After being sworn into office, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano issued a series of Action Directives designed to review and evaluate the five primary missions of the Department. Please write or call Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and urge her to address the current state of immigration detention by making meaningful use of alternatives to detention and by ensuring that conditions in detention are humane and meet international standards.

Amnesty International is calling on the Department of Homeland Security to make U.S. immigration detention standards enforceable, and to use alternatives to detention in a meaningful way. If the government chooses to detain an immigrant, that person must be held in conditions that meet both domestic and international standards, and before a person is detained, all available alternatives to detention must be considered in each individual case.