Law Students

Careless Detention

By Andrea

The Washington Post has just put up part 3 of their 4-part series on health care in immigrant detention. It's absolutely stellar and I hope they win a Pulitzer Prize for it - they've got video, copies of every major document they talk about, it's just great. I can barely keep track of all the thoughts I'm having reading through this series:

- Why is this issue getting so much attention now? I love it, but why not before? Is it because the FOIA requests from the Post and Times just came back? (I suspect so.) Will anyone focus beyond health care on, say, the travesty of lack of counsel that even children, asylum seekers, and the mentally ill are facing?

- Multi-award winning Haitian author Edwidge Danticat (recommended to all) is the niece of a man who died due to terrible care in detention. Wow. I hope she writes a big old novel about it and Oprah plugs it and embarasses DHS some more.

- One of the lawyers for the Korean woman in the series is an Equal Justice Works fellow in Florida whose project was basically the model for mine - she sent me her whole application and was super nice. That made me feel better than I can explain - she's me, two years from now.

- I need to not read the comments on these stories because they anger me too much. I'm especially disturbed by the ease in which people call anyone and everyone touched by the immigration system "illegals" who have forfeited all their rights (including, apparently, being kept on their psych meds so they don't commit suicide) - even if, like the Korean woman, they are actually legal immigrants whose minor crimes have tripped a deportation ground.

- Intellectually, I know that prisoners regularly die shackled to hospital beds, and that people don't get visits with family before they die or are deported. But having to keep reading it in these stories is really painful.

- Is President Obama here yet??

Full post as published by Peanut Butter Burrito on May 13, 2008 (boomark / email).