July 18, 2003
STATEMENT OF THE NEW JERSEY CIVIL RIGHTS DEFENSE COMMITTEE JULY 18, 2003
I want to begin with a brief quotation from Dalia Hashad, an ACLU attorney, which appeared in the Herald News last Saturday:
"Twenty or 30 years from now this will be remembered as one of the bleakest periods in American history. Don't let it be said that you did nothing about it."
We are the New Jersey Civil Rights Defense Committee, a group of citizen activists from this area. And we are here to do something about it.
We are here to express solidarity with our brothers and sisters in the Passaic County Jail--all of them. But we are here particularly to applaud the courage and perseverance of two of the immigrant detainees being held here, among the hundreds who have been held over the past couple of years, and among the many who have previously held hunger strikes in this facility.
They are Nigel Maccado and Hemnauth Mohabir.
Nigel is from India. He is 54 years old. He has been subsisting on only water and juice for over three weeks. He has a heart condition and is being denied medication. Hemnauth, from Guyana, is 42. He is a permanent resident with a green card. He has been virtually without solid food for over two weeks. He is a musician and an artist. He was detained at JFK last April, as he returned from Guyana after a visit to his mother in a medical emergency. He has been denied contact with his wife and child since. Hemnauth has written to us of the conditions inside the Passaic County Jail. :
'The food is very small in portion and strange in combination, like macaroni and peanut butter....The jail is roach infested, the bathroom shower goes from 160 to 60 degrees in one minute....The police do shakedowns...on a regular basis with a dog....A policeman would be marching on the metal table yelling for us to keep our heads on the bars, the dog would be barking and jumping....One day a detainee was in the bathroom during a shakedown, he was pulled out and beaten. I saw his head bleeding....
'In March [during an earlier hunger strike], 8 of us was picked put and put in the bullpen...the police came in the dorm with their dog. It jumped at one prisoner and the prisoner pulled away. A policeman ran up ...and hit him on his head and pushed his face into the ground. One... came up and push his finger in my face and said, Do you want to say something? Two more officers jumped on the other prisoner and was trying to handcuff him....I saw them hitting him in his ribs and he was yelling "Look, my hands, put the cuffs on!"...On the night of the second day they came to do roll call with a dog. A senior officer...started cursing me, he said get off your bed you f-ing asshole" I said it didn't call for that. Then he and another officer came in and put us against the wall. The first officer slammed my ribs. I said I'm sorry, please don't hit me, then he hit me harder. I felt my breath cut for a minute....Later they came in in full madness [with a dog]. They threw all the mattresses on the floor and scattered all our papers, took our towels and sheets and put them in the toilet, and tore up a Bible...They [scare us] ending our hunger strike...Then...they came upstairs in the dorm with a pellet gun a dog and metal detectors and searched and took all the toilet paper, detergent, and extra blankets. They poured lotions on the towels. There were reports of other beatings. They spit on one detainee. They insult us, saying "You f-ing immigrants." I can go on and on....'
This letter is dated June 24, 2003.
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Last month the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General (OIG) issued a report that scored the abuses in the detention system. It cited beatings, humiliations, threats, attack dogs, improper food, and solitary confinement. Abuses just like those Hemnauth has described. These are abuses always and everywhere. But particularly here in the US where there are supposed to be constitutional protections. And particularly for men who have NOT been charged with crimes.
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Only one thing was wrong with this otherwise
forthright accusation against the immigration system: It implied that these
abuses were a thing of the past.
But they are not a thing of the past. They are here. They are now.
These abuses are being suffered by innocent human beings right here in this state, in this County, in this city, a few hundred yards from this spot. These detainees are being held because the system cannot charge them, Yet the brutal and insane terms of yet unchallenged immigration laws and regulations prevent the admission that they are harmless. A crisis of legal representation in the system means they cannot have due process of law without legal counsel and such counsel is not available nor is it being made available to them.
And yet the system will not free them and is not yet ready to deport them. They are being held here in NJ in larger numbers than almost anywhere else in the U.S. The numbers of men (and in some cases women) being held is beyond the capacity of the Immigration Detention Centers. It is overflowing into our jails.
The County government is being paid for immigrant detentions in a bounty system: so much per head per day.
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The New Jersey Civil Rights Defense Committee will not stand by while such injustices are occurring in our midst. We will not be accomplices.
The New Jersey Civil Rights Defense Committee is urging the Office of the Inspector General to conduct an immediate investigation of the conditions against which these men are striking. These conditions MUST be remedied or the detainees be released.
The New Jersey Civil Rights Defense Committee is demanding that the County end its contracts with the Bureau of Immigration. These contracts cannot be humanely fulfilled in this facility. Like mob contracts, they are a license to abuse and intimidate. They also amount to profiteering on the suffering of innocent people, whose only crime is to have sought a better life for themselves and their families in this country.
We join in solidarity with our brothers inside, with the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, and with all Civil Rights, Human Rights and Peace & Justice advocacy groups in this region working to end these brutal detentions and this national shame.
And we will not stop. We will be out here
picketing on a regular basis until they are ended.
The New Jersey Civil Rights Defense
Committee includes the follwoing affiliated organizations: (List in
formation) National Writers Union – NJ Local, NJ Workers Democracy Network,
Socialist Party of NJ, NJ Solidarity, SPEAK OUT AGAINST THE US WAR ON IRAQ!,
Youth Against Exploitation War and Racism, NJ Anti-Racist Action, Council
on American-Islamic Relations-NJ, One People’s Project.
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