While many of us adjust to the myriad difficulties of life during the COVID-19 pandemic, roughly 37,000 migrants are trapped like dry timber in US detention centers, where the COVID-19 pandemic will spread imminently like wildfire, causing unnecessary deaths and further strain on our medical system. This story is not making headlines, nor is it being covered on major networks. By design, our government’s mistreatment of asylum seekers is hidden from our sight.
Most of the detainees fled violence in their home countries and have committed no crime. Seeking asylum and receiving due process are legal rights. But the Trump administration has made exercising these rights a crime, leading to mass detention of migrants, funded by our taxes.
Most detention centers are crowded, with no social distancing, nor soap, protective equipment, or testing. Workers in detention centers, and others near these facilities, are also at risk of COVID-19. It is a matter of days before this becomes another preventable COVID-19 tragedy in our country.
Equally distressing are the thousands of asylum seekers stuck on our southern border, living in crowded tent encampments, due to the US government’s Remain in Mexico policy. Their cases are indefinitely postponed. Families are exposed to gang violence, the kind they fled from in their countries of origin- another humanitarian crisis and preventable COVID -19 tragedy on our southern doorstep.
Many organizations and officials, like Raices Texas, Detention Watch Network, ACLU, Amnesty International, Southern Poverty Law Center, Lawyers for Civil Rights, the Hispanic Congressional Caucus, and individual members of Congress, including Congressman Jim McGovern, have called for the immediate release of all migrants in US detention facilities, unless they have a history of violent crimes, to await their asylum hearings safely at home with their families in the US.
Please contact your legislators urging them to demand that ICE enact compassionate release of asylum-seeking detainees immediately, to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in this already traumatized population.
Western MA Jewish Activists for Immigration Justice:
Holly Bishop, Annique Boomsma, Joyce Duncan, Joan Epstein, Dina Friedman, Shel Horowitz, Ellen Kaufman, Alice Levine, Karen Levine, Betty Wolfson and Susie Zeiger.
(Submitted to the Daily Hampshire Gazette, 4/13/20)