A Media Ceiling Is About To Fall In on Democrats
Mark Brody
Wed, 01/25/2023 – 22:48
Archive for category: Immigration
It’s time to rethink EU migration policy. New walls are being built in Europe, but they will not solve the present crisis – and the money could be far better spent.
Instead, Serbia is constructing a fence on its border with North Macedonia and plans another to prevent crossings from Bulgaria. Greece is planning to extend its high-tech 40-kilometre-long, 5-metre-high steel, concrete and barbed wire fence on the border with Turkey by a further 140 kilometres.
Over the past two years Poland, Lithuania and Latvia have fortified their borders with Belarus by erecting fences of steel and barbed wire at a cost of more than half a billion euros. Several years earlier, Hungary spent €1.64bn erecting steel and razor-wire barriers on its borders with Serbia and Croatia.
Around 1800 kilometres of border walls and fences have been built on the perimeter of the EU in the past decade. The hefty prices include cameras, heat sensors, drones, armed vehicles and guards to patrol and keep the outsiders out, as well as the costs of reduced trade between neighbours and damaged wildlife.
The new militarised borders are intended to slow down the inflow of irregular migrants entering the EU from the east along the western Balkan route. Over 228,000 undocumented asylum seekers from the Middle East, North Africa and Asia entered the EU last year, half of them along the Balkan route. That was a substantial increase on 2021, sparking fears of another refugee crisis similar to the one that sent a million undocumented refugees to the EU in 2015-16.
Yet these expensive walls are unlikely to stop the refugees. If the wall can’t be scaled with ladders, it can be walked around: the wall on the Polish-Belarusian border may be 186 kilometres long, but that leaves 232 kilometres of the border unfenced.
Nevertheless, these longer walls do force would-be migrants to take more dangerous routes. They also permit higher profits for smugglers and traffickers of people. For example, even though fewer refugees were apprehended in Hungary after the fence was built, the number of human smugglers arrested increased, and thousands of migrants continued to cross the southern Hungarian borders heading for western Europe.
The long journeys of asylum seekers include dangerous crossings of seas or rivers, sleeping rough in cold and heat, and abuse by people smugglers. According to the Missing Migrants Project, more than 25,000 people have gone missing in the Mediterranean alone since 2014.
Why take such risks? Refugees from Afghanistan may be escaping Taliban rule. Those from Turkey, Iraq and Syria may be fleeing wars. Economic migrants from Tunisia, Egypt, Bangladesh, Algeria and Morocco are determined to reach the EU to escape poverty, earn living wages and build a better life. Yet the EU meets them all with walls, barbed wire and filthy refugee camps.
There is a precedent for solving migration issues with humane policies, not walls. The war in Ukraine drove four times as many refugees into the EU in 2022 than the conflict in Syria did in 2015-16. In contrast, the status of Ukrainian refugees is regulated.
Over 4.8 million of them, mostly women and children, have registered for the EU’s temporary protection scheme or other national programmes, including over 1m in Poland and Germany, and over 100,000 in the Czech Republic, Italy, Spain, the UK, Bulgaria and France.
The EU’s Temporary Protection Directive allows Ukrainians to move freely between member states, gives them instant rights to live and work, and offers access to benefits like housing and medical care for up to three years.
While migrants are a net cost in the short run, in the long run they are taxpayers. Some will assimilate and settle in the EU, thus helping relieve its worker shortage and demographic crisis.
Why not adopt the same policies for Arab and African migrants? Governments can provide asylum-seekers with temporary accommodation, legal pathways to obtain jobs, language classes and modest financial support. Private companies can invest in human capital by training and hiring these workers. Once employed or in school, the young men – most of these migrants are young men – will pay taxes and productively contribute to the host society.
The fears that natives lose jobs to migrants are largely overstated, because migrants tend to take less desirable jobs. Moreover, they create new jobs within and outside diaspora communities – in other words, groups of migrants in host countries who have come from the same original culture.
If people in host countries are worried about an excess of young male migrants, the EU can design a ‘merit’ migration system like the one in Canada to welcome families with young children. Local diasporas and personal sponsors can be asked to support new migrants and bear some responsibility for their housing, language training and employment. With more support and mentoring available, migrants will be better able to assimilate into the EU culture.
There are some hopeful signs. The new Slovenian government is removing a 143-kilometre razor-wired border fence with Croatia, built during the 2015-16 refugee crisis, due to its ineffectiveness. Let’s hope that other countries will follow suit, and use the lessons of regulated migration of Ukrainian refugees to address the problem of other migrants in Europe and beyond.
Scientists have long known that ancient people living in Siberia made their way into what is now North America. Mounting DNA evidence suggests migration also happened in the opposite direction
As the Texas National Guard cordons off a gap in the U.S. border wall, migrants wait on the banks of the Rio Grande on Dec. 20, 2022.
Photo: Morgan Lee/AP
“Cruelty is the point” — a phrase coined by The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer — became a popular liberal refrain to describe the motivations behind what, at the time, Democrats called intolerable Trump-era policies. President Donald Trump’s moves to detain and deport immigrants at the southern border, including tearing families apart as policy, were highlighted as key justifications for the catchphrase.
There’s no doubt that a gleeful viciousness attended the Trump administration’s decisions to round up, cage, and expel desperate, nonwhite migrants.
Cruelty is, however, more than an affect.
The United States border regime is cruel whether or not its maintenance is enforced by a president spewing racist slurs or a president appealing to the need for “safe and orderly processing” while he announces a plan to turn away thousands of migrants en masse — as President Joe Biden did on Thursday.
The Biden administration unveiled a blanket policy to immediately eject asylum-seekers from Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua who cross the border from Mexico without having previously applied for asylum in a third country — which means obtaining a financial sponsor in the U.S. and going through a background check.
The same “transit ban” policy is already in place for migrants from Venezuela, an extension of the Title 42 measure deployed by the Trump administration in the first year of the pandemic as a way to turn away migrants under the guise of public health. In some nine months under Trump, nearly half a million people were removed under the law; keeping the law around for two years, the Biden administration has already used it to deport over 2 million.
It should be obvious that no amount of anti-immigrant policy will be enough for the white supremacist right.
Biden’s border regime would be no more acceptable if it were a political ploy aimed at insulating Democrats from “law and order” attacks by the right, but it isn’t even that: Republicans have made clear that they will paint Biden as an “open border” president, regardless of how harshly Trumpian his border policies remain. It should be obvious that no amount of anti-immigrant policy will be enough for the white supremacist right.
Yet it would be misplaced to understand anti-immigrant moves made by the Biden White House as simply failed efforts to appease the right. Democratic presidents, particularly so-called deporter-in-chief Barack Obama, have long opted for hard-line border rule.
Democrats couch their border logics in the neoliberal language of management and order, rather than explicitly racist “America First” slogans. The maintenance of the border as a racist, spatial fix for capital, though, has the same disastrous, deadly effects no matter the rhetoric with which it’s justified.
On Thursday, Biden pitched his border plan as a way to bring order to chaos, with between 7,500 to 8,000 refugees crossing the U.S.-Mexico border every day in December. The wealthiest country in the world could respond to this mass movement by working with direct service providers on the ground and providing sufficient resources to swiftly resettle those fleeing political turmoil — turmoil for which the U.S. carries significant historic responsibility.
Instead, the burden of this order is being placed on those fleeing for their own survival, with the alleged right to claim asylum at port of entry reserved only for those with the ability to apply and secure a U.S. sponsor before they reach the border.
“The right to asylum should not hinge on your manner of flight from danger or your financial means,” said Mary Miller Flowers, the senior policy analyst at the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, in a statement. “Yet, for far too long, seeking safety is treated as a privilege for a select few, and the Biden administration’s cherry-picking of who can and cannot access protection proves this.”
The White House’s latest policy does include some carrot alongside the stick of mass, immediate expulsions. The U.S. will offer humanitarian parole for up to 30,000 asylum-seekers per month from Nicaragua, Haiti, Cuba, and Venezuela who have already applied for asylum while crossing Mexico, before reaching the border; gone through a background check; and secured a U.S. fiscal sponsor.
As Jonathan Blazer, the American Civil Liberties Union’s director of border strategies, put it in a statement on Thursday: “There is simply no reason why the benefits of a new parole program for Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Haitians must be conditioned on the expansion of dangerous expulsions.”
The Biden administration continues to claim to stand against Title 42. Within minutes of announcing his latest Title 42-based expulsion plan, Biden told reporters on Thursday, “I don’t like Title 42.” The government has also fought to end the measure in court — an effort that was most recently rejected by the Supreme Court at the end of December.
The danger in the administration’s border policy lies in what it serves: an ideological commitment to immigration deterrence.
At the same time, however, the administration has deployed and continued to expand Title 42’s use to expedite migrant expulsion.
“The Supreme Court’s decision on Title 42 last week did not direct the Biden administration to apply the Title 42 expulsions to more people,” noted immigrant rights group Freedom for Immigrants, calling out the administration’s “Title 42 hypocrisy.”
Such hypocrisy has been the modus operandi when it comes to Biden and his Democratic predecessors’ approach to the border, and hypocrisy in and of itself is not the problem here.
The danger in the administration’s border policy lies in what it serves: an ideological commitment to immigration deterrence — not a prevarication over legal process, but a choice to condemn millions of predominantly Black and brown people to suffering and proximity to death. Cruelty is the constant.
The post Biden’s Border Plan Drapes Trump Policies in Liberal Rhetoric appeared first on The Intercept.
Lakota historian Nick Estes talks about Thanksgiving and his book “Our History Is the Future,” and the historic fight against the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock. “This history … is a continuing history of genocide, of settler colonialism and, basically, the founding myths of this country,” says Estes, who is a co-founder of the Indigenous resistance group The Red Nation and a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe.
Sometimes, the scholarly life means taking delight in unexpectedly relevant news items: a new adaptation…
Warning: This article contains graphic accounts of force-feeding.
Ajay Kumar set out from India in June 2018, eventually ending up at the U.S. border in California, where he declared his intention to seek political asylum. He was then taken into the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, expecting to be released as he awaited his hearings. Instead, he languished in detention for nearly a year.
So he began a protest. In July 2019, along with three other Indian asylum-seekers, Kumar undertook a hunger strike, demanding release from ICE detention. The agency responded by transferring him to the El Paso Service Processing Center in Texas, an ICE jail operated by the firm Global Precision Systems.
With Kumar more than a month into the hunger strike, the government, using Justice Department lawyers, sought a judge’s order to force-feed him and the other three men. With the judge’s approval, contractors working at the detention center on ICE’s behalf began the process of involuntarily feeding Kumar in August 2019, 37 days since his last meal. The process was captured on video.
“I asked them to give me my freedom. If they had granted it at that time, there would have been no need for all of this.”
“I asked them to give me my freedom. If they had granted it at that time, there would have been no need for all of this,” Kumar said. “This is not humanity. This is totally against humanity.”
Historically, the federal government’s force-feeding procedures have been mired in secrecy, with even the court orders to carry it out frequently issued under seal. Video, court records, and medical records reviewed by The Intercept in the case of the El Paso detention center provide a firsthand look at how the procedure is approved and executed — including the first publicly released video of force-feeding done under the auspices of the federal government. National and international medical organizations consider force-feeding hunger strikers a transgression of medical ethics; the process has been criticized as torture by international human rights organizations.
The video, nearly one hour long, shows five detention guards in riot gear, employed by Global Precision Systems, introduce themselves to the camera in preparation for their “calculated use of force” on Kumar. The guards enter the facility infirmary, where medical personnel explain the procedure to the asylum-seeker through a translator and begin their attempts to insert a nasogastric tube. Medical officials failed to correctly insert the tube two times before successfully beginning the force-feeding.
According to ICE’s Performance-Based National Detention Standards, whenever there is a “calculated use of force,” staff are required to use a handheld camera to record the incident. The Intercept, with Kumar’s consent, requested the video through the Freedom of Information Act. After ICE refused to turn over the footage, The Intercept filed a lawsuit and ICE subsequently agreed to turn over the footage, but the agency redacted the faces and names of everyone who appears in it, aside from Kumar. (ICE declined to comment for this story and Global Precision Systems did not respond to a request for comment.)
Kumar watched the video for the first time with The Intercept, which also showed the footage to four experts from universities and advocacy organizations, who work on medicine and immigration detention.
“The process of watching this hourlong video was excruciating, knowing what Ajay was going through,” said Joanna Naples-Mitchell, research adviser for the U.S. at Physicians for Human Rights. “That was, perhaps, the most chilling thing about it: this kind of quiet, pernicious nature of the violence that was present throughout this video — and having these officers standing around him, and just this tremendous power imbalance and asymmetry between him and them.”
Ajay Kumar stands on a balcony in California on June 1, 2022.
Still: Stuart Harmon
Kumar fled from India after receiving threats related to his political activism. The threats were very real: Later, as Kumar was in ICE detention, his father was killed in India, his immigration attorney said in court. From India, Kumar took a plane to Ethiopia and then another flight to Brazil and traveled north by car, bus, and foot, before ending up at the California border, according to records from an interview he gave to the U.S. border guards. After making his intention to declare asylum known, Kumar was placed in ICE custody and taken to the Otero County Processing Center in New Mexico — another privately run facility, in this case operated by Management and Training Corporation. (Management and Training Corporation did not provide a comment for this story.)
Asylum-seekers, when placed in ICE custody, are fighting civil immigration cases. Their legal right to request asylum, however, does not preclude detention. They are frequently placed in immigration detention centers. They sometimes stay under lock and key until their cases conclude, but in other instances they can argue for release to pursue their claim from the outside. Despite being placed in detention facilities while awaiting civil — not criminal — cases, conditions for asylum-seekers are identical to jails and prisons.
For Kumar, days passed, then weeks, without any indication of when he would be released from detention. The conditions and treatment, he said, were abysmal. It was “the worst experience I had over there, the worst,” he told The Intercept. “I did not expect that these people would treat us like this.” Kumar said he would speak up for himself and others. The complaints Kumar said he lodged included a request for the staff to respect Hindi detainees’ religious observations, including a request that their food not be cross-contaminated with beef, which is prohibited in the Hindu religion. In response, he said, Otero correctional staff would send him to solitary confinement. (In some cases, records indicate he was segregated for “insolence.” In one case, the documents say the segregation order was related to claims of a hunger strike.)
Advocates for migrants have lodged a raft of complaints against the Otero County Processing Center, including over its use of solitary confinement. In 2021, Advocate Visitors with Immigrants in Detention, or AVID, and Innovation Law Lab, released a report co-written by Nathan Craig, a professor at New Mexico State University who has worked on Kumar’s case, that drew on more than 200 complaints of alleged abuse at the facility. They included claims of unsanitary conditions, inadequate medical care, harassment by staff, and prolonged use of solitary confinement. Recently, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties wrote a recommendations memo to ICE highlighting concerns and best practices to be improved in terms of detainee treatment.
“The private contractors’ aim is to cut costs and try to extract profit out of this situation. These lead to dangerously bad conditions,” Craig said. “There’s poor sanitation, poor medical care. The conditions are very unpleasant, partly by design, partly by the extraction of profit.”
“The private contractors’ aim is to cut costs and try to extract profit out of this situation. These lead to dangerously bad conditions.”
Even as he fought for better conditions, Kumar requested to be released on bond. ICE, though, kept him confined. He decided something drastic needed to be done: After nearly a year in ICE detention, Kumar ate his last meal on July 8, 2019, and began his hunger strike.
“For the first few days my body was demanding food all the time, all the time. But after 10 to 12 days, my hunger stopped permanently,” Kumar said. “And as the days passed, the weakness increased gradually.”
Other men in the facility also began hunger strikes. Kumar said they were all threatened with force-feeding: “The guards who were there before the transfer were threatening me: ‘Now you will go to El Paso and tubes will be inserted inside you. You will be force-fed.’”
The El Paso Service Processing Center is a hub of federal government force-feeding. Kumar was far from the first detainee to be force-fed there. A report from the American Civil Liberties Union and Physicians for Human Rights shows that as early as 2016, there was a court order for a forced hydration in the facility.
Additional ICE records reviewed by The Intercept show that, in 2018, there were a total of 25 hunger strikes, six of which were met by “involuntary administration of fluids.” One ICE detainee was flown from New Jersey to El Paso to be force-fed in November 2018. In early 2019, the Associated Press reported that nine men were simultaneously being force-fed at the facility. That year there were 40 hunger strikes in the facility, according to an ICE facility report, with Kumar’s case brining the reported total to 13 known force-feedings.
The practice of force-feeding incarcerated hunger strikers is widespread in federal facilities, spanning Democratic and Republican administrations alike. While the Pentagon’s force-feedings of Guantánamo Bay detainees by the Department of Defense made global headlines in 2013, other government agencies — both at the federal and state levels — also engage in the practice, albeit with less fanfare.
As in Kumar’s case, the Department of Homeland Security force-feeds detainees at several immigration jails. The Justice Department’s Bureau of Prisons has also conducted force-feedings, which typically require an order by a judge. Though contractors running and working at detention facilities do not typically initiate the court proceedings that result in judicial orders for force-feedings — in Kumar’s case, the government was itself the sole petitioner — contractors do, as in Kumar’s case, sometimes carry out the procedure.
Though advocates, journalists, and lawyers have continually fought to get videos of federal force-feedings, none had been made public. In 2014, a judge ordered the release of the Guantánamo Bay videos, but after the Obama administration appealed, a panel of three federal judges overturned the previous ruling.
What is likely the first video of a force-feeding being carried out by authorities was published in 2016 by Wisconsin Watch, a nonprofit investigative news organization. The state government in Wisconsin carried out the procedure: The video shows a person incarcerated at Waupun Correctional Institution, a state prison, being force-fed by Department of Corrections staff. The man, Cesar DeLeon, was on hunger strike to protest prolonged solitary confinement.
“If someone has capacity — they’re legally competent to make their own medical decisions — you cannot force-feed them.”
The practice has been condemned by medical experts and ethicists. The American Medical Association says force-feeding violates the “core ethical values of the medical profession.” The World Medical Association and the International Committee of the Red Cross have also condemned the practice. And, before Kumar ever arrived in El Paso, the United Nations said that ICE’s force-feeding of previous detainees could be violating the U.N. Convention Against Torture.
“If someone has capacity — they’re legally competent to make their own medical decisions — you cannot force-feed them,” said Dr. Matt Wynia, director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado and the former head of the American Medical Association’s Institute for Ethics. “It’s a law enforcement intervention, and doctors do not have a place to use their skills and knowledge to be agents of the state for purposes of law enforcement, or for purposes of maintaining control of the prison population, or to try and break the hunger strike.”
Last year, the ACLU and Physicians for Human Rights released a report about hunger strikers and ICE’s response in immigration detention. The authors, Eunice Cho of the ACLU and Naples-Mitchell of Physicians for Human Rights, relied on over 10,000 pages of documents, studying the cases of nearly 1,400 people.
“Although some detained people, on occasion, are able to bring outside attention to their hunger strikes,” the report reads, “very little is known of ICE’s systemic response to hunger striking detainees.”
The report found that ICE began seeking and executing judicial orders for involuntary medical procedures since 2012, including a previously unknown force-feeding case from 2016 under the Obama administration. It also found that in many cases, ICE failed to consider alternatives to force-feeding, including addressing the conditions the hunger strikes were protesting. In multiple cases, the report found, documents and internal emails revealed ICE officials attempted to hide or manipulate information about in-custody hunger strikes in order to avoid public pressure.
“We have to remember how coercive and how abusive the detention system actually is in the first place,” said Cho, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU National Prison Project. “In the context of that, it may be that people have tried to do everything else possible, but it sometimes becomes an option of last resort because there is simply nothing else to do in terms of controlling one’s own bodily autonomy.”
Force-feedings have taken place at other jails, not just the El Paso facility. In 2020, immigrants detained at two separate Louisiana detention centers were subjected to force-feeding. Just this year, in February, ICE force-fed a Yemeni man detained in Arizona. That process went so badly that “one of the guards in the room thought the man was having a stroke,” according to a report from the Daily Beast.
“This is a practice that has clearly been accepted by multiple administrations, regardless of political party,” said Naples-Mitchell from Physicians for Human Rights. “It’s routinized within ICE policies and practices. And even though it’s clearly accepted, there’s also this veil of secrecy around how often it’s being used.”
About a week after he had started the hunger strike, the transfer order that guards had threatened him with was issued; Kumar was taken to the El Paso Service Processing Center. Government lawyers then sought a court order from a federal district judge for ICE to force-feed him. Kumar had lost just over 20 pounds during the hunger strike, dropping from 139 pounds to 118.
After the federal judge’s order came, a social worker concluded Kumar was “fully competent” to make decisions over his own medical care, according to court records reviewed by The Intercept.
On August 14 at 3:45 p.m., the U.S. government began the process of force-feeding Kumar. The video obtained by The Intercept shows the infirmary, where the three other hunger strikers are seen in the beds, also with their faces blurred, watching Kumar be force-fed.
“If they wanted, they could have taken me to another room,” Kumar said. He alleged that officials force-fed him in front of the others to encourage them to break their own strikes after watching him undergo the procedure. (A news report suggests that one of those three men was taken to the hospital the following day and diagnosed with ileus, a lack of muscle contractions of the intestines that can lead to a life-threatening blockage. That man was later returned to ICE custody and force-fed.)
“Our responsibilities are to pin the detainee, control the head, and if a weapon is produced, secure the weapon,” says one of the correctional officers dressed in riot gear, whose face was blurred in ICE’s video.
As correctional officers began to tighten the restraints on Kumar, someone behind the camera instructs the lead security officer to remove the restraints and use their hands.
“He was obviously so weak and so thin,” said Dr. Parveen Parmar, an associate professor of clinical emergency medicine at the University of Southern California, who reviewed the video. In 2019, Parmar filed an affidavit after reviewing hundreds of Kumar’s medical records during the court process to force-feed him. “As a physician, it was really viscerally hard to watch the use of force,” she told The Intercept. “I can clearly state it was medically unnecessary.”
Michelle Iglesias, a doctor with whom ICE contracts, oversaw Kumar’s force-feeding to verify the tube’s placement, according to medical records and court testimony reviewed by The Intercept. When Kumar’s attorneys attempted to stop the procedure from continuing, Iglesias defended the practice in federal court, though the doctor did concede that that force-feeding violates medical standards “in the private world.” The doctor suggested that “because this is a detainee in custody,” there is “a different policy.” (Iglesias declined to comment.)
“In our history, we have seen that is a very dark path to go down, where doctors are using their medical knowledge and skills to serve the interests of the state and of the court system.”
Experts that spoke with The Intercept rejected Iglesias’s argument. “In medicine, we fight against that pretty regularly, for, I think, obvious reasons,” said Wynia, the former American Medical Association ethicist. “In our history, we have seen that is a very dark path to go down, where doctors are using their medical knowledge and skills to serve the interests of the state and of the court system.”
Private prison firms running ICE detention centers sometimes require doctors to declare that they are aligned with ICE’s mission. In a 2019 posting for a $400,000-a-year job as lead physician at an ICE facility in Louisiana, unrelated to the Texas facility, the private prison firm GEO Group said candidates must be “philosophically committed to the objectives of the facility.”
In the video, before the force-feeding begins, a woman who identifies herself as a “doctor” is present to oversee the procedure. Kumar identified her to The Intercept as Iglesias.
A screenshot from footage obtained from ICE shows Ajay Kumar after two failed attempts by medical staff to insert a nasogastric tube at the El Paso Service Processing Center on Aug. 14, 2019.
Kumar is given one last chance to avert the force-feeding. In the video, the doctor tells a translator to deliver a message to Kumar: “Up until this point, he still has the opportunity to drink the protein supplement, as opposed to using the tube in his nose.”
Kumar refuses, saying through the translator: “You guys know the only thing I want: my freedom.” The guards dressed in riot gear then hold Kumar down.
In the video, two nurses wearing U.S. Public Health Service uniforms perform the force-feeding. Health care in the facility is overseen by ICE’s Health Service Corps, which includes Public Health Service employees, but in ICE’s sprawling network of detention centers, the ground-level providers can also be contracted private providers. At times, medical personnel from multiple organizations are in the same facility.
In the video, one nurse begins inserting the tube through his left nostril, having Kumar sip water to facilitate the insertion. Kumar complies with instructions.
“At first I got scared seeing that tube — the tube that was almost as thick as my pinky finger, which they were going to put in my nose,” Kumar later said. The tube was about 6 millimeters thick, according to notes written by a nurse involved in the procedure. By comparison, the tubes used to force-feed Guantánamo detainees were between 3.3 and 4 millimeters, according to Guantánamo force-feeding documents obtained by Al Jazeera in 2013.
As the tube is inserted, Kumar is in visible pain, his back arching as the officers hold him in position.
“Right then, my mind stopped working,” Kumar said. “I was only thinking that I wish this tube would flip and go into my brain and the story ended there. I felt as if it was going through the throat, tearing the flesh. And blood started coming from the mouth and nose.”
Kumar is then guided to a wheelchair and taken for an X-ray to verify the tube’s correct placement, though he has trouble standing up. The insertion was found to be “unsuccessful,” according to the medical notes and video. The doctor overseeing the procedure later testified in court that the tube had coiled in Kumar’s esophagus. Kumar then returns to the bed, where a nurse removes the tube.
“When they dragged the tube out, it seemed like everything in the stomach was going to come out along with the tube,” Kumar said. “It was just as painful as inserting the tube.”
A nurse and then a doctor asks if Kumar would like to break his hunger strike and drink the protein supplement. He refuses.
A second nurse begins to perform the same procedure, inserting the tube.
“As soon as they started the second time, it was more painful than the first time, because my nose was already injured and the tube was going inside, tearing it again,” Kumar said. “So the second time was more painful than the first.”
Once again, the X-ray showed the tube coiled in his esophagus, according to the doctor’s court testimony. After nurses remove the tube for the second time, Kumar can be seen on the video bending over a container.
“When they took it out, I had a lot of blood in my throat, which is why I had to vomit, and they brought the trash can for me to spit out the blood,” Kumar said.
“It does not seem like an accident that ICE intended to show in full view this remarkably invasive and torturous medical procedure to other people who are also participating in this hunger strike with him.”
It wasn’t until the third attempt — in his right nostril this time, since, according to Kumar, the doctors told him his left nostril was too swollen from the previous attempts — that the second nurse was able to reach his stomach with the tube.
“If you use a thinner, more flexible tube, you’re lubricating adequately, or providing adequate anesthesia, you’re much more likely to get it right the first time and not result in having to do it three different times,” said Parmar, the University of Southern California professor. “It’s incredibly painful. I’m not surprised he was vomiting blood because it’s traumatic. It is traumatic to the nares and to the esophagus when you put in the tube, particularly multiple times — particularly if it’s a larger, more rigid tube.”
One of the nurses then begins the drip of nutritional shake through the tube.
“The other thing that was very disturbing was the fact that this was happening in full view of other people who had also participated in a hunger strike,” said Cho, the ACLU attorney, who reviewed the video. “It does not seem like an accident that ICE intended to show in full view this remarkably invasive and torturous medical procedure to other people who are also participating in this hunger strike with him. It was, frankly, very disturbing.”
Ajay Kumar in his apartment in California on June 1, 2022.
Still: Stuart Harmon
As ICE was trying to quietly continue force-feeding Kumar and the three other Indian asylum-seekers through sealed court filings and closed proceedings, public pressure began to mount. On September 5, with his health condition improving, ICE paused Kumar’s force-feeding and removed the tube, according to court records.
Kumar, though, kept up his hunger strike and his health declined. Once again, ICE and U.S. Attorneys sought a judge’s approval to reinsert the tube and commence force-feeding.
“We tried to work with Ajay and other men to have the opportunity of some legal representation to oppose this order, because the hunger strike is a protest, it’s not a medical condition — it is a political protest,” said Craig, the New Mexico-based professor and immigration advocate. “The orders are temporary. So, if they want to continue force feeding this person, they have to return to the court a second time.”
During the court battles between Kumar’s attorneys and the government, Parmar filed a court affidavit after reviewing nearly 500 pages of records. In the affidavit, she reported that his health was declining and warned that the medical care he was receiving in ICE custody was “putting his life at risk.”
“I was so disturbed by the instability of his vital signs and how clearly he was getting progressively much more ill. I was very concerned he was going to lose his life,” Parmar told The Intercept. “He wasn’t getting a basic standard of care for somebody as ill as he was. This just wasn’t the setting for somebody this ill.”
The federal judge, though, once again approved the procedure on September 12. Kumar was taken to a hospital, where medical personnel inserted another tube — this time a much thinner one — and began to force-feed him.
After continued protests and complaints by Kumar, his attorneys, and migrant advocates, ICE reached a deal with Kumar a week later and finally released him on September 26. Kumar’s hunger strike had lasted 76 days. In total, he lost 45 pounds.
In the first few months after his release, Kumar had recurring nightmares about solitary confinement, the hunger strike, and being subjected to force-feeding.
“I asked them just for freedom, from the first day until the date they released me,” Kumar told The Intercept. “I didn’t have any other demand.”
The post The Public Has Never Seen the U.S. Government Force-Feed Someone — Until Now appeared first on The Intercept.
Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, is home to 10 million climate refugees – people who have been internally displaced as monsoons and flooding destroy homes and farmland. With another 2000 arriving in the city every day, it’s proof that human migration caused by climate catastrophe is already a reality and accelerating fast.
In Nomad Century, environmental-science journalist Gaia Vince explains that climate migration is going to happen on a huge scale this century and that the world needs to work together to manage it financially, safely and humanely. As she leads us through the climate scenarios detailed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is clear that even if we limit global heating to 2 °C (an outcome she deems unlikely), vast swathes of the Earth will be uninhabitable by 2050, displacing hundreds of millions of people. With a 4 °C temperature rise, billions of people will be affected in this way.
Such a scenario sounds catastrophic, but Vince argues that, properly managed, it needn’t be. She explains how we can use the little time we have left to start planning – and begin moving people before disaster strikes them. Vince shares examples of where this is already happening on small scales and her text is packed with references to the studies behind her suggestions.
Concentrating a growing world population into a smaller liveable area will be a massive social, political and technological challenge. New mega cities will have to be built in places like Canada, Greenland and Scotland. Sudden growth provides the opportunity to scale up sustainable housing, infrastructure and farming. Vince’s solutions always put people first, acknowledging that the world’s poorest will be hardest hit and that they must be helped not only to find safe new homes, but also new livelihoods.
Managing large-scale migration is only part of the solution. We also need to decarbonize – remove some of the carbon dioxide already in our atmosphere – and fix damage done by climate change. This is the hard-science part of the book, with whirlwind tours of green energy generation, habitat restoration and geo-engineering. Every option is considered, and Vince suggests that ultimately most will be needed – there is no single solution to this crisis.
Nomad Century deftly led me from the terror of what humans have done to sincere belief that we can and must create a better world that is liveable for every person.
- 2022 Penguin Books 288pp £20.00hb £9.99ebook
The post Humane solutions for the massive human migration caused by climate catastrophe appeared first on Physics World.
It was 100 years ago that Alexander Terrell, a former Confederate officer and Texas representative, claimed that “Mexicans are induced on election day to swim across the Rio Grande and are voted before their hair is dry.”
The Terrell Election Law of 1903, fueled by false claims that non-citizens from Mexico were voting in Texas elections, restricted primaries in Texas to white voters only.
Following the Civil War, the 15th Amendment of the Constitution in 1870 had banned states from restricting the right to vote on “account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Political parties still had wide leeway in nominating candidates for office, however, and this was a workaround that was quickly adopted throughout the South to take the right to vote away from recently freed Black men and other people of color.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled white primaries unconstitutional in 1944. Terrell’s rhetoric and unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud and immigrants coming across the border illegally became a permanent tactic.
Anti-immigrant rhetoric has featured prominently in Republican candidates’ campaign ads and speeches ahead of the Nov. 8 midterm elections. But watchdogs say this election cycle is different because of how much the GOP has embraced and promoted a more sinister mix of fringed conspiracy theories rooted in xenophobia and white supremacy.
Experts and voting rights advocates worry history is repeating itself as red herrings about noncitizens voting and claims of an invasion at the border are used while lawmakers curtail voting rights and ballot access across most of the country. Immigration advocates worry the lies and hateful rhetoric brewing this election cycle could spur some to violence.
That became apparent when a 21-year-old man walked into a Walmart on Aug. 3, 2019, in the border city of El Paso and used an AK-47 to kill 22 people. The fear of a “Hispanic invasion of Texas” drove him more than 650 miles from his home. His mission: to kill Mexicans.
This and other racist massacres committed across the country in recent years have been inspired by a fringe conspiracy theory, widely known as the “Great Replacement Theory” — the claim that Western elites, often injected with anti-Semitic rhetoric about Jewish powerbrokers, want to replace and disempower white Americans.
Once confined to the dark fringes of the internet including white nationalist sites, aspects of replacement theory have gone mainstream on primetime Fox News shows and is front and center for many GOP candidates, according to Zachary Mueller, political director of America’s Voice, an immigrant advocacy group that’s been tracking GOP messaging in political ads since 2018.
The group has tracked more than 600 messages about an invasion at the border from more than 100 GOP candidates, political action committees and right-wing media outlets this election season. More than 130 messages tracked by the group falsely claim Democrats are purposely allowing immigrants to enter the country illegally to gain voters.
There is no statistically meaningful evidence of non-citizens voting in U.S. elections. And far from the border being “open,” record breaking numbers of migrants have been stopped by border patrol this year.
“Democrats are actively ignoring laws on the book and allowing millions of migrants to come into our country illegally. Why? Because the thinking goes that if they’re given enough handouts, these migrants will eventually be Democrat voters,” an election campaign email sent by Monica De La Cruz in September reads. De La Cruz is a Trump-backed GOP candidate running for Congress in Texas’ 15th District.
The replacement and invasion rhetoric was mainly on the fringes of the Republican party in 2018, Mueller said, but this year the number of messages is about five times higher and it’s coming from the leadership all the way down.
“That’s dangerous because some segments of those folks that believe that racist lies are going to take it upon themselves to act as vigilantes to try to stop it,” Mueller said.
In the wake of a mass shooting at a Buffalo supermarket last fall, U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, the third-highest ranking House Republican, faced criticism for a series of Facebook ads that warned of a “permanent election insurrection,” arguing that Democrats want to grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants and “overthrow our current electorate.”
In an interview rebutting the allegations that her ads echoed the conspiracy theory that inspired the Buffalo shooter, Stefanik said there’s nothing racist about wanting a secure border or opposing mass amnesty.
Stefanik’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Democrats and immigration rights advocates have also condemned Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and state Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, both Republicans, for describing immigrants crossing the border as an invasion.
“We are being invaded,” Patrick said at a press conference this past year. “That term has been used in the past, but it has never been more true.”
Abbott said at the same presser that “homes are being invaded” as he announced the state would be spending an initial $250 million to construct a barrier at the state’s southern border with Mexico to fill in gaps that have remained since the border wall was first constructed nearly 30 years ago.
U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, a Democrat from El Paso, condemned Abbott’s and Patrick’s remarks in a tweet after the press conference.
“If people die again, blood will be on your hands,” Escobar wrote.
Abbott took it a step further: He issued an executive order in July that invoked the U.S. Constitution’s “Invasion Clause” and directed state law enforcement to arrest migrants and drop them off at ports of entry. Article IV Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution says the federal government “shall guarantee every state in this Union a republican form of government and shall protect each of them against invasion…”
(The term “republican” refers to a republic of representatives, not the Republican party.)
After years of former President Donald Trump demonizing undocumented immigrants and using the word invasion on a regular basis, more than half of Americans say there’s an “invasion” at the southern border, according to an August poll by NPR and Ipsos,
But experts say, “the current increase in apprehensions fits a predictable pattern of seasonal changes in undocumented immigration combined with a backlog of demand because of 2020’s coronavirus border closure,” according to a recent analysis by the Washington Post.
As Texas politicians continue to attack immigrants and sound the alarm on border security, they have also ramped up efforts to restrict access to the ballot box.
Last year, Abbott signed into law one of the nation’s strictest voting bills. The bill rolled back extended voting hours and drive-through voting, restricted voting by mail, added new voter ID requirements, banned some forms of organizing voter turnout and increased criminal penalties for violating election laws.
Abbott and Patrick did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The reality is that Texas is not alone: Access to the ballot box has gotten worse in 26 states, and this has been particularly bad for people of color, according to a Center for Public Integrity report looking at voting inequalities in all 50 states and Washington D.C.
False claims that non-citizens are voting and influencing elections have been used to justify some of those new restrictions. In Arizona, Republican legislators passed a new law requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote. It could have the most significant impact on the state’s elderly Indigenous population, who are less likely to have birth certificates or other documents proving citizenship.
“It’s not politically popular to say, ‘Hey, I just don’t want non-whites to vote, so we’re going to create these arbitrary barriers so that only more middle-class white folks and affluent whites can vote,’ that’s not going to win you an election that’s pretty on face,” Mueller said. “So they create these other kinds of boogeyman to do that sort of thing.”
This article first appeared on Center for Public Integrity and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s kidnapping of dozens of migrants as a political stunt is disturbing. More troubling is the help he seems to have gotten from the Department of Homeland Security, a pro-MAGA federal agency that’s been quietly amassing vast powers.
Venezuelan migrants gather at a ferry terminal in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. (Carlin Stiehl for The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
There are a lot of questions to be asked about Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s disgraceful stunt last week, tricking, kidnapping, and stranding a group of migrants in Martha’s Vineyard. One of the most important is the role in the scheme played by officers with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
In the press so far, the episode has largely, and with good reason, been framed around the loathsome figure of DeSantis. The governor, having built his planned political ascent on pretending to be Donald Trump to the point of shamelessly copying his mannerisms, clearly saw this as a way to prove he could be just as cruelly racist as the former president, whose administration infamously stole migrant children from their parents and tried to rehouse them with American families. And sure enough, the lawsuit filed by the migrants names and details the actions of only DeSantis and his cronies.
But then what about the words of Boston immigration lawyer Rachel Self, who briefed the press about what had happened to the migrants after meeting with them? Self told reporters that DHS agents had processed the migrants before boarding the chartered planes that took them to Massachusetts, that they’d “listed falsified addresses on the migrants’ paperwork,” naming “random homeless shelters all across the country” as their mailing addresses even when told they had no homes in the United States, and that the agents told the migrants they must check in with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offices closest to those addresses within only a few days. The fact that those shelters were, according to Self, as far afield as Washington and Florida suggests they were deliberately being set up to fail and be deported.
“There is no other reason to list as someone’s mailing address a homeless shelter in Tacoma, Washington, when they ship him to Massachusetts,” a clearly livid Self had said.
Self’s charges were backed up by Elizabeth Ricci, a Tallahassee immigration lawyer, who insisted to the Orlando Sentinel that ICE “likely conspired with the governor’s office to pull off the stunt.”
“It couldn’t have been done without their direct involvement,” Ricci alleged.
If this is true, it’s not only doubly scandalous, but critically important to know as authorities work to ensure some accountability, and to prevent this kind of thing from being tried again. Unlike ladder-climbing politicians like DeSantis, immigration officers are, at least in theory, meant to be neutral actors simply enforcing the law — not immigration hawks working with unscrupulous lowlifes to deliberately sabotage the applications of asylum seekers.
It would be yet one more data point hinting at an alarming politicization of the DHS bureaucracy, particularly its immigration divisions. Under Trump, agencies like ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) made headlines for spying on anti-Trump protesters and putting journalists, activists, and immigration attorneys through extra screening, as well as putting out menacing videos like this one that showed militarized CPB officers training to put down civil unrest, and calling for the arrest of politicians from sanctuary cities.
This has come at the same time as revelations that the agencies have quietly assumed vast domestic surveillance powers. For years, ICE has been partnering with the data brokers who trade in the wide variety of intimate information the private sector collects on hundreds of millions of Americans, from addresses, phone numbers, and Department of Motor Vehicles records, to the geolocation data our phones are constantly pinging out. Best of all for these agencies, they can do it without a warrant, since they’re merely customers paying to access data that’s commercially available to anyone. Just last year, we learned that border officials are collecting and storing the content from as many as ten thousand electronic devices each year.
Given all this, it’s especially vital we find out for sure if Self’s charges are correct, that DHS agents really did abuse their power to help an anti-immigration official carry out what she calls a “sadistic lie” to fraudulently deport a group of asylum seekers.
Sadly, it would not be surprising. DHS agents and officials have already been variously accused of similar deceit and abuse. Human Rights Watch last year documented accusations against DHS officials in Del Rio, Texas, that they told migrants they’d be flown elsewhere in the United States for processing before deporting them to their home countries. A congressman accused DHS of putting out misleading photos showing processing facilities with few unaccompanied minors, when they had really just moved them to tents next door that were operated by different agencies. Its agents have been repeatedly accused of falsifying asylum seekers’ testimonies to undermine their cases.
The fact that a power-hungry politician would jeopardize desperate people’s hopes for escaping violence so that he could appeal to cruelty and hatred is disgusting, but perhaps not so surprising. But if he was being helped by the government agents of a sprawling bureaucracy responsible for dispassionately enforcing immigration law, we need to know if it’s true, and how far up it goes — and to aggressively clean house of such elements.