Donald Trump’s concentration camps for immigrants

This video from the USA says about itself:

Trump’s Muslim Registry Should Remind Us of Japanese Internment Camps

23 December 2016

Richard Cahan, author of “Un-American: The Incarceration of Japanese Americans During World War II,” joins David to discuss Japanese internment in the context of Trump’s America.

By Eric London in the USA:

Trump plans detention force and network of camps for immigrants

14 April 2017

The Trump administration is advancing plans to create a national force of paramilitary guards and officials aimed at deporting millions of undocumented people from the United States. According to the Washington Post, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is planning on jailing tens of thousands more immigrants in the coming period, hiring thousands of agents, as well as the construction of a wall between the US and Mexico.

According to an internal DHS memo acquired by the Post, the government is expanding the number of detention beds by 33,000, including some for “unaccompanied minors,” in other words, children held in prison.

These facilities will include five private, for-profit prisons and two government facilities. The total number of immigrants imprisoned on a daily basis will rise to around 70,000—approaching the number of Japanese-Americans interned by the Roosevelt administration during World War II.

The memo also explains that “progress” has been made and that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is “taking all appropriate action to immediately plan, design, and construct a physical wall” along the border. One contractor proposed to build a wall with a moat filled with nuclear waste that immigrants would fall into if they attempted to cross.

DHS is also dredging up the most backward and fascistic elements to hire 5,000 new guards and agents who will serve as modern-day slave catchers. The memo announces that the agency has eliminated the most basic physical and mental fitness requirements for applicants and has dropped the requirement that applicants must pass a polygraph test.

To combat widespread hostility to immigration raids, DHS will engage in propaganda to “further improve brand awareness and convey the importance and scope of our mission within the public sphere.” To do so, DHS is targeting young people: “We will also continue to focus on increasing our digital and social media presence to reach the millennial generation; [and] expand our outreach at high schools, colleges and universities.”

The new memo comes after DHS announced it has hired two fascistic white nationalists, John Feere of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) and Julie Kirchner of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), to serve as policy advisers to ICE and CBP, respectfully. The fact that CIS and FAIR are now helping direct the government’s immigration policy is a warning of even more brutal treatment to come.

The New York Times reported yesterday that the Trump administration is also seeking to eliminate even the minimal requirements for services at immigrant detention centers. The administration is considering dropping translation services for immigrants, eliminating rules that detainee requests for medical attention be granted within 24 hours, and closing a bureau responsible for overseeing conditions for protecting immigrant women from sexual assault.

Immigrant detention centers are already hellish places, often located in isolated areas, where immigrants are fed rotten food, barred from seeing their attorneys, and housed with violent non-immigrant criminals. Many immigrants are housed in county jails. One Ohio police sheriff told the Times, “Jail is jail … we don’t put chocolates on the pillows.”

Private prisons house roughly 65 percent of detained immigrants, and this figure is likely to rise when the new expansion is carried out. The Democratic and Republican parties established a “detention bed quota” whereby the government is required to fill prisons with immigrants, producing windfall profits for privately-run facilities whose corporate executives donate heavily to both parties.

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Widespread demonstrations have taken place against Trump’s immigration policies, and polls show large majorities oppose the construction of a border wall. Ninety percent of Americans support granting citizenship to immigrants who have lived in the US for several years. Last week, roughly 30,000 people demonstrated in Dallas, Texas to defend the rights of immigrants.

United States imprisoned immigrants' list of demands

From the World Socialist Web Site in the USA:

Hundreds of jailed immigrants join hunger strike in Tacoma, Washington

By a reporter

14 April 2017

A hunger strike of immigrant detainees in Tacoma, Washington nearly doubled in size yesterday as the number of participants rose to 750 inmates, half the capacity of the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC). The first strikers have now gone three days without food.

Immigrants are protesting horrendous conditions at the facility. They are demanding better food, better medical care, regular cleaning of prison clothes, an increase in the amount of recreation time, the establishment of education programs and anti-depression programs, an increase in pay for prison labor, and a decrease in price gauging at the prison store.

At present, immigrants at NWDC and at many locations around the country receive only one hour of outdoor recreation per day, despite the fact that many detainees have never been convicted with any criminal offense. Depression is rampant and abuse at the hands of brutal prison guards is widespread. Roughly 170 people have died in immigration custody since 2003. Immigrants at the facility make $1 per day for prison labor.

The hunger strike marks a resurgence of protest by immigrant detainees. In 2014, 1,200 immigrants were on hunger strike at facilities across the country, including at NWDC. That year, protesters outside NWDC blocked deportation buses from entering or leaving the facility. Hunger strikes of women detainees broke out in April 2014 at the Karnes County Family Detention Center in Texas, and 500 more women went on a hunger strike at the T. Don Hutto facility in Texas. Similar protests have taken place in California, Louisiana, Alabama, Pennsylvania and Colorado.

Jonathan Rodriguez Guzman, a young hunger striker at NWDC, told the press the strike is “for everybody out there” and that “what we want is for people to hear us out” on deplorable conditions in the facility.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesperson Rose Richeson tried to downplay the strike in an interview with Reuters: “Right now it’s more of a meal refusal thing that some detainees have done.”

NWDC is a privately run, for-profit detention center owned by GEO Group, a corporation whose CEO donated $250,000 to fund Donald Trump’s January inauguration celebration. GEO Group’s stock has doubled from $23 per share on Election Day to $48 at yesterday’s closing bell.

The corporation has further reason to celebrate. A memo released by the Washington Post yesterday shows the Department of Homeland Security will be expanding the number of detention spots by 33,000 in the near future.

The company announced that ICE awarded it a $110 million contract to operate a 1,000 bed detention center in Conroe, Texas. According to Yahoo Finance, the project is expected to generate $44 million in revenue each year.

“We are very appreciative of the continued confidence placed in our company by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” said George C. Zoley, GEO Group’s CEO. “We are pleased to have been able to build on our longstanding partnership with ICE to help the agency meet its need for detention beds.”

GEO Group makes vast profits from human misery and oppression, operating 143 prisons worldwide, jailing up to 100,000 people every day.

In March, the company announced a public stock offering of 6,000,000 shares at $41.75 per share, which would bring in $250 million. According to a Berkshire Hathaway report from March 8, “JP Morgan, SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, Barclays, and BofA Merrill Lynch are acting as joint book-running managers for the offering.”

The government pays GEO Group roughly $150 per day for each prisoner. Yesterday, dozens of protesters gathered outside of the GEO Group facility in Tacoma and demanded the release of their family members.

Augustino Lucas, a 15-year-old, told the Stranger that his father, Francisco, is among those currently detained. “Everything changed” when ICE officials took his father.

Ashlee, a 12-year-old, explained that her father was also detained at the facility, where guards denied him medical attention. “My dad was hard-working,” she said. “He would always make me laugh and smile.”

Maru Mora Villalpando, an organizer with the protest group NWDC Resistance, told the Stranger: “If anybody is asking themselves if we need this place, whether we should deport people or detain people this way, they should take a look at themselves and their humanity. Because maybe they lost it.”

This 14 April 2017 video from the USA is called 700 Immigrants On Hunger Strike at For-Profit Prison to Protest Conditions & $1/Day Wages.

On Monday, the United States Supreme Court voted 9-0 to allow portions of President Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim travel ban to go into effect. Seventy-two years after the Supreme Court’s infamous 1944 Korematsu decision upholding internment camps, curfews and military exclusion orders targeting people of Japanese ancestry, the court is once again authorizing state discrimination based on nationality: here.

Trump announces plan to cut legal immigration in half: here.