200 NGOs Oppose Biden’s Historic Expansion Of ICE Detention System: “Detention Should Not Be About Politics.”

In a letter to President Biden delivered Thursday, 200 organizations, including NNIRR, voiced “outrage over your administration’s expansion of the cruel and unnecessary immigration detention system.”

The Hill has run a story on the letter here.

An excerpt from the story: “[A]dvocates and administration officials are operating under different paradigms of immigration policy: On one side mainly as an administrative field with broad humanitarian consequences, and on the other as a hybrid administrative and law enforcement matter subject to compulsory physical consequences and dependent on tactical deterrence…. ‘This suffering does not advance any rational policy goal. Detention does not provide an efficient or ethical means of border processing, and it certainly does not indicate to migrants that they are welcome in the United States. It merely exists to further the political goal of deterrence, which is cruel, inhumane and misguided — as even the most punitive forms of detention have been proven not to deter people from seeking safety or a better life,’ wrote the groups.”

Read the full letter and list of signing organizations here.