AKA the Office of Inspector General, Department of Homeland Security.
DHS Inspector General Finds ‘Dangerous Overcrowding’ In Border Patrol Facilities
by Joel Rose and John Burnett, NPR
July 2, 2019
In a strongly worded report, the inspector general said the prolonged detention of migrants without proper food, hygiene or laundry facilities — some for more than a month — requires “immediate attention and action.”
The report comes amid growing outrage over detention conditions for migrants and follows reports that migrant children were kept in squalid conditions without enough food and basic necessities in a Border Patrol station in West Texas.
Inspectors from DHS’s Office of Inspector General in June visited Border Patrol facilities and ports of entry across the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, the busiest sector in the country for illegal border crossings.
“We are concerned that overcrowding and prolonged detention represent an immediate risk to the health and safety of DHS agents and officers, and to those detained,” they wrote.
In its response to the report, the Department of Homeland Security says the surge of migrants crossing the Southern border has led to an “acute and worsening crisis.”
“The current migration flow and the resulting humanitarian crisis are rapidly overwhelming the ability of the Federal Government to respond,” DHS says.
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The inspector general’s office released a report in May describing similarly dangerous overcrowding conditions in Border Patrol cells in the El Paso region.The latest report from the Rio Grande Valley includes photos of migrants penned into overcrowded Border Patrol facilities — including one man pressing a cardboard sign to a cell window with the word “Help.”
The inspectors quote one unnamed senior manager calling the situation a “ticking time bomb.”
Inspectors found that hundreds of children were held for longer than the 72 hours, the maximum time federal rules allow. In some cases, kids were held for more than two weeks. And some adults were kept in standing-room-only cells, without access to showers, for more than a week.
Inspectors said Border Patrol management informed them there had been “security incidents,” such as detainees clogging toilets with Mylar blankets and socks in order to be released from their cells during maintenance.
“We ended our site visit at one Border Patrol facility early because our presence was agitating an already difficult situation,” the inspectors wrote. “Specifically, when detainees observed us, they banged on the cell windows, shouted, pressed notes to the window with their time in custody, and gestured to evidence of their time in custody (e.g., beards).”
Charlie Pierce-
Once Upon a Time, These Photos Would Have Sent the Whole Country Aflame
By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire
Jul 3, 2019
Time was when information as damning as that released on Tuesday by the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security — whether an official government report, or testimony by a whistleblower, or by the dogged work of investigative journalists—would set the country aflame. It’s what Upton Sinclair did with meat-packing and Ida Tarbell did with Standard Oil. It was what happened when Life published the photos of one week’s worth of American dead in Vietnam, and when the first photos of the slaughter at My Lai appeared. You could see through the country as though it were one of those transparent figures from high-school biology. You could stare into its viscera and find it unrecognizable as the body of the country in which you thought you’d been living.
The IG’s report, complete with pictures, is unsparing in its conclusion and brutal in its truth. We are running along our southern border a desert-bound gulag of what are indeed concentration camps, if that phrase has any meaning at all.
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McAllen and Clint are going to live in the memory of the people confined there, and of their descendants, for decade upon decade. Sooner or later, of course, this country will decide even more firmly than it does now that these people brought these horrors on themselves by “breaking the law.” That is the way empires think, especially dying ones.