Looking at the human rights abuses that plague the treatment of incarcerated immigrants,
Matt Blake usefully points out the structural problems that have made abuses more likely. I'll focus on a basic humanitarian point: government treatment of immigrants, whether they are documented or undocumented, must be ruled by simple principles of human decency. This has clearly been forgotten by many in law enforcement and corrections, as Nina Bernstein's
alarming investigation in the New York Times makes clear.
Bernstein reports on several instances of Homeland Security representatives hiding the truth, or actively lying to the media about immigrants, many of them legal immigrants incarcerated for minor crimes but nonetheless subject to deportation. In one case, a DHS spokesman said he had no way of finding out about a detained person who was suffering from serious health problems, while at the same time exchanging memos about how to deal with the potential fallout from the man's death.