Tuesday, April 04, 2017

The Disappeared-In-America Immigration System


You can read this article and you can not believe it, or not believe it, you can call it a generalization, or call it an abomination. Yet, dear reader, your opinion about this story and the people in it does not matter. Many others will be treated like the individual in this story, no matter who you share this story with or how much you might not want to even believe it or protest against it. 

That's because right now, a loud chunk of the voting public and the elected leaders hate immigrants. Voters don't actively hate them, they do it passively . Elected leaders are, however, very actively drafting and enforcing policies which are beyond cruel and abusive. Everyone, of course, can just call this system inadvertently harsh and brutal. And do nothing about it.

So why am I posting this? As with so very many posts here - it is something I do for myself. I post this because I do not want to be part of such a system. I have many friends who are terrified to be even near the edges of our current war on immigrants. I post it because I have this awareness, this slim bit of knowledge added to what is already known.

Anyone (typically not white) can be taken by ICE agents, and as a their detainee, you have no right to call anyone, no visitors, nor right to counsel though the detainee can hire one if he/she fills out the proper paperwork, that is if they can read and write English, and in the meantime ICE can move you from prison to prison, no outside contact, no hearings, no pleas, no time limit on how long you can be held so they just wait for the detainee to wear down and sign a voluntary deportation order.

"Locking up accused criminals indefinitely is a tried-and-true way of getting them to plead guilty, whether they actually committed a crime or not. The same principle applies to immigration detainees. And criminal defendants, even those accused of the worst crimes imaginable, don’t get sent to three different states in a two-month period as part of their pretrial detention."