Immigrant advocates discovered that New York prison authorities maintain close collaboration with Customs and Border Protection (ICE) agents, to whom they hand over immigrants who have committed a crime, even though they have served their sentence.
Through documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the Immigrant Defense Project (IDP) and the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJ) shared the emails exchanged between immigration authorities and corrections officers, including with discriminatory expressions.
The organizations report indicates that eight years have passed since laws limiting the collaboration of local authorities with ICE were approved, as part of the efforts for sanctuary cities and states.
“We have tracked for years how city agencies flouted our existing laws and continued to funnel people into the hands of ICE,” says the report seen by this newspaper. That has hurt immigrants and their families.
IDP and BAJ obtained more than a thousand pages of emails exchanged between the New York City Department of Corrections (DOC) and ICE between 2015 and 2019, after months of legal battles, so they fear the practice will continue after the mentioned years.
“The correspondence shows, without a doubt, that the city agency has been violating the city’s detention laws and actively taking steps to facilitate the detention of New York immigrants by ICE,” it is accused.
Deportation Messages
The organizations reveal documents of how the DOC maintains regular communication with ICE, despite the fact that local laws prevent it.
“The language of the emails also illustrated a deep and shocking culture of collusion, a desire to facilitate the deportation of New York immigrants, and a total disregard for the rights of the people they detain,” it is accused.
In one of the emails you can read “#teamsendthemback” or “team send them back”.
In another email, DOC tells ICE that they are “urgently” waiting for a detainer, for someone and when they finally get it, they say, “You are my BOO FOR REAL,” an expression of celebration.
what the authorities say
The head of the Department of Corrections, Paul Shechtman, testified before the City Council on February 15 at a joint hearing between the Immigration and Criminal Justice Committees.
“[L]The emails you read are not our policy and should not have happened,” he said.
He added that this was not consistent with what the law establishes.
One of the cases brought forward by activists was that of an immigrant from the Gambia, who lived in the United States for more than fourteen years, where he married a US citizen and had two children.
“In 2018 he was arrested for a criminal matter,” it is indicated. “The day he was scheduled to be released in March 2020 from [la prisión] Rikers and reunited with his family, the DOC told him, ‘You’re not going home. You are going back to Africa. ICE is coming to get you.’
The immigrant was deported and separated from his family.
Another case was the written testimony that Bronx Defenders submitted for the February 15 City Council hearing, where their client, an immigrant identified as Mr. J, revealed that he had lived in the US for 10 years; although he served a six-month sentence at Rikers, instead of being released, he was tricked into ICE.