Out of the Woods

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.