To the editor:

The abysmal record of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) begs for reform of their “prison/industrial complex” of privately run “detention center” prisons that lack essential elements of compassion and justice for innocent suffering individuals.

For example, Haitians who were pulled from the recent earthquake rubble, and flown to the U.S. on military planes have been incarcerated by ICE authorities and held for deportation, even though deportations to Haiti have been suspended indefinitely since the earthquake. These people have been traumatized. They have lost parents, siblings or children.

And they have been left by ICE to languish for MONTHS behind bars, devoid of treatment, recourse, contact, legal assistance, and in some cases, even sufficient food and water.

None of these people have criminal histories. Legal advocates who stumbled on the survivors in February at the Broward County Transitional Center, a privately operated immigration jail in Pompano Beach, Fla., have tried for weeks to persuade ICE officials to release them to U.S. citizen relatives who are eager to take them in.

Detailed individual requests for release by two dozen of the detainees have received no response. There is no reason to spend taxpayer dollars detaining traumatized earthquake survivors who cannot be deported, and that are neither a flight risk nor a danger to the community. Their prolonged and unnecessary detention has severely exacerbated their traumas that were the reasons they were flown here in the first place.

The Haitian nephews of Virgile Ulysse, 69, an American citizen from Norwalk, Conn., Jackson and Reagan were brought to the United States on a military plane, then promptly jailed at the Broward center when they arrived in Orlando on Jan. 19.

Jackson, who was trapped in the collapse of his family’s apartment building in the quake, and pulled from under cinderblocks by a cousin, lost many relatives in the destruction. His formal request for release describes how even the noise of someone on the jail stairs reactivates his fear of another earthquake and entrapment in another building collapse. Locked up, he would be trapped again. Talk about PTSD aggravation!

This is an inhumane bureaucratic travesty.

His older brother Reagan was abruptly transferred, and for days Jackson did not know where he was. Reagan had been transferred to a county jail six hours away. A paralegal found him there in shackles, about to be transferred again; guards, following government protocol, would not say where. “His brother is far away — he’s waiting, waiting,” Mr. Ulysse said of Jackson. “He started to cry on the phone. It’s very terrible.”

This is an inhumane bureaucratic travesty.

For three months now, Immigration keeps saying they will release the brothers “in two or three weeks” according to Mr. Ulysse.

In 2008, Hiu Lui Ng, a 34-year-old Chinese computer engineer was dragged from a cell at the ICE jail, the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility at the Central Falls, RI and mocked by guards as he screamed in pain from undiagnosed cancer and a broken spine.

This is an inhumane bureaucratic travesty.

Federal District Court Judge William E. Smith of Providence, R.I., in an unusual intervention at a habeas corpus hearing the day after the incident, sent Ng to the hospital where he died six days later.

Francisco Castaneda, 36, a Salvadoran detainee was held for two years in a California detention center and denied a biopsy for a painful lesion, though government doctors suspected the cancer that eventually required amputation.

This is an inhumane bureaucratic travesty.

In this case, a federal judge has said “the word ‘cruel’ is an understatement” for Castaneda’s mistreatment.

Egad, how low have we dropped to treat other humans worse than lab animals??

In spite of the administration paying lip service to reform, the government is trying to legally dodge responsibility instead of fixing an obviously broken system.

Please contact Congressman Rick Larsen and Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell and ask for reform on this mess.

John Hurd

Clinton