Well I have zero-tolerance for what you're doing to these women

Well I have zero-tolerance for what you're doing to these women

Immigrant Women's Health in ICE Detention Centers

Photo by Michael Goulding via ZUMAPRESS.com

A 2-year old died. Did you know that? Actually, she wasn't 2 yet. Almost. Six months shy.

Her name was Mariee Juarez. She was brought to America by her mother, Yazmin, who had been hoping to give her daughter the best chance she could get in this world. They came from Guatemala, often considered the Murder Capital of the World, across the Rio Grande in March and were put into an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) family detention center in Texas. Briefly after being put into the detention center, Yazmin and her daughter were forced to share a room with other mothers and children who were sick, and Mariee grew quite ill. A temperature of 104.2 degrees, nausea, diarrhea, weight loss...

Of course, Yazmin sought medical assistance, reports The Texas Tribune. However, she was turned away multiple times at the center's health clinic and at best was given a balm that was not safe to use on her child because she was so young. She was promised the chance to see a physician, but this never happened. When Yazmin was released from the detention center 2 days later with her daughter, she immediately sought more medical help. For 6 weeks, Mariee fought hard, but she died with a collapsed lung after visiting 2 different hospitals and likely suffering extreme pain in her final moments.  Mariee lost her life. Yazmin lost her daughter. Did the other detainee who got Mariee sick also die? What might have they gone through? What has Yazmin gone through after the loss of her daughter? What else do immigrant women in detention centers have to go through?

Detained immigrant women have access to substandard medical care, and this needs to be corrected. In addition to the trauma of detention centers, women face poor conditions in these facilities and their health needs are met with minimal care. Their experiences extend far beyond the scope of this blog post, but there are few widespread themes which must be addressed.

First, detained immigrant women can rarely obtain menstruation kits. They often feel humiliated by guards and too ashamed to even ask for them. Even if women have the items in their personal belongings, they are often unable to retrieve them when necessary. No facilities offer female hygiene products to their detainees, and several facilities do not even have them. Before being put into a long-term detention center, women are often held at CPB for roughly 72 hours. Conditions are no better here, says the Human Rights Watch:

“‘There weren’t any sanitary napkins in the first place I was held,’ Melanie G. said of the holding cell in California where she spent 26 hours. Dalia C., a 30-year-old Honduran woman, told us that the El Paso holding cell where she spent three nights in June 2017 did not make sanitary napkins or other hygiene products available to menstruating women.” Women do not have access to feminine hygiene products and are forced to deal with their menstruation on their own while detained by CPB and ICE.

Photo by Mike Blake via REUTERS

Second, detained immigrant women who are pregnant often face a worse fate. They are rarely provided with a suitable environment for their condition or a nutritious diet to support their child, and they are often neglected or mistreated.

According to Huffpost, Pagoada is a 32-year old who moved from Honduras, to El Salvador, to finally the U.S. After watching the murder of her brother and father, Pagoada came to the U.S. in hopes of protecting and happily raising her unborn child, similar to Yazmin from before. She was at least two months pregnant when she came over, and in her first night in detention, was forced to sleep on the floor of a room filled with other women. She woke up bleeding and in pain the next morning. She complained of her pain and worried for her baby to anyone she could in the hopes of being able to see a doctor soon. However, it took three days for her to get the chance to do this. Then, it took another three for the doctor to tell her what she feared she already knew--she had lost the child. It was too late. She was given no pills to manage the pain afterward.

Another woman who spoke up preferred to remain anonymous, referred to as “E,” was four months pregnant when she traveled from El Salvador. She was placed in a detention center in America and woke up one morning bleeding excessively, and she, like Pagoada, begged for medical assistance.

“‘An official arrived and they said it was not a hospital and they weren’t doctors. They wouldn’t look after me,’ she told BuzzFeed News, speaking by phone from another detention center, Otay Mesa in San Diego. ‘I realized I was losing my son. It was his life that I was bleeding out. I was staining everything. I spent about eight days just lying down. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t do anything. I started crying and crying and crying.’” She lost the baby, and she gave up her fight. She was deported back to El Salvador.

Miscarriages due to substandard medical care have been known to occur at 6 different detention centers in Texas, California, New Mexico, and Arizona. In April 2018, there were 35 pregnant women in ICE custody. To make matters worse, Buzzfeed News also reports “a nurse who works with pregnant detainees at clinics operated by Texas Tech University and the University Medical Center in El Paso said the women are ‘almost always’ shackled around their hands and feet, and sometimes around their stomachs [which can cause serious harm to the fetus]. In the past few months, staff at the center have seen at least two women shackled within a few hours of giving birth.”

Miscarriages and injustices are occurring to women who have no one to turn to but our country. They are trapped in these detention centers without help or a voice. They have a lack of access to medical care, and they lose their chance at a happy future in America. It can never be truly forgotten, and their America will always be different from others.

What about issues that don’t relate directly to women’s reproductive system in the detention centers? And what about men in detention centers? The Washington Post reports that a private immigration jail was recently audited by the ICE for denying detainees basic human rights. Several detainees have reported losing teeth from a lack of dental care and being advised to floss with their shoelaces. While there are two dentists at the center, no cleanings or cavities were reported in the past four years. Several detainees were forced to wait weeks or months to see a medical doctor. Specifically, records of men suffering months with congestive heart failure without medical aid are evident. In the past year, there have been 7 suicide attempts in one facility. Overall, there have been 75 deaths since 2010 in immigration prisons, and this past year was the largest of any since 2009. The U.S. has the largest immigration detention infrastructure in the world. Thus, these accounts mentioned so far cannot be the full story.

ThinkProgress reports, “A 2015 Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC) report found that immigrant detainees are at high risk of re-experiencing past traumas when they are detained, with many reporting symptoms of depression, anxiety, and even post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).”

Photo by Thomas Soerenes via AP

In conclusion, detention centers are degrading and abusive atmospheres. They toss aside morals, and they continue to be held to no standard because of the American people's ignorance or indifference. These people deserve more all across the board, but women are disproportionately affected in these circumstances by more than just a lack of reproductive health care. Gender bias leads to inequitable health care and access across the world, and this is reflected in the the experiences of detained migrant women. More accounts which attest to further unacceptable conditions for migrant women can be found in Medical Outcasts: Gendered and Institutionalized Xenophobia in Undocumented Forced Migrants’-Emergency Health Care by Roxane Richter, Ph.D., E.M.T.

Women fleeing to our country are forced into detention centers and met with substandard medical care. These women like Yazmin, Pagaoda, and E suffer everyday, but they deserve much better.

These women have been persecuted everywhere they have gone, and they deserve justice. If the Trump Administration continues to detain migrants indefinitely simply for crossing the border, it must be prepared to provide them with basic necessities like health care. If it is unable to do so, it must abolish the zero-tolerance policy immediately.  The treatment of immigrant women in these detention facilities is a violation of human rights that will forever be a stain on our nation’s history.