WASHINGTON, March 25 (UPI) -- The number of immigrants held in U.S. detention each day has tripled from 10,000 in 1996 to more than 30,000 in 2008, Amnesty International said Wednesday.
The detainees, who include some U.S. citizens, are being held without receiving hearings to determine whether their detentions are warranted and most of them experience "extreme difficulty" in retaining lawyers or getting help to navigate the U.S. legal process, the human rights group said in a release.
Undocumented immigrants are among the detainees but the group also contains lawful permanent residents, asylum seekers and survivors of torture and human trafficking, Amnesty International said. For some of them, an immigration official is the sole decision-maker they have access to, making the act of detention itself a virtual guarantor of an immigrant's fate, said Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International USA.
"America should be outraged by the scale of human rights abuses occurring within its own borders," Cox said. "Officials are locking up thousands of human beings without due process and holding them in a system that is impossible to navigate without the legal equivalent of GPS."
