Friday, June 21, 2019

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.


Friday, June 7, 2019

    Our border with Mexico: a national disgrace.




 
Francisco Cantu, a Mexican-American born and raised in Arizona at age 23 joined the Border Patrol. It did not take him very long to become appalled by the inhumane treatment the border patrol meted out to people crossing the border without  proper papers. Four years after enlisting he left the border patrol. Today he volunteers to visit detained immigrants to bring them small gifts and to try to help them maintain their spirits in hope as they wait for the often inscrutable decisions of the US border bureaucracy.

    In a recent article in the New York Times Cantu describes the fate of one of the persons he visits in one of the many privately owned prisons in Arizona. Here is a woman he calls Ysabel who presented herself at the US border after fleeing violence in Venezuela. She ends up in a detention center and after some months  is told that her request for asylum has been granted. She expects to be released but that expectation is disappointed. She remains in detention in what are essentially prisons for criminals judged to have broken the law. She has done no such thing but continues in this prison.

    Her friend Francisco makes inquiries. After many phone calls to different government agencies he is told that the government is trying to appeal her grant of asylum. No date is set for such an appeal. If the appeal is ever considered by the Board of Immigration Appeals, there will be no public hearing. Isabel will have no opportunity to speak for itself. The board will make its decisions in private.

    This entire process contravenes traditional standards of justice. The immigrants are considered guilty and the burden is on them to prove that they deserve to be accepted into the United States. The hearings are secret; immigrants are not given a chance to speak for themselves. They do not have the support of lawyers.

    The government is very clear: the point of all these violations of traditional standards of legality is to deter people from coming to the border in order to ask for asylum. Human rights and legal rights count for nothing.

    Many Americans, especially supporters of the president, will reply to these complaints about government malfeasance at the Mexican American border by saying that immigrants who are crossing the border without proper papers are breaking the law and are therefore at fault. They deserve to suffer because their actions are illegal. They deserve punishment. They deserve to be sent back to where they came from.

    But that is an excessively simplistic way of thinking about the law and lawbreaking. The seriousness of lawbreaking depends on the law being broken. Some municipalities, for instance, try to reduce the number of automobile accidents by setting the speed limit very low. Most motorists break that law; they simply cannot bear to drive that slowly. No one thinks that their lawbreaking makes these drivers into pariahs because the law that is being broken is thought to be unjustified.

    In the 1920s, during prohibition, most Americans broke the law because they thought it was in error. No one thought that people who bought  illegal alcohol were serious lawbreakers who deserved harsh punishment such as being sent back to their country of origin.

     After the Civil War,  Southern states reacted to the emancipation of former slaves by passing a large body of laws that seriously circumscribed the lives of black Americans. The laws determined where African-Americans could sit on the train or the bus, where they could get a drink of water or relieve themselves. So-called Jim Crow laws imposed curfews and many other illegal limitations on former slaves and their descendents. They deprived African-Americans of the legal rights of white Americans. They deprived African-Americans of recourse to the legal systems. They were once again close to being enslaved. This was an utterly shameful set of legislative actions motivated by completely unacceptable racial prejudice. The laws were enforced not so much by police and sheriffs but by a series of public tortures and lynchings of black persons. In the 1890s a Black person was lynched every second or third day. The frequency declined in the 20th century but lynching did not end until late in the 20th century. Police shootings of Blacks have taken the place of lynching.

    If someone broke any of these Jim Crow laws we would not call them a law breaker who deserved serious punishment. How should we think of people fleeing violence and poverty in their country of origin? Do they deserve the harsh treatment meted out to the Ysabels of this world? There is no justice in our treatment of immigrants from South and Central America.