US Human Rights Abuse Against Refugees and Immigrants: Truth and Facts

II. The human rights violations against refugees and immigrants in the United States see no improvement

◆ In the 21st century, successive US administrations have increasingly restricted immigration and treated immigrants harshly and inhumanely, with arrests, detentions, deportations and repatriation of immigrants on a large scale every year. The US government arrested 850,000 migrants in 2019 and more than 1.7 million in 2021, a record high since 1986. The number of immigrants detained has grown rapidly. In August 2022, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) detained more than 203,000 illegal immigrants from Mexico. In fiscal year 2022, more than 2.3 million refugees and immigrants were arrested at the US-Mexico border. A record high of more than 430,000 immigrants were deported from the United States in 2013. The number still reached 360,000 in 2019. More than 100,000 have been repatriated each year. In large-scale arrests, detentions, deportations and repatriation, the human rights of immigrants are grossly violated, and humanitarian disasters occur frequently. In September 2021, more than 15,000 refugees from Haiti gathered in the Texas border town of Del Rio, waiting for a slim chance to enter the United States. The refugees were brutalized by US border enforcement agencies, with patrols on horseback wielding horse whips, charging into the crowd, and driving them into the river. The CNN commented that the scene was reminiscent of the dark periods in American history when slave patrols were used to control black slaves. On 25 October 2021, the United Nations Human Rights Council condemned the systematic and large-scale deportations by the United States of Haitian refugees and immigrants without assessing their individual situations as a violation of international law.

◆ The migrant truck tragedy shows how rampant human smuggling and trafficking is in the United States. On 27 June 2022, a tractor-trailer packed with illegal immigrants was found on the outskirts of San Antonio, Texas. The truck came from Laredo, a border city in Texas 150 miles away from where the vehicle was found. Local human smugglers planned to transport illegal immigrants by truck via San Antonio to the US hinterland. The truck, which was abandoned on the roadside due to mechanical failure, was found with no water or air conditioning in its compartment and nearly 100 people crammed in. Among them, 53 people died from the stifling heat as local temperatures peaked at 38 degrees Celsius. It was the nation's most serious migrant death case to date. Human trafficking and forced labor have been widespread in the United States due to long-standing ineffective law enforcement and lack of justice. Recent years have seen thousands of human smuggling and trafficking cases taking place annually and the frequent occurrences of similar migrant truck tragedies. In fiscal year 2021 alone, 557 illegal immigrants died along the southern border of the United States.

◆ After COVID-19 broke out, the US government used COVID as an excuse for large-scale deportations of illegal immigrants. In 2020, the US government invoked Title 42 of the United States Code to prohibit immigrants from entering under the pretext of stemming the spread of COVID. Scientists at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the practice lacks a public health rationale and could instead increase the likelihood of the epidemic spreading. Through this practice, the US government has made over 1.8 million deportations, expelling at least 215,000 parents and children, of whom 16,000 are unaccompanied children. The immigrants who were not deported for the time being were sent to detention facilities and continued to be subjected to inhumane treatment.

◆ The United States has set up the world's largest immigration detention system. Currently, there are more than 200 detention facilities in its border states. In order to save costs, the US government often hands construction and operation of the immigration detention camps over to private companies, making them de facto private prisons. The abysmal conditions in the camps make those detained highly susceptible to physical and psychological illness or death. In July 2019, after visiting border patrol stations on the US-Mexico border, US Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said she had witnessed that the women being detained were held without drinking water and that detention officers told them to drink out of the toilet. She said that border patrol stations treat migrants like animals, constituting systemic abuse. A total of 21 people died in US immigration detention facilities in fiscal year 2020, CNN reported, more than doubling the death toll in fiscal year 2019 and the highest number since 2005. Up to 80 percent of the more than 1.7 million immigrants detained in the United States in fiscal year 2021 were held in private detention facilities, including 45,000 children. The El Paso Times reported on 25 June 2021 that private contractors had exacerbated the horrible chaos at the US Fort Bliss shelter where nearly 5,000 children were held. In the shelter, about 1,500 children were jailed in a stockyard-like, jam-packed and terrible environment that resulted in severe physical and mental trauma.

◆ The US immigration policy has caused a serious humanitarian disaster to immigrants. To stop illegal immigrants from entering the country, the US government has implemented a "zero tolerance" policy since April 2018, forcibly separating illegal immigrants from their minor children and detaining them in deplorable conditions. Footage provided by US CBP shows some children even being held in cages with only thin blankets on their bodies. On 18 June 2018, at a meeting of the Human Rights Council, Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, called the practice of forcing parents to part with their children as "government-sanctioned child abuse." UN human rights officials also called on the United States, the only country in the world that had not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, to join the Convention as soon as possible and to respect the rights of all children. Hundreds of thousands of people across the 50 states of the United States staged demonstrations with the theme "Families Belong Together" to protest against the "zero tolerance" immigration policy that has resulted in the separation of at least 2,300 children from their families.

◆ The US law enforcement agencies have never stopped abusing migrant children. In 2019, over a thousand children were still separated from their parents, and 20 percent of them were under the age of five. After COVID-19 struck, the US government enforced the provisions in Title 42 of the US Code, which exacerbated the humanitarian disaster arising from the separation of children and their parents.

According to a CNN report on 23 April 2021, more than 5,000 unaccompanied children were in US CBP custody, and many were kept for longer than the legal limit. Records show that among the 266,000 migrant children held in government custody in recent years, more than 25,000 have been detained for longer than 100 days, nearly 1,000 for more than a year and at least three for over five years.

On 26 June 2019, The New York Times covered a visit by an inspection group consisting of lawyers, doctors and journalists to a detention center of a border station in Clint, Texas. They found that children there were held in prison-like conditions. Hundreds of children were locked in one cell with virtually no adult supervision. A member of the inspection group likened the conditions to "torture facilities."

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet was deeply shocked by the overcrowded US detention facilities, the poor sanitation conditions and the lack of access to adequate healthcare or food, according to a UN website report on 8 July 2019. She stated that detaining migrant children may constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment that is prohibited under international law.

According to a report on the website of The Guardian on 11 October 2021, between 2016 and 2021, US border agents engaged in more than 160 cases of abuse of asylum seekers, including children. Leading law enforcement agencies, notably CBP and US Border Patrol, were involved.

◆ Even if illegal immigrants manage to escape from detention and deportation, it is difficult for them to be treated equally in American society and they tend to become victims of crimes. The US Supreme Court ruled that illegal immigrants enjoy the right to equal protection under the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution. In reality, however, illegal immigrants often suffer from legal and institutional discrimination and hardly enjoy basic rights and benefits. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 abolished most forms of public relief for illegal immigrants and even banned their children born in the United States from being automatically granted citizenship and access to public benefits.

Many illegal immigrants have fallen victim to human trafficking and forced labor in the United States. The Associated Press revealed on 10 December 2021 that for years, illegal immigrants smuggled into the United States ended up forced to toil on farms, cowing to threats of deportation and violence by overseers while they lived in dirty, cramped trailers with little food or clean water. Identification documents of the laborers were withheld, preventing them from leaving and seeking help.

The US Department of Justice website released an indictment on a human trafficking case on 22 November 2021. The document showed that dozens of workers were illegally imported from Mexico and Central America to farms in the State of Georgia. Trapped in illegal detention and forced labor in brutal conditions, the workers became victims of modern-day slavery. Promised high wages to work on farms, they were instead forced to dig onions with their bare hands, and got paid only 20 cents per filled bucket as men with guns kept them in check. At least two of them died, and another was raped repeatedly.

◆ Today, the serious discrimination in American society against immigrants and their descendants remains. "Asia Hate" has been particularly prominent in recent years. According to a 2022 survey by Stop AAPI Hate, the organization had reported 11,467 hate incidents targeting Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) over the past two years. Only 49 percent of AAPIs felt safe going out and 65 percent worried about the safety of family members and elders. As many as 72 percent of AAPIs who experienced hate incidents named discrimination against them as their greatest source of stress, even ahead of their health concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic.