Written by: Chiara Espinal
Edited by: Michael Shalonov
Illegal immigration into the United States has been a “touchstone of U.S. political debate for decades” and while an estimated 66% of Americans view immigration as having the capacity to strengthen the national economy, nativist sentiments were exacerbated during much of former President Donald J. Trump’s presidency. Throughout his term, Trump made consistent promises to put a stop to unauthorized immigration by building a border wall between the United States and Mexico. As border patrol officers began to crack down on illegal immigration, additional controversy emerged over concerns pertaining to the safety and well-being of immigrants being housed at border detention centers. Beginning in 2014, the United States declared an official crisis at the border related to the shocking increase in the number of unaccompanied children migrating through border checkpoints on a regular basis, especially in the state of Texas. Today, the problem of large numbers of immigrant men, women, and children entering the country through border checkpoints and other unauthorized points of entry remains and has led to a series of human rights concerns at border detention facilities.
According to a piece by ABC News, U.S. Customs and Border Protection facilities have been described by one doctor as having conditions resembling “torture facilities.” From being forced to sleep on “concrete floors with the lights on 24 hours a day” to having no access to soap or basic hygiene, migrants in holding facilities in Clint, Texas and McAllen, Texas are facing disturbing living conditions. In an interview with ABC News, physician Dolly Lucio Sevier, who works in private practice in the McAllen area, recounted her experience visiting the Ursula facility in McAllen – the largest CBP detention center in the country. Sevier visited the site after lawyers learned of an alleged flu outbreak that sent five infants to the intensive care unit. After a series of assessments on 39 children under the age of 18 living in the center, Sevier described conditions for unaccompanied minors at McAllen as including “extreme cold temperatures, lights on 24 hours a day, no adequate access to medical care, basic sanitation, water, or adequate food” (Marshall et al).
The children also displayed evidence of trauma that Sevior compared being “worse than jail” and yet, little has been done to address border safety concerns. On Thursday December 8th, most of the Texas Republican Congressional delegation, including incoming members, presented their collective border security agenda to the 118th Congress at a press conference near the U.S. Capitol. The agenda is reportedly meant to address four overarching priorities for Texans, which include “physical border infrastructure, border enforcement policies, interior enforcement, and targeting drug cartels and criminal organizations.” Lawmakers say the framework will fulfill the border-security goals of the Commitment to America plan, which was a broad Republican policy platform that came about in September of this year. The framework consists of 41 specific bills, 34 of which were backed by members of the Texas delegation. The bills aim to do everything from “building the wall to reimbursing states for border security expenses” (FAIR). One of the bills in the framework is H.R. 1843 the Lone Star Reimbursement Act, which “reallocates Department of Defense funding to reimburse the State of Texas for Operation Lone Star, a state-level border security effort” (FAIR).
The Texas agenda mentions little pertaining to improving the health and safety of detention centers. Instead, a central part of the framework claims to address the abuse of the asylum process. Each year, over 100,000 immigrants arrive in the United States seeking asylum. PHR-trained health professionals in the Asylum Network support asylum seekers’ applications by “providing medical and psychological evaluations that reveal the scars left by torture, beatings, sexual violence, slavery, and other abuses” (FAIR). However, the asylum process is often described as “rigorous and requires that victims have exhausted domestic remedies before seeking international protection” (FAIR). Upon arrival, most asylum-seekers are held at U.S. immigration detention centers where they must provide a “credible fear of persecution” to avoid deportation.
Researchers have begun to look into the lasting harm caused by family separation and detention at detention centers. According to a recent study of refugees, family separation has a health impact similar to being beaten or tortured. To help provide proof for the notion that refugees are experiencing severe mental and physical stress at detention centers, medical experts with the Physicians for Human Rights’ (PHR) Asylum Program have conducted forensic evaluations of asylum seekers to show that their “physical and psychological symptoms are consistent with the persecution that they report having endured in their countries of origin” (Hampton). In recent years, the PHR has received over 1,700 requests for forensic evaluations of asylum seekers fleeing domestic violence. Denying asylum to refugees who are unable to receive forensic evaluations or whose evaluations yield no solid evidence leaves these refugees with little hope of a better life and fails to grant them the asylum they seek.
The government’s reliance on private prisons to house immigrants, many of whom are seeking asylum, has proven to be a serious predicament for United States Customs and Border Protection. However, in the absence of agendas and legislation to remedy the issues faced by immigrants in detention centers in Texas, New Mexico, and California, many of these issues are likely to remain unsolved. The state of immigrant detention centers is cause for concern from a human rights standpoint, as allegations of sexual abuse, missing children, and medical neglect are among additional humanitarian concerns for asylum seekers and immigrants fleeing their native countries.
[The views expressed in this article are those of the author and the author alone; they do not necessarily represent the views of all members of the RULR Editorial Board and Rutgers University]
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