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InAlienable
Daily Dispatch
March 20, 2019
Immigration News:
According to an article in the LA Times, border patrol agents have started the process of releasing detained immigrants, not because it is cruel and unjust to imprison families for seeking help, but because there is NO MORE SPACE in these facilities,
"Normally, the Border Patrol would transfer the migrants to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to be “processed” and in many cases placed in detention facilities. But officials said that both agencies have run out of space due to a recent influx of Central American families…
… A Border Patrol official — who spoke on the condition that he not be identified — denied that the release was a political stunt and said that crowding the facilities would threaten the safety of agents and migrants. “It is a crisis,” he said. “It’s not a self-proclaimed crisis.”The agency plans to make similar releases along other parts of the border, he said”…
For immigration court cases, language barriers could be causing “unfair deportation trials” for migrants. In a recent article by The Marshall Project, the author states that,
“Now the Justice Department has ordered the judges to use more translators who work over the phone because of what the agency says are budget problems. But judges and lawyers say the quality of the telephone translations suffers and may be leading to unfair deportation trials.”
Detention Centers + Health:
While images of migrant children and families being detained is quite saddening, what’s even more heartbreaking is the long term effect, both physically and emotionally, that these individuals will experience after being treated which such disdain. In two separate facilities, it has been reported that a “youth detainee has shown symptoms of having scabies” (Fox13Memphis) and that in a facility in Texas, 186 people have contracted mumps.
Even with backlash from community members and nonprofit organizations, private corporations such as GEO Group and Immigration Centers of America (ICA) are still working to have for-profit immigration prisons in these communities. And if that isn’t bad enough, a recent article by Common Dreams states that the Office of Refuge Resettlement has been sending youth migrants to “off-the-book facilities”,
“An investigation by Reveal on Monday showed that at least 16 young immigrants—as young as nine years old and in need of mental or behavioral health treatment—have been sent by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) to "off-the-books" facilities outside the network of federally-funded detention centers. The administration is housing immigrant children with an even greater degree of secrecy than was previously known, in violation of U.S. law.”