“Dogs get better care in the dog pound… <…> You don’t treat people like that. There has to be some kind of moral fiber,” stated Catherine Rouse a contract nurse at an Arizona detention center.
“The U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will to keep them sedated during the trip back to their home country…”
These and other shocking findings resulted from the investigative reporting published this week by The Washington Post on medical neglect of infirm immigrant detainees, revealing at least 83 recorded deaths, 20 more casualties than the ones reported last week by the New York Times.
It is hard to ignore when two icons of America’s mainstream media denounce abuses that defy any moral principle or human and civil rights. There is good reason to be alarmed, since it happens to be the flagship of the Bush administration, the Department of Homeland Security, to be the entity responsible for the excesses systematically carried out against immigrants.
Tens of thousands of immigrants are being hoarded like animals because they fall within the ever-widening concept of “illegal” immigrant. The enforcement arm of the Department of Homeland Security, ICE prides itself of holding an average of 33,000 detainees on any given day, twice the total inmate population of countries like Ecuador.
The available records show that the most common cause of death of immigrant detainees is “suicide”. One of the reasons is that now the Division of Immigration Health Services (DIHS), whose current mission is to “keep detainees fit to be deported”, increasingly deals with larger numbers on mentally ill – suicide prone- immigrants whom authorities expunge from state mental institutions and prisons.
Did we mention an ever-widening concept of what means “illegal” immigrant? Besides lacking or overstaying a visa, having committed a past misdemeanor 10 or 20 years ago, or being legal residents whose naturalization application was rejected, now it also includes: suffering from some mental illness.
Besides invading Iraq, combating so-called illegal immigration has become the hallmark of this “war on terror”. Convicted murderers are granted better care and legal rights than “illegal” immigrants.
In American history this is the largest roundup of immigrants since World War II, when over one hundred thousand Japanese residents in the US were locked inside concentration camps.
It is no strange thing either this tendency to “lockup” any actual or perceived enemy as is now the case of immigrants. After all this is the nation that proudly holds the largest inmate population in the whole world, actually 2.3 million prisoners. With less than 5% of earth’s population our nation holds 25% of the world’s inmate population.
Now those numbers will soar and with good reason: we are now dealing with “immigrants”, the worst criminals ever.
http://www.pontealdia.com/press.php?article=27388§ion=3&edition=420