The US Has A Concentration-Camp Population of Tens of Thousands

Lexicus

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Maybe someone can convince me that the detention centers described in this article aren't concentration camps.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politic...io-inspired-the-immigration-crackdown/554027/

The political economy of it:
“Under the Trump administration, we’re seeing the detention system balloon,” said Clara Long, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. With arrests up by 30 percent, ICE has requested $2.7 billion to increase detention capacity by 25 percent. “It is one of the fastest growing sectors of the carceral state,” said Kelly Lytle Hernandez, an immigration historian at UCLA.

Detention is big business. ICE relies on private prison companies for roughly 70 percent of its long-term lockups. After the election, the stock prices of the two largest private prison companies, Geo Group and CoreCivic, nearly doubled.

But most of the growth in detention predates Trump. After decades of bipartisan collaboration, Trump “inherited a machine,” said Long. In 1995, Bill Clinton advertised that he was “deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before.” The next year, Congress passed two laws, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which together expanded categories of deportable immigrants and mandated more detention. The Bush and Obama administrations followed suit. In 1994, there were roughly 5,000 detainees a day. In 2018, ICE has requested enough money to maintain a daily population of 51,000.

Here is the kind of public safety threats we are detaining:

One Arizona woman agreed to tell me about her experience in detention. In 2015, she was visiting the state from Bolivia when her host attempted to coerce her into a kind of indentured servitude. “I was desperate,” she said, so she fled to a Border Patrol station to file a report against the person and to ask for help. “But they didn’t believe me.” Instead, officials detained her because they suspected she had used her tourist visa to work illegally. (I was introduced to the woman by the Florence Project, a local group that provides aid to detained immigrants; she spoke on condition of anonymity, out of fear of retaliation against her family by her alleged abuser.)

Fortunately this had a "happy" ending:

Finally, the government granted her a visa for victims of human trafficking. She now sells food from her modest apartment in Tucson to get by.

“I’m starting from zero,” she said.

Note that this happened under Obama, not Trump. So one can only imagine it has gotten worse now that the "handcuffs are off" for ICE.

What are conditions in detention like?

“Eloy is one of the deadliest detention centers in the country,” said Carlos Garcia of Puente. Since ICE was founded in 2003, 179 detainees have died in its custody--15 at Eloy alone. Reports from Human Rights First, Human Rights Watch, Detention Watch Network and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights allege subpar conditions and preventable deaths in lockups across the country. But “Eloy stands out for the large number of deaths,” said Long, and “for the large number of suicides.” While the woman was detained there, two people died. One, José de Jesús Deniz Sahagun, generated considerable media attention because of the unusual circumstances of his death. He committed suicide by stuffing a sock down his throat.

Hey, a legal justification:

Such deportations met legal challenges, but the Supreme Court soon ruled that the president has almost unrestricted power to expel non-citizens. These decisions placed immigration enforcement outside constitutional protections afforded to people accused of crimes because incarceration for the purpose of deportation is “not imprisonment in a legal sense,” the court ruled in Wong Wing v. United States. Detainees are technically not in prison, and they have no right to a lawyer.

Hernandez pointed out that the court handed down Wong Wing on the same day as Plessy v. Ferguson, the decision that upheld the Jim Crow system.

So anyway yeah. Why has the growth of a concentration-camp system, overseen by Presidents from both parties, in the US largely passed unremarked?
 
Why has the growth of a concentration-camp system, overseen by Presidents from both parties, in the US largely passed unremarked?
On the part of the voters - indifference. Out of sight, out of mind.
On the art of elected officials - they aren't voters, so no need to kiss their babies.
 
What putative solutions do people see? They can slow the process of 'rounding up' undocumented immigrants, they can allow people out of the prison camps to seek employment or flee the country, and they can increase the number of judges presiding over the cases. To me, the obvious choices would be to deflate the size of the camps and to increase the number of presidings. I don't have a good idea on how to track people who have been 'caught and released'.

In Game Theory terms, it's a hell of a choice. In trying to deter people arriving, they use an anti-humane approach. But that creates victims. Much like negotiating with hostage takers, you are left with a real dilemma on how to proceed.
 
What putative solutions do people see? They can slow the process of 'rounding up' undocumented immigrants, they can allow people out of the prison camps to seek employment or flee the country, and they can increase the number of judges presiding over the cases. To me, the obvious choices would be to deflate the size of the camps and to increase the number of presidings. I don't have a good idea on how to track people who have been 'caught and released'.

In Game Theory terms, it's a hell of a choice. In trying to deter people arriving, they use an anti-humane approach. But that creates victims. Much like negotiating with hostage takers, you are left with a real dilemma on how to proceed.

I believe in open borders, so there are no 'undocumented people'. That is the obvious solution. Note that doesn't necessarily mean giving everyone who comes citizenship.
 
I believe in open borders, so there are no 'undocumented people'. That is the obvious solution. Note that doesn't necessarily mean giving everyone who comes citizenship.
How do you reconcile that with a modicum of respect for democracy, considering the vast majority of American citizens are entirely opposed to open borders?

Shouldn't democrats (small d) propose solutions that are at least acceptable to the majority?
 
I believe in open borders, so there are no 'undocumented people'. That is the obvious solution. Note that doesn't necessarily mean giving everyone who comes citizenship.

I am more of an 'open borders' guy too, though it necessarily strains services that depend upon a protected sovereignty. But I think we're in a minority, and so you will always have a social issue of people being taken into custody at rates that the system cannot handle.
 
I am more of an 'open borders' guy too, though it necessarily strains services that depend upon a protected sovereignty. But I think we're in a minority, and so you will always have a social issue of people being taken into custody at rates that the system cannot handle.

That's not necessarily true. You could probably cut down the average detention time quite significantly right now by funding the immigration court system more. But I think broad majorities of Americans supported reform that I think would have led to less detainment overall, as recently as 2013.
 
It's back to my first question. Though your 'speed up legal migration' is an excellent additional option to reduce pressure on new detainments.
 
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo...ant-woman-raises-tensions-in-south-texas?utm_

According to a statement released by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), a lone agent was responding "to a report of illegal activity by Centeno Lane...where he discovered a group of illegal aliens" just after noon.

The statement adds:

"Initial reports indicate that as the agent attempted to apprehend the group, he came under attack by multiple subjects using blunt objects. The agent fired at least one round from his service issued firearm, fatally wounding one of the assailants. The rest of the group fled the scene. Border Patrol Agents called for EMS and administered first aid until the Rio Bravo Fire Department arrived."

Three other migrants were subsequently apprehended. Neither the agent nor the deceased woman, who was shot in the head, have been identified.

Even if this story is true, I actually think it is morally legitimate to employ violence to resist ICE and Border Patrol at this point.
 
Do you think that committing violence against the Border Patrol, in order to facilitate illegal Crossings, will result in more or less humanitarian crisis for refugees? Or for economic migrants?
 
Do you think that committing violence against the Border Patrol, in order to facilitate illegal Crossings, will result in more or less humanitarian crisis for refugees? Or for economic migrants?

Undoubtedly it will/would be bad from a tactical perspective, but I don't have any moral problem with doing violence to people carrying out a campaign of ethnic cleansing. I honestly think that the next President should fire the majority of Border Patrol and ICE employees. Both agencies need to be completely overhauled from law enforcement to social work and supporting.
 
What putative solutions do people see?
There's a difference between detention and a concentration camp. Significant improvements can and should be made in terms of access to health care and lawyers, safety, living conditions, not separating children from their parents and not letting the guards rape the inmates.
 
@El_Machinae ideally we'd see a massive civil resistance campaign such that every time ICE or Border Patrol attempt to make an arrest, they would be forced to make hundreds or thousands of arrests. But I've no idea how to get us to the point where that's happening.
 
I live in San Diego. It’s really disheartening how little networking there is for direct action against ICE raids. There’s some small degree of warning, where people inform each other about ICE movements etc, but active resistance against ICE raids is almost nonexistent and definitely disorganized.
 
Undoubtedly it will/would be bad from a tactical perspective.

Not from a tactical or moral perspective. A strategic one. Do you think this tactic will help economic migrants? I'm specifically talking about border patrol.

I don't see it as being wise. Foolish, even. You're also super-close to promoting criminal assault on our forum.
 
Under some circumstances, like when Border Patrol is going to release people to human traffickers, I think it will help economic migrants, yes.
 
I drove a tow truck in Anaheim back in the 80s, we were based at a gas station/car wash. I got out of my truck one day as Immigration vans showed up, a dozen or more people were running in all sorts of directions. The Hispanics who were legal just stood and watched too. It was surreal... And sad, these guys weren't hurting anyone...
 
Aggregate benefit, or individual benefit? I'm asking about net benefit to the sum of refugees and economic migrants if more of them start assaulting border patrol agents.

You're now clarifying to the idea that they should be attacked in specific scenarios?
 
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