COVID-19 harms immigrants and their children: Does anybody care?
Last December, Customs and Border Patrol agents in San Diego barred doctors from giving flu shots to children in detention centers. The shots, doctors said, would prevent even more deaths for kids in these cramped, disease-prone places.
The reason they refused to vaccinate, border officials said last year, was that immigrants were held at temporary detention centers for only a short time, and that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had a vaccine program in place for long-term detainees.
But doctors argued that many detainees would be sent to Mexico, and thus would not receive a vaccine, or could be at centers far longer than the 72 hours they were claimed to be held.
Now, with COVID-19 making the dangers of not being vaccinated even greater, will the government change its policy? But that’s really not the most crucial question. This one is: Will our government continue to keep families and small children in the country’s three family detention centers?
Last June, a federal judge ordered all children to be released from these detention centers “with all deliberate speed,” either with their parents or in the custody of guardians the parents approved. In her ruling, Judge Dolly M. Gee of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, cited the dangers of COVID’s spread in these cramped conditions, and stated there was “no more time for half measures.”
If the administration acted in good faith, parents and children would be released together. But who thinks that will happen? To date, it appears that the administration has neither released children and parents nor improved conditions at these detention centers.
Activists working to close down the Berks County detention center in Pennsylvania say that ICE is ignoring the judge’s order. Worse, they charge that Democratic governor Tom Wolf has failed to use his emergency powers as governor to keep detainee families together and safe.
Of course, he’s not the only Democratic governor who’s been criticized for not using his power to protect detainees. Pressed by activists, Virginia governor Ralph Northam says he lacks the authority to shut down the COVID-ravaged Farmville detention center. The public pressure did lead Northam and the state’s two Democratic Senators to seek help from the White House, resulting in the arrival, albeit belatedly, of staff from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention into the facility.
But it’s difficult to predict whether detainees will actually get the treatment and care they need.
The only winners in this ghastly immoral exercise are the for-profit companies that run these centers, like the Immigration Centers of America, which runs the Farmville facility for ICE.
Profiting on human misery is nothing new in America. After all, it was the business plan for slave owners. But seeing it play out in real time is truly horrifying.
