Photo/daymonjhartley.com
The assault on the immigrants’ human rights began before Trump, but Trump’s policies have made it far worse.
In early July, the Department of Homeland Security released a report on conditions in migrant detention centers. Time magazine said DHS reported that “Adults and children have been held for days, weeks, or even months in cramped cells, sometimes with no access to soap, toothpaste, or places to wash their hands or shower. Some reports have emerged of children sleeping on concrete floors; others of adults having to stand for days due to lack of space. . . .At an Arizona facility, a 15-year-old girl from Honduras reported that an officer groped her during a patdown in front of other migrants and officers.” There have been outbreaks of flu, lice, chicken pox and scabies.
In July, Yazmin Juárez, an asylum seeker from Guatemala whose 19-month-old daughter Mariee became ill in ICE detention and later died, told Congress, “I noticed immediately how many sick children there were in detention, that no effort was being made to separate the sick from the healthy.”
The Center for American Progress in mid-June reported on Covid-19 in ICE facilities, saying that the virus “has spread quickly and dramatically within detention facilities and throughout the network of facilities around the country” and that ICE “has ignored commonsense measures to halt its spread.”
Another aspect is the government’s “Remain in Mexico” program, which allows US border officers “to return non-Mexican asylum seekers to dangerous locations in Mexico as their claims are adjudicated in US immigration courts,” according to Human Rights Watch. The thousands sent back to wait in Mexico face “kidnapping, sexual assault, exploitation, lack of basic necessities, abuse and other dangers in Mexico, with no meaningful access to due process in the United States.”
Finally, as Alexis Goldstein reported recently in Truthout, Trump has “manufactured a [funding] crisis” at the federal agency responsible for green cards, citizenship, and asylum. The agency may have to furlough two-thirds of its workers in August. This would further suppress immigration and could deny the vote to hundreds of thousands of potential new voters.
No one should be imprisoned for seeking life and freedom, and no one should be imprisoned in dangerous conditions. There is plenty to go around. The people get little from our government while the rich get trillions. The real criminals are in high places. They need to be removed so we can get the resources we need to take care of all of us.
Bob Lee is a professional journalist, writer and editor, and is co-editor of the People’s Tribune, serving as Managing Editor. He first started writing for and distributing the People’s Tribune in 1980, and joined the editorial board in 1987.
