Daniel Zwerdling's reporting revealed the abuses that some immigrant detainees were subjected to in federal prisons and local jails. A new study by the Government Accountability Office takes Zwerdling's reporting one step further: not only are immigrant detainees being abused and mistreated, they are being prevented from pleading their cases due to a lack of access to phones and counsel, and some are even being denied medical care.

A recent article in THE NEW YORK TIMES reports that key parts of the detainee system are stretched beyond capacity and inmates are being sent to facilities in other states in order to relieve overcrowding. Moving inmates to another state, however, “puts stress on tenuous family bonds” making visits by family members and counsel they may try to provide much more difficult; THE NEW YORK TIMES article further argues that moves to other facilities may be “inhibiting the ability of inmates to receive health care.”

The increase in prison populations is due not only to bolstered border patrols but, as Zwerdling pointed out in his reporting, to renewed enforcement of a decade-old statute in immigration law which allows the government to indefinitely detain immigrants, even those in the country legally, if they’ve ever committed a crime, no matter how trivial.

Tag(s): immigration , prisons
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Prisoners attacked by dogs, denied medical attention, and threatened with solitary confinement. No, these allegations weren't from Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo. The alleged abuses happened right here in the U.S. -- at immigrant detention centers.

Immigration reform in the 1990s created a new class of prisoner. Non-citizens, living in the United States either legally or illegally, who committed any crime at any time, are subject to deportation. Pending a decision from the Department of Homeland Security, the immigrants are held at one of hundreds of detention centers around the country.

NPR reporter Daniel Zwerdling first heard of such facilities, and rumors of abuse inside them, from a New York immigrants' advocate. One particularly heinous case stood out: the 2004 death of a 34-year-old Jamaican immigrant held in Louisiana for a decade-old conviction. But confronted with a stone wall from authorities, and little access to the other inmates who witnessed the death, Zwerdling struggled to gain any traction.

This week on EXPOSÉ, how Zwerdling used sources inside the prison to uncover harrowing tales of prisoner abuse on American soil.

>> Listen to Zwerdling's original NPR series investigating the alleged abuse of two men detained by the Department of Homeland Security in two separate New Jersey prisons: "Jailed Immigrants Allege Abuse" and his moving piece using eyewitness testimony from several inmates to take listeners' step-by-step through the events leading up to "The Death of Richard Rust" at Louisiana's Oakdale Federal Detention Center.

Tag(s): Daniel Zwerdling , government contractors , immigration , prisons
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