The Unexplained Deaths of Immigrant Detainees

The deaths of two immigrants this past week under U.S. custody have raised questions regarding the treatment of detainees. The recent deaths come at the heels of a report released in July stating that 62 detainees had died while in U.S. custody since 2004. Edmar Alves Araujo, an illegal immigrant from Brazil, died Tuesday in Rhode Island shortly after being detained by U.S. immigration officials. His sister claims she desperately tried to deliver the penicillin that would have saved her epileptic brother’s life, but was turned away by police officers. And earlier this week Rosa Isela Contreras-Dominguez, a legal permanent resident facing deportation for a felony drug conviction, died in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement authorities in Texas after being hospitalized earlier this week with leg pain. She was seven weeks pregnant.

The deaths of two detainees in one week is deeply troubling and points to an overcrowded immigration detention system that is relying excessively on incarceration as a means of border control. The very idea of detaining undocumented immigrants, many of whom have no previous criminal record, is morally questionable. But beyond this these programs are terribly under funded which means that regardless of whether or not they are viable forms of immigration control, they do not have the financial nor organizational backbone to function properly. So regardless of whether one agrees with the tactics of incarceration and raids, no one could approve of the way these detention centers are being run. It is classic bureaucratic fumbling that has become sadly characteristic of the current administration. The York County Prison’s warden, Thomas Hogan, wrote in a court affidavit last year “The Department of Homeland Security has made it difficult, if not impossible, to meet the constitutional requirements of providing adequate health care to inmates that have a serious need for that care.” Not only have we created an inhumane and criminalizing method of dealing with undocumented immigrants, we have managed to fumble how we run these questionable detention centers in the first place. Our inhumane and criminalizing process is incapable of properly maintaining and running itself, which then leads to even more human and civil rights abuses.

Beyond the lack of funding for these detention centers there is also a lack of administrative oversight and record keeping. Although raids on immigrant workers may seem like the work of an effective police force, the truth is far messier. Instead of a powerful government taskforce, the current detentions of undocumented immigrants are being carried out by a patchwork of county jails, privately run prisons and federal facilities where more than 27,500 people who are not American citizens are held on any given day while the government decides whether to deport them. There is no separate government body that is responsible for accounting for the lives or deaths of immigrants while in U.S. custody. Because of this, the mistreatment of undocumented immigrants is often unreported or is lost in a sea of red tape and bureaucratic disorganization.

Just this past month a mother was finally reunited with her mentally underdeveloped son who, although a legal citizen of the United States, was erroneously deported to Mexico where he lived by scavenging from trash cans and bathing in rivers. The U.S. immigration officials did not assist her in locating her son, and she needed to pay for the search out of pocket. This extreme case of both cruelty and dysfunctional management prove that the U.S. immigration control is at once wielding excessive power and excessive sloppiness.

It seems that the current administration’s cruel and racist policies are not much more than cardboard cut-outs of what they purport to be. They are only a chaotic mess of cronyism and xenophobia under the guise of a policy. No one should be happy with the current policy. Those who favor harsher anti-immigration policies should recognize that the current system is disjointed and inconsistent, with no clear record keeping or regulation. And those who support and advocate for immigrant rights should be upset at the lawlessness of the current system, the lack of accountability for human rights abuses, and the inhumane treatment of all those who are unlucky enough to be caught in this system, be them documented or not.

 

This was written for Advancement Project’s Blog

www.justdemocracyblog.org

by Clare Bakota