|
The Pandemic Shows That Now Is the Time to End Immigration Detention |
 |
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=55747"><span class="small">Susan M. Akram, Open Global Rights</span></a>
|
|
Wednesday, 19 August 2020 08:18 |
|
Akram writes: "There is no legal or moral case to detain the vast majority of immigrant adults, let alone immigrant children. Ongoing immigration detention is an unreasonable risk not only to immigrants,?but to the health of all of us."
Migrant looking over the Rio Grande river on International Bridge 1 Las Americas, a legal port of entry which connects Laredo, Texas in the US with Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. (photo: Marco Ugarte/AP photo)
The Pandemic Shows That Now Is the Time to End Immigration Detention
By Susan M. Akram, Open Global Rights
19 August 20
Immigration detention is rarely justified and now poses a greater risk to the public given the spread of COVID-19 in ICE facilities.
 n its first report on confirmed cases of COVID-19 in correctional and detention facilities in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) documented horrifying numbers: 4,893 cases among detained or imprisoned persons, and 2,778 cases among staff members, with a total of 103 deaths in both categories as of that date.
But these numbers do not even reflect actual totals, as only 69% of jurisdictions nationwide reported, actual testing practices are not universal, and not all jurisdictions provided information from private prisons and immigration detention facilities. Information obtained from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shows over 3,596 confirmed cases among immigrant detainees and 153 ICE employees in the over 200 ICE jails and detention centers by July, 2020—but only about 10% of the detained immigrant population has been tested.
The United States incarcerates about 2.3 million people, more than any other industrialized country in the world, with approximately 50,000-500,000 people in immigration detention each year—the majority simply awaiting immigration hearings. Because the justifications for this detention are weak on health, legal and moral grounds, it is imperative to put an end to immigration detention once and for all.?
ICE has long been subject to severe criticism from legal and medical professionals, and the Department of Homeland Security, for its failure to provide adequate healthcare to detainees. ICE has also been charged in a range of lawsuits with civil rights violations of immigrants in detention. Due to systemic disregard for proper medical care, 207 immigrants have died in ICE custody since 2003, and in 2020 alone,10 people have died in ICE detention facilities. The CDC and state health services have documented outbreaks of multiple contagious diseases that ICE neither prevented nor adequately treated. Thousands of medical professionals have issued predictions that COVID-19 will spread throughout detention centers and jails if conditions do not change.
Of the reported cases nationwide, just less than 1 in 6 are in Texas facilities, the majority of which are run by private for-profit prison corporations. The largest, including the GEO Group and Immigration Centers of America, are making millions from the federal government, and lobby heavily to keep their facilities funded (GEO spent over $1.5 million on lobbying in 2019 alone).?
ICE detention centers have operated at triple and quadruple capacity, with detainees forced to sleep in open rooms with bunk beds packed together, making social distancing utterly impossible. Detained immigrants and asylum-seekers have complained that they have not been provided with masks, gloves, sanitizers, or even hot water so they can prevent virus spread.?Immigrant child detainees are at much greater risk than adults, and by March, more than fifty immigrant children and over a dozen staff members working in children’s detention centers tested positive for the virus.
In the absence of a rational federal policy to release all detainees who are not criminals or pose no danger to the public, the only way to address the pandemic among immigrant detainees is through individual or consolidated lawsuits. Litigation has included class actions, demanding release of all or high-risk individuals in particular detention facilities; groups of children and parents; or classes of vulnerable individuals such as the ones in Florida, Washington, DC, California and Texas. (A chart collating COVID-19-related detention litigation can be found here). In one of the most significant recent decisions, Judge Dolly Gee ordered the release of over 100 children and parents held in three ICE detention centers in Texas and Pennsylvania, claiming that the facilities “are ‘on fire’” due to the spread of the virus.
The vast majority of immigrant detainees are not criminals, but increasingly harsh policies since the 1990s have criminalized civil immigration violations. The corresponding rise in immigration detention can be tracked over the last two decades: from approximately 105,000 in 1990 to approximately 500,000 in 2019. Yet, empirical studies have shown that the overwhelming majority of immigrants who file claims against deportation appear at their hearings upon release.
The case for detaining immigrant children is even weaker or completely unjustified, and woefully out of step with the global consensus. This was starkly evident during the negotiations over the New York Declaration and the Global Compacts for Refugees and Migrants. The position of the overwhelming majority of states was for language in the Declaration—and in the Global Compacts—that detention of children should be prohibited. The US Administration insisted that the language should be changed to “detention for the purposes of determining migration status is seldom, if ever, in the best interest of the child,” and succeeded in including the weaker language in the Declaration. That is particularly ironic considering that following the voting on the Declaration, the US pulled out of both Global Compacts, joining only Hungary in voting against the Compact on Refugees.
Experts around the world have called on all states to end immigration detention, as it now poses a greater risk to the public given the spread of the virus. The UN has stepped up the pressure to conform more closely to the letter and spirit of the Global Compact for Migration, to which the vast majority of countries have committed themselves. The UN Network on Migration’s Working Group on Alternatives to Immigration Detention has developed policy guidelines for states to use immigration detention as only a last resort. The most relevant demands the UN is making of states is to stop all new detentions of migrants, introduce a moratorium on immigration detention, and to release all detained migrants in favor of community-based, non-custodial alternatives.
The US can and should follow the best practices many countries have now instituted. Spain, for example, has committed to ending immigration detention and most of its immigration detention centers are now empty. Spain is housing new arrivals in community-based facilities with access to local health and social services. Norway has also been releasing immigrants from detention in favor of community housing and monitoring. In Zambia, the Ministry of Home Affairs has ordered the release of all individuals in immigration detention. A number of countries have also announced no-arrest policies for persons who need virus testing or health care, while others have committed to full access to health care for all, including migrants and undocumented persons. Portugal is the first country to offer health care to all non-citizens, regardless of status, during the pandemic.
As in the US, in some countries, courts have taken the lead in ordering releases from detention. In the UK, courts have ordered the release of hundreds of migrants, are requiring individual justification for additional detentions, and are ordering an end to detaining persons pending deportation. Mexican courts, too, have ordered the government to release all vulnerable migrants at risk of the virus and to transfer all unaccompanied minors from detention to community-based shelters.
However, litigating the right to release is costly, time-consuming, not assured of success, and fails to address the systemic issues that affect all detainees. Americans concerned about ending the virus spread need to be demanding an end to immigration detention as so many other countries are now doing. Indeed, the demand is growing amongst communities affected by the massive detention policies around the country. They can build on the international “best practices” of other countries, and the UN policy guidelines that highlight the urgent need to end mass detention and illustrate sensible alternatives being implemented elsewhere.
There is no legal or moral case to detain the vast majority of immigrant adults, let alone immigrant children. Ongoing immigration detention is an unreasonable risk not only to immigrants,?but to the health of all of us.
 |
|
John Kasich Should Shut His Gob About What Qualifies as 'Extreme' |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
|
|
Tuesday, 18 August 2020 12:58 |
|
Pierce writes: "On Monday night, both of these people - former Congresswoman Susan Molinari and former Governor John Kasich - will be speaking at the Democratic National Convention. Julian Castro will not be speaking. Neither will Beto O'Rourke, to name only two actual Democratic politicians."
John Kasich. (photo: Bryan Woolston/Reuters)
John Kasich Should Shut His Gob About What Qualifies as 'Extreme'
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
18 August 20
The Republican ex-governor has secured a speaking slot, along with three other Republicans, at the Democratic National Convention.
n 1996, the keynote speaker at the Republican National Convention said the following about the incumbent Democratic president.
Now, think about Bill Clinton. He promises one thing and does another. He hopes we'll forget his broken promises. But I ask you -- have you forgotten that Bill Clinton promised a middle class tax cut, then passed the largest tax increase in American history? I didn't think so. Have you forgotten that Bill Clinton promised common-sense health care reform, only to impose a huge Washington-run bureaucracy health care system on all of us? And have you forgotten that Bill Clinton promised to balance the budget, first in five years, then 10, then seven, then nine, then went on to veto the first balanced budget in 25 years? Americans know that Bill Clinton's promises have the lifespan of a Big Mac on Air Force One.
Earlier that evening, another speaker at the RNC said the following:
You know, if you're like me, you grew up with parents who worked hard. My dad carried mail on his back for 29 years. My mother would rather walk than take the bus, just to save 50 cents. My parents educated three kids without a dime of student loans so their kids would have more than they had. I'm proud to serve in a Congress where our goal has been to make America better, with our children's future as our guiding star. As we approach the 21st century, we must all be part of an effort to guarantee the promise of a brighter future for all of those who will follow us, and ladies and gentlemen, that is America's greatest legacy, that our children are left with more than our parents left to us.
A big part of that promise has been our dedication and work to balance the budget. You may think that budgets are about green eye shades and numbers, but it's far more important that that. You see, budgets are about ideas. Budgets are about values. And most important, they are about people.
On Monday night, both of these people—former Congresswoman Susan Molinari and former Governor John Kasich—will be speaking at the Democratic National Convention. Julian Castro will not be speaking. Neither will Beto O’Rourke, to name only two actual Democratic politicians. They will be joined by dueling Republican Whitmans—Christie Todd and Meg. A bunch of people who thrived in the days in which the Republican Party was cultivating within itself the forces that produced the current president* will kick off a convention designed to crush the monster they helped make inevitable. This is guaranteed to make me slightly more than moderately crazy.
Everybody’s gone all realpolitik on this, just as everyone suddenly developed a sweet-tooth for the likes of Bill Kristol and David Frum over the last three years as the prion disease for which they were primary vectors became full-blown. Big tent and all that. Which would be fine if Kasich hadn’t gone out of his way Monday morning to throw a ring-and-run elbow at one of the Democratic Party’s most prominent young voices. From Buzzfeed News:
“People on the extreme, whether they're on the left or on the right, they get outsized publicity that tends to define their party. You know, I listen to people all the time make these statements, and because AOC gets outsized publicity doesn't mean she represents the Democratic Party. She's just a part, just some member of it. And it's on both sides, whether it's the Republicans or whether it's the Democrats.”
OK, just to start, as my grandmother used to say, who the hell is this guy when he’s at home? Who’s John Kasich to decide where the “extreme” lies in Democratic politics? He still supports the damn Balanced Budget Amendment, not only an extreme idea, but also the worst one in American politics. He signed a bill that would imprison doctors for performing a common abortion procedure. Now, that’s extreme. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is one of the most popular figures in her political party; certainly, she’s a more popular Democrat than Kasich is a Republican. Her most prominent policy positions—the Green New Deal and Medicare For All—have widespread support inside and outside the party. And a helluva lot more Democrats would rather hear her speak than him. So John Kasich can shut his gob, take a seat, and be grateful that nobody throws produce at him from the audience.
|
|
|
Extreme Weather Just Devastated 10 Million Acres in the Midwest. Expect More of This |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=53127"><span class="small">Art Cullen, Guardian UK</span></a>
|
|
Tuesday, 18 August 2020 12:49 |
|
Cullen writes: "I know a stiff wind. They call this place Storm Lake, after all. But until recently most Iowans had never heard of a 'derecho.' They have now. Last Monday, a derecho tore 770 miles from Nebraska to Indiana and left a path of destruction up to 50 miles wide over 10m acres of prime cropland."
'Grain bins were crumpled like aluminum foil. Three hundred thousand people remained without power in Iowa and Illinois on Friday.' (photo: Robert Franklin/AP)
Extreme Weather Just Devastated 10 Million Acres in the Midwest. Expect More of This
By Art Cullen, Guardian UK
18 August 20
Unless we contain carbon, our food supply will be under threat. By 2050, US corn yields could decline by 30%
know a stiff wind. They call this place Storm Lake, after all. But until recently most Iowans had never heard of a “derecho”. They have now. Last Monday, a derecho tore 770 miles from Nebraska to Indiana and left a path of destruction up to 50 miles wide over 10m acres of prime cropland. It blew 113 miles per hour at the Quad Cities on the Mississippi River.
Grain bins were crumpled like aluminum foil. Three hundred thousand people remained without power in Iowa and Illinois on Friday. Cedar Rapids and Iowa City were devastated.
The corn lay flat.
Iowa’s maize yield may be cut in half. A little napkin ciphering tells me the Tall Corn State will lose $6bn from crop damage alone.
We should get used to it. Extreme weather is the new normal. Last year, the villages of Hamburg and Pacific Junction, Iowa, were washed down the Missouri River from epic floods that scoured tens of thousands of acres. This year, the Great Plains are burning up from drought. Western Iowa was steeped in severe drought when those straight-line winds barreled through the weak stalks.
A multi-decade drought is under way in the Central Plains and the south-west. Wildfires are spreading from Arizona to California, and are burning ridges north of Los Angeles not licked by flames since 1968. Cattle in huge Kansas, Texas and Oklahoma feedlots will drink the Ogallala Aquifer dry in 20 years. This drought, which could rival or exceed the Medieval Drought that occurred about AD1200, could last 30 to 50 years, according to research from the Goddard Space Institute. It will become difficult to grow corn in southern Iowa, and impossible in western Kansas. By mid-century, corn yields could decline by 30%, according to the Iowa State University climatologist Dr Gene Takle.
Takle notes that the 20th century was the wettest on record. This could be the driest.
“The last century was our Goldilocks period,” Takle said. “Just right. And that period is coming to an end.”
We have cyclone bombs in winter and derechos on top of tornadoes. We have 500-year floods every 10 years. And we have a steady increase in night-time temperatures and humidity that makes it difficult for the corn to breathe even with the latest in genetic engineering. Protein content in the kernel is falling. Livestock and plants fall prey to new diseases and pests along with extreme heat stress.
It will lead to a reckoning more quickly than most of us realize.
The pandemic exposed the fragility of the food supply when meat processing plants teetered last spring for lack of healthy workers. Prices shot up 50% at the grocery counter.
Farmers didn’t share in that windfall. Corn prices are at a 10-year low in a broken industrial system propped up by government design.
When Takle was a teenager, baling hay in 1960, there were 18-20 days a year when the temperature would get above 90 degrees. By the end of the century, Takle warns, this region could be scorched by temperatures over 100 degrees 50 to 60 days a year.
Soil that can hold water and defy heat is losing that capacity to erosion driven by extreme rains. Poor soil, combined with the extreme heat Takle describes, assures crop failures. Takle said corn crops could fail every other year if we go on with “business as usual” pumping out carbon.
It’s already happening in Latin America. Decades of drought are driving Guatemalan campesino refugees to Storm Lake to work in meatpacking. Similarly, epic migrations were driven by the Medieval Drought. It is believed that the Mill Creek people who settled here were driven north up the Missouri River to the Dakotas as they were droughted out of Iowa. That drought also led to wars in Europe, not unlike the contemporary conflicts and migrations in Africa whose roots are in failing agricultural and food systems.
The impacts of climate change are real and profound for our most basic industry: food. Fortunately, sound science tells us that we can make a real impact on climate change by planting less corn and more grass that sequesters carbon. Paying farmers to build soil health and retain water is a better investment than writing a crop insurance check for drought. Farmers on the frontlines of climate change are trying to become more resilient to extreme weather by planting permanent grass strips in crop fields, and planting cover crops for the winter that suck up nitrogen and CO2. The rate of adaptation would be quickened if conservation funding programs were not always under attack.
The derecho is yet another destructive reminder that heat leading to extreme storms will destroy our very food sources if we don’t face the climate crisis now.
|
|
FOCUS: Unlike Republicans, Democrats Can Govern. But Can They Fight? |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51635"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog</span></a>
|
|
Tuesday, 18 August 2020 10:50 |
|
Reich writes: "It's important to understand the real difference between America's two political parties at this point in history."
Former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich. (photo: Steve Russell/Toronto Star)
Unlike Republicans, Democrats Can Govern. But Can They Fight?
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
18 August 20
 s America heads into its quadrennial circus of nominating conventions (this year’s even more surreal because of the pandemic), it’s important to understand the real difference between America’s two political parties at this point in history.
Instead of “left” versus “right,” think of two different core competences.
The Democratic Party is basically a governing party, organized around developing and implementing public policies. The Republican Party has become an attack party, organized around developing and implementing political vitriol. Democrats legislate. Republicans fulminate.
In theory, politics requires both capacities – to govern, but also to fight to attain and retain power. The dysfunction today is that Republicans can’t govern and Democrats can’t fight.
Donald Trump is the culmination of a half century of GOP belligerence. Richard Nixon’s “dirty tricks” were followed by Republican operative Lee Atwater’s smear tactics, Newt Gingrich’s take-no-prisoners reign as House speaker, the “Swift-boating” of John Kerry, and the GOP’s increasingly blatant uses of racism and xenophobia to build an overwhelmingly white, rural base.
Atwater, trained in the southern swamp of the modern Republican Party, once noted: “Republicans in the South could not win elections by talking about issues. You had to make the case that the other guy, the other candidate, is a bad guy.” Over time, the GOP’s core competence came to be vilification.
The stars of today’s Republican Party, in addition to Trump, are all pugilists: Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio; Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Georgia’s Brian Kemp; Fox News’s Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson; and attack dogs like Rudolph Giuliani and Roger Stone.
But Republicans don’t have a clue how to govern. They’re hopeless at developing and implementing public policies or managing government. They can’t even agree on basics like how to respond to the pandemic or what to replace Obamacare with.
Meanwhile, the central competence of the Democratic Party is running government – designing policies and managing the system. Once in office, Democrats spend countless hours cobbling together legislative and regulatory initiatives. They overflow with economic and policy advisers, programs, plans, and goals.
But Democrats are lousy at bare knuckles political fighting. Their campaigns proffer policies but are often devoid of passion. (Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid was little more than a long list of detailed proposals.) Democrats seem stunned when their GOP opponents pillory them with lies, rage, and ad hominem attacks.
This has put Democrats at a competitive disadvantage. Political campaigns might once have been about party platforms, but today’s electorate is angrier and more cynical. Policy ideas rarely make headlines; conflict does. Social media favor explosive revelations, including bald lies. No one remembers Hillary Clinton’s policy ideas from 2016; they only remember Trump’s attacks on her emails.
As a result, the party that’s mainly good at attacking has been winning elections – and pushed into governing, which it’s bad at. In 2016, the GOP won the presidency, along with control over both chambers of Congress and most governorships. On the other hand, the party that’s mainly good a governing has been losing elections – pushed into the role of opposition and attack, which it’s bad at. (House speaker Nancy Pelosi, however, seems to have a natural gift for it.)
This dysfunction has become particularly obvious – and deadly – in the current national emergency. Trump and Senate Republicans have let the pandemic and economic downturn become catastrophes. They have no capacity to develop and implement strategies for dealing with them. Their knee-jerk response is to attack – China, Democrats, public health officials, protesters, “lazy” people who won’t work.
Democrats know what to do – House Democrats passed a comprehensive coronavirus bill in May, and several Democratic governors have been enormously effective – but they’ve lacked power to put a national strategy into effect.
All this may change in a few months when Americans have an opportunity to replace the party that’s bad at governing with the one that’s good at it. After all, Joe Biden has been at it for most of the past half century.
Trump and the GOP will pull out all the stops, of course. They’ve already started mindless, smarmy attacks.
The big question hovering over the election is whether Democrats can summon enough fight to win against the predictable barrage. Biden’s choice of running mate, Kamala Harris, bodes well in this regard. Quite apart from all her other attributes, she’s a fierce fighter.
|
|
f all the jobs I’ve ever watched humans do, few have seemed more appealing to me than counting salmon at the head of the Ugashik River, in Alaska. Every hour, the man charged with this duty would rouse himself from his cabin in that vast and sweeping wilderness, climb a ladder into what looked like a lifeguard’s chair, and then stare down at the stream—with a clicker in his hand, like an usher at a movie theatre. Each time he saw the flash of a fish passing upstream, he’d count it. Several times a day he’d send his count to headquarters and then climb back down—assuming, of course, that grizzlies had not appeared to do some fishing, in which case he would wait in his perch.
