Shut Down the Buffalo Federal Detention Facility
Buffalo Federal Detention Facility in Batavia, New York is the state’s largest immigrant detention center. It is also notorious for abusing detained people with prolonged solitary confinement, coerced labor, and retaliation for speaking out against human rights abuses. RFK Human Rights and partners expose and fight the long history of retaliation and abuse at the center by ICE officials.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
$1.00
To avoid prolonged lock-ins at BFDF, detained people must enroll in a “voluntary work program” that pays only $1.00 a day.
18 hours a day
BFDF locks people in cells for 18 hours a day, inflicting severe mental health harms.
652 days
BFDF tortured a man with a year and a half of solitary confinement and is one of the highest users nationally of solitary in immigration detention.
WHAT’S AT STAKE
Filthy living conditions. Retaliation and abuse for peaceful protest. Prolonged solitary confinement. Surveillance and disruption of attorney communications. Denial of access to telephone and language services.
These are just a few examples of the abuse inflicted at the Buffalo Federal Detention Facility. BFDF subjects entire general population units at the facility to conditions tantamount to solitary confinement. The BFDF indiscriminate lock-in policy confines people in cramped cells for 18 hours a day as a matter of course. This has severe medical consequences: self-harm, suicide, post-traumatic stress disorder, and reduced cognitive function.
To suppress reporting of these abuses, BFDF officials open, copy, and retain privileged legal communications between attorneys and detained people, chilling free speech and encouraging impunity for cruel and degrading treatment.
Years of reports of abuse by federal oversight agencies and detained people make clear: BFDF must be shut down.
OUR WORK
Reports
On June 7, 2024, officers at BFDF retaliated against approximately 40 detained engaged in their First Amendment-protected right to peacefully hunger strike. Detained people were protesting the discontinuance of free phone calls to family and the BFDF policy of indiscriminately locking people in cells for approximately 18 hours per day.
In response to BFDF’s mass suppression of constitutional rights, RFK Human Rights and partners filed a federal civil rights complaint with Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.
Litigation
In Ceesay v. Kurzdorfer, RFK Human Rights sued to free a 63-year-old man arrested by ICE without due process and sent to BFDF. Because the arrest was without notice, Mr. Ceesay was not carrying his medication. He later suffered a stroke while detained in immigration detention.
Education
Our educational resources empower human rights defenders to end the the abuses occurring at BFDF. Our legal access guide explains how communities can organize to build local movements to end immigration detention. And our dispatches, social media posts, op-eds, and interviews highlight the experiences of people that RFK Human Rights attorneys meet on legal outreach trips to BFDF.
OUR PARTNERS
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Cornell Law School
The Immigration Law and Advocacy Clinic at Cornell Law School focuses on innovative work on behalf of undocumented and DACA communities through the Path2Papers Project and on advocacy for detained immigrants and asylum seekers.
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Harvard Law School Crimmigration Clinic
In the Crimmigration Clinic, students work on cutting-edge issues regarding the intersection of criminal law and immigration law.
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Justice Action Center
JAC uses co-equal litigation and storytelling strategies to address unmet needs and build new frameworks to tangibly improve immigrants’ lives.
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Justice for Migrant Families
JFMF is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit agency that promotes justice for migrant families by providing support to individuals in the federal detention facility in Batavia, information and resources to families in the community, and advocacy both within and beyond the local community.
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New York Civil Liberties Union
The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) advances civil rights and civil liberties so that all New Yorkers can live with dignity, liberty, justice, and equality.
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Prisoners’ Legal Services of New York
PLSNY’s mission is to provide high quality, effective legal representation and assistance to indigent prisoners, help them to secure their civil and human rights, and advocate for more humane prisons and for a more humane criminal justice system.