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 night of the incident, in the very early hours of May 20, CCA officials interviewed both the alleged victim and the guard. The guard was immediately placed on administrative leave; he was officially fired the next day.
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.
Taylor Daily Press
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. |
It started when Juana Villegas, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who was nine months pregnant, was pulled over by a police officer in a Nashville suburb for a routine traffic violation.
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.
NYTimes.com
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.
The articles, based on thousands of pages of internal documents, found that 83 detainees had died since ICE was created five years ago and that many more sick and mentally ill people have been denied the treatment to which they are entitled. The Post found medical staff shortages, treatment delays, sloppy record-keeping, poor administrative practices and cover-ups by employees aware of the poor care.
Washington Post
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 violations is not a myth. Here are some resources to fight this cancer that grows within these militarized borders:
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