LA Times: Abuse Reports from Detained Black Immigrants Disproportionately High, advocacy groups say

The article features Government Accountability Project whistleblower client claims and was originally published here.

WASHINGTON —

After analyzing the records of nearly 17,000 calls between 2016 and 2021 from its national immigrant detention hotline, Freedom for Immigrants released a report Wednesday that it and other advocacy groups say indicates a pattern of racism and abuse toward Black migrants.

Among the findings of the report, the groups concluded that 28% of 2,200 abuse-related reports came from detainees from predominantly Black countries, despite accounting for 6% of the detained population in 2019, according to their analysis of the most recent population data by country of origin from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan data research organization at Syracuse University. Freedom for Immigrants and the other groups behind the report, including the Black LGBTQIA+ Migrant Project, the Black Alliance for Just Immigration and the UndocuBlack Network, advocate for the abolition of immigrant detention.

According to the study’s methodology, the analysis assumes that detainees calling from Black-majority countries are Black. The authors filtered call records for phrases indicating verbal or physical abuse, such as “medical neglect,” “assault,” and “N Word.”

Alexxis Pons Abascal, a spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in a...

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