Thursday, May 14, 2015
Report: Immigration Officials Discriminate Against LGBT Immigrants
An analysis conducted by the Center for American Progress has found that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, or LGBT, immigrants are consistently detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, even when ICE’s own system recommends release.
According to data obtained by CAP through a Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, request, ICE chose to detain LGBT individuals in two-thirds of instances in which its own Risk Classification Assessment, or RCA, tool explicitly recommended release. Seventy percent of all LGBT persons processed through ICE’s RCA system were given an option or recommendation of release, yet 68 percent of them were instead detained and more than half were detained without bond.
A study by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General found that ICE officials overrode explicit RCA recommendations only 7.6 percent of the time for the general population, but the rate for LGBT immigrants was nearly 20 percent. In only 16 percent of overall cases, the RCA tool gave discretion to ICE officials on whether to detain. That number is contrasted with the 64 percent in LGBT cases.
The Center for American Progress submitted a FOIA request to ICE on October 8, 2014, requesting the Risk Classification Assessments for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender immigrants for fiscal year 2014, which ran from October 2013 through October 2014, and the actual custody determinations made by ICE for members of this population. ICE provided the requested documents on March 13, 2015.
Click here to read the paper.
https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2015/05/report-immigration-officials-discriminate-against-lgbt-immigrants.html
