Heather Cox Richardson: “Yesterday, federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement pepper-sprayed Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) along with demonstrators outside Delaney Hall, a 1,000-bed detention center in Newark, New Jersey.” Inmates at Delaney Hall have complied with US laws, but they have been denied due justice, and are kept in filth; denied medical care, including to the elderly and medically vulnerable; and denied due process.
“Kim posted on social media that the detainees had accurately represented conditions there. He said he found an eighteen-year-old high school student crying and saying she just wanted to graduate; a pregnant woman without full OBGYN care; a woman who had suffered a miscarriage and had no medical care; a mother who was largely separated from her four-month-old baby, the husband of an American citizen wife and child; spoiled food; a court docket showing one judge with 74 cases to handle in one day, allowing the judge about five minutes per case; a man from South America being threatened with deportation to Congo, where there is an active Ebola outbreak; and so on.
“Kim concluded: ‘Spending tens of billions of dollars from American families to perpetrate cruelty against people who aren’t violent criminals or felons is a waste of money and wrong…. Our government should focus on helping Americans afford their lives, not lock people up in for-profit detention centers where corporations like GeoGroup and CoreCivic make billions. No profiting off of human misery.'”