Death in ICE Detention
America can do better than this. Can't we?? Believe.
I never knew Choung Woong Ahn; you undoubtedly didn’t either.
Mr. Ahn, a native of South Korea who had come to America seeking a better life, died in the Mesa Verde ICE detention center in Bakersfield, CA.
Like every other ICE detention facility in California (and the majority throughout the country,) Mesa Verde is a for-profit business. Prisons and similar facilities that are for-profit do not, by definition, focus on the comfort and safety of people incarcerated within. Most deaths in those places are by suicide.
Geo Group and CoreCivic, the two largest companies furnishing for-profit detention centers, advertise extensive lists of “around-the-clock access to medical care, in-person and virtual legal and family visitation, general and legal library access, dietician-approved meals, religious and specialty diets, recreational amenities, and opportunities to practice their religious beliefs.” If you believe this, I have a crypto meme coin I’ll sell you cheap.
At a vigil for people who, like Mr. Ahn, have died in ICE detention, someone played a cellphone recording of him singing a prayer song. It was at that point I had to leave; haunting does not adequately describe that melody sent from behind barbed wire, or its message.
My head is thinking: People are being scooped up from their workplaces — people who have been working hard & paying taxes while trying to get legal status — and sent to detention facilities. My heart is at a vigil for people who DIED while in such places? This is my country, the land of the free?
Rays of light are sometimes hard to find. But this morning’s email brought a note from my granddaughter across the country with a photo of the banner she has made to carry in a No Kings Day demonstration:
Donald Trump will undoubtedly delight in the multi-million-dollar birthday parade he is throwing for himself — with ourmulti-millions of dollars. He loves those fireworks and marching bands, not to mention guns firing, tanks rolling and the cadences of hundreds of military boots.
But voices of peace and freedom ring truer, together raised in song.
I wonder, do we hear the cries.
sigh. thank you, Fran.