One of my primary duties at the ACLU of Maine is processing the hundreds of requests for legal assistance we get every year. Many of these requests come from incarcerated individuals: some don’t receive adequate healthcare, some feel they have been treated unfairly, some are improperly transferred, and some describe terrible physical abuse. We keep these legal intake forms confidential, but the Immigrants Rights Project at National gained permission to publish a handful of the hundreds of letters they receive every month. These samples of letters from folks in immigration detention facilities carry the same discouraged tone as the letters we receive.
In fact, affiliates across the country receive requests from detained and incarcerated folks. This interactive map illustrates the astounding growth in immigrant detention over the past thirty years: we now have more than two hundred times the population of detained immigrants than we did in the early eighties. In 2011, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) held a record-breaking 429,000 immigrants in over 250 facilities across the country. Click here to learn more.