Questions linger amid promised overhaul of immigration detention

LOS FRESNOS — As Michael Watkins walks the halls of the Port Isabel Detention Center each day, he is at once the most popular and most reviled man in the room.

Some detainees dressed in matching color-coded uniforms approach him with smiles and extended hands. Others shout obscenities from behind plate glass.

After 16 years working in the U.S. immigration detention system, though, he has learned that such a mixed reception comes with the job.

"Generally speaking, people don’t want to be detained," he said during a recent tour of the facility.

But Watkins is no ordinary warden, and Port Isabel is no ordinary prison.

As the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official in charge of the facility, he oversees a crowd of 687 detainees of varied heritages, backgrounds and circumstances. Some have criminal pasts, while others have never been convicted of a crime. Some have resigned themselves to their surroundings, while others continue to fight for a chance for release.

The only thing they all have in common: Each is accused of being in the country illegally.

As the administration of President Barack Obama undertakes a comprehensive review of the nation’s immigration detention policies — pledging to address the varied backgrounds and situations of its wards — centers like Port Isabel remain in transition.

Half prison, half barracks for those with no criminal past, the center and its employees strive both to secure their charges in what is, for many, their last stop before deportation, while also providing the basic human comforts due to those individuals who have only come to the United States seeking asylum or work.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced in October a sweeping overhaul of the agency’s detention system, which had become a growing target for criticism under former President George W. Bush.

Amid the largest expansion of detainees in years, migrant rights advocates and immigration attorneys increasingly faulted the current system for too often treating those it housed as if they were all violent criminals.

Napolitano pledged, however, in her announcement last fall to address those concerns by shifting non-criminal immigrants from prison-like structures to more comfortable facilities, developing a system to classify detainee risk and developing alternatives to the detention process.

"We run a huge detention system through ICE," Napolitano said during an Oct. 6 teleconference. "It’s a huge range of detainees from those who have criminal records and need to be housed in a prison-like system to those who have no criminal background and who have come to this country only seeking asylum."

Since then, ICE has scuttled evaluation standards based on those used by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons and has developed its own assessment criteria to meet the unique needs of its detainee population.

The agency acted immediately on some changes — like ending a policy of sending immigrant families to the T. Don Hutto facility outside Austin, a detention center often criticized for housing young children in prison-like environs — and separating detainees with criminal pasts from those without.

But other promised reforms — like development of an online inmate locator system for families and attorneys of the detained — have been slower to develop.

What exactly those changes will mean at the Port Isabel facility remains unclear.

While ICE allowed access to the detention center on a recent media tour, reporters were prohibited from interviewing detainees.

The facility — one of the largest ICE-managed detention centers in the country — houses a population made up of 86 percent criminal aliens, an agency-designated term used to describe undocumented migrants who have also been convicted of crimes while in the United States.

As a result, detainees remain housed in locked-down pods, they eat their meals and watch television under guard, and all are escorted from building to building amid rows of fencing and barbed wire.

Port Isabel remains prison-like because it has the features to accommodate a criminal population, said Watkins, the warden. But in other respects, that nature is changing.

Detainees have access to telephones throughout most of the day and can make calls as long as they have money in prepaid accounts to do so. They also are allowed to spend at least one hour a day more in the recreation yards than is required by national guidelines.

And in the facility’s kitchen — which serves over a thousand platters each day — Watkins likes to point out that his staff routinely prepares meals from cultures across the world to give detainees a little taste of home. He has also increased portion size from the minimum standards of 6 ounces of food per meal to 8 ounces.

"Food is the least expensive thing we can give to make sure someone’s well kept," he said. "In our environment, it’s a concern if people aren’t getting enough to eat."

The facility has also submitted to new, more rigorous inspection standards and transferred all its female detainees to other facilities with specially tailored programs targeted toward women.

That doesn’t mean the complaints from immigration attorneys and civil rights groups have subsided.

For more than a year, the Port Isabel facility has been plagued by reports of detainee hunger strikes. Protesting alleged denials of due process, medical attention and legal resources, several men held there have forgone food for days, according to groups like the Southwest Texas Workers Union, an immigrant rights advocacy group.

While the organization estimated at one point in April 2008 that the number of hunger striking immigrants at Port Isabel had reached 200, ICE maintains those numbers have been largely exaggerated both inside and outside the facility.

"The complaints usually come from the same place," said Deborah Achim, deputy field office director for detention operations in the agency’s San Antonio office. "They’re generally incorrect, but we take each of them seriously."

Others complain of the slow progress in implementing many of the promised reforms.

"They’ve said some pretty groundbreaking things on wanting to overhaul the immigration detention system," said Brittney Nystrom, director of policy and legal affairs for the National Immigration Forum, a think tank that has often been critical of ICE detention centers. "In terms of implementing their announcements, though, it’s a little slow. There’s a little frustration."

But Watkins, the warden, said his center is prepared for whatever changes may come. He will continue to spend his days walking the halls of the facility, greeting those detainees who welcome him and even the ones who don’t.

Whether that’s enough to appease the critics remains to be seen.

"Having a nicer way to detain people is welcome," Nystrom said. "But if it looks like a jail and feels like a jail, at the end of the day, it’s still a jail."