The immigration detention system is a big, swollen mess. (Note: I work in immigration, but my thoughts in this post, as always, are entirely my own.) Thanks to an increasingly aggressive (and increasingly well-funded) Immigration and Customs Enforcement, it's had to take in ballooning numbers of immigrants (and U.S. citizens) over the last decade; thanks to a thoroughly backlogged and understaffed immigration court system, it's had to hold them for ever-increasing periods of time until they can be deported or released. The result is horrific: in recent months, everyone from Human Rights Watch to the libertarian magazine Reason has called attention to widespread abuse and dysfunction. The Obama Administration is making an effort to reform detention standards, but, at best, there's a long way to go. One might think that even immigration hardliners would want fewer people stuck in immigration detention; after all, it means they're not being swiftly and efficiently deported en masse. (In fact, the status quo is ideal only from one perspective: the private corrections industry.) But two House bills signal that Republicans in the 112th Congress are moving to embrace immigration detention as a positive good. The first is the DHS appropriations bill currently under debate on the House floor, which grants ICE $2.5 billion more for detention than the agency requested for while requiring it to maintain a daily capacity of at least 34,000 beds. (ICE wasn't given a dollar more than it requested for "alternatives to detention.") The second is the so-called "Keep Our Communities Safe Act of 2011," which is under consideration in the House Judiciary Committee. Attempting to undo a pair of Supreme Court decisions, the bill would allow indefinite detention of immigrants who (for diplomatic reasons) can't be deported to their home countries. Furthermore, it would allow asylum-seekers and other immigrants who are applying for legal status under current law to stay in detention without bail for months or years. Both sides of the immigration debate used to agree that the current system is broken. This week, while arguing that conservatives should be more willing to compromise even on taxes than on immigration, columnist Ross Douthat wrote "There doesn’t have to be a deal on immigration. The system is dysfunctional, yes, but a dysfunctional immigration system doesn’t threaten the long-term stability and prosperity of the United States." With these bills, House Republicans are signing on with Douthat. Mass detention is, quite literally, a holding pattern, but it's becoming the operating condition of our immigration policy.
