Portside

ICE says immigrant detainees are only obligated to make their beds and avoid clutter. But a for-profit prison company is accused of forcing them to do much more – and for no wages.

Harrison Ford | Extinction Rebellion. Suckers | Randy Rainbow Song Parody. Bias In Medicine | John Oliver. ICE Shuts Down Hotline for Detained Immigrants After Netflix Episode. What the US Gets Wrong About Minimum Wage.

"From abolitionism to Standing Rock, Americans have come together time and again to defy horrific injustice. Now, as the government tries to normalize concentration camps, it is time like never before to target those responsible."

We must hold these dual, overlapping realities in our minds, as we strive to comprehend the interrelated horrors to which the United States — not just Trump, but the United States — subjects millions of people every day.

Immigrant-detainee suicides indicate that the Stewart Detention Center and ICE are out of step with a trend in corrections to keep seriously mentally ill people out of solitary confinement.

Donald Trump’s policy of family separation at the borders motivated an upsurge in activism, including widespread calls to abolish ICE. Now it’s time to go further, to attack the long-standing policy of separating families inside our borders.

The increasingly routine consequence of the Trump Administration’s immigration policy to separate children from parents who enter the United States without papers reminded me of a conversation I heard between Henry Kissinger and Ruth K. Westheimer.

Conditions at Adelanto Detention Center, a privately operated prison currently used to detain undocumented immigrants, are said to be grim. Nine detainees, all of whom came to the U.S. seeking asylum, were so fed up that they staged a hunger strike. Guards responded with violence and pepper spray.

Adelanto, a town of 32,000, is home to three prisons. This was not a coincidence. With a history of agriculture, excessive water use, the Great Depression, cheap vacant land filled with a military base which closed in the 1990s, Adelanto turned to prisons. During the 1980s, under increasingly stringent drug laws and harsh sentencing policies, demand for new prisons had grown. So had the belief that prisons could nourish economic development in rural communities.