Migrants in Custody at Hospitals Are Treated Like … Felons?

Sometimes a headline says it all, the whole reported story and a great deal more: “Migrants in Custody at Hospitals Are Treated Like Felons, Doctors Say”. The New York Timesreports, today, of the now familiar and yet still jarring brutality the Trump administration, the Nation-State more generally, visits on the bodies and souls of those courageous enough to seek asylum. In this instance, the focus is the abuse directed at “a 20-year-old Guatemalan woman who had been found late last year in the desert — dehydrated, pregnant and already in labor months before her due date.” The treatment by ICE agents is vicious, mean and often illegal. Horrible. But the doctors never actually say the migrants are treated like felons. What is to be made of the phrase, “treated like felons”?

As the article explains, “In many cases, doctors say, their patients are newly arrived asylum seekers, like the Guatemalan woman in Tucson, who had fled violent abuse from her baby’s father back home. Such patients, who are in custody only because of their immigration status, are often subjected to security measures meant for prisoners charged with serious crimes.” Dr. Patricia Lebensohn, a family physician, thinks that constant supervision in a patient’s room “makes sense if you have a prisoner that’s convicted of murder, but this is a different population, especially the asylum seekers. They’re not criminals.”

They’re not criminals, they’re not felons, and so they deserve to be treated as … human beings with Constitutional, legal, civil, and human rights and protections? Is that the implication? This is the common sense that emerges from decades of mass and hyper incarceration. This is a reason that shackling pregnant women, women in childbirth, “makes sense”. They’re criminals, felons. It makes sense for agents to be present during medical examinations, to listen in on conversations with doctors, to watch ultrasounds, to intentionally interfere with sleep, to harangue and harass. It makes sense because they are criminals. It makes sense because they are women, people of color, poor, fleeing violence, begging for mercy and demanding assistance, seeking justice. Criminals and felons, each and every one. This is our common sense, but it doesn’t have to be. Imagine if we treated migrants and felons like people, like ourselves. Another headline is possible.

(Image Credit: ACLU)