Exclusive: Booker, House Dems introduce most ambitious bill yet to curb immigration detention

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As the Trump administration continues to expand immigration detention to unprecedented levels, and (with the help of the Supreme Court) continues to restrict which immigrants can post bond to get out of detention while their deportation cases are pending, a group of congressional Democrats — led in the Senate by presidential candidate Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) — is proposing a bill that would throw the detention machine in reverse.

The bill, the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act, was first introduced in the 2017-’18 Congress (with Washington Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Adam Smith co-sponsoring it in the House and Booker introducing the Senate version).

It’s being reintroduced this week as a response to an April ruling from Attorney General William Barr that prohibited asylum seekers who came to the US without papers from posting bond. If Barr’s ruling goes into effect as scheduled over the summer, single adult asylum seekers will be at the mercy of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to decide whether to release them on parole or keep them in detention for weeks or months.

Democrats’ bill would reverse not just Barr’s ruling but the entire system on which it was built: the 20-plus-year expansion of an immigration detention system that has turned detention into the default state for immigrants who’ve been arrested by ICE or apprehended by border agents.

It’s an extremely ambitious bill that would enable thousands more immigrants a month to seek release in the short term, and radically restrict detention capacity over the course of a few years. It’s almost certainly not going to pass in its current form. Arguably, given the number of hearings it would add to an already overloaded immigration court system, it wouldn’t even work without a much bigger liberalization of the immigration system.

But it’s a reminder that some congressional Democrats — not to mention a presidential candidate in Booker — are looking at the interplay between the Supreme Court and the Trump administration that’s allowed mandatory detention to flourish, and are interested in taking back a role for Congress.

Reversing Barr’s decision on bond — and the mandatory detention system it’s built on

The last time Congress passed a major immigration bill — the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which radically expanded interior immigration enforcement and restricted legalization opportunities — it mandated that certain types of immigrants be held in detention until their deportation cases were resolved. Immigrants who’d been convicted of certain crimes, for example, were subject to mandatory detention even after serving criminal sentences.

 

 

Full story: https://www.vox.com/2019/4/30/18523745/cory-booker-immigration-democrats-dignity-detained-act