Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey,  the largest immigrant detention center on the East Coast, was the sight of a May demonstration against the Trump administration's immigration policies. (Photo by New Jersey Monitor)

WASHINGTON — Members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus pledged Thursday to make more visits to immigration detention centers across the country to carry out oversight of the Trump administration’s crackdown.

The members detailed their visits to various detention centers over last week’s recess. Many people they visited in those centers were arrested while attending their court hearings or had no criminal record, they said.

“What we and our colleagues witnessed was the system being used to punish people simply for being an immigrant, and we all know that cruelty is the point with this president,” said New York Democratic Rep. Nydia Velázquez.

Continued oversight of immigration detention centers will only become more important, members of the all-Democrat caucus said, if congressional Republicans succeed in passing a massive tax and spending bill that would increase immigration enforcement funding by billions, including for detention centers.

Republicans are moving ahead with a legislative procedure known as reconciliation to fulfill President Donald Trump’s priorities without needing 60 votes in the U.S. Senate.

The vow to continue with oversight at detention centers comes after three congressional Democrats said they were accosted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials at a New Jersey detention center last month. That incident ended with the Newark Mayor Ras Baraka arrested, and Rep. LaMonica McIver facing federal charges. The charges against Baraka were dismissed about two weeks later.

“We will not succumb to any intimidation tactics,” CHC Chair Rep. Adriano Espaillat of New York said. “We will continue to comply with our duty to have oversight of these detention centers, and we will visit them within the parameters of the law.”

Members of Congress are allowed to conduct oversight visits at any Department of Homeland Security facility that detains immigrants, without prior notice, under provisions of an appropriations law.

Collateral arrests

Washington state Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a former chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, slammed the Trump administration’s expansion of government contracts with private prison companies to detain migrants.

“It is critically important that we members of Congress continue to investigate what are supposed to be civil detention centers, but instead operate as private for-profit prisons with substandard medical care and they make billions of dollars … in contracts from this administration detaining people of all legal statuses,” Jayapal said. 

The detention center in New Jersey reopened this year and ICE awarded GEO Group Inc. with a $1 billion contract to run the facility.

Jayapal said when she conducted an oversight visit at the Tacoma, Washington, Northwest ICE Processing Center, which was formerly known as the Northwest Detention Center, over the recess, some of the people being detained were caught up in immigration enforcement raids targeting other people. Such immigration arrests are known as collateral arrests.

She said one woman she spoke to who was detained had been in the country for more than 20 years, but did not have a permanent legal status.

“She was swept up in a raid at the workplace, and she was detained less than a week before she was going to get married to a U.S. citizen,” Jayapal said.

She said another person she talked to was a man who had been in the U.S. for 31 years and is a permanent legal resident.

“These are not the so-called worst of the worst that Trump kept saying he was going to go after,” Jayapal said. “These are simply people who love this country, who have been in this country for decades, who are married to U.S. citizens and have U.S. citizen children, and do not understand why the country they love would be doing this to them.”

Democratic Rep. Lou Correa of California, said that he’s come across immigrants in detention centers who were arrested while attending their court hearings.

“These individuals are following the law, showing up … to court hearings, and they’re having their removal cases dismissed,” he said. “Immediately as they walk out of that courtroom, they are rearrested and put into what is called an expedited removal process … to quickly get them out of the country.”