Is ICE’s ‘Risk Tool’ Sentencing Innocents to COVID-19 Death?
Faced with evidence that federal immigration agents in New York have routinely jailed almost everyone they’ve arrested during the Trump administration, a judge ordered them Tuesday to carry out the individualized bond review the law requires.
The decision by Judge Alvin Hellerstein at U.S. District Court in Manhattan applies only in New York, but it calls into question whether Immigration and Customs Enforcement is holding people unjustly across the country at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic ratchets up the danger of being incarcerated.
Since 2013, ICE has relied heavily on a computerized tool called the Risk Classification Assessment to evaluate whether to release someone pending a hearing. The New York Civil Liberties Union and Bronx Defenders charged in a lawsuit that “By mid-2017, ICE had changed the tool’s algorithm to prevent it from recommending that people be released on bond or their own recognizance.”