Force-Fed by ICE | Hacker News Reader

Force-Fed by ICE

theguardian.com

97 pointsHotGarbage29 comments

I think every American should also read the ACLU's report (Resistance, Retaliation, Repression: Two Years in California Immigration Detention).

https://www.aclunorcal.org/publications/resistance-retaliati...

Some of the issues it highlighted:

- forced labor in order to afford to eat. The $1/day "Voluntary Work Program" is the only way to get enough food to live. And if you refuse to work or try to protest, ICE doesn't have to give an excuse to send you into solitary confinement. CoreCivic sells this labor to companies

- extensive use of solitary confinement often for "minor disciplinary infractions or as a form of retaliation for participating in hunger strikes or for submitting complaints"

- dozens of documented deaths from forced labor and medical neglect

All of these conditions have only gotten much worse.

There was no actual punishment to the slave owners and they've ingrained their grievances about having to work into every generation since. If there's no punishment coming it will just continue the cycle of racists wanting to be lazy but reap all the rewards because of their skin color.

It's even worse than you say. When that jig was up, slave owners (ie the upper class) moved on to new oppressive dynamics. Their grievances were ingrained into people in the lower classes, who now readily imagine themselves in the upper class position as the real upper class has moved on to other things.

I don't see the relation here, to be honest. How is immigration enforcement about racists wanting to be lazy?

The people paying illegal immigrants minimal wages under the table are far more analogous to slave owners in my mind.

So confusing how holding people in confinement, starving them, and selling their labor to others without compensation gets people tossing the word "slavery" around. Obviously it's the people paying wages to voluntary workers without giving the government a cut that are the real slavers!

ICE enforcement was almost completely stopped at the very beginning of this administration in all rural farm areas.

> The people paying illegal immigrants minimal wages under the table are far more analogous to slave owners in my mind.

Are you unaware that the slaveowners did not pay their slaves, at all?

Like modern-day ICE detainees forced to work...

Same thing in Germany.

whenever i hear someone bad mouthing the germans about ww2 i wonder why living in a pity party becomes part of some peoples identity.. like they thrive on those feelings and have to reach hard to generate more of it.

Point was that German attitudes haven't changed from them until today.

I'm actually confused as to what the policy should be.

Should ICE or whomever else just like the people on hunger strikes die? Or should they continue force-feeding the people on hunger strikes? Neither seem like a good solution but I don't know what the alternatives are, besides giving in to the hunger strikers, which is most likely never going to happen otherwise everyone would hunger strike to get whatever they want.

To expand on another comment under you, which was "Maybe take a few steps farther back"... I took that to mean proper healthcare and fair treatment for all people in (any kind of) detention, which would probably prevent people from wanting to strike in the first place. That or not even detaining them in the first place (especially for prolonged periods) if it's not for a serious offense and they're not a threat to anyone.

Maybe take a few steps back and think about whether we should cave to adult children throwing temper tantrums. If you reward the behavior you incentivize more of the behavior. This is why we don't negotiate with terrorists, and it's also why the jurisdictions that let out criminals get more crime.

Maybe take a few steps farther back

Maybe read the username of a lost cause.

This is essentially a health-care issue; it is not an issue of torture or human rights or discretion on DHS' part.

If EMTs or a hospital found someone who is not eating, they would feed them. They would feed them medically with any coercion required to keep them alive. Uncooperative patients can be legally restrained, compelled, and coerced into life-sustaining medical treatment; food and water are at the top of this list.

The bottom line is that food and water are not "extraordinary means" of life support. They are always considered ordinary means. It is not optional for a health care professional to feed and hydrate a patient. It is their solemn duty to the state.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Force-feeding_(suffr...

I once stumbled across an extraordinary image of a suffragette being force-fed in her prison cell. I am not sure if it's a photograph, a drawing, or a retouching, but it apparently depicts a very real and routine practice of dealing with hunger-striking activists a century ago.

Now that we are on the right side of history, we see suffragettes as the righteous victors, and so would we rather that the government had allowed them to die from hunger-strikes, in contrast to ordinary life support for medical patients?

It is also important to note that labor can be compelled from prisoners in the United States. Slavery was not abolished here after the Civil War, it was redefined! The XIII Amendment specifically states the circumstances for legal slavery, and chief among them is for prisoners. All the criminals today who willfully and voluntarily commit crimes? They are offering themselves as slaves to the state. They are recapitulating the lives, often lives of their ancestors, who were unwilling slaves, by sacrificing their freedom to become voluntary enslaved by the state in prison. Therefore, enslavement of prisoners is routine, widespread, safe, and legal in the United States, and this won't exclude illegal, criminal aliens.

Most people in immigration detention haven't been duly convicted of any crime, and thus the 13a loophole doesn't apply. Jails cannot force people waiting for trial but not convicted of any crime to work involuntarily either.

The bigger moral issue is: Why do we continue to allow the 13a even to have a slavery loophole? Slavery should never be allowed in any context. And neither should "voluntary" servitude for below minimum wages for "commissary" goods essential to life and human decency the for-profit corporate scum prisons fail to furnish. All companies that use prison slave and so-called "voluntary" labor below minimum wage need to be outed and boycotted.

Wow, this is horrific treatment. I hope to see the day the perpetrators will punished.

Just remember that most soldiers who worked in concentration camps in WW2 were never punished until very recently : https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33533264

It may be unlikely, it's true, but I'm still hoping for justice.

> I hope to see the day the perpetrators will punished.

This is unfortunately incredibly unlikely, at least when it comes to the people who are really responsible.

Some of the foot soldiers working in these prisons might get some punishment assuming we in the US still live in a functioning democracy (IMO until after the midterms happen, this is actually an open question) and if power is able to shift away from the current administration, but the people really responsible for this are above federal law, which is a thing we allow in the US.

They will all be mass pardoned by Trump before he leaves office.

You don't get to choose when you ultimately go in a free country. You must stay alive and work so the rest of us can be free of the guilt that we let you down.

WTAF does this gibberish mean?

Horrific details inside the article, be warned

Imagine how terrible it must be to live in Kurdistan or Afghanistan that these guys are willing to be tortured to remain in the United States.

You think they have a f'n choice?? This has to be a troll comment

> But as Choli’s hunger strike went on, it threatened his health and also, in the government’s opinion, posed “a serious threat to the security and good order” of the facility, ICE argued in court filings.

They call it "order". It's all about control. It always is. The Trumps, the Zuckerbergs, the ICE stooges. Their lives are about controlling others.

Maybe dont use the asylum process to flee your drug smuggling consequences.

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