A vulnerable man — nearly blind and unable to speak English — was left alone on a cold winter night with no known attempt to leave him in a safe, secure location. That decision from US Customs and Border Protection was unprofessional and inhumane, Buffalo Mayor Sean Ryan said Wednesday, calling Shah Alam's death preventable, and insisting CBP answer for how and why this happened.
A nearly blind Burmese refugee who was abandoned by border patrol agents has been found dead in Buffalo, New York, city officials confirmed. Nurul Amin Shah Alam, 56, had been missing since 19 February, when he was dropped off by border patrol following his release from Erie county holding center, according to the Investigative Post.
Juan Nicolás has been detained at Dilley since January, where his mother said he's been consistently sick. According to reports compiled by Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), Univision's Lidia Terrezas, and Juan's mother, at about 3 a.m. on Sunday, Juan suffered a "medical episode" where he was "choking on his own vomit." He was rushed to a hospital on Monday night and diagnosed with bronchitis.
The Department of Homeland Security is planning to spend $38.3 billion turning warehouses into immigrant detention centers, according to documents shared late Thursday by New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte. Ayotte said in a statement that she received the documents in response to an inquiry about the economic impact on the town of Merrimack, where $158 million will be spent to retrofit a warehouse into a holding facility.
According to ICE's guidelines, people in custody should be given access to a telephone, visits from family and friends, and private consultation with legal counsel. The agency can make administrative decisions, including about visitation, when a patient is in the hospital, but should defer to hospital policies on contacting next of kin when a patient is seriously ill, the guidelines state. Asked in detail about hospital practices related to patients in immigration custody and whether there are best practices that hospitals should follow, Ben Teicher, a spokesperson for the American Hospital Association, declined to comment.
"I would characterize the conditions in this facility as truly crisis-level. It is an emergency, what's happening inside," said Margot Mendelson, executive director of the Prison Law Office, which brought the lawsuit alongside the American Civil Liberties Union and the law firm Keker, Van Nest & Peters.
(AP Photo/Eric Gay) Handwritten letters from children out of a Texas immigration detention center published by ProPublica on Monday offer a rare and unsettling glimpse into the lives of children caught up in the Trump administration's immigration crackdown. The letters, obtained by the outlet in mid-January, were written after reporter Mica Rosenberg asked detained parents at Dilley Immigration Processing Center whether their children would be willing to describe their experiences through writing or drawings. One detainee collected the letters and carried them out upon their release from the Dilley facility on January 20, saying the parents understood the material would be shared publicly with a journalist.
It's rare for interpreters' cultural background to reflect the music itself, says AV Vilavong, a Deaf concert interpreter who performs at major music festivals across the country. "The fact that Celimar is Puerto Rican, there are cultural nuances that are already embedded in how she, as a Deaf interpreter, will match the tone, the cultural aspects, the songs, the significance behind the slang for particular vocabulary," Vilavong says through an interpeter. "It's embedded in who she is as an individual."
WASHINGTON, DC - A BILL THAT TWO BROOKLYN CONGRESSMEMBERS HAVE COSPONSORED would require U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection to perform an initial health screening on detainees. House Resolution 7335 , which Rep. Raul Rodriguez, Democrat of California, introduced on Tuesday, Feb. 3, and which is now referred to committee, has 73 cosponsors, including eight from New York and two from Brooklyn: Reps. Nydia M. Velazquez, D-07, and Dan Goldman, D-10.
A federal judge issued an emergency order on February 2 temporarily blocking Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's latest effort to prevent Democratic lawmakers from making unannounced inspections of federal immigration jails, where at least 38 people have died since Donald Trump returned to the White House. "Unlawful secrecy has fueled the deadliest era in Department of Homeland Security detention history," said Andrew Fels, a staff attorney at the migrant rights group Al Otro Lado, in an email to Truthout. "Today's ruling reaffirms the importance of congressional oversight, particularly when lives, safety, and basic human dignity are at risk."
Last month, a 20-year-old Guatemalan man who came to the United States when he was 2 years old was detained at a gas station by heavily armed men in black military-style uniforms, sent to Alligator Alcatraz, the notorious immigration detention center in the Florida Everglades, and eventually ended up on a deportation flight back to Guatemala, according to a sworn declaration filed this week in San Diego federal court.
We go now from New Jersey's most famous musician to New Jersey Democratic Congresswoman LaMonica McIver. She's facing up to 17 years in prison, stemming from an incident last May when she and two other Democratic congressmembers went to inspect Delaney Hall, the private immigration prison run by GEO Corporation under contract with ICE. The federal government claims McIver assaulted an immigration officer as federal agents were arresting Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, who had accompanied the congressional delegation to Delaney Hall.
Lavandera reported tension [was] kind of escalating as whistles went off and protesters stood face-to-face with federal officers in the background; others could be seen holding signs and one protester waived the Mexican flag. The CNN broadcast picked up one protester yelling F*cking cowards! at the officers as Lavandera tried to talk about the scene. Authorities have been telling them for probably the better part of an hour to scoot back, Lavandera said.
The immigration detention facility, owned and operated by the private, for-profit prison company CoreCivic, currently holds about 1,400 people, the senators said, but it has a capacity for 2,560 detainees. It opened in late August, under a two-year, $130 million contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The detainee population has grown steadily, and CoreCivic has said it expects to fill the place early this year.
