While North Carolina congressional candidate Mark Walker is sounding off about wanting to declare war on Mexico, our elected officials are busy grossly mistreating Central American immigrants in New Mexico
In an article in the Boston Review, Lauren Carasik exposes the unconstitutional detention of legitimate asylum-seekers at a prison (by any other name) in New Mexico:
[There are] more than 600 women and children being held at an isolated makeshift detention facility in the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) located in Artesia, New Mexico. The town of 11,000 lies almost 200 miles from El Paso, the nearest metropolitan city, and far from pro bono immigration lawyers. The Department of Homeland Security, charged with overseeing the facility and the immigration process, declines to label those living in the FLETC barracks inmates, calling them residents instead. But they are not free to leave, and their access to visitors, phone calls, and legal advice is limited.
As Carasik points out, many of these 600 human beings are fleeing death and/or death threats in their home countries. These asylum seekers have "viable refugee claims under international law, but the U.S. government is refusing to follow its own asylum protocols, designed to protect those imperiled in their home countries."
Instead of being provided with the safety from harm that every person deserves, both under international law and the law called basic human decency, these women and children are taken, practically locked up, and then "sent back to violence-ridden countries whose governments have proven unable or unwilling to protect them from grievous harm" as soon as some mid-level bureaucrat gets around to doing the paperwork.
As member freewayblogger put it, a story like this reminds us Americans "how lucky [we] are for being born here." And hopefully the lawsuit that's being filed against the government will remind it, with a little pressure on the pocket, that this country (built on immigrants) is not above international law.