The contradictions of an immoral immigration policy

Washington, DC – Below is a column by Maribel Hastings from America’s Voice en Español translated to English from Spanish. It ran in several Spanish-language media outlets earlier this week:

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will distribute $608 million for states to build immigration detention centers, at a time when the agency faces severe cuts to its programs for preparedness and rapid response to increasingly intense natural disasters.

Even though the money comes from a fund that was initially intended to help states to provide shelter to the the influx of immigrants that surged just over a year ago, it is remarkable that now, when the agency’s budget is being cut by nearly $1 billion in funds to assist first responders at the local level, $608 million from FEMA is being allocated to detention centers.

These detention centers cost millions of dollars to operate. Still, they are plagued with problems: overcrowding, poor facilities and food, lack of access to medical care, and reports of due process violations, denial of the right to contact family members and lawyers, as well as instances of mistreatment and abuse.

The Everglades detention center in Florida, cruelly nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz,” is the model that the Trump administration wants other states to replicate. The center will have an annual operating cost of $450 million. Still, immigrants report human rights violations, suffocating heat, lack of water, insects, and maggots in their food, to name a few.

You have to live under a rock not to realize that natural disasters are becoming more intense, whether they are flash floods, storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, or earthquakes, among others.

Climate change and its impact on disasters, and therefore on our daily lives and the economy, are an undeniable reality. Recently, there have been deadly events, such as the flooding of the Guadalupe River in Texas after heavy rains. There were 136 deaths. Criticism of FEMA was swift for its bureaucracy and the lack of personnel to respond adequately, although the acting director denies this.

In September 2017, I experienced Hurricane María in Puerto Rico. I can attest to the importance of FEMA in addressing the initial crisis and subsequent reconstruction efforts, despite the agency’s many problems, especially the stifling bureaucracy involved in releasing funds.

Without a doubt, the cuts being considered and even the potential elimination of FEMA so that states can manage their disasters, as Trump desires, are a threat to public safety.

This is even more outrageous because the reconciliation bill Trump signed into law gives ICE a $75 billion budget, making it the best-funded agency among all federal law enforcement agencies. Of that amount, a total of $45 billion is earmarked for detention centers to meet Trump’s target of deporting one million immigrants annually. Why, then, are FEMA funds being used to open detention centers?

            According to the TRAC report, as of July 13, 58,816 immigrants are in ICE detention centers, and nearly 72% have no criminal record.

With its windfall of funds, 62% greater than the entire federal prison system’s budget, ICE aims to detain 116,000 immigrants daily, according to the American Immigration Council.

Another $30 billion will allow for the hiring of 10,000 additional ICE agents to join the 20,000 currently implementing the plan to deport one million immigrants annually.

That’s just ICE, because the total budget for immigration agencies is $170 billion, including nearly $47 billion for Trump’s futile border wall.

As funds are squandered to terrorize the immigrant community and their citizen family members with mass deportations that also hurt our economy, the budget bill cuts Medicaid funding, allowing between 12 and 17 million Americans to lose their health coverage, and 22.3 million families will lose some or all of their nutritional assistance or SNAP.

Such are the contradictions of an immoral immigration policy.

The original Spanish version is here.