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No Truth On Immigrant Deaths

MÁS EN ESTA SECCIÓN

Fighting Sargassum

Community Colleges

COMPARTA ESTE CONTENIDO:

We might never know the number of deaths of immigrants under detention.

Immigration officials and detention private contractors were and still are engaged in a macabre dance of concealing or distorting the truth of the brutal and inhumane treatment of immigrants at detention centers and their deaths.

The macabre dance seemed mainly staged to elude or deceive the media.

“A trail of confidential memos and BlackBerry messages that show officials working to stymie outside inquiry” in addition to “thousands of pages of government documents including scathing investigative reports kept under wraps” were obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union and The Times under the Freedom of Information Act” wrote Nina Bernstein, who specializes in investigating abuses of immigrants under detention and their deaths.

The lengths to which the authorities are prepared to go in order to mask the abuses could only be characterized as ghastly.

One of the strategies devised by the authorities was to ship away dying detainees so they would actually die abroad in their home countries. One documented case shows federal officials conferring at length “about sending the man back to Africa to avoid embarrassing publicity.”

In another case Jail medical personnel “falsified a medication log” to show that some care was extended to a detainee, who happened to be dead by the time a painkiller was supposedly administered.

Most of those ultimately deathly mistreatments took place at privately run centers such as the Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey and the Eloy Detention Center in Arizona.

Nina Dozoretz who won an award “for cutting detainee health costs”, was vice president of the Nakamoto Group a private company “hired by the Bush administration to monitor detention”, and has now been rehired by the Obama administration “to lead its overhaul of detainee health care.”

Thanks to the media at least 107 immigrant deaths under detention have been disclosed to a Congressional inquiry.  But this is only what the public opinion’s uproar managed to unveil. 

In an attempt not to lie, but definitely to not tell the truth, now the Obama administration disclosed, “that more than one in 10 immigrant detention deaths had been overlooked and omitted from a list submitted to Congress last year.”

“More than one in 10 immigrant detention deaths” could mean two, six, or nine. 

We might never know, and the key officials and private contractors that remain on the job will ensure we remain in the dark.

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