U.S. “Solution” to the “Immigration Problem”:

Torture, Then Deportation Back to Hell

June 29, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Carolina said her 15-year-old daughter was the victim of severe sexual assault in Honduras when she was 9. “My daughter tells me she can’t bear being locked up anymore,” said Carolina, who has been detained with her daughter for three months. “She told me she wanted to take her own life.”

―“US: Trauma in Family Immigration Detention,” Human Rights Watch, May 15, 2015

Until a year ago, the U.S. government had fewer than 100 beds across the country for detention of immigrant women with children. Either they were quickly sent back to the hell they had fled, or released to husbands or other family members in this country, or to shelters provided by immigrant rights organizations and churches, while awaiting their court-ordered fate.

But then tens of thousands of people—including many children traveling alone—fleeing the crises of violence and poverty in U.S.-dominated Central American countries began arriving at the U.S. border. And the rulers of this system saw a different crisis forming at the border—a “danger” that people desperately trying to escape the “made in USA” hell in their own countries would get the idea that they might find a “safe harbor” in this imperialist citadel, and encourage others to follow them. The rulers felt it necessary to deliver a different message—to make it clear that the people from Central America did not belong here, and would find no help or safety here. So the U.S. government implemented a “no release” policy, saying that it was denying release of families from detention specifically, according to Human Rights Watch, to “deter migrants from coming to the U.S.”

The Obama administration instituted “an aggressive deterrence strategy” targeting Central American border crossers, including people seeking official political asylum. First, many new judges were assigned to fast-track hearings to speed up the deportation process. But the lack of pro bono lawyers (lawyers who work for no fee) meant that many children had to argue their appeal for asylum without a lawyer.

Anyone who had been previously deported could not gain release from custody prior to their deportation—a policy that refuses to even consider the likelihood that to desperately relive the dangerous experience of getting to the border could well mean people were escaping a terrible fate in their home country. And even those who had been found to have a credible fear of danger to their lives if they were forced to return were still required to pay a high bail that meant, in practice, they would remain in prison indefinitely.

In order to carry out this draconian enforcement and imprisonment, the U.S. contracted two companies in the business of running prisons for profit to quickly build two huge prisons in Texas. The Texas “detention centers” are in Dilley and Karnes—both outside San Antonio—and another is in Pennsylvania. As of June 12, 2015, Dilley alone held 1,735 individuals, about 1,000 of them children.

According to Clara Long, a Human Rights Watch (HRW) researcher, the result has been widespread trauma, depression, and suicidal thoughts:

The Obama administration has now kept traumatized children and their mothers locked up for nearly a year. They have no idea when they will be released, and they are terrified to be deported back to places where they could be killed, raped, or otherwise harmed.... Indefinite detention takes an especially damaging psychological toll on those who had been forced to flee their homes. Children are asking their mothers, “When will we be able to leave?” and these mothers have no reply. (HRW, May 15, 2015)

We’re talking about women like “Carolina” (described at the start of this article) rescuing a daughter after a brutal sexual assault; or like “Beatriz,” whose 11-year-old son was threatened with forced recruitment by gangs in Honduras; or like “Melinda,” whose sister-in-law was murdered by gang members in Guatemala, and now suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). “Estrella,” her four-year-old daughter, has now spent 20 percent of her life behind bars. In that time, she’s been hospitalized with acute bronchitis and also suffered acute pharyngitis (sore throat), ear aches, fevers, diarrhea, and vomiting.

Severe Psychological Toll on Mothers and Children

In May of this year, a 19-year-old woman with a four-year-old son was found crying and bleeding in a bathroom at the Karnes County “residential center” in Texas. After seven months of imprisonment, with no idea if or when she would get out, she had just slit her wrist in an attempt to kill herself. She received medical treatment, her son was taken away from her, and she was put on suicide watch for several days.

You can find a photo of her partially healed wrist on the Internet; it was taken—in Honduras—two weeks after she tried to kill herself. Yes—less than a week after she’d been found and given medical treatment, she was deported. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) assured the public the injury was minor, and she was treated well. And we are assured that “ICE takes the health, safety, and welfare of those in our care very seriously.” (“Congressional delegation will visit family detention center where teen mom cut wrist,” Franco Ordonez, mcclatchydc.com, June 22, 2015)

Life in Dilley Detention Facility: “Soul-Destroying”

In Dilley detention center in South Texas, the brand-new and largest of the three prisons for immigrant mothers with children in the country, a woman described how her daughter deteriorated mentally and physically after three months living in a cell—which ICE calls a “private room.” According to a Guardian report,“She watched her child’s physical and mental health decline. The child’s skin allergies worsened, she stopped eating and she kept pleading to leave. ‘She didn’t want to be there. She was always crying,’ said [the mother].” (“‘Soul-destroying’: one migrant mother’s story of life at Dilley detention center,” May 22, 2015)

The mother said that when she went to ICE for help, “They told me, ‘You can’t come here trying to guilt trip us about your daughter’s illness, she’s not really ill.’ And they said they wouldn’t let us out unless we could pay the bond.” She needed to come up with $5,000—but she had no money by that point. To get here from Honduras she had to ride “La Bestia,” the massive locomotive that travels across Mexico, back and forth from Central America, carrying on top hundreds of asylum seekers hoping to make it to the U.S.-Mexico border. The “help” that the Mexican government is now providing the U.S. to stop immigrants crossing Mexico translates on the ground to the $400 cost for “greasing the palms” of Mexican immigration officers. And then, to cross the Rio Grande on an inflatable raft, another $800 is needed to pay a Mexican drug syndicate.

It was at this point that this young mother attempted to take her own life, thinking it would be better for her daughter in the long run if she were dead. “I knew then we were never going to get out; that my daughter was going to fade away in Dilley. I became wrapped up in my own world. I thought we would be locked up in there forever.” Her attorney said hundreds of mothers and children being held in detention are going through this same kind of torture: “[W]hen these women learn that they and their young children will be kept in captivity indefinitely, that extinguishes all hope. When they think their kids are going to be subjected to being locked-up long term, that’s soul destroying.”

ICE Responds to Protest with Retaliation, and to Court Orders with Delay

There have been mounting political protests, both outside the detention centers and by the imprisoned mothers. People have converged for protests at Dilley and Karnes, and in major cities around the country. Open letters to Obama by scholars and the general public are circulating widely. And, courageously, mothers have held hunger strikes inside both Texas prisons. ICE then retaliated against the hunger strikers by putting the organizers in solitary confinement, until a lawsuit by RAICES, an immigrant legal advocacy group based in San Antonio, forced them to back off. A petition already signed by over 100,000 people is demanding these prisons be shut down.

But in the face of mounting outrage, demands for the immediate release of these immigrants, and two district court rulings against the detention of children, ICE has been carrying out a process of empty promises of change, and resistance to every legal ruling against it. In February and April of this year, district courts found, first, that the use of detention of children to deter immigration is illegal; and second, that the family detention system violates a decades-old agreement that the U.S. government must favor release of migrant children to their families.

It is, in fact, a violation of international law to use detention for minors as anything other than a measure of last resort. ICE was given 30 days to implement changes to bring its procedures in line with child protection laws, or be forced to close all three prisons. The series of changes ICE announced in response were described by the American Immigration Lawyers Association as “almost meaningless” and “lipstick on a pig.”

After a delegation of eight Democratic congressmen finally went to see the conditions at Dilley and Karnes on June 20, and the next day wrote a letter to ICE calling on the immigrant prisons to be closed, ICE did its own tour and released a statement: “Family residential centers are an important part of the U.S. government’s comprehensive response to the increased number of undocumented families arriving at our borders ... an effective and humane alternative for maintaining family unity....” ICE is now promising to allow mothers who have shown they have a credible fear of persecution if returned to their homeland to be released from detention. That can take months, and ICE hasn’t said it will lower or drop the bail requirement in the meantime. There is also no agreement that ICE will stop holding families where the parent has already been deported once before—even if they could qualify for asylum.

***

To this system, the human toll resulting from its destruction of the living conditions in countries it has dominated and brutally exploited throughout the world does not—and cannot—matter. The world today is witnessing millions and millions of people risking their lives, and losing their lives, in desperate attempts to escape what this capitalist-imperialist system has done to the countries of the Third World in its expand-or-die drive to exploit people worldwide. Their system has no answer to what it is doing to the people and the planet. The revolution does.

How will the kind of humanitarian crisis that began last June at the Texas border be handled after this system of capitalism-imperialism is finally defeated, dismantled, and replaced by the New Socialist Republic in North America—with a government truly dedicated to overcoming all of the inequalities, and all the other scars of this horrific system, with our sights set on the emancipation of humanity?

Confronted with tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors and an equal number of mothers with young children escaping the unlivable conditions that the former rulers of this imperialist monster had created and enforced on the “Northern Triangle” region of Central America—Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador—the new revolutionary state will immediately call on people broadly, all those in a position to help, to reach out and provide loving comfort, food, and shelter for them, while working as fast as possible to help them reconnect with their family members in this country. At the same time, as our internationalist responsibility, we will be contributing to transforming the conditions that imperialist domination had wrought on their countries, and the millions and millions of people still there.

Now compare that with the disgusting crimes the Obama administration has committed, representing the ruling class in this country, against the asylum seekers. If it doesn’t sicken you, and make you even more determined to put an end to this foul system as soon as possible, better check your pulse.

 

 

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