Immigrant Detainees Killed by Neglect and by Juan Crow

Immigrants held in immigration detention facilities are not just suffering and dying because of the bad management documented so thoroughly in recent stories by the New York Times, the Washington Post and on 60 Minutes; they're suffering and dying because the situation of undocumented in the U.S. bears more than a passing resemblance to that of African-Americans dehumanized and killed by Jim Crow. Call it Juan Crow: the matrix of laws, social customs, economic institutions and symbolic systems enabling the physical and psychic isolation needed to control and exploit undocumented immigrants.

The death, violence and neglect suffered by immigrants would not be possible without the increasingly radical dehumanization seen daily on television, heard on radio and felt in the almost daily raids on homes and workplaces. And, as reported last week, even schools and childcare facilities are no longer free from the looming presence of heavily armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. Given the extremes to which our government is going in its war on immigrants, it should come as no surprise that, since 9-11, more detainees have died in immigration detention than have died in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib combined.

Nowhere is the increasingly tragic plight of immigrants more obvious than in the Georgia. The toll this increasingly oppressive climate has taken on citizen, non-citizen and, especially, undocumented, immigrants is felt powerfully by children. The younger children of the mostly immigrant Latinos in Georgia are learning and internalizing that they are different from white -- and black -- children not just because they have the wrong skin color but also because many of their parents lack the right papers.

To read more about Juan Crow, go here.

Follow Roberto Lovato on Twitter: www.twitter.com/robvato

Comments

[clr2]

Why can't you ever use the words ILLEGAL ALIENS? These people should have never been here to begin with. We spend BILLIONS to educate and provide health care for people who don't belong here. Don't detain them DEPORT THEM! We need to spend these BILLIONS on our own poor.

[huffposer]

The plight of illegals in Georgia? How about the plight of American citizens in Georgia? My cousin was murdered by an illegal last year in Georgia. It was problems like that that caused our state government to start, at long last, doing what the federal government won't do -- make our home unwelcome for LAWBREAKERS.

Also, how surprising is it that the states having the biggest budget problems are the ones with the highest populations of illegal aliens? Golly. Who woulda thunk it?

The cost of illegal aliens in California alone? It was a net $9 billion in 2003.

http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2004/12/06/news/top_stories/19_56_5812_5_04.txt

You go right ahead with your deceptive pity party, but Rome is burning and you are fiddling away. You aren't fooling anyone.

[Rule Of Law]

Looks like the word "Illegal" fell right off your keyboard again, Roberto.