Every day the U.S. government is forced to grapple with the consequences of harsh and sweeping immigration laws passed by Congress 13 years ago. Under the 1996 laws, detention and deportation are mandatory for thousands of immigrants convicted of nonviolent crimes, and judges are powerless to intervene, even in the most deserving cases.

Plans to reform immigration detention management and oversight, announced today by the US government, should quickly be translated into actual policy change and accountability. The plans focus on centralizing control of facilities used to hold detained immigrants.

As a feminist and as an American working on immigration policy, I have a clear line in the sand when it comes to the treatment of women who immigrate to this country: “defending our borders” should not be at the expense of defending our values. But when I interviewed women in immigration detention facilities all over the country last year and heard their stories of neglect and abuse, it became clear to me that this line has been crossed.

The US government should reform immigration enforcement policies that inflict needless suffering on immigrant women and their families, rights advocates said today. A former immigration detention center nurse, a former detainee, and a group of leading human rights advocacy and research groups will testify to Congress at a Capitol Hill briefing on June 24, 2009.

Thank you all for coming today and for taking part in this discussion. My name is Meghan Rhoad and I am the US researcher for the Women’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch. I was the principal researcher and author of the March 2009 report, Detained & Dismissed: Women’s Struggles to Obtain Health Care in United States Immigration Detention.  It is a privilege to be here and to have the opportunity to share our findings and recommendations about these important issues in our nation’s capital. And it is an honor to be introducing Kathleen Baldoni, who, despite the adverse consequences for herself, has come forward to speak out on behalf of the women and men she cared for as a detention center nurse.

Three quarters of non-citizens deported from the United States over the last decade after serving criminal sentences were convicted of nonviolent offenses, and one in five had been in the country legally, sometimes for decades.

"I was starting to go blind," said Mary T. A diabetic, she was being held by U.S. immigration authorities when her vision began to fail. "I could only see shades of people," she said, "I couldn't see numbers or letters." She repeatedly complained to her jailers but received no medical care for 15 days as her condition worsened. When a nurse finally was summoned, Mary T. recalled, the nurse asked her, "Why didn't you tell us?"