Crossposted from The Sanctuary
Torture has been in the news lately, masquerading in the Witness Protection Program under the alias “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” and “not-torture”, but there are too many of us who recognize its darkness no matter what the CYA Campaign declares. These lowest of standards are not reserved especially for prisons outside the United States, however; many instances of abuse have occurred right here on U.S. soil within the profitable network of migrant detention centers.
The company called ICE, which contracts out the facility to CCA to house immigrants seeking asylum with their families. In fact, the alleged victim’s son was in the room during the sexual encounter, according to the ICE report. The son’s age was not reported but the victim’s room contained a crib.
That particular violation happened at the notorious T. Don Hutto “Family” Prison in Taylor, Texas. Across the way in Tennessee, another woman was shackled like an animal as she gave birth, with agents claiming she was a flight risk:
By the time Mrs. Villegas was released from the county jail six days later, she had gone through labor with a sheriff’s officer standing guard in her hospital room, where one of her feet was cuffed to the bed most of the time. County officers barred her from seeing or speaking with her husband.
After she was discharged from the hospital, Mrs. Villegas was separated from her nursing infant for two days and barred from taking a breast pump into the jail, her lawyer and a doctor familiar with the case said. Her breasts became infected, and the newborn boy developed jaundice, they said.
The detention center system has all the same evil genetic makeup of the former President’s fake Global War on Terror™ – denial of habeas corpus rights, magically disappearing detainees to who-knows-where, physical and sexual violence, and negligent refusal of medical care.
As the country has a discussion about whether or not its acceptable to almost-drown someone 183 times in a month while in U.S. custody, we in the pro-human/migrant rights community should remind them all loudly that abuses are tightly woven into the prison networks here. It shouldn’t matter whether a human being is a citizen, non-citizen, enemy combatant, unlucky bystander, whatever – nor should it matter what type of treatment someone in our “group” may receive from “them” – if a society wants to claim its exceptionalism, then it must be earned.
In the case of migrant workers, the reality of family separation, criminal treatment of civil violations, and human rights abuses is not a myth. Here are some resources to fight this cancer that grows within these militarized borders:
I would be doing a disservice to my blogging record if I didn’t raise the issue of migrant detentions and abuses in light of the release of the OLC memos. Thanks for reading
The lost, the disappeared, the abused & the tortured, but thanks to you, not entirely “the forgotten”.
Damn, Manny,
I have to come by & read your blog again.
As much as there is attention to torture, there at least should be some directed at this aspect of it.
Torture is torture is torture no matter who is the victim.
People spend so much time dehumanizing the “lessers, that when it comes to accounting, the dehumanized are by then not really important.
Thank you for all you do.
You said it all, Knucklehead: “Torture is torture is torture no matter who is the victim” Thanks for reading
Nothing stays put. It’s my shorthand for telling people that anything humans develop – tools, systems, methodologies, etc. – for one use, will inevitably migrate to another.
Most notably, prisons, having been abandoned as places of rehabilitation, became laboratories tasked with devising how to control the greatest number of people with the least effort and expense.
As funding was withdrawn from other social institutions, such as schools, the already proven methodologies of the prison system found new areas for implementation. If students were “out of control” it was guards, not teachers, that would bring things to right.
Alfred Nobel, the inventor of TNT, never foresaw it’s war-time usage. He simply wanted to make earthmoving a less laborious task. Seeing the carnage wrought by the “mis-use” of his invention, he left the money he gained to fund a peace prize in perpetuity.
Humans are problem solvers, and there is no stopping our ingenuity. But when we abandon any part of our world to the cruelest utilitarian usage, be it hill-sides in our way or people, we open the gate for that cruelty to spread to the things we love.
Very perfect & beautiful comment, Keres
ot, Thanks for the Sook explanation.
poetry, keres. thanks so much for sharing it with us
It sickens me that torture is even being debated. It sickens me what has become of this country under the broken rules of law by BushCo. Not only have they committed war crimes but crimes against humanity period. I would love to see the UN get involved in this.
Thank you for all you do my friend. You are one helluva young man. Wise beyond your years.
Thanks for your comment, Nancy. I wish the UN would get involved, too, but the way things are sometimes, that would just arouse a thicker-skin of arrogance among the people who deserve a comeuppance. As much as I would love to see war crimes trials on an int’l level, it would be preferable for our own justice system to function correctly and with honor to hold them accountable.
Notice we never had a family prison until the Bush Administration. We stopped being the United States of American and became “Homeland Security”. T.Don Hutto should be closed it is one step below Guantanamo Bay and maybe worst because children are being detained.
we need to shut down the entire prison-for-profit system, but that would involve a huge loss of lobbying influence from an industry that, I believe, controlled the Bush misAdministration.
I believe that that must include all prisons to a certain extent, because state & federal prisons definitely are “for profit”
You can certainly believe that if they operated at a loss, it would all be Clinton & Carter`s fault & they would be shut down.
Family Prisons and Prisons for Profit. There needs to be a major push to get rid of both. The Bush White House left us with real scars, as a country. Scars fade-but they never disappear.