Growing numbers of noncitizens, including legal immigrants, are held unnecessarily and transferred heedlessly in an expensive immigration detention system that denies many of them basic fairness, a bipartisan study group and a human rights organization concluded in reports released jointly on Wednesday.
Confirmation of some of their critical conclusions came separately from the Homeland Security Department's inspector general, in an investigation that found detainee transfers by Immigration and Customs Enforcement were so haphazard that some detainees arrived at a new detention center without having been served a notice of why they were being held, or despite a high probability of being granted bond, or with pending criminal prosecutions or arrest warrants in the previous jurisdiction.
The bipartisan group, the Constitution Project, whose members include Asa Hutchinson, a former under secretary of homeland security, called for sweeping changes in agency policies and amendments to immigration law, including new access to government-appointed counsel for many of those facing deportation.
In its report, the human rights organization, Human Rights Watch, revealed government data showing 1.4 million detainee transfers from 1999 to 2008, most of them since 2006. The transfers are accelerating, the report found, with tens of thousands of longtime residents of cities like Philadelphia and Los Angeles being sent to remote immigration jails in Texas and Louisiana, far from legal counsel and the evidence that might help them win release.
''ICE is increasingly subjecting detainees to a chaotic game of musical chairs, and it's a game with dire consequences,'' said Alison Parker, deputy director in the United States for the human rights group, and author of its report. The data underlying the report was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) of Syracuse University, which issued its own report.
The inspector general's investigation found that the consequences of haphazard transfers include a loss of access to legal counsel and relevant evidence; additional time in detention; and ''errors, delays and confusion for detainees, their families, legal representatives'' and the immigration courts.
Some detainees were transferred with files lacking a photo and a security classification, field inspectors found in work conducted from October 2008 to February.
Officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is part of Homeland Security, said the agency would issue advisories reminding field offices of 10-year-old national detention standards that require a review of a detainee's ''alien file'' before any transfer, and reinforcing the need to coordinate with immigration courts.
In August, the Obama administration announced ambitious plans to overhaul immigration detention, a disjointed network that relies heavily on private prisons and county jails. But taken together, the three reports underscore the gap between the plans and the problems on the ground in a system that, according to the inspector general, is estimated to be detaining more than 442,000 people a year -- more than double the number in 2003, ICE's first year of operation.
John T. Morton, director of the immigration agency, envisions a ''truly civil detention system'' shaped by more centralized agency control. In contrast, the Constitution Project recommends shrinking the use of detention, in part by adding more constitutional safeguards required in the criminal justice system.