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  1. #1
    Senior Member JohnDoe2's Avatar
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    “BURIALS ARE CHEAPER THAN DEPORTATIONS”

    “BURIALS ARE CHEAPER THAN DEPORTATIONS”: VIRUS UNLEASHES TERROR IN A TROUBLED ICE DETENTION CENTER

    Ryan Devereaux
    April 12 2020, 8:37 a.m.

    TENSIONS WERE BUILDING inside the Alabama jail. A group of new detainees had just been dropped off at the Etowah County Detention Center in downtown Gadsden, and one of the men appeared sick. Word was spreading that he and the others had been exposed to the coronavirus. Detainees demanded that the new arrivals be quarantined. A young corrections officer resisted, telling the men that if they did not obey his order to lock down, he would summon the “troops.” For the men in the unit, the implication of the officer’s words was clear.

    Karim Golding, a veteran of the unit, decided that desperate measures were in order. The 35-year-old slipped between the bars of a second-story railing. He tied one end of a rope of bedsheets to the railing. He wrapped the other in a noose around his neck. Thirty-nine-year-old Tefsa Miller soon joined him and did the same. On the opposite side of their unit, a man streamed the scene on his cellphone, capturing a moment that would have otherwise gone unseen by the outside world.

    “This about to become a suicide,” he said. “They both about to hang it up.”

    The men did not leap from the railing. The troops never came. Golding’s plan seemed to work, at least for a moment, forcing a dialogue between detainees and jail officials that led to the peaceful resolution of a heated showdown. Nonetheless, the dramatic events that unfolded on the night of March 20 underscored a grim reality: As the coronavirus grips the nation, a rising tide of terror and a profound sense of abandonment is coursing through its immigrant detention system.

    “If we die, so what? This is the attitude of the people here.”

    Locked in closed-off places across the country, where social distancing is impossible and failures to provide adequate medical care are longstanding, tens of thousands of people are now expecting the worst.

    Golding, in an interview with The Intercept, said that what happened in Etowah last month was the culmination of years of frustration on the part of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees at the remote Alabama facility, frustrations that have taken on life-or-death urgency with the coronavirus ripping through the United States and increasingly spreading throughout the South. Despite last month’s dramatic protest, ICE continues to send detainees to the Alabama jail, including individuals who have come through facilities with confirmed coronavirus infections.

    Recently, officials at Etowah consolidated two units into one, virtually doubling the number of men sharing the space overnight.

    “We’re the last people to get protected,” Golding told The Intercept. “If we die, so what? This is the attitude of the people here. This is the attitude of the attorney general. This is the attitude of the president.” ICE’s actions in recent weeks have revealed a macabre calculation that values carceral profit over human life, Golding argued. After all, he said, “Burials are cheaper than deportations.”

    The video of the suicide threat went viral soon after it was streamed. Etowah County Sheriff Jonathon Horton quickly batted it down as a hoax. The man who streamed the event was swiftly placed in an administrative lockdown, and according to sources inside the detention center, threatened with criminal charges for use of a contraband cellphone. In an email to The Intercept, Bryan D. Cox, ICE’s southern region public affairs director, said the “brief, minor protest” was “based on inaccurate information.” Cox added, “There is no one in ICE custody at the Etowah County facility with suspected Covid-19. Rumors to the contrary are false and needlessly spread fear through misinformation.”

    Prisons, jails, and detention centers are widely known to be major vectors of infectious diseases. As of last week, Cook County Jail in Illinois was “the nation’s largest-known source of coronavirus infections,” according to a New York Times analysis.

    On Rikers Island, the infection rate among incarcerated people has been reported to be seven times that of New York City, which is currently home to the largest number of coronavirus cases on the planet.

    Screenshots from a video, live streamed to Facebook by a detainee at Etowah Detention Center, of the protest by Karim Golding and Tefsa Miller.
    Screenshots: The Intercept

    So far, ICE has reported 80 confirmed cases of Covid-19 among employees or detainees in two dozen facilities and one local hospital across 14 states. Unlike law enforcement agencies in the criminal justice system, ICE has sweeping discretion to release the people in its custody for civil immigration violations at any time. Last month, more than 3,000 doctors signed an open letter calling on the agency to do just that. Medical experts at the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that oversees ICE, have issued similar calls, describing the potential danger in the detention centers as a “tinderbox.” In March, a former top DHS civil rights official told The Intercept that she expects ICE’s current posture to result in detainee deaths.

    As demands for sweeping releases of incarcerated people have mounted, several legal organizations have taken aim at ICE’s facilities in the South, where the agency has a particularly poor track record when it comes to medical care.

    Last week, a federal judge overseeing a case brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana ordered ICE to disclose the number of detainees it is granting and denying release to in several Southern states, including Alabama, after filings in the case revealed that ICE’s New Orleans field office was denying detainees parole at rates of up to 100 percent. ICE’s propensity for denying parole to detainees, particularly in the age of Donald Trump, is well-documented. As The Intercept reported earlier this year, the agency has been accused of going so far as to manipulate algorithmic software to ensure that everybody in its custody stays locked up.

    An email to congressional staffers obtained by BuzzFeed News last week revealed that ICE was reviewing the cases of some 600 immigration detainees who it considered particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus — a sliver compared to the thousands of individuals being released from jails and prisons in the criminal justice system across the country. The agency has thus far offered no indication that it plans a wide-scale release of the more than 35,000 people currently in its custody.

    In the case of Etowah, ICE’s position is that there’s no story there. “Bottom line: ICE is following the appropriate CDC protocols to include the use of PPE, screening and testing, and cohorting of persons,” Cox wrote in an email to The Intercept. “If you choose to write an article here the only version that would be factual is that the facility’s population is down, there are no cases, and it is fully complying with CDC protocols.”

    “We have no confirmed cases because there’s nobody being tested.”

    ICE’s editorial preferences aside, interviews with multiple detainees and audio recordings from inside Etowah suggest a more complicated reality. The men held by ICE described a facility that is fundamentally unprepared, and seemingly unwilling, to protect those in its custody. Among detainees, there is a prevailing sense that jail officials are doing the bare minimum, ticking off the necessary boxes to say they took appropriate actions should an outbreak occur.

    To a person, sources inside Etowah each said the same thing about the people responsible for keeping them alive: They do not care.

    In late March, days after the threatened suicide, dozens of Etowah detainees requested to be screened by a nurse for Covid-19. “These past two weeks I felt like I had it and I got past it,” Golding said. “We asked to be tested, knowing that they didn’t have tests, even though they’ve been telling us they have tests.” It was a basic screening, Golding stressed, not a test for the coronavirus. Golding said a nurse told him he was “symptomatic” and provided him with Advil and allergy medication.

    Several other detainees were told the same, he added — none were placed in quarantine.

    The Intercept asked ICE and Sheriff Horton about the claim that multiple detainees had been told they were symptomatic. “If you have a detainee telling you the facility has suspected cases, they are spreading inaccurate rumor to you,” Cox wrote in an email. While ICE has not reported a confirmed case of Covid-19 in Etowah, detainees worry that fact might have something to do with the measures the agency is taking — or not taking — to proactively protect the people in its custody.

    “We have no confirmed cases because there’s nobody being tested here,” Golding said.

    https://theintercept.com/2020/04/12/...-jail-alabama/

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  2. #2
    Senior Member JohnDoe2's Avatar
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    NO AMNESTY

    Don't reward the criminal actions of millions of illegal aliens by giving them citizenship.


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  3. #3
    Senior Member JohnDoe2's Avatar
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    Cremation is cheaper than burial.
    The average cost of a funeral today is about $6,500, including the typical $2,000-or-more cost of a casket. Add a burial vault, and the average jumps to around $7,700. A cremation, by contrast, typically costs a third of those amounts, or less.

    Cremation is the hottest trend in the funeral industry - NBC News
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  4. #4
    Senior Member JohnDoe2's Avatar
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    NO AMNESTY

    Don't reward the criminal actions of millions of illegal aliens by giving them citizenship.


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  5. #5
    Senior Member JohnDoe2's Avatar
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    "Since 2009, county officials have stopped burying bodies, a practice that used to cost taxpayers up to $1,200 per person. Instead, they cremate the bodies and toss the ashes into the sea, a lot cheaper at $645 per cremation."


    Remembering the lost dead


    Graves without names on the U.S. southern border

    by Sophia Lee
    Post Date:
    March 04, 2019


    A student from Mount St. Mary’s University marks the grave of a migrant who perished on the journey. (Sophia Lee)

    The drive to Holtville, Calif., a tiny desert city near the U.S.-Mexican border, runs on an asphalt ribbon winding through the forbidden Southwest wilderness: A white sun beats down on cactuses and sand. Granite rocks sit stacked on each other like blobs of baked dough.

    Shrubs sprout from dusty hills like an old man’s unbrushed hair. Blankets of snow and blustery winds hint at freezing nighttime temperatures. And all throughout that drive between mountains and deserts, I thought about the thousands of migrants who have died in these valleys.

    After weeks of reporting on the migrant caravans from Central America, I realized that although I’m also an immigrant to the United States, I know next to nothing about the lives of the millions of immigrants who dwell among us without legal status.

    So I decided to continue asking and learning—and that brought me to last week’s visit to Holtville’s Terrace Park Cemetery, a private burial site for migrants who died crossing over the southwestern border.

    That morning, I crawled out of bed at 3 a.m. and drove 250 miles from Los Angeles to the 3-acre cemetery, where all the way in the back, beyond the well-trimmed lawns filled with headstones and flowers, is a locked gate.

    Behind that gate lie 520 bodies, half of them unidentified. There, the final resting place of the poor has no headstones, no monuments, no flowers, no grass, no mourning family members.

    Instead, it’s basically a field of soil and wood chips, where neat rows of bricks mark the bodies as “Jane Doe” or “John Doe”—graves so shallow that visitors are not allowed to step on them in case their feet crush the decomposed remains.

    Usually the cemetery administrators don’t allow the public into that burial site, but I had special access that day thanks to Border Angels, a humanitarian nonprofit that has escorted people to the Terrace Park Cemetery since 2001.

    With me were Border Angels volunteer Hugo Castro and a group of students from Mount St. Mary’s University, a private Catholic women’s college. We were in Holtville for one simple reason: To remember the forgotten.


    A brick inscribed with the words ‘John Doe’ sits as a marker on a grave. (Sophia Lee)



    Nobody spoke a word as we stood staring at the dirt and bricks. Compared with the loving memorials in the first section of the cemetery, the inscriptions on the bricks seemed so clinical and impersonal: Jane Doe … John Doe … John Doe … Jane Doe ... Row 13-37 … Row 17-37 … Row 11-28. Who knows how much these individuals suffered before death?

    Who knows what sort of desperate conditions drove them into the desert, knowing yet refusing to believe the dangers ahead? Why would they take such a risk? Do their family members know what happened to them? Do they miss them?

    In death, when our bodies are disintegrating back into the earth, our possessions and documents shouldn’t matter, yet somehow they still do, at least in the way flesh and bones are buried and memorialized. Here in this dirt field rest the nameless sojourners—and in great irony, their bodies are now one with the land for which they lost their lives to reach.

    Today at Terrace Park, that’s no longer the case for newer migrants.

    Since 2009, county officials have stopped burying bodies, a practice that used to cost taxpayers up to $1,200 per person. Instead, they cremate the bodies and toss the ashes into the sea, a lot cheaper at $645 per cremation.

    But even that’s too much for some anti-illegal immigration folks, who protest that the county is diverting funds away from more important needs. Even in death, some people view these migrants as a nuisance.

    For years, particularly after the United States built a wall in 1994 and toughened its enforcement against illegal immigration in San Diego, more and more migrants have crossed the border using less traditional routes. Those routes cross areas where the U.S. Border Patrol didn’t bother to build walls, because they thought the deadly terrain—where temperatures can rise to 120 degrees Fahrenheit and then dip below 30—would be a natural barrier.

    But the terrain didn’t stop people from coming. Americans who haven’t been in these migrants’ situations cannot imagine the depths to their desperation, and there is no greater courage—or foolishness—than desperation.

    People climbed mountains, hiked deserts, or swam the All-American Canal, a man-made river that runs along the border in southeastern California.

    Those who died got lost or drowned or came unprepared, without sufficient water, proper clothing, or enough food. That’s how Border Angels got started—its founder Enrique Morones heard about the corpses strewn across the desert and began carrying jugs of water out into those remote regions, hoping they would save a life.

    One of numerous signs posted along the All-American Canal. (Lenny Ignelzi/AP)

    According to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, border agents found 294 dead bodies in the southwest border region in fiscal year 2017. The highest figure was 492 bodies in 2005, and the numbers have gone up and down over the years. Many of these bodies have no IDs, since their coyotes (smugglers) advise them to throw IDs away so they can lie about their identities to Border Patrol agents. That idea appeals to Central American migrants, who may lie to ICE that they’re from Mexico so that agents will deport them to Mexico, not farther out to Honduras or El Salvador (though with fingerprints, agents can figure out where they’re from anyway).

    As for those bodies with identification, often their family members back home are too poor to pay for a funeral, so the bodies end up in U.S. gravesites like the one I visited in Holtville.

    “The border has become a river of blood,” Hugo said as we crouched before one of the cemetery bricks.

    Yes, these people broke the law when they crossed the border. Yes, they chose to cross a hostile terrain, and paid for it. But we can still honor their dignity as human beings, Hugo said:

    “Dignity shouldn’t be based on a piece of paper.”

    So we planted wooden crosses in front of the bricks, kneeling and pausing before each one. Local schoolchildren in San Diego had decorated these crosses, some painted pink with white dotted flowers, some fiery orange and red, some plain white with the words “No Olvidado”—not forgotten—painted on them. Most crosses had Spanish words written on them—“Paz,” “Descansa en Paz,” “Amor sin Fronteras.”

    Students from Mount St. Mary’s University pray over the graves of the unknown. (Sophia Lee)

    Later we gathered in a circle to pray in unison, both in English and Spanish: “Lord Jesus, help us to recognize You in the face of the stranger and welcome Your presence among us. You have graced us with the gifts of many cultures and nations. Free us from the fear of those from other lands. Teach us to share our gifts with newcomers in return, so that You may say, ‘I was a stranger and you welcomed Me. Come now into My Kingdom.’ We ask this in Your name, from the Father through the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

    https://world.wng.org/2019/03/remembering_the_lost_dead
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  6. #6
    Moderator Beezer's Avatar
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    Should be dirt cheap to bury them at sea without cremation!

    Drop them over the side 20 miles out.

    There are hundreds and we should not be paying for creamation.

    They need to stop coming here. I am SICK of paying for these criminal trespassing FOREIGN CITIZENS who have no right to come here and stick us with the bill.


    REMEMBER KATE STEINLE, SARA ROOT, JAMILE, MOLLIE TIBBETS, AND ALL THOSE WHO WERE MURDERED, RAPED, BLUGEONDED, SET ON FIRE, RUN OVER, AND HACKED TO DEATH BY ILLEGAL ALIENS!!!

    REMEMBER OUR LOST DEAD!

    THEY HAVE BEEN FORGOTTEN BY PELOSI, SCHUMER AND THE SWAMP!
    Last edited by Beezer; 04-14-2020 at 04:48 PM.
    ILLEGAL ALIENS HAVE "BROKEN" OUR IMMIGRATION SYSTEM

    DO NOT REWARD THEM - DEPORT THEM ALL

  7. #7
    Senior Member JohnDoe2's Avatar
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    NO AMNESTY

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