To the editor:
A new immigration detention camp just opened in Florida.
The conditions at the camp are, reportedly, “horrible.” Prisoners are denied water and food for long stretches; the food they are given has pests in it. The lights are kept on 24/7, I assume to keep the prisoners awake. Prisoners aren’t allowed to bathe.
Even if you have a zero-tolerance policy toward violating immigration law, that doesn’t automatically justify jailing all your suspects, and it could never justify such conditions. This treatment is unsafe, unsanitary, unconstitutional and unconscionable.
The camp is part of the Trump administration’s policy of mass deportation. The White House set a quota of 3,000 new detainees per day nationwide. Government agents are attempting to meet this target via widespread racial profiling, arresting random brown people off the street —- often with no pre-existing suspicions about their actual immigration status, no evidence demonstrating they require jailing. Legal residents and U.S. citizens have been imprisoned and removed from the country in this dragnet.
But also, many of those arrested who did enter the country illegally have lived here peacefully for years; most have committed no crimes since arriving. In fact, research shows that immigrants generally commit fewer crimes than U.S.-born people, and that crime doesn’t rise (there’s evidence it may actually decrease) in communities where immigrants settle. Nor is crime rising in the U.S overall. Quite the opposite: Crime’s been going down for decades. As Pew Research states: “Both the FBI and [Bureau of Justice Statistics] data show dramatic declines in U.S. violent and property crime rates since the early 1990s.”
So using the supposed “danger of crime”, whether by immigrants or in general, as an excuse for these civil and human rights violations, is deceitful. Worse, it’s fear mongering to justify ethnic cleansing in America. This country’s long pattern of scapegoating and dehumanizing immigrants has been escalated by Trump’s movement to a militarized program of internment. We should all be disturbed, and we must commit to halting and reversing this deadly course.
Rob Kipp
Presque Isle
