News Round Up In-Brief

U.S. News

• On October 8, eight Democratic members of the House of Representatives were arrested outside the Capitol building during a protest to support comprehensive immigration legislation.
• Sonia Nazario, author of Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with his Mother, writes that U.S. immigration policy has been at the root of much family separation, both by driving family members to immigrate separately and by deliberately deporting parents without their children.
• ThinkProgress posted a “simple guide to the Affordable Care Act” for non-citizens with varying levels of access to ACA-provided care.

The U.S. Border Patrol’s “Low-Intensity War”: Ill-Conceived and Inhumane – Rachel Stonecipher

Rachel Stonecipher
SMU

In a previous AccessDenied post, I considered how the institutional culture of the U.S. Border Patrol often neglects the medical needs of migrants. Despite policies calling for “humane treatment,” agents regularly destroy humanitarian water bottles in the desert, allow overcrowding in detention, deny medications, and commit acts of physical violence. Moreover, as Seth Holmes writes in a recent post, the Border Patrol’s stated policy of “prevention through deterrence,” which aims to deter future migration by making the journey north as difficult as possible, is inhumane.

As the agency predicted, and as Holmes notes, the increase in Border Patrol personnel and surveillance since 1994 has forced migration routes into the remote desert, increasing suffering.