Immigration facility guard given jail time for sexual assault of detainee
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Version 0 of 1. A 40-year-old guard at a family detention center for immigrants and asylum seekers will go to prison after admitting he sexually assaulted a 19-year-old Honduran woman he oversaw at the Berks County Residential Center in Leesport, Pennsylvania. Human rights groups have previously reported sexual abuse in immigrant facilities, but Daniel Sharkey is the first worker at a family detention center to be convicted of institutional sexual assault, a third degree felony assault charge for employees of jails, detention centers and other facilities serving children. Sharkey, who is married, first claimed he and the detainee had a consensual relationship. But last week he pleaded guilty to institutional sexual assault and was sentenced to six to 23 months in prison. There is a chance he will serve less time than his victim and her three-year-old son spent in detention. “Frankly he had sex with her against her will,” said the woman’s attorney, Matthew Archambeault. “Her desire was to see him put away for a long, long time because of the damage that he did to her.” In a written statement provided to the judge before sentencing, the victim described how Sharkey began by giving she and her son gifts and food, then tried to kiss her and demanded she have sex with him. “Whenever I’d denied his demands, he’d get very angry and humiliated me,” she said in her statement. “He would tell me that if immigration ever found out, my son and I would be deported instantly, which is why I obeyed.” Sexual contact between a guard and someone who is detained is, by definition, non-consensual and illegal under federal and most state laws. The National Prison Rape Elimination Commission has reported that immigrants in detention are “especially vulnerable to sexual abuse and its effects because of social, cultural and language isolation; poor understanding of US culture and the subculture of US prisons, and the often traumatic experiences they have in their cultures”. The first person to report the problem at Berks as a witness was a seven-year-old girl detained there with her mother, whose story was included in the prosecution’s criminal complaint. In August 2014, she told a psychologist at the facility that she had a hard time falling asleep and was “afraid” to go to the bathroom after witnessing Sharkey and the detainee together in a bathroom stall, with his hands on the woman’s hips, adjusting her shorts. The girl described how memories of her own past abuse had re-emerged. She was urged by a psychologist to draw what she was afraid of. Berks director Diane Edwards soon reported the inappropriate contact to local police, who began an investigation that October and also notified Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE provided surveillance camera footage that show several instances when Sharkey followed the victim into a female restroom. He was also seen multiple times in the hallway near her bedroom “and entering bedrooms in that hallway” with her, according to the criminal complaint. In January 2015, Berks County prosecutors charged Sharkey with seven counts of institutional sexual assault. The seven witnesses named in their criminal complaint were all detainees. One 22-year-old mother described how Sharkey pressured her to serve as a “lookout” when he met with his victim, while she cared for her son and her own two children. “She was victimized herself,” said Carol Anne Donohoe, a local attorney who has represented this witness. The witness has since been granted a U-visa, which allows victims of certain crimes who assist law enforcement to work legally in the US for four years and apply to become a legal permanent resident. Archambeault said his client, the victim, has also applied for a U-visa. She is currently appealing the denial of her asylum claim based on abuse she escaped in Honduras. He was critical of ICE’s decision to keep her detained for several more months at Berks after the assaults were reported, before releasing her in late December 2014. “I had a simple request,” Archambeault said. “Her mom lives in Georgia, so I said, ‘why don’t you release her and her son to her mother and we can make her available for the investigation?’” He said his request was quickly shot down, “so she had to stay in the place” of the incident. “It was unfair.” After she reported the assault, staff at Berks instituted a new dress code that barred detainees as young as six years old from wearing shorts, tight clothes and tops that showed cleavage. The American Civil Liberties Union criticized the move for putting the burden to prevent sexual assault on the women’s outfits, instead of the guards. Complaints about inappropriate sexual relationships at a Texas family detention center holding hundreds of women and children prompted an investigation in 2014, but led to no charges. The Department of Homeland Security reviewed video footage there and said it found no wrongdoing, other than two employees who had sex in a laundry room. Denise Gilman, director of the immigration clinic at the University of Texas Law School, said she has obtained records that later showed many cameras at Karnes were not working, or did not cover areas where abuse may have occurred, “so it is very unlikely that most of the incidents would have been caught on videotape, and yet that was part of the main basis for the government’s conclusion that the allegations were unsubstantiated.” In 2011, a guard at an all-women immigrant detention center in Taylor, Texas, was convicted of both state and federal charges of molesting detainees while transporting them to the airport. The Berks detention center is operated for ICE by the county. Unrelated to the guilty plea, the detention facility faces possible closure. Berks County is appealing the state’s decision not to renew the facility’s license, because the facility holds adults even though its license only permits it to hold children. |