Lawyers: immigrant mothers coerced to wear ankle monitors

“ICE takes very seriously the health, safety and welfare of those in our care”, the statement added.

Volunteers at the San Antonio bus station have found many families do not understand the terms of their release, and even where they have been handed important documents, they are in English so Spanish or indigenous language speakers do not understand the content. Mothers who have been shackled with an ankle monitor have no idea how or when to charge the device and their deportation officers refused to explain or answer questions before release.

She said she would rather not be wearing the ankle monitor, which itches her skin and keeps her up at night, but wasn’t given a choice. On Monday, lawyers at a Texas facility said women were being coerced into accepting ankle-monitoring bracelets even though they had already been granted bond.

“There is a stigma”, Lichter said.

Immigration experts said they don’t think the ruling will drive more immigrants to come to the border.

A court decision last week found holding children to be unlawful, and families are being released from immigrant detention centers faster. There is also another small detention center under investigation in Pennsylvania. Pushing the monitors is an abuse of authority, he said, that “threatens the entire immigration court process”.

Federal District Court Judge Dolly Gee in Los Angeles ruled that an 18-year-old settlement between the US government and child migrants still applies to children now detained with their parents.

The Associated Press reports that ICE is imposing an unusual set of conditions on the women, as indicated by American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), who sent an open letter to ICE along with several other immigration nonprofits.

The de facto use of ankle monitors maybe on the rise: ICE officials in New York also began fitting migrant women with them last year, telling Village Voice reporter Tessa Stuart they were a “flight mitigation tool”. The lawyers say that similar tactics are happening in the facility in Karnes City.

The Karnes County Residential Center and the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley are two of the facilities impacted by the ruling.

Part of the government’s original rationale for opening the detention centers was to deter more women and children from coming to the United States.

The ICE official said during that meeting that it was necessary to detain families to ensure they didn’t vanish.

In June 2015, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, announced that the administration would make “substantial changes” to family immigration detention, including by limiting the detention of families who show they have reasonable or credible claims of fear of returning to their home countries, a first step in qualifying for asylum in the US.