The Obama administration has refused to make legally enforceable rules for immigration detention, rejecting a federal court petition by former detainees and their advocates. The decision disappointed and angered immigration advocacy organizations around the country.

From New York Times:

The Obama administration has refused to make legally enforceable rules for immigration detention, rejecting a federal court petition by former detainees and their advocates and embracing a Bush-era inspection system that relies in part on private contractors.

The decision, contained in a six-page letter received by the plaintiffs this week, disappointed and angered immigration advocacy organizations around the country. They pointed to a stream of newly available documents that underscore the government's failure to enforce minimum standards it set in 2000, including those concerning detainees' access to basic health care, telephones and lawyers, even as the number of people detained has soared to more than 400,000 a year.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the immigration detention system, a conglomeration of county jails, federal centers and privately run prisons, concluded "that rule-making would be laborious, time-consuming and less flexible" than the review process now in place, Jane Holl Lute, the agency's deputy secretary, said in the letter.

The department maintained that current inspections by the government, and a shift in 2008 to "performance-based standards" monitored by private contractors, "provide adequately for both quality control and accountability."

The "performance-based" standards the Obama administration has now embraced have no penalties and are not significantly different from what failed in the past, said Karen Tumlin, a lawyer with the National Immigration Law Center in California. On Tuesday, the center issued what it called "the first nationwide comprehensive report" on violations of detention standards, based on records from 2004 and 2005 obtained through Freedom of Information litigation.

Dozens of more recent inspection documents, some from this year, show a similar pattern, said Chuck Roth, the director of litigation for the Chicago group, Heartland Alliance's National Immigrant Justice Center. Many were posted by the government itself on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Web site after the center won a three-year federal court battle to force their release.

"The groups that ICE commonly contracts with are staffed by former ICE employees and former corrections officers who have a vested interest in pleasing ICE," Mr. Roth said, "so we haven't seen them take the useful watchdog role."