House GOP: Rape Prevention Measures an Unreasonable Luxury

[kpete]

House GOP: Rape Prevention Measures an Unreasonable Luxury
—By Tim Murphy| Thu Mar. 29, 2012 3:00 AM PDT
Rep. Zoe Lofgren: "I don't think that it's a 'hospitality' guideline to prevent rape of detainees"

The Karnes County (Texas) ICE detention center, as imagined by Rep. Lamar Smith. GekaSkr/Shutterstock
On Wednesday, as most of official Washington was fixing its gaze squarely on the Supreme Court, the House Committee on the Judiciary convened a hearing on another issue: the supposedly posh conditions at the Department of Homeland Security's immigrant detention centers. The hearing, dubbed "Holiday on ICE" by chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), focused on the idea that Obama administration rules intended to prevent sexual abuse and inhumane conditions at Immigrations and Customs Enforcement facilities made detention too fancy. ---"War on Women," meet "War on Immigrant Women."

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The new standards, unveiled in February, were meant to ensure a basic threshold of human rights at an agency marred by serial abuse, sexual and otherwise. As the Los Angeles Times explained, "Among other things, the new rules improve access to mental health care and legal assistance, and establish additional safeguards for reporting mistreatment." New rules set up a hotline for immigrants to report abuse, and require strip searches—a common source of sexual assault charges—to be conducted by guards of the same gender.

If you think that sounds like a badly needed (if incomplete) fix, you're probably not a member of the House Republican caucus, though. "It's outrageous that immigration detention facilities have morphed into college campuses," said Rep. Elton Gallegy (R-Calif.). "Under this administration, detention looks more like recess," Smith proclaimed. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) attempted to turn the immigrant rights advocates' figures against them, arguing that, comparatively speaking, the number of detainees who have died while awaiting deportation is actually quite small: "110 deaths is not alarming to me," he explained, suggesting that immigrants were actually safer in an ICE detention center than they were "in the broader society." But as one witness, ICE assistant director Kevin Landy, pointed out, King was comparing apples and oranges. The detention population does not mirror the broader population: Immigrants in their mid-30s generally don't die of old age.

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So it was up to Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, to put the proceedings in their proper context: "This hearing demonstrates the Republican Party's war on immigrants, and here we see where this war meets the war on women," she suggested in her opening remarks. Lofgren, who noted that Gallegy had personally called her up to apologize for the name of the hearing, cited the case of Francisco Castaneda, a Salvadoran immigrant who, while detained in San Diego, complained frequently to ICE officials about a growing lesion on his penis. ICE denied access to a doctor, and he eventually died of penile cancer. In 2008, a federal judge ruled that ICE's treatment of Castaneda went "beyond cruel and unusual."

MORE
it gets worse:
http://motherjones.com/mojo/2012/03/gop-preventing-immigrant-rape-ice-holiday

[Drale]

1. Can we just combined all the GOP wars into one and call it what it is?

War on Humanity

[Brigid]

2. I like it.

Because that is exactly what it is.

[Angry Dragon]

3. why do republicans hate everyone??

they don't even like the people they have running for president