Warehousing Human Beings

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Episode Description: Hundreds of detained people launched a hunger and labor strike at Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, over Memorial Day weekend to protest inhumane conditions at the immigration detention facility run by the for-profit company GEO Group. Protesters flocked to the scene to echo detainees’ pleas for release and better conditions — and were met with brutal tactics from federal, local, and state law enforcement officials, who beat, tear-gassed, and arrested protesters.

“Detainees are raising that they have no access to quality medical care, that they're not getting needed medications,” Andrea Sáenz, a former federal appellate immigration judge who was fired by the Trump administration last year, tells The Intercept Briefing. “They don't have enough food to eat. The food that they are getting is spoiled. They're facing hostility and harassment and violence from the guards.”  

This week on the podcast, host Jessica Washington speaks to Sáenz and Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior policy fellow at the American Immigration Council, about the conditions at the 1,000-bed jail and other detention centers across the country. The Trump administration has restricted members of Congress and state officials from oversight of federal immigration detention centers. “ICE doesn't want people to see the way that they're treating human beings in these facilities,” says Sáenz. 

Intercept reporter Noah Hurowitz, who covers federal law enforcement and immigration, was on the scene at Delaney Hall on Monday. He describes the violence that erupted outside of the facility between protesters and law enforcement officers.

“The ICE agents on the scene were quite willing to use violence at times against protesters,” says Hurowitz. “But from everything I saw, the Newark and New Jersey police were much more indiscriminate with their violence and much more willing to attack outright and fire tear gas and really put people in danger.”

Reichlin-Melnick says that the Trump administration’s war on immigrants should concern everyone. “We're seeing every government database being turned into a tool of the mass deportation state, and that is something that impacts all Americans,” he adds, “because you cannot carry out a mass deportation of 4 percent of the U.S. population without fundamentally transforming the United States into more of a police state.” 

Full transcript: https://interc.pt/4dQhgnD

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