Two West Coast lawmakers have introduced legislation in the Senate and House of Representatives aiming to add additional oversight to immigration detention centers and put a pause on their expansion.
Representative Pramila Jayapal from Washington and Senator Kamala Harris from California filed legislation, dubbed the ‘‘Detention Oversight, Not Expansion Act’’ or ‘‘DONE Act,” this week. Citing current leniency related to in-custody deaths …
and inadequacy in the Department of Homeland Security’s attention to abuses within these facilities …
the legislation proposes a moratorium on the expansion or construction of immigrant detention centers …
and requires DHS to prepare a report on how current immigration detention numbers will be decreased.
Nearly two-thirds of immigrant detention centers are privately-owned, and it’s not clear how the legislation would affect local jails that contract with the federal government for immigrant detention.
You can follow S. 2849 and and H.R. 5820 on GovTrack, and read the DONE Act embedded below.
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Image by Seattle Globalist via Flickr and is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
