Immigrant deaths in detention were a driving force behind pressuring the Obama administration to promise overhauling the sprawling, inhumane immigrant detention system last August. There is no accountability, however, when immigrants are mistreated or tortured by outsourced corporate contractors profiting from the booming detention industry.
"While the administration has made some modest steps forward, their strategy lacks one crucial element: accountability," reports Carla Long for Human Rights at change.org.
"Take the case of Hiu Lui Ng. Hiu Lui Ng was a Chinese computer engineer detained in Rhode Island. Security cameras caught guards mocking him as he screamed, while they dragged him from his cell. He was suffering from undiagnosed cancer and a broken spine. He finally got care only through an appeal to a federal judge.
"Now Ng's family is seeking to hold the government accountable for his mistreatment. But the government argues that it can't be held liable because it contracted out for Ng's detention."
Long reports that ICE has also outsourced monitoring and evaluating at a cost of $31 million in 2009.
Approximately one million undocumented immigrants or refugees were detained over the past five years, highly profitable for Corrections Corporation of America that manages over 50% of all prison beds in privately contracted US prisons.
In earnings reports released at the end of 2009, "the nation’s two largest private prison operators cited 'significant growth opportunities' for detaining immigrants, driven largely by the Obama administration’s emphasis on detaining 'criminal aliens,." (The Business of Detention: Focus on “Criminal Aliens” Increases Demand for Private Immigrant Detention Business – According to New Profit Reports)
Joan Friedland, Immigration Policy Director for the National Immigration Law Center noted that as of March 22, 2009, “19,495 individuals were identified as undocumented through the Secure Communities program. Of these, only 1,436 were identified as ‘Level 1 criminals.’ (The Hill's Congress Blog: Still Waiting for Change, Joan Friedland, October 29, 2009)
The rest were arrested for lesser crimes including minor traffic offenses like driving without a license according to Friedland.
Focusing on illegal aliens and outsourcing the detention industry has little resemblance to a democracy,
Learn more: See Alex DiBranco's piece at Immigrant Rights blog, "Government Argues It Can't Be Held Responsible for Detainee Abuse.
Photo: Change.org
Comments
IF THEY WENT HOME AND PUT THEIR OWN GOVERNMENTS IN ORDER. THEY WOULDN'T HAVE THIS PROBLEM.
We have become soft as a nation and have let the business community and open border groups intimidate us. Its not these entities that pay for these people that they hire? Its the American taxpayers who carries the the whole and complete financial weight of the extra subsistence for these illegal aliens. Join this historic war against unrestrained illegal immigration, DIMINISHING RESOURCES, CROWDED HIGHWAYS, FAILING INFRASTRUCTURE, OVERPOPULATION GROWTH at numbersusa.dot.com.(millions have?) Discover the corruption in Washington at judicialwatch.dot.org. Make your vote known at the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121
Here's an idea: If you and the rest of Americans discontinued allowing your tax dollars to be spent to train and send mercenaries to "their own governments" to start coups for corporate interests, and to run unjust programs such as NAFTA - people of the South would not be deliberately run out of their homes with nowhere to come but here. The war against immigration is not based on historical facts, American values or human rights. It is based on the opposite. It is no different to yesteryear when American ills were blamed on Communism, discrediting and ruining lives of opponent of racist Nazis in Congress and in other high-level entities. I suggest that you see Nazi Hydra in America, Suppressed History of a Century, p. 208-217 for a sampling of how good people are led to blame scapegoats to preserve racist ideology. Fix the real problem - imperialism and people can have the pleasure of living in their own countries, free and safe from what US taxpayer aggression does to the oppressed.
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