Thursday, June 18, 2020 | 2 a.m.
View more of the Sun's opinion section
The heavily armed protesters who mobbed Michigan’s capital several weeks ago denounced that state’s lockdown as a tyrannical move by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and described the state as being engulfed in socialism and communism.
The signs they carried reflected their feeling that their rights and freedoms had been abridged: “Give me liberty or give me COVID-19,” “The lockdown is killing us, not COVID-19,” “Massage is essential,” “I Want A Haircut!”
And despite being free to protest and do other things, many of these “open now” protesters compared quarantining to being incarcerated.
“I’m tired of this lockdown. We aren’t prisoners. We are constituents,” one told The Detroit News.
But while “open now” protesters in Michigan and other states were making hysteric claims about being confined, tens of thousands of innocent individuals were literally locked up in cages at the United States’ southern border. And they were being treated like prisoners, if not actually worse.
Not only were these immigrants been detained before COVID-19 struck America and before stay-at-home-orders came into fruition, but they have faced an array of issues that could mean life or death. And rest assured, getting a haircut is definitely not one of them.
The problem that many Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees face is not just being confined during a pandemic, but the high chance of contracting the virus within such a vulnerable, compacted area. Although ICE has stated that it is taking preventive measures to contain the spread of the virus inside the facilities, most of these centers are not even owned by ICE. Seventy percent of detained migrants are being held in privately run prisons, a handful of which have been described as inhumane environments due to the lack of treatment and horrible conditions migrants face.
And as of May, ICE affirmed more than 985 confirmed cases among detainees within these privately run immigrant detention centers.
While many protesters are tired of feeling like prisoners in their own homes, ICE detainees are raising the exact opposite concerns — they want to be able to practice social distancing and have access to soap and personal protective equipment. They’re pleading for a safer environment.
Oscar Chacon, executive director of Alianza Americas, told CGTN America, “If we were being rational about what measures need to be taken in order to avoid any possible (outbreak) in the fight against COVID-19, we would actually be making sure that nobody’s being left out, nobody is being ignored, nobody is being excluded.”
ICE has ignored the detainees’ pleas for help. Instead of acknowledging the health hazard that will inevitably ensue, detention officers have resorted to placing detainees in solitary confinement or tear-gassing disruptive detainees who are pleading for a safer environment amid the pandemic.
The contrast between the “open now” protesters and detainees couldn’t be more apparent. The “open now” protesters are not only counterintuitively harming the public health and safety of all Americans, but they fail to recognize the inconsistency in their quasi-demand for rights, freedom and liberty, even though they technically haven’t lost one bit of them. Not only do these protesters falsely claim that their own personal rights have been taken away, but they don’t acknowledge the thousands of people whose actual rights and freedoms have been stripped away, let alone their health significantly deteriorating from the poor treatment and conditions within the crowded ICE detention cages.
As many Americans continue defying social distancing guidelines for superfluous activities and protest their own state government for supposedly taking away their rights, which they are fully entitled and positioned to do, let’s not forget the tens of thousands of detained migrants who don’t have the privilege to protest their lack of rights and poor conditions during this pandemic. It’s time for Americans to realize they aren’t the only ones enduring this life-threatening virus.
It’s time for America to address the heightening inhumane treatment that is at hand. No, not the closure of barbershops and nail salons, but the inadequate sanitary measures taken to prevent another outbreak in the many cramped cages that house thousands of detainees at the border. It is in these callous cages where life is safer on the other side — somewhere not near all the riots and ICE detention facilities.
Kyle Catarata is a second-year philosophy student at UNLV.
