Read this important 36 page report.

It concerns the treatment of detainees. A key sentence reads in part "we are concerned that undocumented aliens are not only suffering from inadequate medical attention while in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), they are also dying in our Nation's detention facilities."
The letter goes on to ask a number of questions regarding medical facilities and deaths.

Read this letter.

The "Shadow Report" is projected for a launch on September 11th and will be circulated nationally through collaboration between NJCRDC and the Bill Of Rights Defense Committee(BORDC),a national organization with many local affiliates. "Our two groups will use the report to hold local governments accountable for the unconstitutional immigrant detentions taking place in county jails throughout the country and to press those governments to close the detention centers," said NJCRDC spokesperson Jeannette Gabriel.

The press conference was held at 12:00 noon on Thursday, January 25th, in front of 26 Federal Plaza, New York headquarters for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Former detainees who were held at the two New Jersey facilities included in the audit provided testimony about the abuses they witnessed and were subjected to by County Jail and ICE officials.

The most recent government audit targeted five immigrant detention centers around the country, two of them in New Jersey. Although the official report identified conditions below legal standards, it was extremely cursory and failed to include the most damning complaints of abuse by detainees. Information gathered by NJ Civil Rights Defense Committee from hundreds of detainees over a period of five years illustrates a clear pattern of punitive treatment at the hands of local officials, including the use of attack dogs, guard beatings and rapes, and systematic food and heat deprivation. Detainees in NJ and elsewhere have been held in dungeon-like, overcrowded, filthy, and vermin-infested conditions and have resisted with hunger strikes and attempted suicides. Sami Al-Shahin, a Jordanian immigrant who was held in detention in Passaic County Jail, and who led in the successful fight to close the immigrant detention facility there, asked in response to the report, "Where is all the information that I gave to the government officials? Why didn't they include all the reports of abuse?"

NJCRDC will produce its report with assistance from student interns under the guidance of the two Rutgers University professors. Sociology Professor Rodriguez said, "I look forward to my students helping to systematically organize and summarize a database of hundreds of pages of direct detainee testimony, written and transcribed, about abuses occurring from the Fall of 2001 to the present in various New Jersey county jails and detention centers, but especially in the jails of Passaic and Hudson Counties that were included in the Inspector General's official audit."

The report will then be used by NJCRDC and the BORDC to encourage activists nationwide to hold local governments accountable for abuses against immigrant detainees and to work to shut down detention centers throughout the nation. The intent of this project is to emphasize the inherent abusive nature of immigrant detention and highlight its unconstitutionality. Administrative detention punishes non-criminal immigrants who have not been charged with any crime by forcing them into incarceration and denying them access to government-provided representation. Flavia Alaya, a member of NJCRDC and a BORDC board member, said that "The government is using administrative detention to bypass the Bill of Rights. The bottom constitutional line is that all those held without criminal charge should be freed."

Eric Lerner of NJCRDC said: "This isn't a serious report. ... This is in no way a reflection of the information we gave to the OIG. It's basically a whitewash that specifically does not address the many reports of abuse of the detainees."

Read the full report Also read the three news articles in the column at the right dated January 17th and 19th, 2007.

Read the Linda Greenhouse story in the New York Times.
Or the AP article in the International Herald Tribune.

• The PBS show.
• An interview of Daniel Zwerdling by Leonard Lopate on WNYC.
  

• End to Passaic County Detentions.
• NYC Commission of Inquiry Tries Real Criminals for Detention, Torture.
• NJCRDC in the Community.
• Massive Immigrant Rights Rallies Defeat Criminalization Bill.

AP estimate of the biggest rallies:
400,000 in Chicago
400,000 in LA
100,000 in San Jose
55,000 in San Francisco
15,000 in Houston
30,000 across Florida

In New York City, estimates of size were all over the place, but the 3-mile long March could not have been smaller than 150,000

In certain areas and industries, the strike was almost complete. Agricultural production across both Florida and California came to a halt. Contstuction workers in Florida struck in large numbers. In the Midwest, all three of the largest meatpackers were forced to close, knowing that if they did not, their workforces would have walked out anyway. In Los Angeles, the garment workers closed the huge garment center and the wholesale food workers struck as well. The independent truckers shut down the ports of Los Angles and Long Beach. Except for some of the meatpackers, none of these groups of workers were in unions.

By comparison, in all of last year, labor-union strikes involved 100,000 people.

Workers have found the US in 2006, as they have found in other places and at other times that there is another way to fight than traditional union strikes: the political mass strike. What demands for wages or working conditions alone could not do, an ambitious political demand--for the legalization of ALL immigrants--has accomplished.

At the same time, the immigrant rights movement, now clearly a movement of the immigrant section of the working class, has discovered that bold, uncompromising demands--for Equal Rights, no deportations--and bold tactics--a general strike-- can achieve unity , while timid "realistic" demands and tactics cannot.

In New York the crowd was overwhelmingly Latino, so the sort of unity achieved among various immigrant groups in Chicago has not yet come to New York. Nor were many native-born in evidence, so the unity of the peace movement and immigrant movement is also yet to be achieved. But it was a joyous and militant crowd. The sure-fire applause lines were all those calling for legalization for all immigrants and equal rights for all. Those were the demands that unified everyone and that had brought them there.

At the rally, Saleh Ajaj spoke for NJ Civil Rights Defense Committee on the demand, adopted by the May 1 coalition, to "free all detainees". He movingly spoke of being himself detained for 14 months. We then paraded in the midst of the huge crowd with our "FREE ALL DETAINEES" banner, which got into many photos.

Of course, the local English-speaking press declined to publish any of the demands.

Importantly, the coalition passed out tens of thousand of flyers calling people to a New York metro regional conference on June 17 and to the next meeting of the coalition, tomorrow night,. Hopefully through these flyers were will bring into a new democratic organizing process some of the key grass-roots activists who mobilized this strike in workplaces and communities. That will be the key to building an ever-growing movement for immigrant and worker rights.

Videos from last October’s First Session of the Commission of Inquiry are now available for viewing. The following are on the Testimony on Detention and Torture

Eric Lerner of NJCRDC and Barbara Olshansky of the Center for Constitutional Rights

Sarah Sohn, Immigration Equality

Saleh Ajaj, former detainee

Session II of the International Commission of Inquiry On Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration was held in New York on January 20-22, 2006.

Read the announcement in Business Wire or the more interesting story in The New York Times.

Read the news stories at the right starting with December 29th.

Read the NJCRDC statement and press release.

• NJCRDC meets with Monmouth Officials, visits Detainees.
• Hunger Strike at Passaic County Jail.
• Office of Inspector General Audits Detention Facilities.
• Massive hunger strike by immigrant detainees at Guantanamo.

Read this Passaic County Jail report