Hope in a time of choler: In Canada, provinces end immigrant detention in their jails

June 17, 2023 by Leave a Comment

On Friday, June 16, Ontario announced it would no longer allow the federal government to hold immigrant detainees in local jails. At any given moment, Ontario houses around half of all immigrant detainees in Canada, and it has kept them in maximum-security regional jails. Ontario is the eighth province to end the practice of jailing immigrant detainees. Last summer, British Columbia announced it would suspend its contract. After that, Alberta, Nova Scotia, Manitoba and Saskatchewan followed suit. Two weeks ago, Quebec and New Brunswick announced their intention to cancel the contracts. The actual cancellation of contract takes a year. At this point, only Newfoundland and Labrador, P.E.I. and the territories have not announced an intention to cancel their contract. Taken together, these remaining provinces account for less than 1% of immigrant detentions.

For the past two years, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have campaigned, lobbied and pushed for provinces to act. The campaign is known as #WelcomeToCanada. Two years ago, to the day, they released a report, “I Didn’t Feel Like a Human in There”: Immigration Detention in Canada and its Impact on Mental Health”, which lays out the brutality, cruelty and devastating impact of immigrant detention in Canada. Part of the mental health issue is that Canada allows for indefinite detention of immigrants: “For many detainees, not knowing how long they will be detained causes trauma, distress, and a sense of powerlessness.” Canadian provincial prisons are “notorious for their poor conditions.”   As Hannah Gross, Human Rights Watch researcher, noted, “This is an incredible victory. It’s a monumental win for human rights, for migrant and refugee rights.”

And so now the struggle moves to the federal level. First, the Canada Border Services Agency, CBSA, is largely a law unto itself: “The CBSA has sweeping powers including arrest, detention and search-and-seizure without a warrant. It is the only major law enforcement agency without independent civilian oversight to review policies and investigate misconduct.” Year in year out, CBSA incarcerates greater numbers of immigrants. In violation of international law, CBSA separates children from their parents and, further, keeps no record of how many children. CBSA has been found guilty of racial profiling, especially of Black immigrants. As mentioned, Canadian law allows for indefinite detention of immigrants. Teresa Gratton, for example, died October 30, 2017, in immigrant detention, far from her family who had no idea where she was. There was an uproar, momentarily. Six years later, indefinite detention continues. Glory Anawa, several months pregnant, was placed in indefinite detention. Her son, Alpha, was born behind bars. It is reported that his first words were “radio check”. “I don’t even have words to express how I feel. It makes me speechless. I’ve been robbed of my life,” said Glory Anawa. Glory Anawa was imprisoned in 2013. There was an uproar, momentarily. Ten years later, indefinite detention continues.

On March 24, 2023, the so-called Safe Third Country Agreement between Canada and the United States came into effect. Under this agreement, “People entering Canada from the US along the land border are still not eligible to make a refugee claim; will be returned to the US.” These terms “make it more dangerous for people to cross and increase the risk of being detained.” On Friday, June 16, the same day Ontario announced its cancellation of contract with the CBSA, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the Safe Third Country Agreement, while sending it back to lower courts for some clarifications. While the cancellation of provincial contracts with the Canada Border Services Agency is indeed an incredible victory, one to be celebrated, it also casts a light into the ongoing darkness of persecution of immigrants in Canada and beyond. The struggle continues.

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Image Credit: Canadian Council for Refugees) (Photo Credit: The Conversation / Prisoners’ Justice Day Committee Vancouver)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , , ,

British Columbia decided that rather than be second in the race to the bottom, it would prefer to be first in the pursuit of justice

July 23, 2022 by 2 Comments

#WelcomeToCanada

On Thursday, July 21, 2022, British Columbia’s Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General, Mike Farnworth announced that the province will end its immigration detention contract with the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA). The province would no longer hold immigrant detainees in provincial jails. Minister Farnworth explained, “In the fall of 2021, I committed to a review of BC Corrections’ arrangement with the CBSA on holding immigration detainees in provincial correctional centres. This review examined all aspects of the arrangement, including its effect on public safety and whether it aligns with the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners and expectations set by Canadian courts …. The review brought to light that aspects of the arrangement do not align with our government’s commitment to upholding human-rights standards or our dedication to pursuing social justice and equity for everyone.”

Part of the impetus for the provincial review came from a joint Human Rights – Amnesty campaign, #WelcomeToCanada, launched last year, on June 20, World Refugee Day. At the launch, the campaign noted, “Between April 2019 and March 2020, Canada locked up 8,825 people between the ages of 15 and 83, including 1,932 in provincial jails. In the same period, another 136 children were `housed in detention to avoid separating them from their detained parents, including 73 under age 6 … Since 2016, Canada has held more than 300 immigration detainees for longer than a year.”

This week, Ketty Nivyabandi, secretary general of Amnesty International Canada (English Speaking), said, “Today’s decision is a momentous step. We commend British Columbia on being the first province to stop locking up refugee claimants and migrants in its jails solely on immigration grounds. This is a true human rights victory, one which upholds the dignity and rights of people who come to Canada in search of safety or a better life.”

Kasari Govender, British Columbia’s current and first independent Human Rights Commissioner, added, “Detaining innocent migrants in jails is cruel, unjust and violates human rights commitments. CBSA may still hold migrants in a detention centre, but this a significant first step towards affirming the human rights of detainees. Now, it is up to the federal government to abolish all migrant detention and expand the use of community-based alternatives that support individuals.”

The decision is momentous, landmark, in a number of ways. In and of itself, it marks the first province to stop the brutal practice, and to do so in the name of human rights, social justice and equity. Additionally, until now, British Columbia is a leader in the incarceration of immigrants. From 2019 to 2020, 22% of detained immigrants were held in provincial jails. Then Covid hit. The number of people held in 2020 – 2021 dropped to 1605, of whom 40% were held in provincial jails. In the two years under review, only Ontario exceeded British Columbia in the incarceration of immigrants, asylum seekers, refugees. This week, British Columbia decided that rather than be second in the race to the bottom, it would prefer to be first in the pursuit of justice.

 

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Image Credit: Amnesty International Canada)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , , , , ,

Covid Operations: In prisons, jails, immigrant detention centers, the United States refuses to address Covid

September 18, 2021 by 25 Comments

In June, the Florida Department of Corrections ended all Covid-related pandemic emergency protocols. This includes reporting, and so now, although cases increase and people behind bars are dying, the state issues no reports. It’s none of your or our business. Go away. Florida is not an outlier. The whole country has refused do care for people behind bars. According to the most recent Prison Policy Initiative analysis, the United States gets an F, the Federal Bureau of Prisons gets an F. 42 state prison systems get F or F+. The highest grade went to New Jersey, C. Another study, looking at jail populations, finds that one of the best forms of Covid mitigation – along with vaccination, mask mandates, social distancing – is jail decarceration: “The globally unparalleled system of mass incarceration in the US, which is known to incubate infectious diseases and to spread them to broader communities, puts the entire country at distinctive epidemiologic risk …. Public investment in a national program of large-scale decarceration and reentry support is an essential policy priority for reducing racial inequality and improving US public health and safety, pandemic preparedness, and biosecurity.” As to immigrant detention centers, “The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has proven itself ill-equipped to manage the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in its detention facilities.” This applies as well to the “nongovernmental detainee facilities across the country”, such as the Otay Mesa Detention Center, site of the largest Covid outbreak among detained migrants … thus far. Say what you like about Florida, when it comes to concern for the vulnerable, for care of those people living and suffering in prisons, jails, immigrant detention centers, it’s just one of the guys.

As the Prison Policy Initiative analysis suggests, this shouldn’t have been so complicated or difficult. Reduce the prison population. Reduce infection and death rates behind bars. Vaccinate everyone living behind bars. Address basic health and mental health needs through easy policy changes: waive video and phone call charges; provide masks and hygiene products; suspend medical co-pays; require staff wear masks; require staff be tested regularly. That’s it. It’s not complicated. It’s not hard. Everyone failed. I know … New Jersey got a C, California a C-Everyone else got a D or F.New Jersey vaccinated and released many living behind bars, but New Jersey’s infection rate in prisons was almost four times higher than the state COVID infection rate, and the prison Covid mortality rate was almost double that of the state.

Four states – California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New Jersey – made significant efforts to reduce prison population, partly through early release, early medical parole, suspension of incarceration for technical violations of probation and parole. Even with that, no state actually passed: “the nation’s response to the pandemic behind bars has been a shameful failure.” The response is shameful because there has been no response, and here I don’t only mean on the part of prisons, jails, immigrant detention centers. Where is the outrage? Where is the attention? Other than the usual suspects, who really cares? The failure is shameful because it is part and parcel of the national project. This is us, brutal and bankrupt in our lack of concern.

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Infographic Credit: Prison Policy Initiative) (Photo Credit: The Guardian / Tannen Maury / EPA)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , , , , ,

Today is July 4, 2019: There is nothing to celebrate here

July 4, 2019 by 5 Comments

Yesterday, July 3, 2019, the American Academy of Pediatrics released the drawings below, done by children who had been held, caged, in immigrant detention centers on the U.S. Southern Border. The AAP said, simply, “The American Academy of Pediatrics believes no time in detention is healthy or safe for children.”

Today is July 4, 2019. There is nothing to celebrate here.

 

(Photo Credits: American Academy of Pediatrics / Facebook)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , , , ,

Migrants in Custody at Hospitals Are Treated Like … Felons?

June 10, 2019 by Leave a Comment

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)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , ,

No one is free until we are all free!

March 5, 2019 by Leave a Comment

Children are dying at detention centers on the border. ICE detention centers, which line the pockets of counties like Essex, New Jersey, with millions of dollars each month, have been reported with disgusting health and safety code violations, violating the cushy contracts. Undocumented immigrants in detention at the border have finally won their right to continue protesting with hunger strikes without the fear of nasal tube force feedings. In New Jersey, a Guatemalan toddler died in a state hospital, after being detained by ICE.  Her 104-degree fever was ignored before she was reunited with her family in the Garden State. a record number of babies are in detention, raising concerns about the children’s health and wellbeing; and the list goes on and on. 

We have reached a crisis moment in the United States when we can ignore the violence and the othering of people, denying them their humanity and justifying carceral violence as a penalty of illegality. Babies and children should not be in detention. Women fleeing violence should not be incarcerated; people should not be put behind bars.  

The bubbling incarceration rates of all people in this country, the ties to private prisons that give stockholders millions or billions for putting people behind bars for nonviolent crimes, drug crimes, crimes of self-defense, tickets, misdemeanors, children incarceration: all of this should not be. The crime of being poor and being black or being brown should not be. The lists of should-not-be are endless.

We have more in common with undocumented immigrants in our community, working hard to raise and provide for their families each day, than we do with the billionaires sitting in the oval office and the capitol buildings. We have more in common with the incarcerated than we do with Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Betsy Devos. We have more in common with the impoverished and homeless than we do with Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The threat of homelessness looms over many in this country, including those who claim to be members of the middle class. I have known the certified letters from mortgage companies, threatening foreclosure and homelessness. Many can relate to earning the bare minimum and working until our bodies have deteriorated. For someone whose entire political career involves an obscene amount of “executive time”, he does not understand the calloused fingers and sore feet of working twelve, fifteen hour shifts and then waking up the next morning to do it again. 

We will not become a nation for the people, until we understand that we are all together, all people, all humans, deserving of dignity and humanity, and that we deserve not bars but homes and healthcare, rehabilitation and not violence and felony charges. Prisons give those in power the ability to de-humanize and then justify no one deserving basic human rights: why should the criminal get healthcare when you work for it; why is Narcan for the drug addict free but my medication prices will kill me?

When you realize that the politicians won’t save you, but your common man and women will, then one must organize to demand an end to the inequality and inhumanity in this country and the world. To begin, we must destroy the prison industrial complex.

(Photo Credit: Dialectical Delinquents)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , , ,

Resistance in the age of registries and internment

November 18, 2016 by 3 Comments

The headline reads, “Japanese American internment is ‘precedent’ for national Muslim registry, prominent Trump backer says”.

Prisons do not and will never make us safer. Everything along the spectrum that includes racist “internment camps”, which are prisons by another name, and a “national registry” of people who are Muslim is a hastening and intensifying of carcerality in our society. To be clear, the United States already has racist prisons. They’re called jails and prisons. And we already have prisons for immigrants in our country. They’re called detention centers, and the people imprisoned in them are often not counted in published numbers about this country’s gargantuan prison population.

In a fascist moment, the mode of resistance is clear: to imbue your every action with anti-fascism. This means that if there is a national registry of people who are Muslim or who are perceived to be Muslim, all people of all faiths and backgrounds need to go register for it. This means opening your home to your neighbors or to anyone who needs to hide. Solidarity is not even an option, it’s the choice of survival over necropolitics. Are you still in denial, do you still think this is far-fetched?

As everyone tries to process current events, I see people drawing a lot of comparisons between this moment and Nazi Germany. Those comparisons are important and not melodramatic, but there are some issues with them.

First, the comparison implies that previously this country wasn’t already a white-supremacist nation, wasn’t founded on racism, genocide, and slavery; hasn’t been a bloody colonizer, hasn’t destabilized/invaded other countries, hasn’t created classes of citizens that put some closer to survival and some to death. Of course, it has. And it has already been rounding up people based on ethnicity/nationality and sending them out of the country, in the millions, already. Most of all under Obama, sorry-not-sorry. The only answer to this systemic violence is to demand an abolition of borders themselves.

Second, the comparison brings us to a question of citizenship and legality, and again I see people missing some aspects of that. For example, the idea that the difference (between now and Nazi Germany) is that Jewish people WERE citizens, while undocumented people here are not. Let’s unpack that. Citizenship — and laws themselves — is not a divine mandate, nor an intrinsic natural feature. Actually, the idea that citizenship/lawfulness IS a natural feature is a tenet of Nazism, of eugenics, of racism. (I’d say “antisemitism” but the category “Semite” itself is a racist and meaningless invention, and doesn’t actually specifically refer to Jews.) Citizenship is, the law is, arbitrary and ever changing. It operates on the whim of the state, and it is a weapon that can be deployed against anyone. Citizenship is NOT a stable category. YOUR citizenship, if you have it, will NOT protect you. Your whiteness, if you have it, will not protect you. If you stand idly by while people are deported/rounded up/added to a registry, you’re not only complicit, you’re ignorant. If it can happen to anyone, it could happen to everyone. This is why our demand must be an abolition of borders and other forms of violent containment, including prisons, poverty — capitalism.

“If they come for me in the morning, they will come for you in the night.”
 Angela Davis

“If they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.” James Baldwin

(Photo Credit 1: Intro to Women’s Studies S12) (Photo Credit 2: Fortune / Michael B. Thomas / AFP)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , , , , , ,

In prisons, jails and detention centers, the bodies pile up: Who cares?

April 6, 2016 by 1 Comment

Harmondsworth, 2006

According to a report released today, 2015 recorded “the highest number of executions … in more than 25 years (since 1989).” Along with the `highest number of executions”, many jails, prisons and immigrant detention centers are experiencing the highest number and the highest rates of suicide. Once more into the global work of necropower: “In our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creation of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead … Under conditions of necropower, the lines between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom are blurred.” Welcome to the necropolis.

In the United Kingdom, the number of suicide attempts in “immigration removal” centers is at an all-time high. In 2015, there were 393 attempted suicides recorded. Harmondsworth topped the list at 105. Yarl’s Wood came in second at 64. In 2014, there were 353 attempted suicides. Harmondsworth led again with 68, and, again, Yarl’s Wood came in second with 61. In 2015, 2,957 detainees were on suicide watch during 2015. Of that number, 11 are children.

Meanwhile, in 2014, prison suicides in England and Wales reached a seven-year high. The Probation Ombudsman for England and Wales found a 64% increase in self-inflicted deaths in custody over the previous year. There is no surprise in either the seven-year high in prisons in England and Wales, nor in the all-time high in immigrant detention centers.

In the United States, during the Obama administration, there have been 56 deaths in ICE custody. These include six suicides and at least one death after an attempted suicide. Eloy Detention Center, in Eloy, Arizona, holds pride of place in this race to the bottom. As of July 2015, 9 percent of detention deaths nationwide since 2003 occurred at Eloy, where 14 of the 152 total deaths occurred. In 2013, women prisoners in Eloy went on hunger strike to protest the conditions. As Thesla Zenaida, an Eloy hunger striker, explained: “Look, a girl hanged herself. A girl was hanged here. [After] she was hanged, they didn’t want to take her body down. And for the same reason—because they treat us poorly. A guard treated her poorly, and that guard is still working here.” And now, three years later, people still ask, “Why so many suicides?

Meanwhile, in 2015, the Arizona prison system recorded close to 500 attempts at self-harm and suicide, another record broken.

In Illinois, in the Kane County jail, the suicide rate is three times the national average, and no one on staff seems to care. In August 2013, Terry Ann Hart hung herself in the Kane County jail. Now, almost three years later, her daughter is taking the county and the sheriff to court. In a little over a year, Kane County had three suicides and one attempt, while nearby larger jails had no suicides from 2011 to 2015. Terry Ann Hart’s daughter wants to know how it’s possible for so many people to kill themselves and for no one to be held accountable and for nothing whatsoever to change inside the jail.

The family of Wakiesha Wilson, who died in the Los Angeles County Jail last month, has similar questions. How did their loved one die, and why did the State take so long to inform them? From Harmondsworth and Yarl’s Wood to Eloy Detention and Kane County and Los Angeles, and beyond, women are dropping like flies, and their families ask, “Why?” and “Who cares?”

In France, due to two recent high profile prison suicides, people are asking why the rate of suicide in French prisons is so high. Coincidentally, a report released this week notes, “Suicide rates in French prisons are higher than in the general population – seven times as high … According to the French government, there were 113 suicides in French prisons in 2015 … Female prisoners with psychosocial disabilities face particularly harsh conditions in French prisons. Women in general, who are a minority in prison, are more restricted in their movements than men and have less access to treatment for mental health conditions than their male counterparts. Women detained in a prison with separate quarters for female and male prisoners described … how, unlike the men in the same facility, they had to be escorted in all their movements. Besides making them feel isolated, this gives women the sense that they are treated more harshly only because they are women. Female prisoners also face discrimination in their access to mental healthcare: while 26 Regional Medico Psychological Services (SMPR) in French prisons provide mental healthcare during the day and beds for the night, only one of them has beds for women.”

From executions to prison suicides, these numbers are the census of the death-world, where now what is blurred is the line between the living dead and the dead dead. Record-breaking numbers of suicides occur, and nobody knows? How much higher must the piles of women’s corpses rise before the `discoveries’ end and the work of justice begins? Look, a girl hanged herself. A girl was hanged here. ¡Ni una mas! Not one more!

 

(Photo Credit: Institute of Race Relations)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

We may be mad, but we are not crazy!

June 13, 2015 by Leave a Comment

We may be mad, but we are not crazy. We see the pain and persistence, the resilience of our families.

AND we see you Bondi, Slatery, Caldwell* and the rest of the Republican blockers. You are hypocrites.

You want our work, our latino purchasing dollars, our votes, our immigrant taxes but dare to deny our dignity.

AG blockers, purveyors of justice, deny us. Their “family values” don’t include brown/black families. Their “freedom” is only for a few. They want family prisons, bed quotas, mandatory minimums, mass incarceration for prison profiteers. Bondi in bed with GEO.

But guess what, that’s not what our nation wants. We won not in the courts, nor in the Congress. We won in the streets. They may have the past but we possess the future and we are not waiting for it. We built it day by day –with respect and dignity, liberty and justice for all.

 

*Bondi, Florida’s Attorney General; Slatery, Tennessee’s Attorney General; Caldwell, Louisiana’s Attorney General, have joined a suit to stop Obama’s executive order on immigration.

(Image Credit: http://collections.museumca.org)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , ,

Lilian Oliva Bardales: “In prison when I haven’t committed any crime”

June 9, 2015 by 10 Comments

Lilian Yamileth Oliva Bardales, 19 years old, and her four-year-old son have been held in Karnes “Family Detention Center” since last October. She had applied for asylum, explaining that she had fled Honduras to escape an abusive ex-partner, six years older than she, who had beaten her regularly since she was 13. Her application was denied. Last Wednesday, she locked herself in a bathroom and cut her wrists. She was removed from the bathroom, held for four days under medical “supervision” during which she was denied access to her attorneys, and then, on Monday, suddenly moved from Karnes, presumably for deportation. From beginning to now, the treatment of Lilian Oliva Bardales has been a national disgrace.

Oliva Bardales left a note, the translation of which reads, in part: “I write this letter so you know how it feels to be in this damn place for 8 months. You don’t understand that people’s lives have no price and you cannot buy it with money. You don’t have a heart for anybody. You just lie and humiliate all of us who have come to this country … I do this because only God knows what I have suffered in my country. I come here so this country can help me but here you’ve been killing me little by little with punishment and lies in prison when I haven’t committed any crime. What hurts me the most is that I saw how my brother was killed and how it’s hurt my son and all the abuse that we suffered in my country. You don’t believe me you never wanted to give me my freedom. I do this because I would rather be dead than seeing my son fail along with me. Maybe you are not fathers or mothers to understand the reasons and the suffering that we live in this place together with our children. You would not like to be locked up in a place like this the way we are here suffering with our children. What I tell you is that nobody lives forever in this world one day we are all going to die and give an account to God. I do this because I don’t feel any life going back to my country. That’s why I waited so long so you could take a decision on my case but you have treated us worse than an animal …That’s why I do this because you were bad to me and my son. We did not deserve this. now you want to deport me after spending 8 months here.”

That’s “family detention”. It is the place where mercy dies a slow, tortured, mean, evil death:

“The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
‘T is mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown:
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice.”

When mercy seasons justice. When degradation, abuse, torture and despair season the appeal for asylum … what then? Where are Lilian Oliva Bardales and her four-year-old son?

 

(Image Credit: McClatchydc.com)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
Next Page »
блекспрут зеркало блекспрут зеркало блекспрут ссылкаблекспрут ссылка blacksprut blacksprut