Local Governments and Guantanamo Bay
Tomorrow, I am going to Guantanamo Bay. To get there, I have to drive
through Guantanamo Bay.<br>
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How could that be? For the same reason that you might be sitting in
Guantanamo Bay as you read this: because innocent people are
being held, and mistreated, in <b>long-term</b> detention all over the United States, including in local government facilities (see <a href="http://www.detentionwatchnetwork.org/dwnmap" target="”_blank”">map</a>).<br>
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<a href="http://www.cityethics.org/node/491">Click here to read the rest of this blog entry.</a>
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Tomorrow, I am going to Greenfield, Massachusetts, where Hiu Lui Ng was
held in a local house of correction. Mr. Ng is the subject of another <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/13/nyregion/13detain.html" target="”_blank”">New
York Times article</a> about what happens when American immigration
authorities take hold of people who may or may not have broken
immigration laws (for other articles on the topic, click <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/immigrat…; target="”_blank”">here</a>).<br>
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Tomorrow, I'll be driving through Hartford, Connecticut, where Mr. Ng
was also held in a federal facility. And further north, in St. Albans,
VT, he was held in a county jail. In short, local government officials
are involved in the long-term, sometimes cruel and inhuman detention of
innocent people.<br>
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Sixteen years ago, Mr. Ng came to the U.S. from Hong Kong with his
parents at the age of 17. He graduated from an American high school,
got a job as a computer engineer, married an American citizen and
fathered two American citizens. But it took forever to get his green
card, and when he arrived for his final green card interview a year ago,
he was taken into detention.<br>
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A year later he died of cancer after
months of excruciating pain, his cancer completely untreated, his
family unable to visit him until hours before his death. And he even
had a lawyer, who had filed all sorts of suits. If not for that and his
death in custody, we would most likely never know what had happened.<br>
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And local governments, knowingly or unknowingly, went along. This has
to stop. Local governments must refuse to hold any prisoners for the immigration service.
They can no longer assume that the immigration authorities are acting
according to a law any of us could respect. This is difficult, because
they too are government officials. But as with the racial laws of the
past, there are laws that must be ignored, and people trying to uphold
those laws who must be refused.<br>
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<i>Update:</i> Although it easily sailed through the House and the Senate Judiciary Committee, which added immigrant detention centers to its purview, renewal of the Deaths in Custody Act was stopped singlehandedly by Okalahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn, according to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/nyregion/05detain.html">an article in yesterday's New York <i>Times.</i></a> Coburn said that local and state governments should not be forced to report deaths in their prisons and jails.<br>
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Well, Sen. Coburn, then why should local prisons and jails be forced to hold immigrants who do not even have charges against them? Another argument for local governments to refuse to hold immigrants for the federal government.<br>
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Robert Wechsler<br>
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics<br>
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