Attorneys for migrant women freed from South Texas detention facilities earlier this month say their clients are being forced to wear ankle monitors by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The lawyers also say the release process has been full of “coercion, disorganization, and confusion,” and that the women are being misled about their rights by ICE officials.
Women and children seeking asylum in the United States were freed from two South Texas immigration detention facilities on July 14. The facilities became infamous for being identical to prisons; in April, a group of mothers staged a hunger strike at one of them.
The Associated Press reports that ICE is imposing an unusual set of conditions on the women, according to American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), who sent an open letter to ICE along with several other immigration nonprofits. While they await asylum hearings, an immigration judge offered the women the choice to pay a bond or wear an ankle monitor. But AILA lawyers say that even women who paid the bond are being forced to wear the monitors, which are bulky, extremely visible, need to be charged often, and carry a heavy stigma:
Between 70 and 100 women were called into courtrooms at the 50-acre Dilley campus last week and told by ICE officials that they could be released with ankle monitors in lieu of bond, according to a motion filed by R. Andrew Free, a Nashville lawyer working with the CARA Family Detention Pro Bono Project.
ICE appears to want ankle monitors, which use global positioning technology, on the majority of women released, Free said in an interview. The agency’s actions “are misleading people about their rights,” he said.
An immigration attorney in Denver, Laura Lichter, said that in her 20 years of practice she has never seen ICE add a monitoring device or impose other conditions after an immigration judge has set bond. She said the bracelet monitors were cumbersome, conspicuous, and required constant charging and were another tacit attempt at deterrence.
“There is a stigma,” Lichter said. “Everyone is going to think that they are criminals.”
In a press release, AILA and the other immigration nonprofits say some of the released people were “coerced” into accepting ankle monitors, and intimidated out of asking questions about why they had to wear them. Lawyers from the Catholic Legal Immigration Network (CARA) said ICE officials demanded to know the names of women telling them about problems with the monitors: