Our Modern Concentration Camp

[n2doc]

Call it what you will, If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck...notice the part about holding some for YEARS....

Border Policy's Success Strains Resources
Tent City in Texas Among Immigrant Holding Sites Drawing Criticism
By Spencer S. Hsu and Sylvia Moreno
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, February 2, 2007; Page A01


About 2,000 illegal immigrants are being held in this detention facility in South Texas, awaiting deportation to their home countries. Some may wait months or years.






RAYMONDVILLE, Tex. -- Ringed by barbed wire, a futuristic tent city rises from the Rio Grande Valley in the remote southern tip of Texas, the largest camp in a federal detention system rapidly gearing up to keep pace with Washington's increasing demand for stronger enforcement of immigration laws.

About 2,000 illegal immigrants, part of a record 26,500 held across the United States by federal authorities, will call the 10 giant tents home for weeks, months and perhaps years before they are removed from the United States and sent back to their home countries.

The $65 million tent city, built hastily last summer between a federal prison and a county jail, marks both the success and the limits of the government's new policy of holding captured non-Mexicans until they are sent home. Previously, most such detainees were released into the United States before hearings, and a majority simply disappeared.

The new policy has led to a dramatic decline in border crossings by non-Mexicans, according to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

But civil liberties and immigration law groups allege that out of sight, the system is bursting at the seams. In the Texas facility, they say, illegal immigrants are confined 23 hours a day in windowless tents made of a Kevlar-like material, often with insufficient food, clothing, medical care and access to telephones. Many are transferred from the East Coast, 1,500 miles from relatives and lawyers, virtually cutting off access to counsel.

"I call it 'Ritmo' -- like Gitmo, but it's in Raymondville," said Jodi Goodwin, an immigration lawyer from nearby Harlingen.

An inspector general's report last month on a sampling of five U.S. immigration detention facilities found inhumane and unsafe conditions, including inadequate health care, the presence of vermin, limited access to clean underwear and undercooked poultry. Although ICE standards require that immigrants have access to phones and pro bono law offices, investigators found phones missing, not working or connected to non-working numbers.

more:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/01/AR2007020102238.html

[Blackhatjack]

1. Imagine if there was a 'need' to detain American citizens during 'martial law' ...

The corporate supplying of detention facilities and providing of paid mercenaries is a threat to our democratic form of government.

Private prisons run on a profit principle.
Mercenaries not subject to chain of command paid several times what US soldiers are paid to do the same or similar jobs.
Private corporations supplying troops but providing no accounting and no reporting of profitability.

This should make everyone sit up and take notice.

[CoffeeCat]

2. This is so vile....so disgusting...

I am ashamed to be an American. I am disgusted beyond belief.

Why would an illegal immigrant from Mexico---be held for more than a few weeks--at the most?

They know where these people belong!

It's as if Guantanamo warmed us up to conditions that could lead to a concentration-camp situation. Now,
that we're all ok with detaining people for years--without charging them for crimes--it's time to bring
these Stalinesque tactics inside the borders.

This phase is intended to desensitize us to detainment camps within our borders. Pretty soon, they come
for US citizens. By that time, imprisoning people indefinitely--without being charged with a crime or
access to an attorney--will be a proud American pastime.

Gonzales told us the deal, recently. They aren't hiding it. Habeus Corpus is dead. Gonzo said so.
The Constitution does not guarantee it.

Everything we feared is coming true. We are iteratively being accustomed to accepting horrors.

[Scriptor Ignotus]

9. some Latin Americans come in through Mexico

I would guess that they are the ones who need to be detained for weeks or months until the US can figure out how to get them back...

[no_hypocrisy]

3. Why are some immigrants detained and others aren't?

Just asking . . .

[RaleighNCDUer]

8. It specifies these are non-Mexican immigrants.

I reckon it's the cost. The Mexican immigrants can be just bussed over the border (never mind that they may come from 1500 miles to the south, with no way to get back there - making sneaking back across look a lot more inviting). If they are from Guatamala, or El Salvador, or points south, or even from elsewhere, like Africa, it is too costly, on a monthly basis, to fly them to their countries of origin; that is, in each month's budget it costs less to warehouse them than to fly them home - of course, in the long run it costs far more to warehouse them for months at a time - I understand that after the Mariel boatlift, from Cuba, we had hundreds of people in cages for years because Cuba wouldn't take them back but they were undesirables here - mentally ill, criminal, etc. Don't know how that was ever resolved - maybe they got out after promising to join the Republican party.

[noonwitch]

13. A lot of the Mariel boat lift immigrants are guests of the State of Florida

Once they were released from INS custody, many went and committed crimes in Florida, crimes serious enough to get 25 to life. So, many are still in custody and will be until they die. Not all of them, but plenty of them.

[annabanana]

4. Can't talk about this on TV. . .

thar's tornados that are already gone that need the 24/7 treatment.

[GliderGuider]

5. Here's an analysis of the coming crisis on the Mexican border

You ain't seen nothing yet. Once the decline of the Mexican oil fields gets fully underway, we will all come to understand why these camps were built. The US administration has known all along about the state of the world's oil supply. Here's an analysis I developed about a month ago, updated recently in light of the fact that the output of Cantarell, Mexico's largest oil field, has declined 25% in the last year.

Mexico - oil, food, refugees and revolution.

[madrchsod]

10. you forgot the food riots this week in mexico

due to the us taking corn off the market for fuel the cheap corn the mexicana need is no longer there. of course the usa destroyed the mexican farmers home market during the bill "nafta" clinton presidency.

[intheflow]

6. Each bunkhouse has a pen for an hour of daily exercise.

Why can't they be allowed out more than an hour a day? And why can't htey wander freely between bunkhouses? :wtf:

It's not as though they are terrorists. They are just people trying to live the capitolist. colonialist dream that the Europeans settlers have indoctrinated them to over the past 500 years.

[OneBlueSky]

7. love the difference in headlines . . . this thread vs. the Washington Post . . .

"Our Modern Concentration Camp" vs. "Border Policy's Success Strains Resources" . . .

I think that n2doc's head is much more truthful and accurate . . .

[Katherine Brengle]

11. I don't think they should have to wait for months/years, but...

are you suggesting:

1) That they are being denied basic human rights while incarcerated?
2) That they should simply be let go instead of being deported? They have, after all, entered this country illegally, i.e., broken the law.


My solution would simply be open borders because I can't stand this proprietary bullshit about clods of dirt, but clearly that is not going to happene... ever.

[n2doc]

14. 1, yes, 2 no, but we have to do better

It is unacceptable that they are stuck in those tents for 23 hours a day (the kind of treatment high level felons get), and the article makes it clear that they are not treating them in a humane fashion. Have you been to south Texas in the Summer? I have lived there, and those 4 small air conditioners per tent ain't gonna do the job. We had 2 on a 2000 sq ft, insulated house and they were barely enough.
2. We obviously are willing to spend the $$$ to build these things but not spend the $$$ to figure out a way to rapidly process them and send them back. Or to work with their countries to give them reasons to stay home. Or to punish the US Bosses who hire them and provide incentives for them to come in the first place. All we can do is punish the poor.

We can do better. But we won't with the idiots in charge of this Government who listen to the Xenophobes out there.

[itsmesgd]

12. Practice makes perfect

These camps have been in place for sometime now and countless others are in varying stages of completion and operation. They are, of course operated by private corporations like Wackenhut, CCA (Corrections Corporation of America), Dyncorp, and others. Most of these camps are on rural rail lines and are in line with military bases. It is assumed that should a roundup of non-immigrants, citizens, be undertaken that the military will conduct the arrests and initial processing. Then the people would be herded on trains to these camps. This sounds sickeningly familiar like the way that the Native American tribes were rounded up and shipped to Florida and Oklahoma. The trips were very brutal, often conducted in winter in plain boxcars, resulting in the deaths of thousands before they reached their final internment. Let us remember from those few Native Americans who were able to escape along the line, and therefore survive, that if you report to a camp or "community assistance shelter", as they have been called in some places, that you will not make it ot alive.

Let this be a warning to those who think that such a thing could never happen. It has happened before to Native Americans, Asians, and now immigrants. It will happen again, as the growing numbers of camps would suggest. Do not get on the train, do not go to a "assistance shelter", fight with everything that you have because if you submit you die.


sgd

[Shallah Kali]

15. Haliburton's KBR got a $385M contract to build more of these in case of emergency

http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?guid=%7B62C8724D%2DAE8A%2D4B5C%2D94C7%2D70171315C0A0%7D&dist=SignInArchive¶m=archive&siteid=mktw&dateid=38741%2E5136277662%2D858254656&print=true&dist=printTop

The contract may also provide migrant detention support to other government organizations in the event of
an immigration emergency, as well as the development of a plan to react to a national emergency, such as a natural disaster, the company said.

To which I ask what kind of national emergency would require people rounded up and herded into a prison camp? Those who don't care about illegal immigrants being abused might find it in their own interest as well to pay attention in case they too someday end up on the powers that be undesirable list.....