After years of controversy surrounding the Trump administration’s handling of migrants, the long-standing issue has made it to the United Nations for an investigation into human rights violations. 

The Squad and other top Democrats have sent a letter requesting that the UN open an investigation into multiple allegations of abuse by the Homeland Security Department (DHS), requesting an international response.

The letter, in five pages, manages to condense a multitude of atrocities committed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) within immigration detention centers, with the most treacherous occurring in 2020.

It references “recent, ongoing, and credible allegations of egregious human rights abuses by the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), its components, and its private contractors.”
 

“These allegations are hardly the first leveled against DHS, and, unless action is taken, we know they will not be the last,” the letter reads.

In 2020 alone, it’s amazing how far human rights violations under the DHS have come.

COIVD-19 has made the already questionable conditions within ICE detention centers increasingly life-threatening. Migrants housed in close quarters, along with lack of adequate medical attention, has led to deaths from a virus that officials were unable to mitigate given poor living conditions.

Then, reports highlighted alarming claims by Muslim Advocates and Americans for Immigrant Justice, stating Muslim detainees have been forced to accept pork or pork-based products as a supposed result of halal meals that were rotten or expired. This led Congress members to investigate and the issue is referenced in the letter.

One of the most egregious news regarding ICE came shortly after, following disturbing allegations of medical neglect and malpractice at one DHS immigration facility in Georgia, which many, along with Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, have equated to a form of genocide.

At least 19 women have reported undergoing medical procedures unwittingly, including hysterectomies and other gynecological procedures, following a whistleblower allegation of mass-hysterectomies performed on Spanish-speaking migrant women, effectively sterilizing them. 

The failures of the DHS also made it to the presidential debate stage. ICE came under fire after federally-appointed lawyers admitted 545 migrant families, separated at the border by the Trump administration, are no closer to being reunited. 

Currently, ICE has also allegedly been torturing Cameroonian asylum seekers. Multiple refugees have claimed they were threatened, choked, beaten, and pepper-sprayed as a way of forcibly signing documents that would prevent asylum.

Again, this is just within 2020.

“This pattern of behavior perpetuated and encouraged by the consistent and unforgivable failure of the United States government and its institutions to take these allegations seriously by investigating them in a transparent, thorough, and impartial manner,” the letter continues.

Of course, it must be kept in mind that human rights violations regarding migrants have been occurring since well before the Trump administration. 

However, with the level of obstruction the world has witnessed under the current administration, not to mention the constant alienation of the United States, again, under Trump, it is to be seen if interference by the U.N. will amount to the justice needed.