Shelf Life: Immorally Detained in the Immigration Raids

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The Washington Post has done excellent front-page reporting on the abominable medical care provided by (or, more frequently, withheld from) these often private-run immigrant detention centers. For the newspaper’s four-part series “Careless Detention,” Dana Priest and Amy Goldstein investigated cases in which detainees died in custody or shortly thereafter—83 in the past five years—and found repeated instances of “medical neglect.” Seattle Weekly (Aug. 13, 2008) reports that it took Juan Carlos Martinez-Mendez, who is detained at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, two years to get the surgery necessary to repair his “potentially life-threatening” sinus infections—even after repeated interventions from his regular doctor, a boost of support most detainees don’t have.

All of this probably doesn’t trouble the Lou Dobbs crowd. But here’s a question that might get through to those folks: What about the children?

So far, it seems, there isn’t much of a system in place for them. Some kids get locked up with their parents at one of the country’s two “residential” facilities that house families. One of them, the CCA-run T. Don Hutto Center in Taylor, Texas, was forced to improve conditions after being sued by the American Civil Liberties Union in 2007. Since then, the San Antonio Current reports (May 21, 2008), razor wire has been removed, more educational programs have been introduced, and food has gotten more nutritious—but it’s still just a big prison, a renovated medium-security facility filled with parents and children awaiting deportation. And it costs ICE $2.8 million a month.

It’s difficult to advocate for those children, writes Melissa del Bosque for the Texas Observer (May 16, 2008), because federal and state agencies clash over whose turf it is. “Child welfare is a state issue,” she notes, while “immigration is a federal issue.”

Right now, the issue—all the issues—seems to belong to ICE. Writing on Truthout.org (Oct. 26, 2008), David Bacon calls for an end to workplace raids and community sweeps within the much-hyped first hundred days of Barack Obama’s presidency. “Something is clearly wrong with the priorities of immigration enforcement,” he writes. “Hungry and desperate workers go to jail and get deported.”

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