No Family Contact Visits Allowed: Life for Immigrants at Bergen County Jail

The more than 500 immigrants picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and detained at the Bergen County Jail live a life that is more difficult, in one key respect, than any other immigrant detained in the New York-New Jersey region: They can't hug their relatives.

That's because the jail, which now houses more ICE detainees than the county's own locally charged criminal offenders, operates under outdated detention guidelines and forbids what are known as "contact" visits. Immigrants are allowed to meet with their attorneys face-to-face, but when spouses, children and friends come to visit they are separated by a glass partition and must speak through a telephone.

That was a particular hardship for an immigrant with no criminal record who was arrested in Brooklyn for overstaying his visa. He was able to hug his wife and two young children when he was jailed at Hudson County Correctional Facility (which also mostly houses immigrants), but after ICE transferred him to Bergen County Jail the visits through the glass were too difficult for his 3-year-old son, who is autistic. "It’s hard for him to actually focus talking to him on the phone, much less bringing him here at the glass," he said. "Through the glass and on the phone... it would be of no effect, it wouldn't work out."

The man said he suffered from depression, and did not get to see his son before he was deported. He asked that his name be withheld as he continues to fight his case.

Ziggy Lutostanski, a Polish immigrant who overstayed his visa after arriving to the United States 27 years ago, sought and initially received special permission for a contact visit from his daughter, whom he had been estranged from for 32 years. But that visit was canceled, he said, after he told the medical staff that his daughter is a doctor. He threatened to show his daughter his foot, which he said had grown infected because of poor treatment at the jail. 

"She was on the other side of the glass, and we were talking on the phone," he said. "That was so hard for me. I was crying." 

Lutostanski said detainees regularly complained about this restriction on visits, because at other jails "if you got kids, you play with your kids. In Bergen County? Forget about it. Absolutely not."

An attorney for the sheriff's department did not respond to Lutostanski's specific allegation about the visit with his daughter. But Sheriff Michael Saudino said the ban on contact is in place to keep contraband, like weapons that could be used to hurt sheriff's officers, from being smuggled into the facility.

"It's not because we're heartless," Saudino said. "It's for that reason alone — that contraband can be exchanged in the most creative ways that may even slip through the cameras for a second. We just don't want that headache in here. It's compromising the safety of my officers, and I'll have no part of that."

Bergen County Sheriff Michael Saudino

(Matt Katz/WNYC)

The Bergen County Jail gets $110-a-day for each male and female ICE detainee as part of its contract with the U.S. Marshal's Service. Most are locked up pending hearings on their orders of deportation; others are waiting for travel arrangements to be made so they can be deported back to their home countries. Slightly fewer than half already served time for serious crimes, according to Saudino. Others overstayed their visas, which is a civil violation.

All detainees at the Bergen County Jail were picked up by ICE in New York, and many were caught in Trump's crackdown on immigration violations. The facility held a teen mother separated from her child because she turned 18 while in a New York detention center for children, a father of 5 who had been in the country since 1990 and a Chinese national arrested at an interview to obtain a green card. 

While immigration activists and some New Jersey Democrats are demanding that county jails stop detaining immigrants for ICE, saying that it makes officials in these Democratic counties complicit in President Trump's deportation policies, Saudino, a 47-year veteran of law enforcement, rejects the premise. He said it's his duty to cooperate with any law enforcement agency, regardless of who is in the White House.

"I don't think this is a Democratic or Republican issue," said Saudino, a former Republican who was elected sheriff as a Democrat. "And you may not like to hear this — I blame the media for a lot of this hype [about ICE]...I'm not a fan of the president's — I don't like a lot of things he does — but I think the media is kind of too much the other way. We need to maintain law and order in our society."

In June 2015, the county brought in $285,340 per month from ICE. This past June, that number skyrocketed to nearly $1.4 million, according to the most recent figures provided to WNYC. All told, the county is on pace to collect about $15 million this year toward the sheriff's department's $80 million annual budget.

The reason for the dramatic increase is twofold: First, a 2017 bail reform law in New Jersey diverted many prisoners from jails and into alternative programs, leading to a 37 percent decrease in the number of Bergen County inmates and plenty of room for ICE detainees. Second, Trump's zero tolerance policy on immigration enforcement swept up more people for detention, including those who previously served sentences for criminal charges and others who had committed no violations beyond overstaying their visas.

When WNYC visited the jail in August, 439 men and 44 women were detained in the ICE units. Indoor recreation areas included exercise bars and basketball hoops. If a residential unit is clean, jail officials said, the immigrants are permitted to go outside to an open-air yard. Detainees have access to computers to do legal research, and they are provided games and books, according to officials.

The facility looked clean. The medical unit was reminiscent of a hospital ward, with James Taylor playing softly on the radio. In the kitchen, where meals cost $1.60 apiece, all of the workers are ICE detainees. And in one residential unit, a bible study appeared to be underway for detainees. 

But advocates, detainees and immigration lawyers have multiple complaints about conditions of the jail: The use of pepper spray and restraint chairs to suppress detainees who act out, the minimal outside recreation time, the poor food. And Bergen abides by detention standards from 2000, as opposed to more progressive guidelines updated in 2008 and again in 2011 that promote better conditions, like contact visits for detainees. By contrast Hudson County follows standards from 2008, while the Essex County Correctional Facility abides by the 2011 protocol. 

In 2015, a coalition of immigration advocates issued a report that alleged that the jail was overly punitive when it came to solitary confinement, with nearly half of the infractions that led to such punishment not involving violence. An attorney for the sheriff's department, Patrick O'Dea, denied that the jail uses solitary confinement, but he said that sanctions could include "disciplinary detention." He did not clarify the distinction.

The immigrant who wasn't allowed to hug his autistic son said that compared to the jail in Hudson County, where he was also detained, lockdowns are earlier in Bergen. That means phone access is cut off. He described the environment as prison-like: "There's no difference between immigrant and criminal beside the uniform we wear." Immigrants generally wear orange clothing.

Sally Pillay, program director at First Friends of New York and New Jersey, visits detainees at all the facilities in New Jersey. Of Bergen, she said: "We don't see them very sympathetic to the detainees in that facility."

The same dynamic of a surging ICE population and plummeting criminal inmate population is playing out at the jails in Essex and Hudson counties, both of which have similar detention contracts. But in Bergen, there is no apparent public opposition to the immigrant detention.

Essex saw eight protesters arrested this summer as they demanded a meeting with the county executive to end the ICE contract. And Hudson officials, facing protests that reportedly caused a near riot inside the ICE detention wing and a lawsuit from the ACLU of New Jersey, say they will vote on a measure next month to scrap its arrangement with ICE by 2020. 

Bergen County has about 200,000 Latino residents and a total population of nearly 1 million. All of the county-level elected officials are Democrats, and Hillary Clinton won the vote here over Trump by a comfortable margin. That's a similar political profile to Essex and Hudson.

But in Bergen, the county jail is run by an elected sheriff who operates a constitutionally distinct law enforcement agency, and the sheriff alone decides whether to work with ICE. So even though the county budget benefits from ICE money, the county freeholders, or legislators, don't vote on the contract and are therefore a step removed from it. That might be why there isn't public pressure at freeholder meetings.  

WNYC emailed each county freeholder for comment about the policy that forbids immigrants from having contact with their relatives. A spokesman for the freeholders, Michael Sheinfield, replied by saying that the sheriff's department has jurisdictional control over the jail. "The president’s immigration policies have not been humane or compassionate," he wrote. "The freeholders have expressed strong opposition to President Trump's policies that have separated families from one another. However, only those at the federal level can stop ICE from detaining these individuals and ICE has other, less compassionate options when it comes to detention facilities available to them."

County Executive Jim Tedesco is Bergen's top elected official. Asked about the policy on visitations, a spokeswoman for Tedesco, Alicia D'Alessandro, emailed that "the sheriff oversees the jail operations and is responsible for the establishment of jail administrative policies," and national detention standards are set at the federal level.

The statement continued: "The county executive believes that President Trump's immigration policies are both inhumane and immoral. The county does not have the legal authority to determine who may be taken into custody, however, detainees are entitled to humane treatment at facilities accessible to their family and loved ones."

The spokespeople for both Tedesco and the freeholders noted that some advocates for immigrants have argued that cancelling contracts with local jails in New Jersey could lead ICE to move detainees to other parts of the country, where they would be held in far worse conditions. These immigrants may not get visits with relatives at all, since they'd be so far away, and would likely lose their local legal representation. That's particularly relevant for detainees at Bergen, who have access to pro bono representation through funding provided by New York City and the state of New York.

Officials in Hudson County initially argued that the ICE contract needed to remain in place because it kept taxes down and prevented the layoffs of 100 corrections officers. While Bergen County politicians have not made that same point, the Sheriff's Department's former chief financial officer, Omid Bayati, alerted his bosses in a memo last year that the budget relied too much on ICE funding, which could change from year to year.

Omid Bayati Lawsuit by on Scribd

Bayati has since been fired, and he sued for wrongful termination. In the suit, Bayati alleges that a meeting took place last year in which a county official instructed all other officials to keep the county budget balanced ahead of November, when Tedesco, the county executive, is up re-election. One way to do that? Rely on ICE revenue to partially fund the sheriff's department. 

Tedesco's spokeswoman noted that a judge removed the county as a defendant in the lawsuit (though the sheriff's office and Saudino himself are still defendants). As for Bayati's claim about the inappropriate reliance on ICE funds, she said that the county budget is reviewed and approved by state officials, "which attests to the legality and appropriateness of the revenue allocations within the budget."