A report from an internal US watchdog has found "dangerous overcrowding" in migrant detention centres in the south and urged authorities to act.Cramming people in standing-room-only cells for a week? I'm sorry, but that's some Nazi-grade treatment.[1]
Jarring photos of facilities in the Rio Grande show 51 female migrants held in a cell made for 40 men, and 71 males held in a cell built for 41 women.
Adults were packed in standing room only cells for a week, with others held in overcrowded cells for over a month.
One facility manager called the situation "a ticking time bomb".
"We are concerned that overcrowding and prolonged detention represent an immediate risk to the health and safety of [Department of Homeland Security] agents and officers, and to those detained," inspectors said in the report.
Please note that these descriptions are coming from DHS's own internal watchdogs, not from a bunch of squishy Congressmen.
This is who we are, a nation that tolerates industrial-scale cruelty from an administration that couldn't care less. This is the face that we are projecting to the world.
Heckovajob, Donnie.
________________________________________________
[1] No, I'm not sorry. If you want to understand what happened in Germany in the 1930s, look at what is happening here, now, in the United States.
I’ve spent my entire life trying to figure out how the entire nation of Germany, all of its ordinary citizens living in cities and towns and villages across the country, could have stood by while their own government rounded up people and stuck them in hastily built, disgusting concentration camps, and then proceeded to kill them by gas or bullets or starvation or overwork or disease or simple filth and neglect.
This was the week I think I finally understood it. What happened in Nazi Germany didn’t affect their own lives, it happened away from them, it happened to “others,” to people who were not like them, whom they had been conditioned to hate, and it happened at the direction of a leader they admired and revered. And it happened with the overt or tacit approval of their fellow citizens all around them.
This is what is happening in our country right now, right this minute, right in front of us.
18 comments:
Easy way to avoid that treatment:
Don't illegally enter the US.
As it is, it is still better treatment than they *claim* they are fleeing from.
I agree, however, that we should Do Something.
What Social Program are you gonna divert funds from to build better facilities?
The F-35, perhaps...or maybe just quit giving money to countries to buy weapons back from us?
Point of order, if claiming asylum, it still is not legally correct to say they have entered illegally...that is being litigated.
Take away the Koch Brothers’s tax cut. Tax hedge-fund compensation as wages. That should do for starters.
And B steps up to defend the indefensible!
Heckuva job, B.
Tax capital gains over $150,000 as earned income.
I don’t know why Republicans always try to put the burden on the poor and the disabled. I think they just despise people.
Some folks make good little Nazis. Unbelievable.
Dale
The German people didn't even have a recent example of what to look out for when a fascist dictator takes over. How could they have known how evil they could get?
What's our excuse, again?
"...from an administration that couldn't care less."
Oh, they care all right. The cruelty is the point. It's Fergus' strategy to get reelected and stay out of prison now that his own polling is showing him losing the states he needs without the Russian help he had in 2016.
The money required to bring us into compliance with the Geneva Conventions is already there. The private companies running these concentration camps are charging the taxpayer between $250 and $750 per day per child, meaning that not only are we torturing the innocent, but evil bastards are getting obscenely wealthy off of doing so. One of those evil bastards is John Kelly, who recently joined the board of Caliburn International.
Fergus is wagering that this really is not just who we are, but who we want to be.
If he turns out to be right, we deserve what we get.
But none of those children deserve it, nor do their parents, especially when you remember how it is that their home countries got the way they are.
-Doug in Oakland
We can see already the people that will defend cattle cars and gas chambers and medical experimentation. The excuses are all set in concrete now. "Their fault for being Hispanic." (I paraphrase.)
Didn't we used to hang people for crimes against humanity?
Didn't the U.S. Supreme Court, in the Yamashita case, rule that even if the senior person in charge could prove that he didn't know what people under his command were doing, he was responsible for their doing it? (We hanged Yamashita for crimes committed by out-of-control Japanese troops, hundreds of miles from his command post, after we cut his lines of communications so that he couldn't possibly know.)
Finally, what should this mean to Donald Trump?
Just wondering.
Yours crankily,
The New YOrk Crank
Nag:
Nope: Their fault for ILLEGALLY our border. Makes 'em criminals.
You can use all the hyperbole you wish....exaggerations and all that doesn't make what you state truth.
And, I repeat myself: How many of these folks are YOU, Personally, willing to take into your home, house, feed,clothe and otherwise support? If the answer is "None" then that is hypocritical.
B, you're seriously defending cramming so many people into a cell that everybody has to stand up and leaving them in there for a week?
I'm truly sorry for you.
Misdemeanors. Have you ever driven faster than the speed limit? Rolled through a stop sign? Lied on your taxes? Then you are as much "illegal" as refugees and other undocumented.
Also, I don't need to take them into my house. The United States has more room than that.
Some "patriots" think the United States is incapable of producing food, shelter, jobs. And that everyone without a house belongs behind wire. Why the fuck would you feel anything but revulsion about a shithole country like that? About shithole people like that?
One more time: It is not illegal to apply for asylum from conditions in your home country.
It is not moral to try and deny asylum seekers from countries we destabilized in illegal wars.
I don't have any migrants in my home, but mayor Schaff made it very clear that all are welcome in Oakland.
-Doug in Oakland
B: “Nope: Their fault for ILLEGALLY (sic) our border. Makes 'em criminals.”
Actually, no. Simply repeating a falsehood, much like Donnie does, doesn’t make it true. The current state of asylum appeals in the U.S. is status quo, pending final judicial decision on Donnie’s attempts to limit the controlling laws. Status quo means entry and then requesting is NOT ILLEGAL. As for the others, fine, now you’ve decided it’s criminal, they get all the rights accorded under a little document called the Constitution of the United States of America. Previously, Administrations took the pragmatic approach of making the entry a civil issue, not entitling entrants to a trial, it simply allowing return to Mexico...Donnie’s hard-on for fucking brown folks has backfired hugely.
Comrade: I don't like the conditions any more than you do.
But these folks keep coming. What to do with 'em?
Do you advocate just letting everyone in? Open borders?
Having a barrier to entry would prevent (or greatly reduce) the overcrowding.
Instead of complaining, what would you suggest be done?
B, I guess that's progress.
First off: Republicans need to stop giving Trump a pass on this. Those who are silent are complicit.
Second, what has changed in the last couple of years? I think it's Trump. He's slashed aid to Central American countries. He also keeps promising that things are going to get harder and harder for immigrants. If anything, Trump has been creating a "gold rush" atmosphere: "If you don't go to the United States now, you may never get in."
Third, stop the demonization. Immigration is a plus for this country. Immigrants come in, work had and, usually because of their lack of language skills, they take jobs that natural-born citizens won't often take. They pay taxes. Their children become education and get better jobs; many go to college.
Fourth, the plain fact of the matter is that there is no pathway for legal immigration to the U.S. for most people from Central America. That needs to be fixed.
I do take this a little personally. Much of the crap I hear being bandied about by the Right is the sort of racist shit that was used to justify clamping down on immigration by people like me a century ago.
Immigration is a good thing, and we need it in order to make the numbers the goddamn Republicans have baked into the tax code because the workforce isn't replacing itself fast enough to achieve that level of growth.
So have they put their money where their tax law is and come up with a plan to naturalize enough immigrants to make the numbers in their own law work?
No they have not, because both their tax law and their immigration stance are lies.
The tax law purposefully blows an enormous hole in the deficit in order to manufacture a crisis they can use to rationalize the elimination of the new deal and great society against the wishes of an overwhelming majority on the electorate, while benefitting their rich donors to the point that their contributions went through the roof. Fergus already has $124 million dollars in his campaign war chest, and that didn't come from Jane and Joe Sixpack.
And the cruelty to immigrants is a campaign ploy to shore up the support of the bigots and imbeciles in his base, full stop.
There is no reason to reject these people and many reasons to welcome them, like America is famous for doing.
What we have here is torture and human suffering for the amusement of some panicky, backward looking propaganda consumers for the purpose of harvesting their votes and money, perpetrated by evil motherfuckers who are either bumblefucking us toward fascism or doing so deliberately, take your pick.
Which category do you put yourself in right now?
History will note your answer, as it has done many times before.
-Doug in Oakland
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