Hell on American Soil II

It occurred to me that certain Red-Blooded Patriotic Americans will look at my post yesterday regarding the treatment of immigration detainees and say something like: "So what? They shouldn't be here in the first place! They had it coming!"

There are two responses to this argument. First, it is not necessarily true that the people ICE has in custody are in the U.S. illegally. Many are being held pending the outcome of immigration proceedings. Sometimes they win and are allowed to remain here.

Second, the right-wing respect for "Rule of Law" is quite selective. We also have laws against abusing and neglecting prisoners. Why should people who break those laws get a pass?

If you don't have time to read the entire series of Washington Post stories, at least take a minute to read about Isaias Vasquez. Here is his story:

Vasquez had come from Mexico to the United States legally with his family when he was 2 years old. He served in the Army for two years until psychiatric problems ended his military career. Years later, when he was convicted on a drug-possession charge, he served the 1 1/2-year sentence at a Texas state psychiatric hospital. The government said the crime made him deportable, and immigration officers picked him up from the hospital and sent him to one detention center, then another. Records chronicle his paranoid delusions and auditory hallucinations.

He had been diagnosed with chronic paranoid schizophrenia in the early 1990s and had been hospitalized 18 times before he landed in Pearsall. But the staff ruled that he was not schizophrenic and cut off his medication.

Instead, on Nov. 29, 2005, they diagnosed him with an "unspecified personality disorder." Vasquez "insisted throughout session he was paranoid schizophrenic and needed medication," a social worker wrote in his medical file. But the evaluation team concluded that "his thought process and content was normal, logical and coherent." They suspected he was faking to keep his Social Security disability benefits.

They decided to take him off a drug for schizophrenia, and another for depression, and cut his dose of a second antidepressant in half. The effects were swift. A week later Vasquez was placed on suicide observation. He "smeared feces throughout the suicide observation room," his medical chart shows. The next day, "he announced in the dormitory that either he killed himself or God would do it for him, and he took all of his clothes off. Then he got down onto the floor and licked it."

The staff's response: They eliminated the last of his psychotropic medicine. "Mental health visits will cease at present time," says a Dec. 15 note in his medical file.

Two months later, another note warned, "DO NOT PLACE YOURSELF WITHIN GRABBING OR SPITTING DISTANCE OF THIS DETAINEE."

After another month, he was found sitting on his bed with only a blanket around his waist, reading a Bible aloud and screaming, "The world is coming to an end, but not until I finish using my red tape!" He refused his other medications for diabetes, high blood pressure and suspected tuberculosis.

In mid-March, Johnson stuck a handwritten note on Vasquez's cell window: "If you keep refusing to take your . . . medicines . . . YOU put YOURSELF at risk of BLINDNESS, AMPUTATIONS, HEART ATTACKS, KIDNEY FAILURE, STROKES and EARLY DEATH."

Vasquez "covered that area of the window with spit," Johnson wrote in his medical file. "I slid another copy under the door, and he turned it face down and slid it back out, and then he blocked the door with his clothing so I could not slide it under again."

On March 24, "[H]e had saved up 6 empty peanut butter jars and had some sort of yellowish liquid in them. . . . [T]he guards told him to give them up. He refused." The guards subdued him with tear gas.

They gassed him again two weeks later when he refused to give the guards the broken eyeglasses he had "tied to his head with an undershorts waistband. . . . When the room was repeatedly sprayed, he stood stoically."

Unable to persuade Vasquez to take his medicine, the staff discontinued it in late April. A final note on his behavior, from May 1, five days before his release, says he had "smeared feces on window to cell and threw water and feces under door of cell."

Even then, the staff did not reconsider its assessment that he was not schizophrenic or its decision to take away the psychotropic drugs. Their assessment of his problem: "Ineffective individual coping."

Vasquez had won his immigration case. When his common-law wife picked him up, she found him raving and gaunt. Gloria Armendariz drove him straight to the VA hospital. On the way, she recalled, "I had to cut the [car] speakers and put them in the trunk because he kept saying they . . . would listen and videotape him."

At the hospital, guards had to subdue him. He was admitted to the psychiatric ward, "which is where he needs to be," said his lawyer, Lee Teran. The next day, he was started on antipsychotics.

Helped by his medicine and no longer facing deportation, Vasquez, now 49, did something that, in his nearly five decades in the country, he'd never bothered to do: He applied to become a citizen. At the citizenship ceremony last fall, he wore a jacket, a tie and a broad smile.

Yes, the story has a happy ending, but is there any excuse for a human being to be treated this way? If a dog was forced to live in his own filth without medical treatment, people would be outraged. Yet as far as I can tell, no one at ICE has been punished or disciplined in any way for what they did to Isaias Vasquez. You can bet many more such stories remain untold.

This is the thanks our nation gives a sick veteran. God bless America.

Hell on American Soil

The Washington Post has a series of investigative stories about medical care of people being held in the immigration system. It is a stunning picture of incompetence, arrogance, and cruelty. It's not a media hatchet job, either; the facts are well-documented and the government admits some of the worst abuses.

Obviously we have a problem with illegal immigration, and people who are in the process of being deported need to be kept in custody. No one is arguing that they deserve luxury accommodations. At the same time, common human decency as well as an array of laws and treaties demands that prisoners be treated humanely. Part of that is proper medical care. Some of the worst failures have to do with mental illness:

Doctors and nurses who often have difficulty detecting and treating physical ailments are having even greater problems managing the nuances of mental illness, documents and interviews show. Treating mental illness is a challenge in any context, but inside this closed, overburdened world, some psychiatric patients undergo months and sometimes years of undermedication or overmedication, misdiagnosis or no diagnosis.

The records reveal failures of many kinds. Suicidal detainees can go undetected or unmonitored. Psychological problems are mistaken for physical maladies or a lack of coping skills. In some cases, detainees' conditions severely deteriorate behind bars. Some get help only when cellmates force guards and medical staff to pay attention. And some are labeled psychotic when they are not; all they need are interpreters so they can explain themselves. [more]

While those who truly are mentally ill get little or no treatment, perfectly sane people are routinely dosed with powerful psychotropic medicines so they can be more easily transported to other countries.

In a Chicago holding cell early one evening in February 2006, five guards piled on top of a 49-year-old man who was angry he was going back to Ecuador, according to a nurse's account in his deportation file. As they pinned him down so the nurse could punch a needle through his coveralls into his right buttock, one officer stood over him menacingly and taunted, "Nighty-night."

Such episodes are among more than 250 cases The Washington Post has identified in which the government has, without medical reason, given drugs meant to treat serious psychiatric disorders to people it has shipped out of the United States since 2003 -- the year the Bush administration handed the job of deportation to the Department of Homeland Security's new Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE.

Involuntary chemical restraint of detainees, unless there is a medical justification, is a violation of some international human rights codes. The practice is banned by several countries where, confidential documents make clear, U.S. escorts have been unable to inject deportees with extra doses of drugs during layovers en route to faraway places.

Federal officials have seldom acknowledged publicly that they sedate people for deportation. The few times officials have spoken of the practice, they have understated it, portraying sedation as rare and "an act of last resort." Neither is true, records and interviews indicate. [more]

What a classic example of governmental incompetence. The ICE is - or claims to be - incapable of providing basic care for people whom everyone agrees have serious psychiatric problems. Meanwhile people who are not mentally ill get the drugs that are unavailable to those who really need them.

It appears that most of these cases occur when ICE deports people on commercial airline flights. This seems to me like a bad idea for a number of reasons. For one thing, it has to be very expensive; tickets to places in Africa and Asia for a prisoner and two or three escorts aren't cheap. The story mentions one incident where the prisoner was in seat 4-A, which is probably first class. It might be cheaper to just to let them stay here.

If I were one of those prisoners, here is what I would do. As soon as they got me aboard, I would start shouting "Allah Akbar!! All of you are going to die!!" No doubt the needle would hit me a few seconds later, of course, but it would be fun to see the other passengers fight to get off the plane.

Anyway, I highly recommend reading the stories linked above. We should not be surprised that such things happen here. In a culture that tolerates the murder of 4,000 babies each day, allowing prisoners to suffer like this is relatively minor. So next time you sing "God Bless America," ask yourself: why should He?

(Hat tip to Mike for the heads-up.)

Good Clean Illegal Fun

According to the affidavits, the hazing included an incident on Sept. 9, 2006, following UT's football game with Ohio State University, when the pledges were gathered in a University Towers dorm room. Bolding, the president at the time, required a pledge to hold himself on a table on his elbows and toes, a position referred to as "bows and toes," and then turned the table over, sending the pledge falling to the floor, the affidavit said.

Also during that meeting, Sherrill touched a hot clothes iron to the face of two pledges, causing minor injuries, and Evans made a pledge put his hand on a dart board while Evans threw darts at him, the affidavits said. The pledges with the burn injuries were told to skip classes until their burns healed, the affidavit said.

During one event, a so-called cactus run, the pledges were taken to a ranch and made to gather cacti with their bare hands for an upcoming party, the affidavit said. At the ranch, Evans made three pledges eat Crisco shortening, made two eat cat food, made one pledge sit on a cactus and shocked several pledges with a cattle prod, the affidavit said.

Later in the semester, the fraternity held what members referred to as "jungle week" leading up to an annual jungle-themed party, the affidavit said. During that week, the pledges were divided into two teams in a competition centered on building pools, the affidavit said. The competition required the pledges to carry large rocks across the fraternity house yard while fraternity members struck their backs and legs with bamboo sticks, the affidavit said. The losing team was told to enter a Penske truck parked in front of the house, where Bolding and Sherrill used an electric cattle prod to shock them, the affidavit said.

On Nov. 16, 2006, the end of jungle week, nine pledges were selected to participate in an activity called "Senior Boo" that began with the pledges climbing into the back of the Penske truck and blindfolding themselves with their shirts, the affidavit said. The pledges, one of whom was "hog-tied," were shocked with a cattle prod on their way to another location, the affidavit said.

There, the pledges, who were all under the legal drinking age, were given half-gallon sized bottles of tequila, whiskey and Rumplemintz liquor and encouraged to drink excessive amounts, the affidavit said.

Bolding again made a pledge get into the "bows and toes" position and then kicked the pledge in the stomach, the affidavit said. "The kick was described a field-goal kick," the affidavit said. Later during the outing, Bolding and Sherill "traded swats" with several pledges, meaning the fraternity leaders hit the pledges with a bamboo stick and then allowed the pledges to hit them with the stick, the affidavit said.

On the way back to the fraternity house, the pledges drank from a keg, the affidavit said. [MORE]

The next morning, 18-year-old pledge Tyler Cross was found dead on the ground below his fifth-floor balcony. Blood tests revealed high levels of alcohol. Not surprising, given the activities of the previous evening as described above.

What is surprising is how many otherwise decent folks think such things are perfectly fine, even normal. "They're just being kids," people say. "It's normal. Things just got out of hand this time."

In the state of Texas, it is illegal for an 18-year-old like Tyler Cross to possess or consume any amount of alcohol. You could make a case that this law is unreasonable and unjust. I might even agree with you. For now, though, it is the law.

Yet some of the very same people who have no problem with the widespread flouting of the laws about alcohol are outraged when a poor Mexican crosses the border illegally in order to work and support his family. "They're breaking the law! Criminals! Stop them now!"

I totally agree that we need to get control of the border, for a variety of reasons, but some of us are being mighty selective in our devotion to the Rule of Law. If we are going to have laws, they need to be enforced. If they can't be enforced they ought to be changed. Otherwise you end up with anarchy.

One final question: which is the greater long-term threat to the survival of our culture: 1) immigrants who mow our lawns and pick our vegetables for very low wages, or 2) native-born college students whose "education" seems to consist of abusing younger peers and ignoring laws they find inconvenient? Think about it.