Amnesty Internation undocumented arrested without warning and often not told why 300,000 women, children is this human rights abuse since they are arrested without warning and often not told why.

Though innocent of any crime, they are jailed alongside convicted criminals, often hundreds of miles away from their families, handcuffed or placed in chains, held for months or years without any judicial review of their cases, and frequently denied medical care.

They are some of the more than 300,000 women, children and men detained by U.S. immigration officials each year. “Jailed Without Justice: Our Government’s Abuse of Asylum Seekers and Other Immigrants” will be the subject of talks by two speakers — one a formerly detained immigrant himself — on Wednesday, Oct. 28, at 7 p.m., at First Parish Church, 20 Lexington Road.

Those detained are asylum seekers, survivors of torture and human trafficking, lawful permanent residents, and the parents of U.S. citizens. Having fled persecution in their own countries, they suffer treatment in the United States that can be as bad as or even worse than what they left behind.

Sarah Ignatius, executive director of the Political Asylum/Immigration Representation (PAIR) project in Boston, will describe how the dramatic increase in the use of detention to enforce U.S. immigration laws since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has led to a number of human rights violations.

PAIR is a coalition of legal service agencies, civil rights organizations, and bar associations dedicated to helping detainees. Since 1989, its staff and pro bono attorneys have provided legal services to clients who have come to the United States from more than 90 countries.

Also speaking will be “Luis,” who came to this country years ago to escape the violence in his native Nicaragua and immediately applied for asylum. The Immigration Court lost his address, and when he tried again to regularize his legal status after marrying an American citizen, he was suddenly arrested by immigration officials.

What followed was a nightmare odyssey in which he was repeatedly transferred from one detention center to another, all over the country, usually at night, while being deprived of sleep, food and warmth. Finally, as he was being placed aboard a plane for deportation, PAIR stepped in, succeeded in court in reopening his case, and had it transferred to Boston.

Similar experiences

An investigation by Amnesty International discovered many detainees whose experiences were even worse than Luis’s. One man, who had been tortured and imprisoned for five years in an Albanian concentration camp, was granted asylum and had been living lawfully in the United States for 12 years when he was detained and told he would be deported. He spent four years in detention, fearful he would be tortured again if he was returned. In four years he saw his wife and children, who lived hundreds of miles from his detention center, only four or five times, and he lost his small business.

Story after story, verified by Amnesty, tells of treatment that is callous and even cruel. A 34-year-old Mexican mother of three, a legal immigrant, was arrested in front of her 3-year-old autistic son, a U.S. citizen. Unable to speak English, she had no idea why she was being held. After three weeks in detention, desperate with worry about her children and threatened with deportation, she tried to hang herself. Instead of taking her to the hospital, the officers who cut her down handcuffed her and took her to another cell.

In researching its 56-page report entitled “Jail Without Justice,” Amnesty found that the conditions under which immigrants are held violate both United States and international standards for the treatment of detainees. International human rights standards also require that detention be used only in exceptional circumstances, that it be justified in each individual case, and that it be subject to judicial review.

Yet in the United States immigrants can be detained for months or years without any form of meaningful judicial review of their detention. Detainees lack even the basic rights accorded to those charged with crimes. The overwhelming majority — 84 percent — do not have access to legal assistance, leaving them unable to navigate an adversarial and complex court process.

Detention facilities are required to comply with standards established by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, but oversight and accountability for abuse or neglect in detention is almost nonexistent. Immigrants are often placed in excessive restraints, including handcuffs, belly chains and leg restraints, and find it very difficult to get medical treatment. In the past five years more than 80 people have died while in immigration detention.

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