Salon.com > illegal immigration

American hospitals deporting unconscious patients

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 14:45:00 +0000

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Days after they were badly hurt in a car accident, Jacinto Cruz and Jose Rodriguez-Saldana lay unconscious in an Iowa hospital while the American health care system weighed what to do with the two immigrants from Mexico.

The men had health insurance from jobs at one of the nation’s largest pork producers. But neither had legal permission to live in the U.S., nor was it clear whether their insurance would pay for the long-term rehabilitation they needed.

So Iowa Methodist Medical Center in Des Moines took matters into its own hands: After consulting with the patients’ families, it quietly loaded the two comatose men onto a private jet that flew them back to Mexico, effectively deporting them without consulting any court or federal agency.

When the men awoke, they were more than 1,800 miles away in a hospital in Veracruz, on the Mexican Gulf Coast.

Hundreds of immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally have taken similar journeys through a little-known removal system run not by the federal government trying to enforce laws but by hospitals seeking to curb high costs. A recent report compiled by immigrant advocacy groups made a rare attempt to determine how many people are sent home, concluding that at least 600 immigrants were removed over a five-year period, though there were likely many more.

Jay Leno: Call them “undocumented Democrats”

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 16:35:00 +0000

Playing off the announcement from the Associated Press Tuesday that it will no longer use the term "illegal immigrant," "Tonight Show" host Jay Leno made a joke sure to please many conservatives, suggesting the AP should call people who immigrated to this country illegally "undocumented Democrats":

“And in a groundbreaking move, the Associated Press, the largest news gathering outlet in the world, will no longer use the term ‘illegal immigrant.’ That is out. No longer ‘illegal immigrant.’ They will now use the phrase ‘undocumented Democrat.’ That is the newest -- ‘undocumented Democrat.’”

The joke isn't particularly original -- it's typical fare at Tea Party rallies and conservative confabs. Here's radio hosts Rush Limbaugh, Roger Hedgecock and Lars Larson all making the same joke. Rep. Steve King earned whooping applause when he cracked the line at CPAC last month. You can even buy a whole variety of "undocumented Democrats" apparel at the UpYoursObama.com store on CafePress.

Business and labor strike deal on low-skilled worker program

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 12:17:00 +0000

WASHINGTON (AP) — Big business and labor have struck a deal on a new low-skilled worker program, removing the biggest hurdle to completion of sweeping immigration legislation allowing 11 million illegal immigrants eventual U.S. citizenship, labor and Senate officials said Saturday.

The agreement was reached in a phone call late Friday night with AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, U.S. Chamber of Commerce head Tom Donohue, and Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, who's been mediating the dispute.

The deal resolves disagreements over wages for the new workers and which industries would be included. Those disputes had led talks to break down a week ago, throwing into doubt whether Schumer and seven other senators crafting a comprehensive bipartisan immigration bill would be able to complete their work as planned.

The deal must still be signed off on by the other senators working with Schumer, including Republicans John McCain of Arizona and Marco Rubio of Florida, but that's expected to happen, according to a person with knowledge of the talks who spoke on condition of anonymity. With the agreement in place, the senators are expected to unveil their legislation the week of April 8. Their measure would secure the border, crack down on employers, improve legal immigration and create a 13-year pathway to citizenship for the millions of illegal immigrants already here.

Hundreds of immigrants held in solitary confinement

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 16:44:00 +0000

Every day in the U.S. hundreds of individuals, held in detention centers for immigration infractions, are placed in solitary confinement, the New York Times reports. The Times reported that on any given day in the 50 vast ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) detention centers, around 300 people are held in solitary.

"I.C.E. is clearly using excessive force, since these are civil detentions,” Dr. Terry Kupers, a psychiatrist who studies solitary confinement at the Wright Institute, a graduate school in psychology based in Berkeley, Calif., told the Times, “And that makes this a human rights abuse.”

Via the Times:

Illegal immigration as art exhibit

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 19:46:00 +0000

In the summer of 2012, University of Michigan anthropologist Jason De León and a group of his students were doing fieldwork in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona when they came across the body of a 41-year-old woman. Her name was Marisol, and she was dead. She had been for four days.

[caption id="attachment_13220824" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="A map of a portion of the Sonoran Desert showing the spot where Marisol was found"][/caption]

“The way she was lying on the hill, it was like she had collapsed mid-crawl,” one of the students told artist Richard Barnes. De León explained the scene in an essay:

Who will claim the bodies of unknown immigrants?

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 14:00:00 +0000

At the bottom of a freshly opened grave, two young women use brushes and dustpans to sweep the last traces of powdery south Texas soil off the coffin. It’s a little before 8 a.m. on a cloudless May morning, and the punishing sun will soon push the temperature into the 90s. Up on ground level, the excavation’s supervisor, a sprightly forensic archaeologist named Lori Baker, snaps photos of the work. All around them, granite headstones display the names of the dead buried here in the city of Del Rio’s Westlawn Cemetery—Connor, Pennington, Ramirez. Baker has come here from Baylor University in Waco, Texas, to determine the identity of the others, the ones without headstones or whose resting places bear a single word: Unknown. Many of them, she believes, are illegal immigrants who drowned in the Rio Grande or died from heat exhaustion—and whose families have no idea what became of them. “It doesn’t matter if they disappeared in the 1990s,” Baker says. “People don’t stop searching.”

“I just look illegal”

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 21:16:00 +0000

I'll admit it -- when I first became acquainted with Giants relief pitcher Sergio Romo during the 2010 season, I assumed that the young man hailed from Venezuela or the Dominican Republic or some other Latin American baseball factory. It was an easy mistake to make -- Major League baseball rosters are fully loaded with players from south of the border.

Then I heard him interviewed and realized that he was as American as I was, a Californian native whose parents and grandparents happened to be immigrants from Mexico. His grandfather worked in the lettuce fields of Salinas. His dad saw Willie Mays play at Candlestick Park.

And I felt ashamed, having judged him foreign simply because of his name and appearance. Sign me up for the Phoenix Police Department, coach, I'm ready!