Lexicus
Deity
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:
Here is the kind of public safety threats we are detaining:
Fortunately this had a "happy" ending:
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?
Hey, a legal justification:
So anyway yeah. Why has the growth of a concentration-camp system, overseen by Presidents from both parties, in the US largely passed unremarked?
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?