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Yesterday marked the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The same day a joint report by Human Rights Watch and the ACLU titled, “Deportation by Default: Mental Disability, Unfair Hearings, and Indefinite Detention in the US Immigration System”, was released. The report details numerous ways that the immigration court system fails to protect mentally disabled detainees from unfair detention and deportation. The findings are based on interviews with 104 people, including 40 non-citizens with mental disabilities. As of 2008 it is estimated that 57,000 mentally disabled persons were involved in immigration proceedings. Individuals facing deportation are not afforded the right to an attorney. This means that even individuals with greatly diminished mental functioning, who are unable tell time, or remember where they were born, are not provided legal counsel. Immigration judges are not trained to identify mental illness and ICE attorneys were found to have sometimes neglected to perform competency evaluations for detainees even when requested by the court. There is no standard to determine if a person can reasonably act as their own representative. If a detainee is found to be incompetent and cannot provide a lawyer, family member or other advocate, a “custodian” from the detention center may be appointed to help during court proceedings. The report calls this, “…akin to having a jail warden act as a defense attorney.” In the most egregious cases, US citizens were deported from the United States and only returned after intervention by their families. In many cases, mentally disabled non-citizens, including legal permanent residents, are wrongly thrust into a legal system that the report calls, “complicated and adversarial in the best of times”.

Guest: Sarah Mehta, author of the report, “Deportation by Default: Mental Disability, Unfair Hearings, and Indefinite Detention in the US Immigration System,” and an Aryeh Neier Fellow at Human Rights Watch and the ACLU.

Find out more at www.hrw.org and www.aclu.org.

View the report here: http://www.hrw.org/node/91725