Guantánamos Across America
Toughness is the watchword in immigration policy these days. When you combine the new toughness with same-old bureaucratic indolence and ineptitude, you get a situation like that described by Nina Bernstein in The Times yesterday. She wrote about how the boom in immigration detention — the nation’s fastest-growing form of incarceration — ensnares people for dubious reasons, denies them access to medicine and lawyers and sometimes holds them until they die.
Sandra M. Kenley, a legal permanent resident who had high blood pressure and a bleeding uterus, died in a rural Virginia jail after not receiving her medication. Returning home from a trip to Barbados she was locked up because of two old misdemeanor drug convictions. Abdoulai Sall, an auto mechanic, had no criminal record, but was still seized during an immigration interview. He had a severe kidney ailment and he, too, complained about not getting his medicine. He got sicker and died in another Virginia jail last December.
Sixty-two immigrants have died since 2004 while being held in a secretive detention system, a patchwork of federal centers, private prisons and local jails. Advocacy groups and lawyers say that the system not only denies detainees the most basic rights but also lacks the oversight and regulations that apply to federal prisons. Instead of fixing this broken system, the Senate bill that is lumbering toward final passage — after surviving a crucial procedural vote yesterday — is overloaded with provisions that will make it even harsher and more unfair.
One of the worst amendments comes from Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina. It would impose mandatory detention of all people who overstay their visas. It’s a huge overreach that threatens to swamp the detention system, filling already-strapped prisons at great expense and inevitably leading to more abuses and deaths. And because it takes away the power of officials to decide who poses a genuine threat and who doesn’t, it would undermine efforts to catch and deport the truly dangerous.
The cells would be full of people who shouldn’t be there: asylum seekers, the elderly, pregnant women, the sick and those ensnared in paperwork mistakes. Children, like the kindergartners in inmate scrubs walking the halls of a federal detention center outside Austin, Tex. Day laborers, like those in suburban Brewster, N.Y., whose arrests were hailed by a mayor who spoke proudly of his community’s “zero tolerance” for people unlawfully playing soccer in a schoolyard.
The country already detains some 230,000 immigrants a year, at an annual cost of $1.2 billion. Under the current immigration bill, it would build tens of thousands more beds to hold detainees. And it would need many more — Guantánamo Bays across America — if Mr. Graham’s zero-tolerance vision is fully realized.
Noncitizens are subject to our laws and to being deported if they do bad things. But this doesn’t mean the country must detain or deport everybody, or relinquish basic decency or even basic sense to achieve some imagined ideal of toughness.
© 2007 The New York Times
First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.
Pastor Martin Niemöller
^^Ditto^^
Why do these cycles repeat over and over and over and we do nothing to stop them?
They have Guantanamos for us too. This is becoming a lock-down prison society with the largest percent of our population in prison than any other country and a growing prison-labor industy. The National Security Police State is in place, all they need to do is create a crisis to fully impliment it.
The prison industrial complex is now reality in the US. Sounds a lot like the “war on drugs”. Keep those profits rolling in man!
Can you say: GENERAL STRIKE? Let’s organize one now. And an other, and an other……..
It’s time to read Jack London’s “IRON HEEL” again. Bush has been putting together the infrastructure for him to carry out a complete takeover of the government by the executive branch. He’ll be finished well before his current term expires. Then Americans will wake up one morning and realize what has happened to their Constitution and their country. And if they dare to complain about it there will be a legal system in place to deal with your dissent. These Guantanamos’ around the US aren’t only for illegals. They can also be for the disgruntled.
Hoa binh
The U.S. government is incompetent in many ways, but it is thorough. It has the name, address, phone number, and of course the SSN of everyone who has ever posted on this site, and it has the same info on all of our family members and people we associate with. The Internet is completely transparent to its owner, of course. I don’t think we’re in imminent danger of being rounded up, but the government knows who its admirers are and where they can be found, day and night. You’ve got to give the devil its due; it is better organized against us than we are against it. Who will send out a search party for you when you disappear?
Ron - your question “Who will send out a search party for you when you disappear?” reminded me of a conversation I had with my seventeen-year-old the other day. We were talking about Guantanamo and immigrants and how this country imprisons people without charging them with anything or who haven’t really done anything wrong. I said, “What if someday they come for me? Would you care if they locked me up for no reason?” And his response was, “Well, it’s not exactly like you didn’t do anything wrong.”
I have never even engaged in civil disobedience! He is thinking this because I write letters, attend protest marches, have bumper stickers on my car and occasionally signs in the yard, and support progressive groups. But he thinks that these things are *wrong* and would be a justifiable reason to lock me up! My response — when the guys in the black suburbans and sunglasses come knocking on the door, most likely it will be for those movies you have on your iPod. Oh, the look on his face! LOL
And these are privatized detention centers, right?
The abuses will only grow worse, whenever what should be a government run organization is turned over to privately run businesses. When its all about the money, people will continue to suffer needlessly- and sometimes even DIE- what an outrage!
UnCommon: in a letter I sent to my local paper several years ago I recounted Mr. Niemoller’s passage and then proposed to begin anew, thus: “first they came for the homosexuals…”
With several years passage and uncounted instances of psychological and social decay, I’ll finish paraphrasing him now.
First they came for the homosexuals
but because I was not gay
I did not speak out.
Next they came for the Arabic
but because I was not Muslim
I said nothing.
Then they came for the Hispanics
but because I was white
I remained silent.
When they came for the atheists
I realized I was up shit creek
without any paddles.
My letter to the newspaper was a way of speaking out though.
August 2, 2005
To The Editor:
I don’t wish to start a war of words and this is not a personal attack, but last Sunday’s letter by Mr. Ed Bednar points up a particular failure of our current electoral proceedings that cannot go unremarked. Though his letter was well written -eloquent in fact- his argument is none-the-less disingenuous. Mr. Bednar laments the fact that so many Americans base their vote on party loyalty or shallow personality considerations rather than the actual voting records of the candidates. I agree, but I would guess that he ends his own search when he finds out how those candidates stand on issues concerning abortion. That in fact, is the problem. Conscientious voters will support candidates that agree with their personal positions on issues that are nearest to their hearts, but many apparently have not yet figured out that single issue voting has helped empower those who have other, more sinister interests in mind.
The candidates have it figured. Promise a certain constituency that, if elected, they will work to overturn Roe vs. Wade and these consistent voters will punch their ballot every time then turn a blind eye to mountains of lies for an illegal invasion and a bloody, cruel occupation. Not to worry though because the elected are hard at work restoring the moral and ethical standards so long abandoned in this country. I’m sure the thousands of Iraqi mothers and fathers who have lost their children to our bombs and bullets will find comfort in our quest for such high moral standards, championed by the same cynical murderers that have visited this war upon them.
We don’t have to look too far to find proof of the point I’m trying to make. On the same page as Mr. Bednar’s was a letter from Mr. Boyd Townsend questioning Mr. Bush’s lack of action on his promise to ban gay marriage. He closes by surmising that Mr. Bush no longer needs any votes. It doesn’t sound like Mr. Townsend voted for Bush for this or any other reason, but I know there were plenty others that did. I’m not gay and my wife and I have been married for twenty-five years, and if fortune smiles upon us we will be married for another twenty-five, but I have a real problem when we begin to limit the rights of law-abiding citizens based on their sexual orientation.
I suspect that a person’s sexual orientation is something that chooses them rather than vice-versa, and you are not going to make someone who is not a heterosexual suddenly become one. In closing I’ll paraphrase a poem by a German pastor who lived through Nazi totalitarianism.
“First they came for the Jews but because I was not Jewish, I did nothing. Then they came for the communists, but because I was not a communist, I did nothing. When they came for the trade unionists I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. When they came for me there was no one left to speak out” I would start over thus: “First they came for the homosexuals…”
Vince Lawrence
Cross Creek Township, Ohio