This Los Angeles Detention center could be coming to a city near you
There’s a basement about a fifteen-minute walk from where I live. It is small, cold, and perpetually lit. It can hold as many as seventy men for days at a time. The basement has one exposed toilet, with no doors, for the people it detains, which they use in front of one another. Sparse meals appear sporadically, sometimes at 3:00 a.m. and sometimes not at all. The men in this concrete, windowless cage sleep either standing up, leaning against one another for lack of space, or on the cold floor. The basement has a separate room for women; families of detainees there say the conditions appear to be the same.
Some of the people in the basement were put there by masked government agents. Some were on their way to or at work. Others were on the street, at home, or picking up their children from school. Eventually, their government might expel them to another country, maybe one they’ve never visited, far from their families, loved ones, attorneys and anybody who cares for them.
Families and attorneys like me try to visit the basement. They spend hours outside of a locked door. They miss work and other necessary commitments for a chance to visit and provide some comfort. Some arrive carrying medicine their loved one needs – and they are forced to wait for hours too.
This basement doesn’t exist in Russia, or Hungary, or China. It sits below an American federal building in downtown Los Angeles. Federal taxpayers’ dollars keep it running. The ongoing immigration raids in the city keep it full.
I learned about the basement when a panicked son reached out for help from the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, the non-profit that I lead and which files federal litigation to secure the rights of immigrants and refugees. His father was arrested by government agents, who violently pushed him to the ground, pepper sprayed his face, and dragged him off. He had already spent three nights imprisoned in the basement, as his son tried in vain to see him.
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/los-angeles-ice-immigration-detention-center-rcna216884
But the cruelty is the point, isn't it?