Crossposted from The Sanctuary
Torture has been in the news lately, masquerading in the Witness Protection Program under the alias “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” and “not-torture”, but there are too many of us who recognize its darkness no matter what the CYA Campaign declares. These lowest of standards are not reserved especially for prisons outside the United States, however; many instances of abuse have occurred right here on U.S. soil within the profitable network of migrant detention centers.
The company called ICE, which contracts out the facility to CCA to house immigrants seeking asylum with their families. In fact, the alleged victim’s son was in the room during the sexual encounter, according to the ICE report. The son’s age was not reported but the victim’s room contained a crib.
That particular violation happened at the notorious T. Don Hutto “Family” Prison in Taylor, Texas. Across the way in Tennessee, another woman was shackled like an animal as she gave birth, with agents claiming she was a flight risk:
By the time Mrs. Villegas was released from the county jail six days later, she had gone through labor with a sheriff’s officer standing guard in her hospital room, where one of her feet was cuffed to the bed most of the time. County officers barred her from seeing or speaking with her husband.
After she was discharged from the hospital, Mrs. Villegas was separated from her nursing infant for two days and barred from taking a breast pump into the jail, her lawyer and a doctor familiar with the case said. Her breasts became infected, and the newborn boy developed jaundice, they said.
The detention center system has all the same evil genetic makeup of the former President’s fake Global War on Terror™ – denial of habeas corpus rights, magically disappearing detainees to who-knows-where, physical and sexual violence, and negligent refusal of medical care.
As the country has a discussion about whether or not its acceptable to almost-drown someone 183 times in a month while in U.S. custody, we in the pro-human/migrant rights community should remind them all loudly that abuses are tightly woven into the prison networks here. It shouldn’t matter whether a human being is a citizen, non-citizen, enemy combatant, unlucky bystander, whatever – nor should it matter what type of treatment someone in our “group” may receive from “them” – if a society wants to claim its exceptionalism, then it must be earned.
In the case of migrant workers, the reality of family separation, criminal treatment of civil violations, and human rights abuses is not a myth. Here are some resources to fight this cancer that grows within these militarized borders:
- Night of 1000 Conversations
- Detention Watch Network
- Amnesty International
- ACLU’s report on migrant detention
- Breakthrough’s Death by Detention Video
- National Immigrant Justice System
- Human Rights Watch: Forced Apart (By the Numbers)