US failing to protect immigrants in detention from abuse, report says

Human rights advocates have issued a report that says the US government is failing to protect immigrants in detention from sexual abuse. The report follows an announcement that a guard at an all-female detention center in Texas has been charged with official repression and unlawful restraint for allegedly fondling women in his custody. FSRN's Renée Feltz has more.

TRANSCRIPT:

Officer Donald Dunn faces five misdemeanor charges for allegedly fondling female detainees' breasts, buttocks and crotch while he frisked them. Dunn worked at the T Don Hutto Detention Center near Austin, Texas and was employed by Corrections Corporation of America, which owns and operates the facility for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE. ACLU Deputy Legal Director, Vanita Gupta, welcomes the charges against Dunn. But she notes that while he violated a contract clause, he did not run afoul of federal guidelines against sexual assault in detention centers.

VANITA GUPTA: It goes to show that the guidelines that ICE has really need to be significantly beefed up to be meaningful to prevent this kind of tragedy from happening again.

This is the second reported incident at Hutto in three years, and it could be just the tip of the iceberg for assaults occurring in detention centers. Advocates say many women never file a complaint if they're assaulted while detained, and once they're deported they have little legal recourse. Now, Human Rights Watch has issued a report that says ICE needs to revise regulations to prevent assaults from occurring in the first place. Meghan Rhoad is the report's author.

MEGHAN RHOAD: We are interested in seeing them revise the rules around pat searches, there are virtually no limits on when a pat search can happen in detention despite the fact that these are civil detainees.

Human Rights Watch has also called for ICE to ban guards from searching detainees of a different gender. They want the Justice Department to improve its prosecution rates for abuse and assaults in detention. And they say Congress should demand more disclosure of such assaults. Rhoad says ICE has discussed the revised regulations with advocates, but it's unclear when it plans to implement them.

RHOAD: We have thousands of women - and men - at risk, so they need to play catch-up on getting these standards in place, and then they need to make sure they are actually being followed.

This year, ICE expects to detain about 400,000 immigrants - and almost 10 percent of them will be women.

Renée Feltz, Free Speech Radio News