Report on Electronic Ankle Bracelets as Alternative to Detention – webinar today

Freedom for Immigrants, the Immigrant Defense Project, and the Kathryn O. Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic at Cardozo School of Law today released a new report, Immigration Cyber Prisons: Ending the Use of Electronic Ankle Shackles. The report highlights the severe harms caused by ICE’s electronic ankle shackling program. It is the first empirical study to document the nature and scale of the harms, racial disparities and lack of efficacy of the program, using data from legal service providers regarding almost 1,000 immigrant clients, about 150 survey responses from directly-impacted people, and several long-form interviews with people who wished to share experiences with ankle shackling. The Guardian ran a story about the findings this morning.

Some key findings include:

• Over 90% of people experienced physical harm due to the ankle shackle, and those harms included: open wounds even causing permanent scars, excessive heat, and electrical shocks. 
• The psychological consequences are also extremely negative. The constant sight and feel of a shackle around one’s ankle is agonizing, and possibly retraumatizing to people who were fleeing persecution. 88% of survey participants reported the shackles harmed their mental health, and an alarming 12% of immigrants reported suicidal thoughts. 
• The stigma associated with shackling results in social isolation and financial hardship–78% of respondents reported financial hardship as a result of ankle shackling, including over two-thirds of respondents who reported that they lost or had difficulty obtaining work as a result of their electronic ankle shackle. 
• Finally, our study found that Black immigrants were disproportionately subjected to ankle shackles by ICE. Black immigrants were represented in the shackled cohort at more than twice the rate of their representation in the non-shackled cohort.

We hope that the report will be useful to illustrate to judges and policymakers that electronic ankle shackling is harmful to people, and that effective supportive services are available instead.

Today at 2 PM EDT we also are sharing the report with calls to action to Congressional and policy leaders. If you would like to amplify that request, please join the Twitter storm using the link below.

MHC