Wake
Up, America.
We
tend to think of ourselves not only as generally good people but also
as people who place a high value on liberty and equality. But a good
deal of this positive self affirmation seems justified because we
don't pay attention to what we actually do. I wrote about one
instance of that in a previous blog, about Jim Crow – the hundred
years from the end of the Civil War to the 1960s when American Blacks
in the southern states were subject to a daily regime of terror. That
regime of terror now continues in the form of murders of young black
men and women by police, by mass incarceration of African-Americans,
a process that begins by unfair treatment of black children in
kindergarten. Most Americans are not really aware of these injustices
because they're not paying attention.
As
a nation we are not only good-natured and dedicated to freedom but we
are also capable of sustained brutality and gross injustice. The
latest instance of that is our treatment of people who come to our
borders from Central and Latin America fleeing hunger, unemployment
and violent cultures. We hear about that but we do not really pay
attention to take in the gravity of the condition of hundreds of
thousands of men and women and children taken by the border patrol,
CBP, and the immigration police, ICE.
When
refugees come to our borders they frequently are held in facilities
of the Border Patrol prior to being processed. The available
facilities are completely inadequate. Adults and children have to
stand up often for several days because there are too many people for
anyone to sit down or lie down to sleep. In order to get a little bit
of room some people end up standing on toilets which are then not
accessible to their proper use.
Once
processed many of the immigrants instead of being allowed to seek out
their direct relatives or friends with whom they were planning to
stay are imprisoned in facilities designed to hold convicted
criminals where they are treated as if they were criminals. They are
made to wear a prison clothes. They are subject to prison routines
even though they have not been in front of a judge or a jury. They
have not even been arraigned for committing a crime. They are simply
interned in ways reminiscent of the internment of Japanese citizens
during World War II. They're just being shut up because our President
and his people have made hostility to immigration a signature
political issue.
Who
are these people? Why do they undertake the hard journey from Central
America through other Central American countries and Mexico –
thousands of miles – and expose themselves to brutal treatment at
the border? Story after story from the frontier documents that
refugees leave their house in their country after gangs murdered a
husband and threaten the life of the wife and the children, about
parents who are afraid criminal groups will recruit their children
and turned them into criminals, about families living in abject
poverty and seeking a better life for their children. The government
refuses to see any of that. All they see are "illegal
immigrants."
There
are some media accounts of the conditions in different Latin American
countries that force large numbers of people to pick up a bag of
clothes and their children and start traveling by whatever means
available to the US Mexican border. But no one wants to talk about
the causes of this wave of violence engulfing Latin America. No one
mentions that leaders in the militaries of these different countries
have been trained in the United States. At Fort Benning, Georgia what
was formerly known as the "School of the Americas" and was
then re- christened the "Western Hemisphere Institute for
Security Cooperation" they learned how to suppress restive
populations and to bolster dictatorial regimes. The violence the
refugees are fleeing is to a significant extent “Made in America.”
The
majority of detained refugees are held in private prisons owned by
either the GEO Group or Core Civic (formerly called “Corrections
Corporation of America”) -- both generous supporters of the Trump
Inauguration Fund and Trump election campaign funds. Conditions in
these prisons are truly deplorable. The detained immigrants are
mostly Spanish speakers and few have any English. Border Patrol and
ICE agents, on the whole, do not speak English. Our government and
its agents regard and treat them as lesser beings than white
Americans. The detained immigrants do not understand what is being
done to them or why. If detainees have health needs they are likely
to be ignored. Pregnant women do not get medical care. In some cases
the result is a stillbirth. A man who told the guards that he had a
heart condition was, when he alerted officers that he was having
chest pains, not sent to a hospital but to a different detention
facility where he died. Women, especially young women are in constant
danger of sexual abuse by guards. Rapes are common.
In
many detention facilities the food is inedible. Meat has been
observed to be raw or expired. Inspectors saw open packages of
chicken leaking blood all over refrigeration units and identified
slimy, foul-smelling lunch meat, which appeared to be spoiled. Bread
is regularly moldy,
To
add insult to injury, the inmates of private prisons are made to work
for pennies an hour. All the cooking and cleaning and maintenance in
the prison facilities is done by inmates who are paid a dollar a day
or less. The inmates are virtual slaves. The private prison companies
do not have to hire outside persons to provide the services that
prison needs to operate. The system for treating immigrants is not
only brutal it is thoroughly corrupt, a bonanza for the private
prison companies and of course indirectly their political
beneficiaries – the President.
It
is time for Americans to wake up, to pay attention to see what our
government does in our name, how we need to be ashamed of ourselves
because the government brutalizes people in dire need. It is time to
speak up very loudly against the maltreatment of immigrants.
