Detention Business:

Migrants Are Expendable, Not Worthy of Human Rights Protections in US

Rasa - It is true that US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order to allow immigrant families found crossing the border illegally to remain together in detention. But it is also true that the executive order doesn’t guarantee that separated families will ever be united permanently.

News ID: 438400

Date: 24 June 2018 - 09:59

RNA - While Trump’s order will now keep any families detained at the border united, it doesn’t address the more than 2,000 children already separated from their parents. Simply put, there is no plan, intention, or a sense of urgency to begin reuniting these children - many of whom have suffered serious emotional anguish - with their parents.

This is while the US administration has the authority and the resources to immediately begin the process of family reunification. Sadly, rather than clarify the problems facing separated families, Trump’s executive order only replaces one disastrous policy with another. Officials are reportedly preparing to house as many as 20,000 children and their families on military bases, a plan that may well violate their basic human rights under International Humanitarian Law. Under the same law, the use of military facilities and the potential construction of additional facilities is outrageous and illegal. To be building internment camps for immigrants is equally unconscionable.

Nor is that all: A new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) traces over the past several years a devastating trail of epitaphs dotting the vast system of immigrant detention - a burgeoning network of facilities ranging from federal prisons to private commercial detention centers to tent cities in the desert. The official records generally list nondescript reasons for death, such as “cardiac arrest.”

The report notes the growing frequency and patterns of neglect displayed in many of the death cases as warning signs that go ignored. In fiscal year 2017, according to federal statistics, 12 detainees died on Homeland Security’s watch, a record number since 2009 and double the death rate of four years ago.  Now advocates fear that Trump is turning the country’s immigrant-detention system into a new kind of death row along the border.

Further still, with about 2,300 children separated over the past few weeks and warehoused in tent cities and retail buildings, mental health experts have warned of profound damage caused by the toxic stress of protracted separation, including deep anxiety, depression, and chronic post-traumatic stress disorder. Similar traumas could afflict thousands of other youth who were taken into custody after arriving at the border as unaccompanied minors, having already been detained and estranged from their families.

According to Fars News Agancy, this whole crisis in detention would be avoidable if the US government simply stopped imprisoning the vast majority of migrants and their children, who have no criminal convictions and pose no security threat. There are numerous alternatives to detention that do not involve locking up adults or children, including community-based housing and social-support services like those in Europe, so families are kept intact while they fight for their lives in the courts.

It is high time for the Human rights Watch and the international civil society to underline profit motive that is fueling the industry of private immigration prisons in the United States, with many detention facilities and services - including medical programs - managed through massive federal contracts with security corporations. The detention business is designed to ration essential services like food and medical care. It’s a combination of wanting to maximize profit and the idea that the unfortunate migrant families are somehow expendable and not worthy of basic human rights protections.

Many around the world are looking at the US border in horror and wondering how the crisis is allowed to happen and continue in an unjust society. The only rationale seems to be the desire simply to extract profit through the political and economic exploitation of the suffering of desperate migrants and their families. The disgrace of the United States in the twenty first century is that more zeal and compassion towards refugees and migrants is evident among developing nations than among Americans.

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