by American Friends Service Committee

About the author: American Friends Service Committee is a Quaker organization that works to promote social justice. Its arm—the Immigration Law Enforcement Monitoring Project (ILEMP)—monitors the effects of immigration control policies at the southern border.

For nearly a decade, the Immigration Law Enforcement Monitoring Project (ILEMP) of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) has documented the heavy costs of immigration control policies at our country’s southern border. Over the years, ILEMP has demonstrated beyond question a widespread and persistent pattern of abuses of civil and human rights by immigration authorities, ranging from verbal assaults, to illegal detention, to homicide, and falling on native-born as well as immigrants.

In 1996, a study published by the Center for Immigration Research at the University of...