For more than a year, Leticia was not allowed to see her children, except on a small, primitive computer monitor attached to a telephone receiver. The situation was the same for the children, who viewed their mother on a corresponding monitor in the jail's visiting area.
No-contact visits are a jail rule for not only criminal inmates but for immigrant detainees. There is no face-to-face contact (not even through plexiglass), much less any touching.
Jamie Peachey
Arizona ACLU attorney Victoria Lopez advocates for immigrants' rights.
Jamie Peachey
Lindsay Marshall leads the Florence Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing legal advice to immigrants and refugees.
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It took more than a year after Leticia was taken by ICE for her to hug one of her children, and it happened as a fluke. Her 8-year-old son began crying for his mother during her court hearing, and a guard had the heart to allow them a short visit.
The separation adversely affected the boy. Depressed, he started failing in school.
During a phone call from jail before the hearing, Leticia had asked him what was wrong. "He started to cry and cry," she remembers. "'He said, 'Mommy, it's never going to be the same without you.' It was so terrible."
Visits from family and friends occur in a cramped room containing two rows of dingy monitors, with a camera perched atop each screen and a phone beside it. The detainee never sees his or her relative except in a grainy transmission that looks like security-camera footage.
ICE officials claim to be sensitive to detainees' need for contact visits.
They tell lawyers and activists that detainees at the Pinal County Jail are allowed in-person visits with family members — if they file a special request.
But in statements to New Times, ICE representatives tell different stories about the issue of contact visits.
Vincent Picard, agency spokesman in Arizona, says ICE "regularly" takes detainees from the Pinal County Jail to Florence Detention for contact visits, a claim contradicted by ICE field officer Marty Zelenka, who supervises federal detention in the county jail.
Zelenka says he never has denied a request for a contact visit but has received "very few."
Immigrant advocates at the ACLU and detainees say otherwise, insisting that contact visits are denied routinely at the jail.
"Almost all detainees to whom we spoke either indicated they were denied requests for contact visits or did not know they could even request such a visit," states the Arizona ACLU in a just-released report titled "In Their Own Words: Enduring Abuse in Arizona Immigration Detention."
As for the extremely limited visitation system at the jail, Leticia's daughter, Leslie, tells New Times that on several 65-mile trips from Phoenix to the jail to see her mother, she was turned away because prisoners had been put on lockdown or there was a problem with the jail's computers. Sometimes she was told to come back the next week.
New Times witnessed firsthand visitors getting turned away. On this occasion, the computer system had broken down. Everyone who was visiting family was booted out of the visitation lounge.
Pinal County contracts with a private company for its phones, and a 15-minute phone call can cost $20 — money that few detainees have. (The situation is a little better at Florence Detention, where calls cost 17 cents a minute.) The result is that many county detainees cannot contact their relatives.
Field officer Zelenka admits this is a problem that he hopes Pinal County will fix when a new phone contract is negotiated.
ICE is quick to emphasize that it requires contractors to sign an agreement to uphold federal detention standards and that humane treatment of immigrants is paramount among these standards.
Mandates include warm meals and access to outdoor recreation. As mentioned, the Pinal County Jail refuses to provide the latter to the immigrants it holds, even as it allows criminal inmates outdoor privileges.
This despite a 2009 internal ICE report, "Immigration Detention Overview and Recommendations," acknowledging that there are major differences between corrections and detention — mainly that corrections are "punitive" and detention is "civil."
The ICE report emphasizes that the philosophy of "care, custody, control" is inappropriate when dealing with immigrant detainees.
ICE acknowledges that it does not train its contractors to follow federal detention standards, which was obvious when New Times interviewed Pinal County Chief Deputy Kimbell, who is in charge of the jail.
Asked whether he sees a difference between "criminal inmates" and "detainees," Kimbell answers, "Corrections, detention — it's all the same thing."
After a year, Leticia was transferred out of the county jail to the Central Arizona Detention Center and, finally, to Eloy, where she remained in custody for another 10 months.
She says detention at the subsequent two facilities wasn't as bad because she had physical contact with her children during their visits.
U.S District Judge Mary H. Murguia ruled in October 2010 — a year and a half after Leticia's habeas corpus petition was filed — that the immigration courts had to reconsider her case and that continuing to detain her would be unjustified. This reconsideration still is pending, but Leticia has been free and back with her children since the ruling.
Her son is better now that his mother is out of jail. But he still has constant fear of losing her again.
