Jamelle Bouie: The Cruelty is Still the Point

[marmar]

Hundreds of detainees at Delaney Hall in New Jersey are on hunger strike. They're being forced to work without conviction, beaten, denied medical care, and served maggot-filled food. The Secretary of Homeland Security says they're "meeting the caloric standard." This isn't a border security policy. It's cruelty as governance — directed at people this administration has decided don't deserve dignity. The cruelty is still the point.

[pat_k]

1. Decades of inhumanity supercharged.

Post-911, the privatization and incredible expansion of enforcement against "criminal aliens" integrated immigrant detention with the private prison industry. It is absolutely a shameful story of inhumane treatment going back decades.

Even before the formation of DHS, the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) exponentially expanded mandatory detention and broadened the categories of minor, non-violent crimes (including simple drug possession and shoplifting) that subjected both legal and undocumented immigrants to deportation.

For too long we have tolerated the intolerable. And now, as Jamelle Bouie points out, the cruelty has been supercharged under the felon.

For a little history, here's a great article by Tom Barry from 2009.

A Death in Texas
Where profits, poverty, and immigration converge.
Tom Barry

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/death-texas/