Sharp Drop in Border Arrests Is Tied to Recession, Experts Say - NYTimes.com

Detentions At Border Are Down

David McNew/Getty Images

The border at Campo, Calif.

By JULIA PRESTON

Published: November 25, 2009

Detentions of migrants trying to cross the border illegally dropped to 556,000 in the 2009 fiscal year, a decline of 23 percent over 2008 and the lowest number since the early 1970s, according to official figures released this week.

The number of those detained while illegally crossing into the United States fell sharply in the year ending Sept. 30.

The number of detentions of illegal border crossers has been falling since 2000, when it reached a peak of 1.6 million. But the especially sharp decline in the 2009 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, was a sign of a steep decrease in the flow of migrant workers from Mexico and Central America, immigration officials and researchers said.

Migrants have been discouraged from coming by soaring unemployment among immigrants in the United States and tighter enforcement along the Southwest border, officials and scholars said.

Obama administration officials have pointed to the decreasing flow as evidence that they have achieved a major improvement in border security. In a speech this month laying out immigration strategy, Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, argued that a “major shift” in enforcement at the Mexican border had created conditions for Congress to embark on an overhaul of immigration policy, including giving legal status to more than 11 million illegal immigrants.

Ms. Napolitano said that heightened enforcement meant that such a program would not unleash a new flood of illegal migrants across the Southwest border.

Republican lawmakers said they were skeptical, because hundreds of miles of the rugged 2,000-mile-long border are still thinly patrolled and have no fencing. As a backup to border enforcement, they called for worker verification measures to block American employers from hiring illegal workers.

“We think it’s a combination of increased border patrol and the economy,” Fritz Chaleff, a spokesman for Representative Brian P. Bilbray, Republican of California, said of the low numbers. “But we need measures to make sure that the jobs that are available go to the workers who are authorized to take them.”

The Border Patrol hired 2,600 agents in the past year, official figures show, bringing the total to more than 20,000.

But the main factor in the slowing movement of immigrants is the country’s deep recession, which has hit immigrants particularly hard — especially illegal ones, researchers say. By the first months of this year, unemployment among immigrant workers was significantly greater than that of native-born American workers, reversing a trend during the boom years, according to a study by the Migration Policy Institute, a research group in Washington.

Some researchers cautioned that border enforcement would not prevent Latino immigrants from returning if the economy picked up.

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Immigrants, Criminalized

A bedrock premise of smart immigration reform is the sharp distinction it draws between criminal aliens and Americans-in-waiting. While it acknowledges that illegal immigrants need to get right with the law, it treats illegal status as a civil matter to be resolved by the machinery of naturalization, not by the police and prisons.

To hard-line opponents of legalization, illegal immigrants are irredeemable lawbreakers by definition, and the only thing they should be waiting for is deportation.

The administration’s job, as it works on a long-overdue reform bill next year, is to resist that view. So it was disheartening to hear Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, boast recently about identifying “more than 111,000 criminal aliens” through a jailhouse fingerprinting program called Secure Communities.

That was misleading. The program, now in 95 cities or counties in 11 states, will ultimately require all local police agencies to check federal immigration databases for anyone after an arrest. It has so far identified a few thousand serious criminals, rapists and burglars, the kinds of people whose removal from the country must be part of any sane immigration strategy. But it also uncovered minor traffic infractions and visa violations.

It is easy to understand that the administration wants to sound as tough as possible as it gets ready to battle deep-seated resistance to real immigration reform. It is encouraging that Ms. Napolitano recently repeated the president’s insistence that a clear legalization path must be a pillar of reform. That makes it all the more important for the administration to avoid conflating illegal immigration and serious crime.

Laws must be enforced, but doing it this way hurts the innocent, creating a short line from Hispanic to immigrant to illegal to criminal. Having brown skin, speaking Spanish, seeming nervous in the presence of flashing police lights — none of those things say anything about whether you are here illegally or not, are deportable or not. But any one of them can be enough to get you pulled over in jurisdictions across the country.

In Arizona, it can get you jailed. We know of citizens whose homes were mistakenly raided by reckless federal agents on Long Island, day laborers who were targets of indiscriminate sweeps in California, and others who were singled out at roadblocks in upstate New York.

This hurts public safety. If you want to know the consequences of turning the police and jails into instruments of deportation, ask the law-enforcement officials who have complained about programs that muddy the line between local crime-fighting and federal enforcement, and make immigrants fear and shun the police.

President Obama has repeatedly assured 12 million illegal immigrants that he will fight to give them the chance to earn the right to stay. His administration should not undermine that noble effort by carelessly lending credibility to the view that the future citizens living and working among us are a class of criminals.

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Immigration reform, again -- latimes.com

Immigration reform, again -- latimes.com

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Choosing Between Family and the Military

Service Members’ Undocumented Spouses Face Deportation

SOURCE: AP/John Amis

Approximately 70 immigrant soldiers in the U.S. military from 35 countries pledge their allegiance to the United States during a welcome home naturalization ceremony.

By Angela Maria Kelley, Lawrence J. Korb | November 10, 2009

As the nation prepares to celebrate Veterans Day, the flags over the White House and other federal buildings are flying at half staff in tribute to the dozens who were killed or injured at Ft. Hood, TX.

It is unclear whether Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged shooter, was politically motivated or acted because of emotional strain as he awaited deployment to Afghanistan. But the tragedy should remind the nation of the sacrifices our service personnel and their families make, especially during wartime. The stress among military personnel is palpable because for many of them, they are returning to Iraq or Afghanistan for the second, third, or even fourth tour of duty.

And that torment is compounded for an increasing number of military service members when they learn that the federal government has issued deportation orders for a spouse or partner because he or she is an undocumented resident of the United States.

These orders arrive while the service member is in the combat zone, or appear after the soldier has returned home, and occur whether the soldier is alive, killed in action, or missing in action.

In 2007, the federal government issued removal orders for the undocumented immigrant wife of Army Spc. Alex Jimenes while he was missing in action. The proceedings were halted at the request of then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who was spurred into action by Senator John Kerry (D-MA).

More recently, 26-year-old U.S. Army Spc. Jack Barrios returned from Iraq in 2007 suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. He was immediately confronted with deportation orders for his 23-year-old wife Frances, a Guatemalan immigrant, who was six years old when her mother illegally brought her to the United States.

Jack and Frances Barrios have a one-year-old daughter and a three-year-old son, and Frances is helping Jack deal with the hardships related to his mental disorder. Had it not been for DHS’s decision last week to grant a humanitarian parole, Frances’s only option would have been to return to a country she does not know—she grew up in Van Nuys, CA—and wait 10 years before being qualified to return as punishment for being brought here illegally as a child.

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) has reintroduced the Military Families Act to deal with situations like this. The bill would grant lawful permanent resident status to any parent, spouse, child, son, or daughter of an active military service member or of a service member who died as a result of service. So far, Assistant Majority Leader Richard Durbin of Illinois and Democratic Sens. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, Kirstin Gillibrand of New York, and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin have signed onto the bill.

Some conservatives, such as Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) question the need for this legislation. Soldiers fight to preserve our rule of law, they argue, and when laws are broken, consequences must be paid. But proponents of the legislation have argued correctly that soldiers need to be military ready and focused, not wondering if the government they serve is going to separate them from their families.

Lawmakers must remember just how stretched and stressed our service members are:

• The Army’s 45 active Brigade Combat Teams have spent an average of just under 29 months in combat areas since 2002. Of these, all but the First Brigade of the Second Infantry Division, which is permanently based in South Korea, have served at least one tour.
• Of these brigades, 17 have served more than one tour or have had two tours in Iraq or Afghanistan; 16 brigades have had three tours; and five brigades have had four tours.

These multiple and lengthy deployments without sufficient time at home have had broad consequences for the lives of the troops and their families.

Suicide rates among soldiers are at their highest level since the Army began to keep records of the statistic 28 years ago. The Army’s suicide rate was greater than that of the general population last year, for the first time on record. And one third of the troops returning from deployments face significant mental health problems. One of every five service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan show signs of post-traumatic stress disorder and “an equal number are believed to have suffered traumatic brain injuries.”

Our military is increasingly dependent upon immigrants to fill its ranks. Foreign-born members of our armed forces totaled 114,601 as of June 2009, or almost 8 percent of the 1.4 million military personnel on active duty, according to a new report by the Immigration Policy Center.

When the nation went to war after the September 11 attacks, federal policy was adjusted so that immigrants in the armed forces could become eligible for naturalization, regardless of their time in the United States or status. But the issue of military family members who are in the United States without documentation remains unresolved.

As two immigration law experts noted in a recent article for Clearinghouse Review, a publication of the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, “Servicemen and women, citizens and immigrants alike, deserve a system that works and is a better reflection of the values and traditions that make America the land of liberty and opportunity—the land which they have pledged to protect for all of us.”

At a time when our forces are thinly stretched, it does not make sense for military personnel to face the additional pressure of deciding whether to stay in the armed forces and abandon their families, or leave the service they freely joined and move to another country to be with their loved ones.

Angela Maria Kelley is Vice President for Immigration Policy and Advocacy and Lawrence J. Korb is a Senior Fellow at American Progress.

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House Health Care Bill a Mixed Bag for Immigrants

House Health Care Bill a Mixed Bag for Immigrants

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King County, WA setting a good example:

King County OKs 'don't ask' law on immigration

King County will continue providing services to residents without regard to citizenship or immigration status, under an ordinance adopted Monday by a divided County Council.

By Keith Ervin

Seattle Times staff reporter

King County will continue providing services to residents without regard to citizenship or immigration status, under an ordinance adopted Monday by a divided County Council.

The council voted 5-4 for the law, which sponsor Larry Gossett said is intended to discourage racial profiling and "ratchet down the fear level" when people who are in the country illegally seek public-health services or deal with sheriff's deputies.

The law, which prohibits sheriff's deputies from asking about people's immigration status in most circumstances, continues current practices of the Sheriff's Office and Public Health — Seattle & King County, Gossett said. "The reason we wanted to codify it is in a few years there will be different members on the King County Council and a different executive."

The Metropolitan King County Council passed the ordinance after sheriff's spokesman John Urquhart said the county's "don't ask" policy has assisted law enforcement. "We could not do our job," he said, "if people were afraid to come to us as victims, as witnesses to crimes, if they were afraid that they were going to be deported over it."

Public Health Director David Fleming said, "Denying access to care because of citizenship status is not good medicine and is not cost-effective."

But council member Kathy Lambert said after voting against the ordinance, "We've been doing this since before 1992, so why do we have to put it in code?"

Lambert said she believes the county jails should investigate the citizenship of repeat offenders — something they don't now do.

Craig Keller, of Respect Washington, which advocates local enforcement of immigration laws, told the council, "If you pass this ordinance, you're throwing out a welcome mat to a greater population who are in the country illegally. ... The larger problem is the increasing population of illegal aliens and political corruption that comes with them."

The ordinance was supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, the King County Labor Council and other groups.

Voting in favor were Councilmembers Gossett, Dow Constantine, Bob Ferguson, Julia Patterson and Larry Phillips. Lambert, Reagan Dunn, Jane Hague and Pete von Reichbauer voted no.

County Executive Kurt Triplett will sign the law, first proposed by his former boss, then-Executive Ron Sims, said Triplett spokeswoman Natasha Jones.

Keith Ervin: 206-464-2105 or kervin@seattletimes.com

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U.S. readies plan to ID departing visitors

Program would cover only those foreigners who leave by air

One U.S. program fingerprints and photographs foreign visitors, and a plan in the works would screen them at airports as they left, too. (Marcio Jose Sanchez/associated Press)

By Spencer S. Hsu

Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 8, 2009

The Department of Homeland Security is finalizing a proposal to collect fingerprints or eye scans from all foreign travelers at U.S. airports as they leave the country, officials said, a costly screening program that airlines have opposed.

The plan, which would take effect within two years, would collect fingerprints at airport security checkpoints, departure gates or terminal kiosks, allowing the government to track when roughly 35 million foreign visitors a year leave the country and who might be overstaying their visas, DHS officials said. The department plans to send the proposal to the White House as soon as next month for review and inclusion in President Obama's next budget.

Some experts and former government officials are skeptical. In a concession to industry, DHS said it probably will drop plans to require airlines to pay for the bulk of the program and is looking to cut costs, which could reach $1 billion to $2 billion over a decade, largely to be paid by taxpayers or foreign travelers. In addition, the program would not operate for now at land borders, where 80 percent of noncitizens enter and leave the country, because fingerprinting travelers there could cost billions more and significantly delay commerce.

The ultimate scope of the system -- how rigorous it is and its final price tag -- will signal how the Obama administration and a Democratic Congress balance expensive post-9/11 security mandates against the nation's financial constraints, analysts and former government officials said. Congress might have to reexamine the value of border controls that a few years ago were deemed critical for security and for curbing illegal immigration but that might be less effective than first thought or carry unpopular economic or diplomatic costs, they added.

Meeting a mandate

"It will be up to Congress to put its money where its mandate is," a senior DHS official said, outlining the plans on the condition of anonymity because Secretary Janet Napolitano has not made a final decision. "The administration and Congress have to decide how they want to implement this in times of budget austerity."

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a prominent congressional supporter of the tracking requirement, said she was pleased with DHS's "long overdue" move.

"A biometric exit system is critical to tracking the arrival and departure of foreign nationals -- not just through a paper trail, but through fingerprints, photographs, and other fraud-proof biometric identifiers," Feinstein said in an e-mail statement.

The DHS proposal marks the latest government step to satisfy a 1996 mandate by Congress to automatically track when foreigners enter and exit the country. Independent analysts have estimated that 40 percent of illegal immigrants enter the country legally and overstay their visas.

Congress focused on inbound travelers after the 2001 terrorist attacks -- several of the hijackers held expired visas -- appropriating $3 billion since 2003 on the US-VISIT tracking program. The program collects biological identifiers, such as fingerprints and digital photographs, from all arriving foreigners except Canadians and Mexicans with special border-crossing cards.

In 2004, lawmakers ordered that similar information also be collected from noncitizens upon exit but did not set a deadline.

By the time Bush administration officials unveiled a $3.5 billion program in April 2008, however, political impetus for changes had weakened. Air carriers protested that they had not been consulted and should not bear the bulk of the liability and cost of what they argued was the government's duty to fingerprint travelers. The requirement also bucked industry trends of cutting costs by automating boarding processes and moving passengers away from ticket counters.

DHS officials accused airlines of obstructing the proposal. In the end, industry lobbyists persuaded Congress to delay the plan until tests were completed this year. Industry leaders said they still hope the administration consults them.

"As far along as they are in the process, they haven't spoken a word to trade associations or any of our airlines," said Ken Dunlap, a spokesman for the International Air Transport Association, a trade group for 230 carriers.

Costs vs. risks

DHS officials said they are considering ways to hold down costs. Collecting fingerprints at security checkpoints would be cheaper than doing so at the departure gates, but checkpoints could be more prone to fraud by people who leave the airport instead of boarding their flights. Fingerprinting at departure gates, however, would require more workers, DHS officials said.

Such trade-offs raise more basic questions about the purpose of the program. Supporters say that, by collecting fingerprints and other data, officials can instantly check the identity of a foreign visitor leaving the country against security watch lists. It could also help target foreigners who have violated immigration law.

But critics point out that potential terrorists entering the country present a greater concern than those leaving. And, they say, when it comes to immigration violations, the new system would add only a marginal benefit.

DHS says it already can identify noncitizens who leave the country about 93 percent of the time by comparing passenger records of international airliners on arrival and departure. Officials said they think the rest mostly involve people who leave the country by land or whose names are recorded improperly at some point. Of the 200,000 to 400,000 travelers each year who immigration officials estimate overstay their visas, US-VISIT identifies those deemed a higher priority for investigation based on their nationality, age, sex and other biographical factors.

"The idea that there are serious national security risks that we've identified but we haven't pursued because we don't have an exit system is simply not plausible," said Stewart A. Baker, who was DHS undersecretary of policy from 2005 to 2008.

Among the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants living in the United States, the bigger problem is catching those considered a high priority, whether they overstay visas, commit serious crimes, violate deportation orders or pose other threats, Baker said.

The current system of tracking incoming visitors gave immigration officials leads last year on more than 14,000 who potentially presented a high risk, leading to 750 arrests. But the immigration agency office in charge of catching overstayers spent only $42 million on those investigations. Baker said that, before the government spends more to add names to the list of those in the country illegally, it should expand enforcement efforts.

Others noted that an airport-based system can be evaded by people who drive over the border.

"If you're doing this for immigration control purposes, how can you have a complete system without doing land" borders, said Robert C. Bonner, the head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection from 2003 to 2005. "Other than congressional pressure, the question is, why do this?"

The senior DHS official defended the pending proposal. "This would add a level of certainty to the departures of one category of people who came into the U.S. . . . in the air category," the official said, adding, "It is a partial solution and it should never be seen as more than that."

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Immigrants can make important contributions to society, pope says

By Carol Glatz
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- People should not look upon immigrants as problems, but as fellow brothers and sisters who can be valuable contributors to society, Pope Benedict XVI said.

The migration of peoples represents a chance "to highlight the unity of the human family and the value of welcoming, hospitality and love for one's neighbor," he said Nov. 9.

The pope spoke during an audience with participants of the Sixth World Congress on the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Refugees taking place Nov. 9-12 at the Vatican.

The pope underlined the dramatic difficulties many migrants face in their efforts to survive or improve living conditions for themselves and their families.

"The economic crisis, with the enormous growth in unemployment, diminishes the possibilities of employment and increases the number of those who aren't able to find even unsteady work," he said.

The economic divide between industrialized and poor countries continues to grow, he said, and many people have no choice but to leave their homeland in search of a living -- even if it means accepting inhuman working conditions and experiencing great difficulties fitting in someplace new with different language, culture and rules.

Many immigrants today are fleeing "humanly unacceptable" living conditions, but they are not finding "the reception they hoped for elsewhere," said the pope.

Globalization means that working for the common good must extend beyond national borders, he said. True development comes through solidarity, addressing the unequal distribution of the world's resources, "dialogue between cultures and respect for legitimate differences," he said.

The pope said today's phenomenon of world migration can offer that needed opportunity to meet new cultures, foster understanding between peoples, build peace and promote development that benefits all nations.

Christians must be open to listening to the word of God who calls people to imitate Christ in caring for others and to "never be tempted to despise and reject people who are different," he said.

Conforming one's life to Christ's means seeing every man and woman as a brother or sister, children of the one God, he said.

This sense of brotherhood leads to being caring and hospitable toward others, especially those in need, he said.

"Every Christian community that is faithful to Jesus' teachings cannot but feel respect and concern for all people ... especially for those who find themselves in difficulty," he said.

"This is why the church invites all Christians to open their hearts to migrants and their families knowing that they are not just a 'problem,' but are a 'resource'" that can contribute to true development and the good of all people, he said.

For immigrants, illness can bring a death sentence

By Laura Rótolo November 5, 2009

THE RECENT DEATH of an immigrant who was detained at the Suffolk County House of Correction is a tragic display of the human rights crisis in the Massachusetts detention system for immigrants facing deportation.

The death of Pedro Juan Tavarez, as well as the 2006 death of Vincent Murphy, another Suffolk detainee, brings to at least 105 the number of known deaths of immigrants in custody of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement since 2003. While the details behind these two deaths remain murky, we must ask whether they, like others around the country, were caused by the failure to provide the most basic health care to people detained in Massachusetts jails and prisons during deportation proceedings.

While outside the prison gates the nation debates whether to overhaul the health care system with a public option, detained immigrants have no option at all. They cannot bring their own doctors to jail or get their own medication, even if they are willing to pay for them. If immigrants become sick in detention, they must rely on a system that has failed time and again to respond to even the most urgent medical needs.

Meanwhile, Massachusetts makes money on locking up immigrants. The Suffolk County jail, which can hold approximately 275 immigration detainees on any given day, receives $90 per detainee per day from the federal government. One alternative to detention - a GPS monitoring ankle device - costs about $12 a day.

As the lead investigator of a recent 18-month ACLU study of detention conditions in Massachusetts, I saw firsthand the systemic denial of medical care at the nine immigration detention sites - and the fear of retaliation for speaking up about problems.

I repeatedly requested and was denied access to reports filed with the government by lawyers from American Bar Association, who had permission to visit detainees at Suffolk and other county jails in Massachusetts. For years, the Bush administration kept these ABA reports a secret. Recently, however, the Obama administration made them public, and the ABA’s findings directly confirm that detained immigrants are often ignored or face excessively long waits to be seen by a doctor. Some reported that they waited months to be seen by medical personnel, while often growing sicker.

I was surprised to learn that detainees had written a letter to the Bar Association on the day Vincent Murphy died, alleging that he had died from a lack of medical care. They said he was “was coughing blood when he arrived, and detainees notified facility staff of his illness, but staff was ‘not willing to listen.’ ’’

Both the American Bar Association and the ACLU found that detainees fear retaliation if they dare to speak up at Suffolk County jail. Such fear is “at a level that the ABA has not encountered in the nearly five years that we have been visiting detention facilities.’’ ABA lawyers reported such difficulty finding detainees who would speak with them about conditions at Suffolk that they ended up talking to only two detainees, both of whom were so agitated and emotional with fear during their interviews that one of them “held his hands together to try to control his shaking.’’

Janet Napolitano, the secretary of Homeland Security, recently announced plans to improve the immigration detention system. The deaths of two immigrants in Boston serve as a tragic reminder that the need for change is urgent and that the stakes are literally a matter of life and death.

Laura Rótolo is a staff attorney at the ACLU of Massachusetts and author of the recent ACLU report “Detention and Deportation in the Age of ICE.’’

Walking a mile in an immigrant's moccasins -- latimes.com

Walking a mile in an immigrant's moccasins -- latimes.com

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Immigrant Jail Tests U.S. View of Legal Access

By NINA BERNSTEIN

Published: November 1, 2009

A startling petition arrived at the New York City Bar Association in October 2008, signed by 100 men, all locked up without criminal charges in the middle of Manhattan.

The little-known detention center in Greenwich Village, on the fourth floor, reopened last year.

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

Daniel I. Miller, a former detainee at the Varick Street center, complained of abuses there. “These people have no rules,” he said.

In vivid if flawed English, it described cramped, filthy quarters where dire medical needs were ignored and hungry prisoners were put to work for $1 a day.

The petitioners were among 250 detainees imprisoned in an immigration jail that few New Yorkers know exists. Above a post office, on the fourth floor of a federal office building in Greenwich Village, the Varick Street Detention Facility takes in 11,000 men a year, most of them longtime New Yorkers facing deportation without a lawyer.

Galvanized by the petition, the bar association sent volunteers into the jail to offer legal counsel to detainees — a strategy the Obama administration has embraced as it tries to fix the entire detention system.

“Immigration and Customs Enforcement considers the access to legal services at Varick Street as a good model,” said Sean Smith, a spokesman for Janet Napolitano, secretary of homeland security, who oversees immigration enforcement.

But the lawyers doing the work have reached a different conclusion, after finding that most detainees with a legal claim to stay in the United States are routinely transferred to more remote jails before they can be helped. The lawyers say their effort has laid bare the fundamental unfairness of a system where immigrant detainees, unlike criminal defendants, can be held without legal representation and moved from state to state without notice.

In a report to be issued on Monday, the association’s City Bar Justice Center is calling for all immigrant detainees to be provided with counsel. And an article to be published this month in The Fordham Law Review treats the Varick jail as a case study in the systemic barriers to legal representation.

The new focus on Varick highlights the conflict between two forces: the administration’s plans to revamp detention, and current policies that feed the flow of detainees through the system as it is now. A disjointed mix of county jails and privately run prisons, where mistreatment and medical neglect have been widely documented, the detention network churns roughly 400,000 detainees through 32,000 beds each year.

“Any attempt to get support or services for them is stymied because you don’t know where they’re going to end up,” said Lynn M. Kelly, the director of the Justice Center.

When she asked that the lawyers’ letters of legal advice be forwarded to detainees who had been transferred from Varick, she said the warden balked, saying he had to consider the financial interests of his private shareholders: 1,200 members of a central Alaskan tribe whose dividends are linked to Varick’s profits under a $79 million, three-year federal contract.

Federal officials would not discuss their transfer policies, but asked for patience as they try to make the detention system more humane and cost-effective.

“We inherited an inadequate detention system from the previous administration that does not meet ICE’s current priorities or needs,” said Matthew Chandler, a Homeland Security spokesman. Officials say they are committed to a complete overhaul, including less-penal detention centers with better access to lawyers.

The volunteer lawyers and the petition’s author, an ailing refugee from torture in Romania who spent eight months inside Varick, say many problems persist there, though the added scrutiny has led to improvements. Detainees who want a Gideon Bible no longer have to pay the commissary $7. Immigration officials are more responsive when a lawyer complains that a detainee in pain is not getting treatment.

But most detainees do not have a lawyer, and the few who do include men who have fallen prey to incompetent or fraudulent practitioners. Recurrent complaints include frigid temperatures, mildew and meals that leave detainees hungry and willing to clean for $1 a day to pay for commissary food. That wage is specified in the contract with the Alaskan company, which budgeted 23,000 days of such work the first year, and collects a daily rate of $227.68 for each detainee.

The Alaska connection is one of the stranger twists in the jail’s fitful history. Opened as a federal immigration detention center in 1984, Varick became chronically overcrowded after 1998, when new laws mandated the detention of all noncitizens who had ever committed a crime on a list of deportable offenses, expanded to include misdemeanors like drug possession.

A Dominican man there died of untreated pneumonia in 1999 — the first reported death in the nationwide detention system, which now counts 106 since October 2003.

The Varick facility, which is on the corner of Houston Street, fell short of national detention standards adopted in 2000, because it lacks any outdoor recreation space. But under a grandfather clause, it was allowed to remain open until 9/11, when the terror attack, blocks away, forced its evacuation. For years, it was shuttered. It quietly reopened in February 2008, operated by Ahtna Technical Services Inc., a subsidiary of Ahtna Inc. — still with no access to fresh air.

As an Alaska Native corporation, Ahtna has won numerous federal contracts without having to compete with other companies; last year it paid its tribal shareholders about $500 each in dividends. It hires a Texas subcontractor to supply guards and transportation, along with the shackles and belly chains routinely used on detainees being moved in or out.

Varick’s population includes illegal immigrants, asylum-seekers and legal immigrants who face deportation because they have past criminal convictions. Almost half of those screened by the volunteer lawyers have already been in detention for four to six months, according to the bar association report, and nearly 40 percent have legal grounds to contest deportation.

A few, the report says, have a possible claim to citizenship, which would make their detention unlawful. But the volunteers, including lawyers from 16 corporate firms, say they can offer only rudimentary legal triage to a handful of detainees a week.

The Department of Justice is asking Congress for money to expand the law project, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement invites Washington officials to visit the weekly triage sessions. The agency allowed a reporter to observe a session, but not to tour the jail. On a recent Thursday, only 11 of 35 detainees who had signed up made it into one of five glassed-in booths where they could consult with pairs of legal volunteers.

One, a 25-year-old Mexican, had been delivering food for an Italian restaurant on Madison Avenue until his detention. After a week in Varick, the government had not served him with a “notice to appear” telling why he was detained and setting the date and place where he would be heard by an immigration judge.

Volunteers were researching his case a week later when he was transferred to Atlanta. It could just as easily have been Louisiana or Texas, far from any free legal help, said Maria Navarro, a Legal Aid lawyer who supervises the volunteers. Even in cities, she said, lawyers are reluctant to represent detainees who may be suddenly moved far away.

Another 25-year-old, who had come to New York as a legal immigrant from Belize at age 2, told lawyers he had worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken to support his 5-year-old daughter, a citizen, when his sickle-cell anemia permitted. After a standing huddle, the lawyers told him that because his notice listed old convictions for possession of marijuana, he was ineligible for release on bond or with an electronic monitoring bracelet.

A Haitian, who had served time for at least one drug-related offense, had a lawyer but wanted a second opinion after being held in Varick for 16 months. He described himself as a barber, interpreter and legal resident of Brooklyn for 23 years.

“It is double jeopardy,” he protested, nursing a swollen jaw with teeth missing. “I become a diabetic here, because of anxiety, stress and suicidal conditions.”

Yet a detainee from the former Soviet Union praised the jail. “Varick is heaven” compared with some county jails in New Jersey (Bergen and Monmouth) and Florida, he said, citing abuse by anti-immigrant guards.

A century-long line of Supreme Court decisions holds that immigration detention is not a punishment or deprivation of liberty, and does not require legal counsel for fundamental fairness.

But Daniel I. Miller, 39, the Romanian whose petition reached the bar association, said his own case showed how high the stakes can be. Mr. Miller, a chef, fled his native land in 1994 after the secret police mutilated him for advocating gay rights. In New York, he had already been paroled for a criminal conviction — for signing his partner’s name on a contract — when immigration authorities detained him.

To no avail, records show, his lawyer and an outraged doctor at St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan urged his release from Varick for treatment of tumors on his liver. Instead, he was transferred in April to the Orange County Jail in Goshen, N.Y., where he said he also circulated a petition. The authorities there accused him of trying to start a riot and sent him to segregation with a murder defendant.

“These people have no rules, that’s the main problem,” Mr. Miller said, speaking from the Midtown office where he is starting an organic catering business. He credits his lawyer, Howard Brill, for that turnaround: On Sept. 2, after almost a year in custody, an immigration judge granted him the right to stay in the United States.

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