U.S. immigration authorities locked thousands of people in solitary confinement in 2023 as the United States continues to flout international human rights standards in its sprawling network of immigration detention facilities. A new report by Harvard University-affiliated researchers and the nonprofit group Physicians for Human Rights found the dangerous confinements have not only persisted over the past decade, but also increased in frequency and duration under the Biden administration, the Intercept reports. The report highlights the gap between President Joe Biden’s campaign rhetoric and the lived reality of an estimated 3,000 immigrant detainees held in isolation last year, often for prolonged periods — a practice that the United Nations warned can amount to torture. “This is a sheer failure of the Biden administration to stop egregious human rights abuses,” Tessa Wilson, a senior program officer for Physicians for Human Rights and a co-author of the report, told the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, or ICIJ. “The use of solitary confinement is actually only increasing.”
The adverse effects of solitary confinement — generally defined as isolation without meaningful human interaction for 22 hours a day or more — are well documented. It can cause extreme psychological and emotional distress, and lead to sleeplessness, chronic depression, hallucinations, self-harm, and suicidal impulses. In the U.S., home to the world’s largest immigration detention system, solitary confinement has become a go-to tool to manage the swelling number of detained immigrants. More than 38,000 people including long-term U.S. residents and people seeking asylum, were in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody as of January 28, 2024. In 2019, ICIJ and The Intercept published Solitary Voices, an investigation that examined the misuse and overuse of solitary confinement, labeled “segregation,” in detention centers under the agency’s control. A review of more than 8,400 internal ICE incident reports from 2012 to 2017 revealed that many detainees were placed in isolation cells for weeks or months at a time, including people with preexisting mental illnesses and other vulnerabilities.