Civil rights organizations have warned that conditions in U.S. immigration detention centers are worsening, even after years of investigations and calls for initiatives that have joined promises to improve the civil incarceration system.

Early in his term, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas ordered the closure of two detention centers and has since closed a few more.

“Allow me to state one foundational principle: we will not tolerate the mistreatment of individuals in civil immigration detention or substandard conditions of detention,” Mayorkas said in a memo to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) acting Director Tae Johnson in March of 2021”, as The Hill’s publication indicates.

“Even as Biden administration officials have vowed to reduce immigration detention, multiple organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Immigration Lawyers Association, have consistently highlighted the flaws in the system. Still, ICE and private detention center operators such as CoreCivic and the GEO Group have been dogged by consistent reports of abuse, neglect and mismanagement”.

Reports of mistreatment of detainees in immigrant detentions are so widespread and common that civil rights activists say that the detention of non-criminal immigrants is a major problem.

“Even discounting the alleged patterns of abuse, the practice of keeping non-criminal immigrants in detention has been broadly denounced both domestically and internationally, as it subjects people without criminal charges to prison-like conditions for indeterminate amounts of time. […] While incarceration does keep deportable foreign nationals within reach of ICE, […] nearly 100 percent of immigrants with legal representation show up for hearings and meetings with ICE agents”.

And ICE detention costs taxpayers $2.9 billion a year for a detainee population that’s averaged 25,978 people per month since June of 2019, according to numbers from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a data monitoring project at Syracuse University.

On Monday (13), 36 House Democrats led by Reps. Pramila Jayapal (Wash.), Jerry Nadler (N.Y.) and Nanette Diaz Barragán (Calif.) called on the Biden administration to give additional funding to the Case Management Pilot Program (CMPP), which provides legal assistance to immigrants in deportation proceedings, according to the same publication.

“Previous case management programs were highly effective in producing compliance with immigration proceedings. For instance, the Family Case Management Program (FCMP) enjoyed a strong record of success, producing compliance rates of 99 percent for compliance with court hearings and immigration appointments, at a cost of only $36 per day per family compared to adult detention, which costs up to $232 per person per day”, wrote the lawmakers.

Despite the alternative programs, the number of ICE detainees has remained steady during the Biden administration, and a majority of detainees neither face criminal charges nor have a criminal record. “According to TRAC, ICE had 24,170 detainees at the end of January, 14,732 of whom had no criminal charges or records”.

“Many of those detainees complain about living conditions, cruel treatment, food, and alleged overuse of solitary confinement and diminished or lack of access to the asylum process”, according to The Hill.