency leaked to the libertarian Cato Institute, paint a different picture: 73 percent have no criminal convictions, and nearly half have no convictions or pending charges.
Most of those with convictions had traffic penalties or immigration violations as listed offenses, while 5 percent had been convicted of violent offenses.
“In its posts on this subject, DHS and ICE often include people with pending criminal charges as “criminal arrests,” even though these people have never been found guilty, and the charges are often minor and regularly dismissed. ICE is depriving these people of due process by arresting them prior to a conviction,” David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, wrote on November 24.
The conflicting data, or interpretations of it, is another target for the DDIA, mandating a greater level of scrutiny and oversight for the ICE detention system, and allowing Members of Congress greater access to facilities, after a series of incidents in which some were blocked from entering for impromptu inspections.
Immigration legislation is notoriously difficult to pass in Congress, with repeated attempts to change the legal system failing in recent years.
In January, the Laken Riley Act was passed. It created a mandate for ICE to detain immigrants accused or convicted of minor offenses, following the murder of college student Laken Riley by an illegal immigrant. The bill passed despite concerns about added pressures for the ICE detention system. Jayapal told Newsweek that she and co-sponsor Adam Smith, a fellow Washington Democrat, feel the Laken Riley Act will help their cause.
“I've talked to a number of people who voted for Laken Riley and regret it,” she said. “We tried to point out in that moment why it was a bad vote to take, and why this lower threshold of not even having a conviction to be detained and deported was a very, very bad idea and against every principle of due process, so I do think we can reverse some of this.
“I think, in some strange way, what the Trump administration is doing is waking up people to how outrageous and absurd this detention system is, this immigrant incarceration system is, so I feel very confident that we will be able to get a significant number of co-sponsors and that we can move the bill forward, perhaps even more than we could have in the past, because the excesses and the outrages are so extreme.”
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