Mother’s Day in an ICE Detention Center
Obama’s family detention camps were strongly condemned for their inhumane conditions, but Trump has arguably made the situation even worse.
The woman arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border with her daughter in late April. “From what I had heard about the U.S., it was supposed to be a country that practices showing love to their fellow man. But what I have experienced with my daughter was horrible,” she wrote a few days later, after she was transferred from Border Patrol custody to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
An official took me who humiliated me, throwing all of my things into the trash, even the medicines of my daughter and the food that, with much work, I had brought. When I walked in to give my declaration the officials laughed at me because I arrived wet and with mud up to my abdomen. I asked them to please allow me to change my daughter’s clothes, but they wouldn’t let me. … We were still wet with mud. My sadness was that my daughter was shaking from the cold, wet and thirsty. But they would not give us water or food.
The letter was one of 22 I received from women who had crossed into the United States in recent weeks and were awaiting asylum hearings at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas. Although the worst treatment, such as that described above, occurred before the women arrived at Dilley, conditions at the camp were described in stark terms.
The center, a complex of trailers surrounded by barbed wire in this small town south of San Antonio, is one of three Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities that house women and children in the U.S.
U.S. policy on detaining families and children has fluctuated over the years. For decades, people seeking asylum in the U.S. were released while awaiting their hearings. Even with minimal supervision, the overwhelming majority of those not detained showed up for their asylum hearings. But a 1996 law made it more common to detain people hoping to get asylum while their cases were being processed. After largely doing away with family detention, in 2014 the Obama administration responded to a sudden influx of refugee children and families from Central America by detaining large numbers of families and speeding up deportations.
Obama’s family detention camps were strongly condemned for their inhumane conditions, but Trump has arguably made the situation even worse. “There’s been a much stronger emphasis on making the asylum process stricter, detaining more people and keeping them in detention for longer periods of time,” said Katharina Obser, a senior program officer at the Women’s Refugee Commission.
As the president’s rhetoric about “bad hombres” and border walls has escalated, the number of women entering the country without documentation has fallen — and the number of residents in the Dilley center, the largest immigrant detention facility in the country, has fluctuated. Though it has the capacity to accommodate up to 2,400 residents, the actual census is at times much lower. The number of people spending this Mother’s Day at the center is between 300 and 400, according to RAICES, an immigrants rights group that gathers this information from several sources, and the Dilley center has held as few as 120 people in recent months.
Because CoreCivic, the private company (formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America) that operates the family residential center for ICE, is paid a flat fee for running the detention center, the per-person cost of staying at the centers has soared even after monthly payments for running Dilley were cut from more than $20 million to $12.6 million when its contract was revised in October. When the facility is at its emptiest, taxpayers are shelling out more than $3,500 per person per night to keep women and children at Dilley, more than the bill for a night in the fanciest penthouse suite in one of Donald Trump’s Hawaiian resorts.
By all accounts, the experience at Dilley is nowhere near as grand. The restrooms lack privacy. Lights are sometimes left on at night, making it difficult to sleep. The women at Dilley report that the water smells and tastes bad and sometimes makes them sick. Many people in town have voiced similar concerns, and according to Dilley resident Jose Asuncion, “anyone who can afford to buys bottled water.” Medical care at Dilley as well as the two other ICE family detention centers has been inadequate, according to immigration advocates.
“We consistently hear reports of poor medical treatment,” said Amy Fischer, policy director at RAICES, which is part of a group effort to provide services to women and children at the center. RAICES also runs a shelter in San Antonio that houses families released from family detention, where, Fischer said, “we never got a kid who was leaving detention in good health. The hospital in San Antonio has diagnosed kids released from Dilley as being ‘Dilley-ish’ because they’re all sick with stomach and upper respiratory issues.”
ICE denied my request to tour the Dilley facility and did not respond to a request for comment. CoreCivic did not respond to a request for comment.
The letters from women detained at Dilley told of frustrations and humiliations not just at the detention center but at “hieleras,” the temporary facilities run by Customs and Border Protection, where many of them stayed right after crossing the border and before being transferred to Dilley. “Hielera” is Spanish for icebox. And they described treatment that was cold in every sense.
According to government guidelines, no one is supposed to be detained for more than 72 hours at the holding cells, which aren’t designed for overnight stays and typically don’t have beds. Border Patrol workers are instructed to keep family members together and to keep temperatures at the facilities comfortable. “Under no circumstances will officers/agents use temperature controls in a punitive manner.”
Yet, according to the letters, these standards are often violated. Several described being subjected to frigid temperatures. “My daughter was purple from how cold she felt,” one mother recounted. “They wouldn’t give us any blankets. Her lips and her hands and feet were all purple.”
Another wrote of her son becoming feverish during the five days they spent in the hielera. And several letter writers complained of having their children taken away from them. One woman wrote that she asked a female guard to see her twin daughters who had been taken from her. “She said no and slammed the door in my face,” she wrote. “They wouldn’t let me see them even for a minute. I didn’t know if they were getting food.”
Even though they were coming to the United States to escape suffering in their own countries, the women repeatedly described being floored by the cruelty with which they were treated. “One officer hit me on my fingers and told me that I better prepare myself, that they were going to deport me,” one mother described. Another wrote that guards threatened to put her children up for adoption.
Women reported that they and their children often did not receive enough to eat or drink. Perhaps most humiliating, many said they were denied access to the bathroom. “They closed the doors with chains and we were unable to go to the bathroom,” one woman wrote, noting that a guard told her that “this is your punishment for coming here.” Even after this practice sometimes caused accidents, border guards sometimes refused the women’s requests to bathe.
Although access to toilets was meted out like a prize, the bathrooms themselves were sometimes filthy. “It smelled like dead animals and excrement,” wrote one mother, who said she developed an infection at the hielera.
She, like several of the mothers, focused on how their treatment since crossing the border might affect her child. But her letter made clear that the experience had changed her, too. “I thought that entering this country, which had always been my dream, was always going to be an unforgettable day,” she wrote in her letter. “It was. But it was the saddest and ugliest day I could have imagined.”
Top photo: These video stills were submitted as exhibits in litigation filed against the Border Patrol by the American Immigration Council, the National Immigration Law Center, the ACLU of Arizona, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, and Morrison & Foerster LLP. They depict a sample of conditions in the Border Patrol’s “short-term” detention facilities in the Tucson sector, including individuals wrapped in Mylar sheets sleeping on a concrete floor and benches in a cell so crowded there is no room to move around.
Again: American humanity showing its real colors. Non existent. How shameful.
Only the hate and greed of the first white devils in their descendants could kill off almost a whole race of people spaning 2 continents over some 500 years n come back for seconds with this … Mass Exodus . Or maybe just “The Holocaust Pt. 2″
For people who actually read the entire story all the way through and still manage to proudly proclaim their total lack of empathy:
I can say with confidence that the world would genuinely be better off if you were dead. So please do us all a favor and make that a reality.
I empathize with these people and families I just don’t have sympathy for them.
What BS is this? What is the difference between sympathy and empathy? Are you that callous you need to differentiate?
Our we suppose to feel bad about this ? These people literally think that when they get here , that red carpet is going to be rolled out for them….. sorry , not going to happen !
yes. You need to feel bad about this. How did you get to this country? It was never yours!!!
Most Americans did not have to get into this country, we were born here. We are not immigrants. You can call all people immigrants considering roots in Africa, but that renders the term meaningless.
We don’t need any more people, period. All societies adjust their policies over time, we are not burdened with 1890’s-style immigration forever.
Look at Europe and see that treating migrants well leads to a never ending stream.
I am more concerned with the many poor American citizens than migrants. No guilt here.
good news! Ask Lloiyd Blankfein about a Loans For Refugees program and a Come Stay at My Home option. He just loves the invasion growth plan.
And she would have no reason to exaggerate? If it was so terrible, I hope she does not try again. We are under no obligation to take every person who wants to
come here, any more than their own country does. Mexico has stricter laws against illegal immigration than we do and they enforce them. Unfortunately, those are about the only laws they enforce, and they have has 25,000+ murders in one year, involving drugs alone, yet our gov. decided to lighten up on the dealers. Wonder why? Could the cartels have gotten to the Dem party?
This country has evolved into a nightmare because of self righteous, ignorant people like you! Why did someone like you come here? Could not make it at the home country?
Clearly you have no idea what this country was like before the likes of you ruined this country by their presence!
I really do not understand the issue here. You broke in the country the tried to seek asylum. Kind of backwards don’t you think and now want sympathy for breaking the law.
Look up what asylum means before leaving stupid comments.
How did your ancestors get here? By boat?
Were you invited by the resident people who trusted you to be honest and gave you shelter? ? No need to brag about being a citizen in a country that was not yours to begin with.
The key point that Ms. Lerner and those like her miss every time is that these people have forfeited their own immigration rights; no one has “taken them away” from them.
When you knowingly disqualify yourself by arriving illegally, taking steps to cover your illegal behavior over the course of many years, and then bring hardship on your family when you get caught, what is the course of action Ms. Lerner advocates? Bygones be Bygones??
The condition of these centers is a marginal issue; if they were 5-star properties, Ms. Lerner would be here complaining about the lousy view from the 1st floor rooms.
Google “asylum,” jerk.
Read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
Read the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees
Read Article VI, Clause 2 of the Constitution of the United States.
Could you please point to the documentation that the US must follow a dictate from the UN and then point to where in the article that the criminals were or are refugees that are being persecuted?
Stop commenting. You obviously do not understand the issue at hand- you are part of the problem.
Are you incapable to do your own research?
Immigrate to the US legally or yeah your experience will not be what you intended, because you should not be in the US without going through the proper channels to immigrate. This article is intended to pull at the heartstrings of the people reading it and shame those who do not live up to the moral standard this article is expressing.
I know, our immigration process is broken and needs to be fixed. However, if you then say that since this system is broken, but instead of trying to fix said immigration system lets just have those illegals immediately become citizens. While you do this, those who are going through the proper measures to get here are left in the wings waiting; you are now giving those people more incentive to come to this country illegally.
Is it sad that Families are being broken apart due to this issues, yes it is. But, those people who came here illegally should have known about those ramifications before they made the decision to come here without permission.
2nd.
Leaving aside the debate about so-called “illegal immigrants”, the people whose abuse is being discussed in this article are LEGAL asylum seekers.
It’s interesting to say that, considering pilgrims were never required paperwork to immigrate, and yet instead of thanking the Native Americans for their hospitality they took over the Native American’s land and plundered it. That wasn’t all humane then, and it’s not all that humane now.
The ICE officers aren’t following the laws either, so, why are you defending them? If you’re willing to castigate “illegals” where is your willingness to castigate ICE for being illegal in not following the law. They should face charges.
since you are implying that your presence ‘here’ is illegitimate, you can go, i’ll make good use of your property.
Well. Isn’t it? Whose property are you making use of?
Nate, for starters, your first argument is flawed in several ways it is not worth going too deep into it besides saying this. Your projection of modern sensibilities onto historical events, especially those of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries is a terrible way to make a point. The men of that era and their morals are considerably different than that of our own modern generations.
IF these ICE officers that allegedly are mistreating detainees, they need to be put through the justice system and have their punishment should that be the outcome. But to tie the noose around a persons neck because of a clearly biases article trying to manufacture emotion and attempt to get a rise out of the reader is not the way to run a civilized society. Just like it is not right for those who came/come to this country illegally to expect citizenship upon arrival, with all the privileges that new citizenship details while the US has plenty of worthy new citizens trying to enter through proper channels. Most want asylum, if they have been here mult. years I say we have already provided you asylum for a while, time to use the real way. For the rest, you let go through the system to see if they can get what they seek.
500% true.
Come legally and you would not have these problems. Sneak into Uncle Sam’s house illegally, then you deserve deportation.
Mothers should know better !
It seems there is 70% less illegal immigration coming into the USA from the southern border now under Trump than before under Obama. Conclusion: Less people are affected so making the conditions worse has had a positive overall effect.
Off course you can argue that these situations should never exist but that’s like saying nations and borders should be abolished and ultimately private property should not exist. I don’t think humanity is ready for that, yet.
With all due respect, that is an idiotic, heartless response.
A) In almost every case, mothers who flee to the United States are doing so, at least in part, to give their children a better future. I have gleaned this from my time spent with immigrants at a parenting class. If you have evidence otherwise, please share.
B) If there are fewer undocumented immigrants coming across the US border, that means absolutely nothing about the conditions from which would-immigrants are shooting to leave. And, according to this article, it just means we’re paying more per capita at the detention centres.
C) Not everyone flees Mexico and Central America because they are afraid of being killed, but the truth is that Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua are some of the most violent countries in the world, that some children are forced to join gangs, that US cold war disruptions of local democracies exacerbated poverty and political instability and that the gangs would all disappear if Americans stopped buying illegal drugs.
We agree that humanity is not ready to abolish private property, but I don’t really see why we can’t at least be humane about housing these detainees for a month or two – giving them a warm place to sleep, decent food, maybe even books – before deciding to send them back across the border. If the numbers here are correct, we’re already paying enough to put everyone at Dilley up in the Hilton.
Facts are facts, not heartless !
A) you speak of mothers fleeing their country to give their children a better future. That is not recognised as a valid basis for acquiring official refugee status under international law.
B)you concur with my point that harsh measures have a discouraging effect on immigration This is a matter of policy and implies higher costs per detained immigrant in the short term.
C)if the aim of the mothers is to give a better future to their children, away from violence , I don’t think the US has better statistics in inner cities or amongst under privileged youths.
I do agree with you about humane treatment and would say that mothers with children should in general get a better treatment than their male counterparts….but that has nothing to do with Mother’s day !
I know you never traveled to an underdeveloped country just because you said the underprivileged youth and inner cities in the USA are as bad as those countries…. No, sir. They aren’t.
@Voice from Europe has you beat hands down.
people trying to run the guilt trip card on Americans to further beat up on mainstreet like wallstreet does need to be sorted out.
“In the past ten years, the flow of undocumented immigrants entering the U.S. has slowed dramatically. And because many undocumented immigrants are either deported or move home every year, the total number living in the United States is currently falling at rate of about a hundred and sixty thousand a year…” – http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/the-facts-about-immigration
The decline in illegal immigration to the US has been going on for years and has nothing to do with Trump.
It is true that the harsh measures and record deportations of the previous administration under Obama had already produced some results. But the decline in numbers this year is spectacular ! What would be your explanation for this recent decline ?
Silly Mothers. If they had brought a lot of MONEY, of course, it would not matter that they were illegal. They could BUY citizenship, as is common now in “Europe”.
I don’t know which specific country in Europe you are referring to but I know that Canada and Australia do sell official citizenship. In Europe mothers and their children will get official refugee status very quickly when their lives in their country of origin is at risk. No need to pay, they will even receive free housing , medical coverage, schooling and pocket money.
Asylum requests should be evaluated before a migrant enters a nation. The current system of letting all comers declare asylum is not working here or in Europe. There is great shame on US/NATO for destruction in the ME, and chaos in Central America. The obvious solution is stop illegal invasions by -US/NATO, and to pull troops out once and for all. In Central America and A-stan the more money that is spent on “drug interdiction”, the more drugs there are. This is an obvious case of rampant corruption, but God knows we aren’t allowed to criticize the military/intelligence racket..
In any case. it’s not 1910 and we don’t need any more people. Family reunification is a 2-way street.
Who are the “we” who “don’t need any more people”? The collectivity of readers of theintercept.com? The inhabitants of Planet Earth?
the planet has been inhabited by human gone wild. Narry a thought about the ratio of resources to free and clear comfort. Incapable of planning and discipline.Religious sex crazed anti-abortionists, religious sex crazed anti contraceptionists. The human animal could destroy the planet.
Did you know that Romania is overwhelmed with garbage dumps that now threatens their water supply?
7 BILLION AND COUNTING.
Speaking of family reunification, can’t some of you European settlers in the Americas go back to England, Ireland, Italy or wherever, find some of your cousins, and reunite with them there? I’m sure the racist immigrant-haters over there would welcome you.
Ideally maybe: “Asylum requests should be evaluated before a migrant enters a nation”
The problem is that for real political refugees seeking asylum, the act of leaving their existing countries is a crime carrying some severe sentences, or returning to their country would risk their lives (e.g. Informants on the Taliban, or Christians in Syria). Those refugees simply have no choice and must apply for refugee status in the first free country that they enter (be that wherever – even the USA). Then whether the migrant wants to stay in that country or go to another one, is part of the official process.
Real refugees like these though are seldom the problem though. The idiots who decide to jump the border and try to live under the radar until caught are.
Stop already absorbing the guilt tripping “you dont deserve this” con. Wallstreet thieves have been very busy since 1913 casting spells of undeservance up America (north) and preparing mainstreet for the slaughters.
The Wallstreet con game demands growth so they aid and abet a re-invasion of the US for the population growth fraud they need to perpetrate new loans for higher pricing while sacrificing available resources for the life support and comfort that God would want you to have. Desalinators wont cut it. Gargantuan air purifiers wont cut it. Fake soil wont cut it.
This “pulling on your heartstrings” is a conjob. Is the treatment of invaders bad? Yes. But you believe that borrowing more and more of the future of more and more generations for more and more debt at the price of sacrificing real freedom from debt and resource devastation is OK so long as you can accomodate invaders? And what – demonstrate to the rest of the planet that the good way of life is to do that same?
There will be suffering. What do you want to get for your suffering?
And you would dare to use the name of God in that mish mash of cruelty you just wrote?
who is insulted? God inflicted death and devastation and did smote many.
Cruelty? Who all is harmed? Do i profess in the name of God? i do not.
Yet you shrink to be beaten once and again. Yea tho i walk thru the valley of the shadow of death, i have feared no evil. And yet few here can really call out the evil and proclaim even that. What price have you paid?
It’s mind boggling the chutzpah displayed by heirs of the genocidal European invaders of America in treating peaceful people, including heirs of the survivors of that invasion, as “invaders”. No, United Snakes white people, this is not your land! You have no more right to it than any other human being, and certainly no more than any indigenous Americans.
and what be your plan to remedy that?
That is, on the face of it, a powerful argument. The current Americans have seized up all the good land and are locking the rest of the world out to live in squalor unfairly. But … here’s the problem. America is a sparsely populated country, but so is Afghanistan. America has mineral resources, but so do they. If they were demanding a chance to have access to the common inheritance of the Earth, which is the rightful product of the labor of NO man, then they could make a powerful case — a case we all tend to sympathize with deeply, because we all are constantly aware, even if not in a well-organized way, that the vast bulk of the land is in the hands of a few wealthy people, or in the hands of governments that write rules for wealthy people (like, you can’t pick a flower but you can cut down a forest for a pittance, you can’t make a camp for a night but you can dig a giant mine for a few dollars fee if your grandfather started digging in the area and has an existing permit).
Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territories_by_population_density we see that Mexicans have a weak case for population pressure – yes, there are more people in their country than ours. But one of the big black areas on the map, high population density, is Europe — which refugees from all over the world are trying to get into by every crack and crevice! So it’s not really the land per se which people are going after, but the money and perhaps the culture. And what freaks out the middle class is that they know that that money is NOT coming out of the hands of the rich.
Cruel and careless. Two words I’ve seen used describing those who would advocate coming to America legally.
Is it cruel and careless that the subject of the article skipped the line of others waiting for asylum? Delays and numbers allowed for legal immigration is heavily impacted by those illegally entering the country.
Cruel and careless indeed. May as well be asking for Black-Friday style stampedes and call it progress.
Rodger Lodger, below:
We need better Homeland Security!
About that border issue. . .
Too bad the indigenous peoples who were in North America in the 1500s didn’t have the foresight to kill the white invaders before they could establish themselves.
What do you want ? They had a technological disadvantage and were to busy killing eachother.
One reason the invaders had an advantage was their long history of improving methods of killing each other.
But they are wonderful job creators
“sorry, no sympathies.
if the people of the world do not learn to make the place of their birth a home worth living, then why burden the people who have?”
-barabbas
States the ‘hypochristian’ who stains humanity w/ their repulsive rhetoric, while they lounge on genocidal land that was conquered by men who chose not to ‘make the place of their birth a home worth living’.
A One Detestable Fuk’ Production
that is a guilt trip that self-pitying types toss onto others who have refused to inherit the burdens of the ages and who have no real alternative to what works in the face of the catastrophe perpetrated others whom they cannot stand against.
your turn, genius.
If you insist on inheriting the spoils of the European conquest of America, don’t be surprised if some righteous person decides to punish you, individually and collectively, for that crime.
the line was drawn by the formation of the United Nations.
loving your neighbor is also commensurate wth forbiddance of trespass.
my home is by invitation only and then, only temporarily.
What have you done to stop your “home” from invading, looting and destroying the homes of numerous other peoples? Until the United Snakes makes full reparations for that mayhem and plunder, it is fair game for a far more violent invasion than one by peaceful migrants.
i have stated my plan for population reduction and land re-apportionment. What is yours?
Are these South Texas refugee camp residents even women?
_”Yes, Men Can Have Periods and We Need to Talk About Them“_
“Menstruation isn’t just a ‘women’s issue.’ It’s time we opened up the conversation.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/09/21/yes-men-can-have-periods-and-we-need-to-talk-about-them?via=twitter_page
It takes a particular type of person to be intentionally cruel.
This is disgusting.
Our new AG intends to loosen hiring standards for Border Control agents, because it has become difficult to fill positions. The physical process starts there.
I resent that my tax $$ are used to fund this upstanding private detention facility. The system rots for brown and black people. I am ashamed.
Thank you, Sharon Lerner.
You are not the only one who feels this way. We are all immigrants which at this point doesn’t carry much weight. Let’s face it, the media is in bed with the gov’t./corporations and keeps dumping “fake news’ as it has for many years, as well as non stopn sit-comes, soaps, sports to keep the sheeple blissfully consuming and from time to time the media puts on a talking head who has passed a matrix defining who the sheeple are likely to like, all of the while merely reading a teleprompter with information spewed on by whatever the powers that be feel that will, #1, keep the sheeple afraid, and more importantly, #2, sell them a BIG TRUCK, tasteless beer, crap food that is cheap and quick, and on and on and on. Aww, never mind, I’m really disgusted as to how much crap the sheeple kow tow the crap spewed by our fair and balanced media.
We are not all immigrants. Some have been in the US for generations, that is not immigration. If you follow the logic that all people are immigrants, then we should go back to the beginning and all declare ourselves African.
The most impressive images I have seen so far are the ones of young African males, being rescued from overloaded boats with literally no shirt on their back. What do you want to do with them? Potentially there are maybe 200 million who would like to leave Africa and go to Europe. What are these guys going to do with little education and language skills? Are Euro women going to marry them? Immigration advocates need to think these things through, not just demand that every person on earth has equal rights in the US as US citizens.
The government is too bureaucratic to deviate from its own procedures. That means that every single nasty thing they do is going to be hidden in weaselly-worded language right out in plain sight. It’s just like the “privacy policy” in the latest piece of spyware you’re supposed to install in that regard. For example:
Bear in mind that in documents like this, “should” doesn’t mean anything — it expresses an aspiration that is meant to be dashed. Whenever they care, they say “will” or “must”, like “Officers/Agents must regularly
test handcuffs, leg restraints, belly chains…” Other “shoulds” turn up in the 72 hours part and the separating families part. There are many “shoulds” throughout the document, and many of them are explicitly followed up by suggestions of what to do if what “should” be done isn’t convenient.
The “CBP control” offers another loophole, since of course any non-CBP building — like a private jail — is presumably not under their control. The only part here that means anything is “not using in a punitive manner”, but that is a MANNER. Like, if you punish a specific inmate by turning up the A/C, that’s against policy. Making the whole building a legendary “icebox” for whoever passes through is not a punitive manner, just a punitive *intention*.
With this in mind, the rest of the text bears examination for obvious leads, like:
“Obama’s family detention camps were strongly condemned for their inhumane conditions, but Trump has arguably made the situation even worse.”
Should read “and”. “but” is subtle weasel-word apologism for Obama. It implies a dichotomy rather than a continuation of policy.
Yeah, there’s a lot of that sort of confusion (or misdirection) going around.
Increasingly, it’s going around in pieces published here. In Ms. Lerner’s case, I suspect it was just a poor word choice. In the cases of other TI writers, I’m quite sure the misdirection is intentional.
Good point and reasonable supposition. We have Sharon Lerner to thank for pulling much of the weight in maintaining TI’s status as an actual journalistic entity of late. It’s only thanks to its digital format that our house doesn’t use the rest of it as toilet paper. (Especially given that the evil TP cabal conspires to put fewer and fewer rolls in a pack for the same damn price. “Ooo, but they now feature opulent 15-ply uber-plush butt-snuggle technology – new and improved!” Anyone else notice?)
This is indeed unjustifiable. It doesn’t matter if you’re for or against the illegal immigrant on the “main issue” — there’s no possible excuse to mistreat people this way, nor to so dramatically waste money doing it. The American government could pay some poor country like Nicaragua to set up open camps, no fences, no guards, nothing to keep the people in but some cheap humanitarian assistance and their hope for a favorable ruling. To some it might sound harsh to relegate the illegal immigrants to housing in the “third world”, but anywhere that the water is unsafe to drink IS the Third World! And that includes Texas.
Remember, the best water is government water. Ban the plastic bottle.
sorry, no sympathies.
if the people of the world do not learn to make the place of their birth a home worth living, then why burden the people who have?
get out. go home. you cannot have what i built. you will not crowd me out nor feed the criminal wallstreet GROWTH demands. If the weralthy thieves and ceo monsters of wallstreet want to house you in their homes, fine. Maybe Lloyd Blankfein can provide some of the rooms in his place.
No sympathies. This from a poster who sometimes poses as a Christian.
Thank you, Doug, for taking the trouble to compile these selections from Scripture. They couldn’t be more apt. How is it that there’s such a scarcity of empathy, and so little understanding of the desperation that drives immigrants out of Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico into the US? And coupled with that, so little self-questioning about one’s own righteous attitudes.
As God is my witness and Jesus is my savior, i tell you the truth. You are not OBLIGATED to suffer for the benefit of others. Jesus did not live in an overpopulated world.
I respect your response as sincere and earnest and well intentioned. You have mentioned before of your status and if you read me, you know enough of mine as well.
Lack of sympathy does not mean i feel no pain. I suffer greatly for the suffering of others. That may imply an arrogance or condemnation of others on my part. On the contrary, it is equally a blessing to those who have toiled and earned to keep what they have to enjoy their lives which are also modest and humble. It is also a release of guilt that the suffering of others is not an OBLIGATION for those to fix but instead a FREE CHOICE to make on their own part without burdening others. For life is to be lived and enjoyed for without the enjoyment of life, life itself is a burden, and humans are not designed to be such mules.
You may do so if it helps your maintain your sanity but giving up your life that others may live is not the way of living. Jesus gave up his life ONLY to pronounce and make sacred the lessons of life support. But today, is helping the helpless any better that ridding the world of thieves who enrich themselves? Is solving one problem while creating another really a good solution?
Jesus has come and gone and shall not be returning in the sense that evangelicals believe. God has nutured this planet in phases. When his rules of the old testament were not working as desired, he sent us Jesus. The next phase is going to be different.
You are not a Christian. You do not love your neighbour.
WRONG. Once they were my neighbor. Then they moved. Are you so smart that you believe that israelis can invade Palestine to be closer neighbors?
There is no God, which is why it is called faith.
“If the people do not learn…” Do you understand that every time a Central American nation votes to make their birth place a land worth living in, the United States overthrows their governments, arms death squads, sanctions rape, torture, and murder.
The recent wave from Honduras was Hillary’s doing: http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/9/hillary-clinton-honduraslatinamericaforeignpolicy.html
You see, they’d elected a leader who promised to raise wages so that people could feed their children. This was unacceptable to the American corporations who depend on slave wages.
of course i do.
Instead of aiding and abetting these monstrous elitist thieves by helping their predatory dictators rid their land of people by floodng the US & EU with people who would harbor vengeance against the US, efforts and resources be used to prevent this from happening in the first place?
Had the founders of the US instead swept out the kings and lords, America (north) today might still be inhabitated by native Americans. Instead the founders fled england and ireland and geocided the natie Americans.
There are simply to many people on this planet to allow such monstrous dictatorial regimes to chase off populations onto and upon others.
If you want to see where this is headed as it stands right here and now, do some research into the TTIP, ICSID, ISDS and get an idea what the monsters are doing. Here is a brief: American hedgefunds are buying into the mining rights of corporations and suing the governments of 3rd world countries to pay for lost profits which governments have taken steps to provide meaningful employment and environmental protection – which cases are being decided by a world bank tribunal.
What is the sense of always applying bandaids to wounds made by a thief who is always taking a cut of your for himself?
To use Christianity as a reference for your cold logic is comical. When all else fails, reference religion to justify (fill in the blank) If you live in the US and are OK denying mothers and children shelter and dignity, who are simply victims of US foreign policy then you are suffering from an all to common psychological disorder. Either that or a product of a standard neoliberal Chicago school education, same result. This is Lord Of The Flies shit happening on American soil by government employees in 2017. No sympathies? No conscience.
Stop beating yourself up.
Just because wallstreet robbed you and and they fed you WMD and the presidents tortured some folks and your home was taken and your children had to sell themselves for an overpriced education does not mean you have to project your sorrows onto misplaced targets to dissolve your grief or cowardice.
You hear me bragging about the American experience?
religion? Jesus was not a christian. He was a teacher and a fighter. Believing in your so-called christian way has not prevented you from being robbed. But it sure does sound like you are preparing yourself to be a victim and when all you have is gone, you would turn the way of thieves upon me?
There should be a much stricter (reasonable) vetting process but these people are still human beings and should be treated as such, especially small children shouldn’t be treated this way.
Yes, if the french had all runaway and not had tgeir revolution. Stay home and make your leaders accountable to you insteadof easing their burden. All citizens of the Vatican, go there.
See if Saudi Arabia will take them, Lerner. Plus the hijab is a symbol of women’s rights.
I don’t believe in treating people badly gratuitously. My advice to this would-be illegals is to stay away from the U.S.
If they tried this bs to get to Australia, they’d find themselves held on Nauru or on Manus Island. Without AC.
Australia: another country conquered by white invaders who think they have some special right to it.
In this case the wall or some other means to discourage attempts to illegally immigrate is a far more humane affair. Yet there is no excuse for not humanely holding illegal immigrants till they are deported.
You have to wonder about a society that has so many people in power and all the way down the chain who are cruel and careless either directly or indirectly, willing to use their power to abuse, deny dignity too, disrespect and humiliate others. There is no need whatsoever to treat people this way, even if they have broken a law. Preying on someone in your power is unconscionable.
You have to wonder what would happen if the wrong people get into power and use this ‘trait’ to forward an agenda and indulge in even worse treatment of fellow human beings, even neighbors. We’ve seen it before.
It’s not just people crossing the border, it’s in so many areas. One example is US school children who are humiliated, shamed and even branded with a stamp because they are poor, because their parents don’t have money to pay for school lunches or have fallen behind in the payments. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/05/opinion/shaming-school-lunch-bills.html
The photograph is stuffed with aggressive, Type-A go getters. Who didn’t want to apply first to a consulate for proper admission.
They broke a law they knew they were breaking. They’re in a country they understand they didn’t enter lawfully. Enforcing laws is what progressives really hate.
Hey Brain Trust: It is NOT ILLEGAL to seek ASYLUM. If they are coming to get asylum, they are breaking absolutely no laws.
If asylum is the magic word, then can you think of a better refugee camp?
Please! Being cruel and careless, denying people dignity has nothing to do with enforcing laws, collecting evidence, making a case, nothing at all, it is sick and twisted behavior.
“In U.S. law, the word law refers to any rule that if broken subjects a party to criminal punishment or civil liability.”
“Criminal punishment and civil liability” NOT careless, cruel, petty, abusive behavior. There is a world of difference.
the Dilley facility is a detention center, not the best but “WAY” better than others. They have individual rooms, they have school, the parents go to classes and are responsible for their own welfare, they gat meals four to fives times a day plus the kids get snacks. medical is provided by the US Public Health Service, they have drs, dentist, nurses etc etc. better than we give some people in rural poor America. The kids get recreation activities and while they are detained they are well taken care of!
Does Hallmark have a card for this?
OK, that was good. More like this!
To quote Dostoevsky, “You can judge a society by how well it treats its prisoners”. Many if not most Americans would agree that even prisoners should not be treated this way.
THAT BEING SAID, this article fails miserably at even suggesting an answer to the hard question about illegal immigration, which is “How do we deter lawbreakers (which “illegal” immigrants clearly are) from becoming repeat offenders?” As this article fails to even suggest that this is a question, it is in essence nothing more than another puff piece from the catalog of stories about the rigors of illegal border crossing.
Everyone who crosses the border illegally (possibly excepting minor children unfortunate enough to be towed along with their lawbreaking parents) knowingly put THEMSELVES in harm’s way. The question now also becomes one of whether or not we have a responsibility to protect these people from the consequences of their own questionable decisions.
I know that the unspoken argument of this article is obviously the Open Borders one, which is that the inhumanity described should be eliminated by scrapping border controls and letting anyone in who wants to come. Since the author cops out on mentioning that explicitly, however, I will not attempt to write a wholesale rebuttal to Open Borders.
I’m afraid you’ve entirely missed the point.
The clearly stated and illustrated subject of this piece is the way our authorities, in our names, treat women and children who are trying to escape violence and oppression in the places they had the misfortune to be born. We are treating them shamefully, brutally.
Although the argument for open borders is not the subject of this piece, I would venture a guess that you would have an entirely different view of the question had you been born into poverty in, say, Guatemala.
Fortunately, smart guy that you are, you chose to be born into relative comfort and safety, from which position you feel you can righteously judge others who didn’t choose their parentage or nationality at birth as wisely as you did.
“Born on third base, thinks he hit a triple.”
The Great Doug!
Doing Jesus’s work.
Hear, hear, lo and behold !
It’s easy for people who have in the past hinted on the comments board at a station in life that ordinarily brings comfort and loftiness of their own socioeconomic station to write things like that.
By the same token, these interlopers had enough financial wherewithal to bring themselves to a border far away from regions where their own COLs were substantially lower than in where greater perceived opportunities await.
What do you know about ‘these interlopers’? Have you ever walked 100 miles, 1000 miles, whatever? How much did it cost? Do you think the ‘wherewithal’ includes payment to traffickers, that wouldn’t be in business if US policy was more humane? Where is your Christianity? Were the founding fathers persecuted because they were a miserable bunch of unloving people? Is that your heritage? Why did you slaughter the indigenous population?
I think your comment is stupid, immature and snarky. And stupid.
why do you believe it is America’s place to give welfare to illegals? We can’t even take care of our own, why are you not advocating for that, the shamefulness if in the way they are treated in “THIER” country, we give billions of dollars to central America, let them be taken care of there.
and how do you think they are treated? should they be released to never be seen again, over 905 of immigrants released never show up for court, like so many of these stories you see lately of mom’s and dads being “FINALLY found and removed. They failed to show up and were ordered deported by a judge.
It’s not my job to figure that out, but here’s a suggestion: If you’re going to detain asylum seekers who haven’t been convicted of a crime, they should be treated like human beings, and their detention should be as short as possible.
Asylum seekers are not “lawbreakers.” They are human beings exercising an internationally-recognized right, codified in multiple treaties to which the US is a party.
Those treaties, together with the Constitution and laws enacted by Congress pursuant to the provisions of the Constitution, are “the supreme Law of the Land.” See Article VI, Clause II, US Constitution.
The defiantly-ignorant assholes who refuse to recognize and honor this reality are not only piss-poor human beings, they are simply shitty Americans — and there are so many of them that they have turned the US into a depressingly-shitty nation.
What can be done Sharon? There ought to be laws, by golly! Oh wait-….
There are laws. Which the United States is breaking with abandon.
They’re in a refugee camp now, ShaunMarie, so there.
Yes, not the MDay for CrookdClinton! Need to check in with YOUR Church and President– they are RESPONSIBLE FOR SELLING YOU OUT TO,THE GRINGOS, like BertaCaceres.request, demand your President send not trainees to the School of the Americas.
Disgusting treatment of fellow human beings. Let them in and grant them citizenship, if they want it.
Thank you for this article Sharon Lerner.
My heart goes out to these families. We must fix immigration laws and eliminate private prisons – and that’s what these are.
“Immigration is broken.” “There’s a law-w-w.” “Do something legislators“.
Leftist freaks.
What are they doing on this side of the national border, Sharon?
A border only means that two or more politicians agreed on something at some point. If people want to be on the other side of it, that’s their decision.
Any other laws you want to ignore outside of the legislative or electoral process?
Any more wages you’d like equalized downward across the hemisphere? Any more city rents you’d like adjusted upward? Any family-honor trends you’d like to introduce? Not enough crime?
Thank you. Maybe the MS13 gangwill move in next door to Joe?
The article talks about asylum seekers. I’m pretty sure even you can figure out what an asylum seeker seeks to do in a foreign country.
Get off the island of Nauru? Or resolve to get out of any other refugee camp?
What does a citizen owe her own land? An obligation to better it, maybe?
Do you think somebody can just walk up to an attractive country (achieved in some way through its own cooperation and the courage of its individual citizens) and plead “asylum”? There would be 1.2 billion people and their water oxen in this country.
“Do you think somebody can just walk up to an attractive country”
Yes.
Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.”
The United States recognizes the right of asylum of individuals as specified by international and federal law.
Absolutely yes. It’s in article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (not that you’d agree with half of it). And when conditions are dire, they do, typically in neighboring countries.
Then we have a refugee camp for them in South Texas.
Maybe not the water oxen. When was the last time you saw a water ox crossing the border, or on a plane?
It appears we can still count on The Intercept to provide something more substantial than a simple feel-good piece on Mother’s Day.
Turning the United States into Hell-on-Earth will probably reduce immigration. Like many of the best laid plans, however, the unintended side effects can bite you. Future writers will wax nostalgic about the ‘good old days’ when foreigners still wanted to come to the United States and The Wall was designed to keep people out, not in.
The editors won’t stop. If everyone is the same shade of gray and huddled behind wind powered blankets, there will be too many mothers.
This is just heartbreaking.
As with all things, it gets worse or it gets better.
I see absolutely no indication of it getting better.
I foresee no lessening of these manifold cruelties inflicted on the helpless by the authoritarian forces acting in the name of the State.
They — these authorities — betray the very meaning of this country.
All people are created equal. All people have inalienable rights. The purpose of the government is to protect those rights.
When agents of the State abuse people — no matter who they abuse, no matter the crime of which they’re accused or convicted, no matter their religion, no matter their nationality or ethnicity, or no matter the circumstance of that human being — when agents of the State act with cruelty and deny the humanity others, they violate their duty.
There is no excuse for treating people with such indignity and inhumanity.
None!
Yet we have a president and a party devoted to blaming the powerless for their own incompetence and their own cruelties.
It will only get worse.
I guess it’s time to grind off the inscription on the Statue of Liberty…
“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your …”
These lines are from”The New Colossus,” written by Emma Lazarus (daughter of legal immigrants) in 1883 to raise money for the construction of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.
But it doesn’t stand for open borders or illegal immigration, it stands for liberty and freedom from tyranny. Be advised, the USA is a nation of laws…. not poems.
Societies celebrating extreme predatory greed must inevitably develop very cold shoulders.
That power/greed structures in the richest country on Earth label and treat mothers seeking survival for themselves and their children as “criminals” is unforgivable, and one more glaring sign of a sick and blatantly sociopathic culture.
Thank you, Sharon. Happy Mother’s Day, and a day of love and peace also to all without theirs.
It’s really horrible. The USA: the country which has the world’s largest prison population though much smaller population than China or India; the country which has excessive life in jail sentencing for non-violent crimes such as shoplifting or selling marijuana; the country which still has inmates in captivity at Guantanamo Bay Cuba, a facility with a grim history of torturing its prisoners, not to mention rectal force feeding of hunger strikers; the country which has now equipped police forces across the country with military surplus from the Iraq War (rocket propelled grenade launchers, machine guns, mortar launchers, Bradley APC vehicles, etc); and now this: treating immigrants like criminals, incarcerating them, humiliating them, abusing them as revealed in this article. The creeping militarization of all aspects of the USA continues apace. And with Jim Bob Sessions the new AG, things will surely go from bad to worse with a big increase in the prison population as Sessions rolls back all of the efforts by Obama administration to lower prison populations by reducing excessive sentencing guidelines. Too bad.
All true, but none of it indicates what our immigration policy should be.