Posted on 08/05/2009 5:08:55 AM PDT by IbJensen
OUR OPINION: Make immigration detention standards enforceable
Immigrant detainees hunger strike over conditions
A group of detainees at a Louisiana immigration detention center have begun three-day hunger strikes to protest poor conditions there, immigrant advocates said.
The news comes just days after Department of Homeland Security officials dismissed a report critical of conditions at its immigration holding centers nationwide.
About 100 detainees contributed to a report released Thursday by the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice, claiming bleak conditions at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement lockup in Basile, La., 183 miles northwest of New Orleans.
Obama administration dropping 'enemy combatant' term
Breaking with the George W. Bush White House, the Barack Obama administration on Friday dropped the term ''enemy combatant'' for suspected terrorists and said international law governed the detention of terrorism suspects at the Guantánamo Bay prison, which Obama intends to close.
In a court filing in Washington, the Justice Department also said that only suspects who provided ''substantial'' support to al Qaeda or the Taliban would be considered detainable.
The moves represent a departure from Bush's handling of suspects as Obama prepares to close the detention facility.
Krome detainees tested for swine flu
Several detainees at the Krome detention center have developed flu-like symptoms and are being tested to determine whether it is H1N1 influenza or the regular flu, Miami-Dade County health officials said Thursday.
''We don't know if it's regular flu or swine,'' department spokeswoman Olga Connor said.
If it is H1N1 flu, it would be the first such ''cluster'' in Florida, which to date has reported 274 individual cases. A cluster is when an illness spreads rapidly among a group of people in close physical contact with each other.
White House scraps term `enemy combatant'
Breaking with the Bush White House, the Obama administration on Friday dropped the term ''enemy combatant'' for suspected terrorists and said international law governed the detention of terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay prison, which Obama intends to close.
In a court filing in Washington, the Justice Department also said that only suspects who provided ''substantial'' support to al Qaeda or the Taliban would be considered detainable.
The moves represent a departure from former President George W. Bush's handling of suspects as Obama prepares to close the detention facility.
Study: Dozens of terrorism suspects wrongly detained
GARDEZ, Afghanistan -- The militants crept up behind Mohammed Akhtiar as he squatted at the spigot to wash his hands before evening prayers at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. They shouted, ``Allahu Akbar'' -- God is great -- as one of them hefted a metal mop squeezer into the air, slammed it into Akhtiar's head and sent thick streams of blood running down his face.
Akhtiar was among the more than 770 terrorism suspects imprisoned at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. They are the men the Bush administration described as ``the worst of the worst.''
But Akhtiar was no terrorist. American troops dragged him out of his home in Afghanistan in 2003 and held him for three years at Guantánamo, believing that he was an insurgent involved in rocket attacks on U.S. forces.
Regardless of their legal status, immigrants deserve a fair shot at justice once they are in this country. That's especially true for the most vulnerable, those in detention and facing deportation. All too often, however, they are denied justice and basic due process.
Those are the findings of a comprehensive report issued by the National Immigration Law Center, based on thousands of pages of reviews conducted by customs officials from 2001 to 2005 and turned over by court order in a legal case.
The report documents a wide variety of abuses in the detention system. These include denial of access to legal information and help, denial of minimal time for recreation, and violation of the standards for legal and family visits. Detainees were often placed in isolation with no justification, the report said.
At the heart of the problem is the network of federal detention centers -- including the Krome Service Processing Center in Miami-Dade -- and local and state jails and other facilities run by for-profit prison systems. On any given day, these detention centers hold some 30,000 detainees nationwide.
The Department of Homeland Security says much of the data is outdated and that it has improved standards for treating immigration detainees. Those standards, however, are not legally binding, and the Obama administration has fought efforts to change that.
The remedy is legislation. Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., have introduced a bill that would force Homeland Security to adopt legally enforceable rules.
Without enforcement, the standards are little more than guidelines that can be ignored without penalty or consequence. That's the way these detention centers are run today and the way they will continue to operate until the law dictates otherwise.
If they don’t like the conditions....Agree to go back to the hell-holes they came from.
“bleak conditions,” eh? Like what? The table wine served unchilled? Water spots on the escargot fork? Chipped china?
At their bleakest, the conditions are better than criminals deserve, and almost certainly better than the ratholes they came from.
How comfy would they find a Mexican prison?
Which opens U.S. servicemembers and citizens involved with the capture, transport, and detention of said suspects to prosecution by the international courts. Prosecuting Bush administration officials fell flat when the 0 group floated the idea, but they would love to see it happen under the guise of, "international justice."
In a court filing in Washington, the Justice Department also said that only suspects who provided ''substantial'' support to al Qaeda or the Taliban would be considered detainable.
So, whose definition of "substantial"? The career politician in the airconditioned Washinton office, worrying about getting re-elected, or the grimy, Marine in the field, trying desparately to keep his buddy from bleeding out after a militant sprayed a few rounds then took off to hide behind a few burkhas?
And this is a problem because . . . . . . . ????
Sounds to me as though there are helping us cut the costs of supporting them while our useless court system tries to determine whether they can stay and become criminal burdens on our (less) free society, or if they get shipped back to their own homeland to (once again) illegally re-enter the US to become a criminal burden on our (less) free society.
Either way, America loses.
A hunger strike is the best kind- it hurts only the participant. Die, already, and decrease the surplus prison population!
That last line sounds familiar...oh, wait...drop the word prison and it becomes Obamacare for the elderly!
ping
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