Diversion of Patients from Court Ordered Mental Health Treatment to Immigration Detention

Over 350,000 immigrants are detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) each year. An unknown fraction of these detainees have significant mental illness and have been ordered to inpatient mental health care by a criminal court but are instead taken into ICE custody. This practice has been reported to us in multiple states, including New York, New Jersey, Florida, Illinois and Arizona. Over the past 4 years we have provided advocacy efforts in 16 of these cases (all in the NYC area) and report on our findings here. In some instances we were able to secure release of detainees into inpatient care in the community, however these efforts are accompanied by great logistical challenges. Given the well-documented concerns in securing adequate care for mentally ill ICE detainees, a logical policy change would be for ICE to allow these patients to continue to their court ordered inpatient care. This move would improve care for patients, who otherwise would be held in a jail or detention center as opposed to a dedicated mental health treatment center, and would also unburden ICE from the untenable proposition of caring for patients that the criminal justice system has already deemed unfit for incarceration.