The cages are getting smaller and more abusive.
The United States government has placed detained immigrants in solitary confinement more than 14,000 times in the last five years, and the average duration is almost twice the 15-day threshold that the United Nations has said may constitute torture, according to a new analysis of federal records by researchers at Harvard and the nonprofit group Physicians for Human Rights.
The report, based on government records from 2018 through 2023 and interviews with several dozen former detainees, noted cases of extreme physical, verbal and sexual abuse for immigrants held in solitary cells.
Overall, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is detaining more than 38,000 people – up from about 15,000 at the start of the Biden administration in January 2021
Solitary confinement placements in the third quarter of 2023 were 61 percent higher than in the third quarter of the previous year, according to ICE’s quarterly reports.
More than 680 cases of isolation lasted at least three months, the records show; 42 of them lasted more than one year.
The legal way to enter the US is to immediately present themselves to Federal custody so that they can start the process of claiming asylum. That’s how this works.
The vast majority of migrants follow this simple procedure.
Step A; set foot on US soil via any means.
Step 2; locate the nearest border patrol agent and hope they aren’t feeling abusive and or murderous.
Step #; claim asylum.
That’s it. That’s the legal process.
Now, one a migrant has claimed asylum, that doesn’t mean that they get to stay. No, that starts the investigation and Asylum Hearings.
Conservatives absolutely hate brown people coming to the country, so have massively cut funding for investigations and hearings. This means that migrants seeking asylum end up sitting in federal custody (that they willingly turned themselves into) for months, or even years.
Meanwhile, the number one source of “illegal” immigration is, and always has been, visa overstays. Someone will get a visa to visit the US, and then just not go home when it ends.
Fun fact, the people who cross the border without then claiming asylum? They’re instantly deported.
It’s only the desperate who claim asylum, and often because their lives are so bad in their home country that taking the risk of dying on the way to the US border is the better choice. It’s often so bad in their home country because of US intervention over the years… We’ve done more evil in the name of making some rich asshole slightly richer than any other country, save England and the Dutch.
The CIA literally sent agents to South America to teach dictators how to more brutally torture newspaper publishers and elementary school teachers. And people were tortured.
The scars of that sort of shit, both figurative and literal, are part of those countries, even after the right wing dictators were ousted from power.
We owe these people, and yet racist jackasses keep cheering when we abuse them even more, claiming they deserve it for coming here illegally. They’ve followed procedure, and we’ve fucked them over yet again.