USG, President Obama push domestic legislation expanding prisons for profit market and affirming fascist behavior to allies

New Immigration Legislation Would Allow for Indefinite Detention
By Erin Hustings on June 3, 2011 Tweet this

As the US immigration detention web rapidly expands, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) continues to document the existence of numerous problems within the system that harm and sometimes kill detainees. Inability to meet the advanced and chronic health care needs of survivors of persecution, dangerous disregard for ethical obligations, and the overuse of solitary confinement to “treat” behavioral issues are just some of these problems. Incredibly though, despite our unwieldy and inefficient detention regime, some see a need for more. This sentiment has given rise to proposed legislation – H.R. 1932, the “Keep Our Communities Safe Act” – which would subject more people to mandatory detention while their immigration cases are pending and would allow for the indefinite detention of some people who the government is unable to deport.

A well-attended hearing was held on this bill on Tuesday, May 24th by the House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee. Witnesses offered widely divergent accounts of whom the legislation would affect, and how. Supporters of the bill described immigrants with long rap sheets from countries such as Cuba and Vietnam (with whom the US lacks the diplomatic relationships or agreements necessary to arrange for deportation). Such individuals are currently released after a short period of detention but are subject to safeguards that require them to stay in contact with immigration officials. H.R. 1932 would allow for the continued incarceration of people like this, ostensibly to keep our communities safer.

On the other hand, an ACLU attorney cited sympathetic clients who would be indefinitely detained under H.R. 1932, including an asylum seeker, a decorated Gulf War veteran, and a man who’d fled the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror in Cambodia as a young child. ACLU attorney Arulanantham affirmed that, “most of the immigrants covered by the proposed legislation are anything but dangerous.” In addition, he emphasized the potentially crippling expense of expanding and lengthening detention: at an average of $122 per day, its cost dwarfs that of community supervision, at about $9 a day. …more