Over the last three days the Washington Post has been carrying a front page series on the horrors inflicted by ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement branch of US Homeland Security against people they want to deport, which includes even long-term resident aliens with green cards, who are found to have committed a felony in the past, even the very distant past. People who contest their deportations are kept in remote jails with poor access to lawyers or their families and often little medical care. The first story told of a man who died and was buried and nobody can find out officially what he died of. The laws supporting this were passed under Clinton in 1996, but the strict enforcement has come down from Bush since 2003, when ICE was formed along with the Department of Homeland Security, all part of post-9/11 anti-immigrant hysteria.
On Tuesday there was a story of a woman who came from South Korea in 1975 and was living in Florida, married, whom they want to deport because she purchased stolen jewelry over ten years ago. She apparently has cancer, but they are not letting see a doctor, and her husband and lawyer cannot see her. On Wednesday, the story was of how people actually being deported are given powerful and dangerous psychotropic drugs who have no medical problems, a practice banned in many countries specifically and againg international law. We are living in a horrifying police state, but most do not know of this. I have become more conscious of this recently because of a friend, here since he was ten years old who became seriously depressed after ICE began to try to deport him for a minor crime he committed over a decade ago. They are still trying, but at least he is not incommunicado in some obscure jail in the Arizona desert.
8 comments:
The government should have enforced the law consistently over the years, we might not have such problems.
Illegals should be arrested and (humanely) deported.
If the come back they should be prosecuted for using phony SSNs, using phony documents and evading federal income taxes - just like a citizen!
rtb,
What we are dealing with here is a mixture of "illegals" and people who are, well, technically "illegal," but on the basis of a law that is simply horrible and stupid in the extreme. So, the guy who mysteriously died in detention was an "illegal" who had just arrived from Ghana. The people being drugged are, well, a mixed bag, although in most cases they had resisted deportation. So, this was drugging against international law for the convenience of the deporters, who haul these people off in chains, beating them and all sorts of things that all the law-abiding people in this country, descended mostly from people who just walked right in, no hassle or fuss, who either are unaware of all this, or some of whom think it is just great because we do not want all these nasty, foreign-language-speaking, law-breaking, maybe terrorist, job-stealers, and who knows what else, who deserve to be beaten, detained in hideaway gulag concentration camps, and drugged against international law.
BTW, the law that is truly an ass is this 1996 law that says people with green cards, that is legal resident aliens, who commit felonies, should be deported. This law seriously sucks, even if it sort of sounds OK. I will link this up with a previous post of mine, the one on guns and suicide. The friend who failed to commit suicide because he did not own a gun is the same as the one who got severely depressed over this b.s. (his crime was smashing in a door one evening while in college and drunk, way over a decade ago; clearly a candidate for deportation to a nation he has not lived in for over three decades and where he has zero relatives). That he did not own a gun may reflect his foreign birth.
In any case, I take this stuff personally, and am very intensely outraged. My recovering friend has been following the WaPo story, and has told me that many of the commentators on the WaPo blogsite have been of the "they deserve this, screw these illegal immigrants line." I will confess that I find this view to be repulsive and utterly morally bankrupt, no better than all those disgusting "good Germans."
Sorry, if I am offending you, rtb, but I know that you tend to be of the "keep the bastards out so the steelworkers of Ohio can keep their jobs," which I think is a non-computing function, not empirically verifiable at worst. Think carefully about what sorts of stuff you are supporting in reality. This is ugly, inhuman, and nauseating, just to say what I really think.
Barkley
PS to Brenda:
Please send me a private message again with your new email.
Barkley
Thanks for posting this. What was the name of the legislation under the Clinton administration that got this ball rolling? I wonder what prompted the change?
It's interesting that this week the US Pentagon dropped charges against the alleged aspiring 20th hijacker in the September 11 attacks. He has been held in Guantanamo, presumably for the last 7 years. The Defense Department doesn't feel that it is required to give the reason why the charges were dropped.
Extract from the article:
'Sept. 11 families fear war-crimes trial'
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080513/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/guantanamo_sept11_trial
His Pentagon-appointed attorney, Army Lt. Col. Bryan Broyles, suggested that his client's harsh interrogation, authorized by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, could have influenced the decision...
Mohammed also was subjected to harsh interrogation tactics, including waterboarding, by the CIA. Broyles said the United States "does not have clean hands" in the cases of any of the five now charged in the attacks..."
Those of us with foreign spouses or other relatives have been acutely aware of this for some time. Brenda, I don't know the name of the legislation, but I believe it was passed about 1998.
In 1999 I began trying to get a green card for my husband after we decided to return to the US. We had been married for 5 years and had been living in his country. When we married I was told by the Embassy that if we ever wanted to move to the US I would simply have to fill out some forms and it was a done matter. But by the time we began the application process the laws had been changed.
First, I was told that it was impossible for my husband to get a green card, because I was required to sponsor him, and since I no longer had US 'residence', having lived abroad for many years, I had no standing to do so. What should I do, I asked? The only way, they said, was for me to return to the US alone, get a job, establish residence and then reapply. Could they at least give me an idea of how long this might take? No, they couldn't. Meanwhile I was learning from various immigrant boards of cases where families waited for up to 15 years to get green cards for spouses of other green card holders. The time was supposed to be shorter for spouses of citizens, but who knew how long it might take?
In my anger and desperation over the situation I contemplated various illegal options such as smuggling him into the US across the Mexican or Canadian border. Finally the situation was resolved by Madeleine Allbright, who sent a memo around to the embassies instructing them to treat citizens as 'resident' of the US in such cases. It seems that in their hurry to 'solve' the immigration problem the small detail of the numerous international treaties on family unification that the US has signed had slipped legislators minds. By requiring families to separate in order to gain immigration status for one of their members the US was violating the terms of all such treaties.
Our problems were not quite over, however. Since I had been living abroad and earning a local wage I did not meet the financial requirements to sponsor my husband. Fortunately my parents were able and willing to 'co-sponsor' him. Otherwise we would once again have been forced to give up our moving plans-- or contemplate an illegal entry.
Once in the US, there is the increasingly terrifying prospect of your foreign relative being arrested for some 'crime'. I have a friend who also has a foreign husband. He was wrongly accused of a felony by a former employer (a fellow national who had a gripe with him). He spent 6 months or so in jail held in cells with murderers and gang members, his wife spent all their savings on his (ultimately unsuccessful) defense and they have been trying to pull themselves out of debt since. And I suppose they should consider themselves 'lucky' since I know of other instances where people have been summarily deported, leaving dependent wives and children with no means of support.
Between Guantanamo and the story of maltreatment of immigrants in detention cells I have been wondering for some time where the country I was born went. I'm thinking more and more that I need to go look for it-- abroad.
I assume Sarah's parenthetic above should be (ultimate SUCCESSFUL).
There are many reasons liberal Democrats hated Clinton enough to give W the presidency in 2000. And all of them have come home to roost, so those same people are saying "we told you so."
Sarah, I'm very sorry to hear about the extreme difficulties that you and your family have experienced. You said: "Between Guantanamo and the story of maltreatment of immigrants in detention cells I have been wondering for some time where the country I was born went..."
Unfortunately the same question applies here in Australia. The mainstream media have performed such a successful whitewash that, even now, we are still only discovering a very small portion of the truths of our involvement in the Vietnam War, for instance.
"THE Australian Army tested chemical weapons on a[n Australian] town which now has deaths from cancer 10 times the state average. Military scientists sprayed the toxic defoliant Agent Orange in the
jungle that is part of the water catchment area for Innisfail in
Queensland's far north at the start of the Vietnam War..."
'Agent Orange town', Matthew Benns and Frank Walker. May 18, 2008
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/agent-orange-town/2008/05/18/121076
5247617.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap2
Compiling an economic, social and military history is one of the most helpful things I've ever done, in terms of assisting my understanding what has gone wrong and why.
Brenda,
I do not know the exact date or name of the legislation. Again, much depends on enforcement, how strongly and with what interpretations. About half the states in the US have adultery being a crime, but these laws are very rarely enforced. It is a felony here in Virginia, but the only time it has been enforced in decades was a few years ago when a district attorney was called on the carpet by his mistress when he started cheating on her with another woman. It was not the wife who busted him.
In any case, after the new ICE was formed, the Bush administration ordered them to go on a very aggresssive campaign of looking for people to deport on any grounds, any excuse, so that people with green cards who get in trouble with the law and have had trouble in the past automatically get thrown into this awful mess, along with all these other hassles and complications such as Sarah has reported. What is really disturbing is that most Americans have no idea this garbage is going on, and many of those who do think that it is just fine, the anti-immigrant hysteria has gotten so insanely bad.
Barkley
Well, yes. I agree with you Barkley. The Bush administration stand out amongst all others in the US. It has been refusing to subject itself to laws and rules of all types whilst putting the legal boots in against the vulnerable members of the American (and other) populations.
Is it always inevitable that mass of people will always scapegoat vulnerable immigrants in times of economic stress?
Out of Ireland have we come.
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start.
I carry from my mother's womb
A fanatic heart.
WB Yeats, 1931
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