Anti-Immigrant Violence, the Prison Industrial Complex, & Reproductive Justice

The separation of families is abominable, unequivocally evil- on that, a lot of people have agreed (a disappointing number of Americans has been silent on this, but I'm not trying to speak to those folks... It's clear they aren't interested in understanding a perspective that's not their own). Anyways, if you've been angry about separating families at the border, then you might want to be angry about a lot of other things too- a lot of violence is interconnected if you zoom out far enough.

Being hateful towards immigrants is not new to America. It's in our history, as much as we pride ourselves on being "the land of the free and home of the brave", we haven't quite lived up to that creed. The result of post-9/11 anti-immigrant fears, ICE was established by a bipartisan effort in 2003; the immigration agency was placed under the Department of Homeland Security (established just a year earlier), sending a resounding message that immigrants were a threat to our country's safety. (I've seen posts that say Clinton voted to approve ICE but I couldn't find record of it- does anyone know where that would be? I think it's important to acknowledge that Hillary Clinton hasn't had the best record with immigration issues in the past, but I resist rhetoric that conflates a Clinton presidency with what we have now; of course she's not a beacon of radical progress but she would have never put CHIP and DACA on the cutting board, shred the reputation of America abroad, actively threaten the free press, strip away reproductive health services etcetera etcetera and so on-- change my mind).

Let's take a step back. Why exactly are people trying to come to the United States? Hint: it's not to steal American jobs. Undocumented immigrants are pushed into some of the harshest working conditions like agriculture and construction, without being able to rely on protection and oversight because their presence is so tenuous already. They can't report when they're being exploited by employers, they are usually underpaid, they pay billions of dollars in taxes each year, and they have few healthcare options. The public sphere is far from welcoming, but the home can be dangerous too; many women endure domestic violence without reporting because of fear of deportation.

So despite all of this, people still come here because it offers their families hope for a better future, and doesn't that make you wonder how hard people's lives were to begin with? Are families suffering from war and instability and hunger not deserving of the tiniest amount of grace? Isn't America big enough to accommodate the dreams of people who are willing to risk so much to come here? Okay stepping off my soapbox now. Undocumented immigrants come from a lot of different places, we often think of Mexico and Central America but there's a sizable population from Vietnam, Korea, and India too. The conditions that people are trying to leave were not manufactured in a vacuum; the United States has played an enormous role in shaping global politics through war, trade, meddling in elections, and fostering local gang violence. The United States of America is exerts a colonizing influence both domestically and abroad, and we can't untangle the state of the world from centuries of "America-first" politics. The US has also been complicit in climate change and fairly irresponsible about our carbon footprint, and we're starting to see devastating displacement from geographic areas most impacted by climate change as a result. So our bold and unapologetic approach to taking the world's resources and shaping policies that benefit our bottom line has played a profound role in unsettling other countries- so new policies that say that gang violence and domestic violence aren't grounds for asylum here are just devastating. It wasn't always a crime to enter the United States without "proper authorization", and our borders sure looked a lot different not too long ago.

Anyways, ICE works not only at the border but also raids towns to arrest people who are undocumented- kids are left at school with no way to get into contact with their parents (school attend quickly drops after these invasions). ICE has been getting bolder and conducted its biggest raid yet yesterday by arresting 146 people in Ohio. A new policy takes it one step further by aiming to strip away citizenship from folx who have been naturalized. (For all of the "good immigrants" who are trying to distance themselves from the "illegal immigrants"... the current administration doesn't care. They've rolled back H1B work visas, and they're finding ways to remove naturalized citizens. We can't separate these different immigrant experiences. It might feel unfair that some people are "cutting in line" by not waiting for the full documentation process but that's an arbitrary division used to split up immigrant solidarity and we can't stand for it. All immigrants have made sacrifices for their families, and we need to use our similarities to forge a compassion for one another.)

The threat of ICE looms on the way to work, being out in the city, and even at home. People have died fleeing from ICE- recently in SF, a man was killed by the police because he was afraid of being deported (rest in power, Adolfo Delgado <3 ). Once ICE has arrested folx, it proceeds to violate Americans principles like due process and dole our cruel and unusual punishment; for some reason, people aren't granted legal representation and the conditions can be inhumane with unchecked physical and sexual assault and rampant mold. American citizens have been detained too, and they've shared trying tales of proving their citizenship in these devastating places. On any given day, about 40,000 people --including those arrested in ICE raids, victims of human trafficking, and people seeking asylum at the border-- are held in ICE facilities. People are denied routine healthcare-  examples that have made the news include women who are denied abortions and trans folx who are denied hormone replacement therapy. Half of the deaths in ICE custody are believed to be caused by medical neglect. (I'm taking another tangent here to acknowledge that physicians are all too often complicit in state violence; at one end of the spectrum, there are prosaic interactions where law enforcement/ICE are given license to roam freely in hospital environments, another end of the spectrum includes reports of doctors currently sedating detained children with powerful psychotropic drugs. I'm devastated that this is happening in 2018; it's so wrong and violates what our sworn mission to do no harm stands for.). ICE started during the Bush era, grew during Obama's administration, and has been out of control under our current president. The entire immigration detention system needs to end.

The detainment centers are awful already, but the fact that there are people making a profit off of them makes this issue worse (this is a direct manifestation of capitalism). The United States spent $958 million in the 2017 fiscal year; this year, one entity alone is planning to expecting to receive $458 million in 2018 but that number may rise as detainments increase. 73% of these sites are owned privately, and these companies have a powerful lobbying base that's fighting for more business. It costs taxpayers almost $800 each day to keep one family detained. The public-private partnership creates perverse incentives to find and hold more people... just like our prisons do too. It's well documented that black and Latinx individuals are more likely to be sentenced compared to white peers; women of color especially have a harder time meeting bail requirements; prison itself is terrible and then being marked a "felon" forever makes it harder to reintegrate after being released. Families are being separated in places beyond the border; it's estimated that over a million people who are incarcerated in the US have kids under the age of 17. The number of kids with a mom in prison more than doubled from 1991 to 2007. An Illinois prison has been piloting a program to allow women to keep their babies in jail with them, but given that two thirds of these women are in jail because of non-violent offenses, less restrictive solutions need to be explored. The Child Welfare System has also done work to separate families- low income women of color are under disproportionate surveillance, with more kids being placed in foster care because of neglect, not abuse. Crimes of poverty can't be helped by punitive measures like jail time and losing custody, folks need support and resources to get back on their feet instead-- but that's not where our current system puts its money.

All of the aforementioned items are ways in which our government (the state) disproportionately harms (creates violence) against people of color and low-income folks (race and class groups)- this racialized, classed state violence is all connected. The tactics are similar- increased surveillance to generate more charges and then punishment out of proportion to the charge, with jail being an especially lucrative option due to the profits made from the private prison industry. Then the state somehow justifies his violence by demonizing and dehumanizing those most affected by it. These policies exert control over low income people of color and keep them trapped in poverty, which breeds crime as people try to make ends meet for their families; perversely these acts of survival can be enough to lose custody of one's kids. Once in foster care, the cycle of violence continues for kids who have been taken from their families. The toll that these stressor take on one's life expectancy are well-documented; income and exposure to violence are some of the most important social determinants of health. It is easy for us to ignore racialized state violence if we never have to engage with it; it's easy to zoom into an individual and question why they came here without documentation or why they're in prison. It's harder to take a step back and examine how these policies and practices are connected (this skill is called "structural competency" which is something we've gotten classes about in medical school- neat right?). 

Anyways, other forms of racialized state violence include gang injunctions, which essentially allow for arresting people with less evidence than the criminal justice standard; there's little oversight on whose names are placed on injunction lists, and folks can be added to it if there's any suspicion that they're friends or family with someone in a gang- essentially it's used to justify racial profiling. And it's a huge issue in San Francisco. Police brutality is another form of racialized state violence. The police working with ICE is even worse. As much as I want to believe in good cops who are just trying to protect people in dangerous situations, time and time again we see police unions refuse to hold their members accountable. As a student doctor, it's my responsibility to speak out when members of the healthcare profession violate their power; it's so rare to see police officers do the same to their colleagues. There's very few consequences when police officers kill unarmed folks of color; it's been a few years since these events entered our national consciousness on a large scale, but little has changed really and these murders just keep happening all over the country (thinking about Antwon Rose who wrote about mothers losing their sons before he was killed this week in Pittsburgh <3). Policing has a dark history, and attempts at reform haven't really been effective. The extent to which the state is invested in maintaining practices that are so clearly violent towards people of color is truly maddening. 

My final point is about reproductive justice. I see two sides to the reproductive justice movement: one involves birth control and abortion access, enabling women to not have children when they don't want to have children. Reproductive health services have been under attack all across the country, and of course we need to keep advocating for their increased access and protection of patient autonomy. But the other side of reproductive justice that often goes less noticed is fighting for women to have families when they do want children. This is what reproductive justice was about originally when the term was first coined by awesome women of color in the South. In order for women to create families, they need to be free of all of these violences I've discussed above. It's not possible to advocate for reproductive justice without a critique of anti-immigration rhetoric, indefinite detainments, the prison industrial complex, police brutality, other forms of violence, and all of the non-violence-related challenges that make it harder for people to raise families.

It's well-documented that violence and instability are negatively associated with health, that the traumas that result can last a lifetime and shape brain development in kids. While it's important to protest these injustices from the health angle, I also see this from the standpoint of a citizen who cares and who wants everyone to feel the freedom and security that I've grown up with. I'm angry about all of these terrible things in our country (this post is by NO means a comprehensive list of them), and I hope you are too. I also believe in hope and resilience and the power of family and in imagining a better future. We're in this together.

(I hope this post didn't get you too down- resistance is happening! People are assembling, lawmakers have been speaking out, mayors are taking stands for their cities. The first step to making change is understanding the lay of the land, so reading up on what's happening in our country and seeing how it's all connected so we can advocate for the most comprehensive changes is a great place to start. #abolishICE #abolishprisons)

'I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.' audre lorde



xoxo,
Juhi