In our civilized world, geography is destiny. In all corners of the globe, political, economic, and sociocultural forces promote inequalities in the distribution of wealth, health and opportunities. Unequal valuation of human lives produces oppressed, exploited, humiliated and disenfranchised people. To see this heart-rending problem here in the USA, we need to look no further than within our immigration detention centers.
To even get to detention centers, immigrants first must escape home countries with issues that include food and housing insecurity, civil unrest and violence, persecution, and exploitation. With a resilience born of repeated hardship and for the sake of reaching haven, they reach US soil. However, the cruel system enforced and expanded by the current US federal administration conveys a message that if you treat undocumented immigrants including children harshly enough, it will disincentivize others to come.
For those able to cross the US border, many are placed in detention centers with incarceration-like conditions while they await immigration proceedings. Their length of stay ranges from <1 month to >4 years.
The journey that most immigrants and asylum seekers undergo for the sake of improving their life conditions often turns into a long and perilous path that ends in detention centers, where the conditions that they endure are worse than the ones they were escaping from in the first place.
ELOI Ministries Inc advocates for legal alternatives to detention methods and improvement in the immigration system of this country. If you feel compassion and empathy for people serving indefinite sentences without crime like our President did in the US immigration detention centers under ICE, support us to create a difference through our interventions.
