My wife is a foreign national. I have hundreds of ICE officers as clients. I have been in refugee and detention facilities all over the world. I have been in ICE detention facilities in the US.
1) ICE has never, even under the worst days of Bush, gone door to door looking for undocumented aliens. If they approach a door its because they have probable cause that a criminal alien is living there. The major difference now is that under Obama ICE would only take the criminal aliens while now ICE will pick up all the illegals, even if they have been living here for a long time and never committed any crime.
2) Previously, under Bush ICE did conduct random sweeps into neighborhoods to pick people up.
http://www.immigrationnation.net/articles/more_than_1100_arrested_in_ca_immigration_sweep.html
ICE agents still have to have probable cause and the technique that they use is to have undercover agents (maybe half of ICE agents are naturalized citizens) congregate in public places and strike up a conversation with someone. They would say something like "Hey didn't you go to high school in X City." Once a person responds it is easy for an ICE agent to get probably cause to ask further questions based on accent and statements made.
The most important advice for people who are undocumented (like my son in law) is not to answer questions posed by strangers. ICE agents must have probable cause and if someone doesn't respond there is no probable cause.
3) ICE detention facilities are clean and much better facilities than most US jails. There is a very large number that are taken to medical facilities for care, especially after they are picked up. They are all offered legal representations.
Most people being deported are recent arrivals. They know that they have no chance of staying and want to go back as fast as possible but they have to appear before a judge with attorneys. Usually they go in groups of 20 and there are several prosecutors and defense attorneys but only one interpreter who has to interpret each element to each migrant.
The elements of the proceeding follow the same allocution procedure you see on Law and Order. Each defendant has to be told that they could be sentenced to jail, that they have a right to a trial, etc. All of them just want to go back but they have to allocate.
They also have to explain how they entered the country. This usually causes the most confusion because the migrant can't remember, or was confused, or is trying not to get somebody in trouble.
The last time I was in an ICE detention facility I had to wait half an hour because an inmate complained that the phone company was overcharging on the service. The officer I was supposed to meet with had to go through three months of phone calls and found that indeed the phone company had overcharged the inmate $ 5.35.
Again most people in detention facilities under Obama are people caught near the border after just jumping the fence and want to go back as soon as possible.
Here is the contact information about the Detention Facility in Denver. Every inmate is assigned a defense attorney and many of them can be bonded out prior to final deportation adjudication.
https://www.ice.gov/detention-facility/denver-contract-detention-facility
4) Over a 4 year period over 100,000 people who were here illegally were released by ICE, even though they had no legal right to be here:
https://www.ice.gov/detention-facility/denver-contract-detention-facility
ICE responded with the records this year. Some highlights:
• Just over half of the 105,632 releases involved Mexicans. El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras are the native countries for the second, third and fourth largest groups, respectively.
• Nationally, the largest share of convictions – nearly 40 percent — involved traffic offenses, including driving under the influence. There were also 10,731 convictions for assault; 890 for sexual assault, including rape; 473 for homicide-related offenses; and 375 for kidnapping.
• The largest number of releases from a single detention center – 3,712 — happened at the Adelanto Detention Facility northeast of Los Angeles. The South Texas Detention Complex located southwest of San Antonio had the second largest number at 3,390.
The only complaint I could find about the detention facility was by this woman who was angry that the guard told her to take her phone to her car and she had come by bicycle. The person who told her she couldn't put the phone in a locker (provided for visitors so that all of the prohibited items like phones, wallets and gum go into a locker and you get it back when you leave). The person who told her she couldn't leave the phone was a contracted private guard and when she asked to speak with the ICE officer she was told that she could leave the phone. I think if her relative was not getting food, medicine or legal services she would not be shy to share it. Fact is illegal aliens get much better health care than I do.
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