Fast forward 10 years to 2017. ShacCorrie and Saja are now married, with 2 children. ShaCorrie says of her husband. "He cooks, cleans, does laundry, makes the kids lunches, and gives them baths. I never have to ask for help. He just did it. We have built a life together. We have been through so many things that would have destroyed any family..."
ShaCorrie applied for US permanent residency for her spouse, but the petition was denied. They decided to wait for the outcome of his years-long pending asylum case, which was also later denied. On top of that, Saja was diagnosed with congestive heart failure and a neck tumor.
Saja was scheduled for a tumor-removal operation in January 2018. But because he had remained in the U.S. to support his family after his asylum case was denied, ICE took him into custody shortly before his scheduled operation. ICE did not allow him to keep his hospital appointment. In the weeks that followed, a local organization, NWDC Resistance, received calls from [inside the detention center] saying, 'There’s a guy with tumors on his neck that we can see, he shouldn’t be here, he should in a hospital.'"
It was not until April 2018, after spending months in pain, that Saja was allowed to have his operation, by which time nerve damage had led to permanent decreased mobility in his arm.
News about the Tunkaras:
Read the story of Saja and ShaCorrie's romance here. (Gofundme page to support the Tunkara family)
Did ICE Retaliate Against a Detainee Over Seattle Weekly Report? (Seattle Weekly, Nov 5 2018)
Incarcerated and Infirmed: How Northwest Detention Center Is Failing Sick Inmates (Seattle Weekly, Oct 10 2018)
Can Seattle Really Call Itself a Sanctuary City? (South Seattle Emerald, Jun 8 2018)
To those rather predictable people who respond to reports of abuses in immigration detention by saying, "Oh well, if you break immigration law, you'll have to suffer the consequences":
ReplyDeleteI'm all for being law-abiding. But let's not forget that the goal of law and order is justice and safety. Where is the justice if the consequence is horrendously out of proportion with the "offense"?
Losing your eyesight and losing the use of your arm for overstaying a visa is NOT a just consequence.
And let's remember that immigration detention is civil detention, NOT criminal detention. It is NOT supposed to be punitive.
And even in the case of criminal detention, is acquiring a permanent disability part of the sentence?
Detention can and should be carried out humanely. There are some people who seem to think that individuals who break the law, no matter how trivial the offense, and no matter how inconsequential that offense is to other humans, become fair game to be targeted for all sorts of human rights violations. (at least if the target is black or brown)
But some of those same "righteous" people can easily perceive injustice in similar circumstances when the victim is a member of their racial group receiving disproportionate punishment from a society ruled by another racial group. (For example, the case of the white American boy who was detained for allegedly stealing a poster in North Korea. Even if he did commit the theft, most people have no difficulty seeing that dying in a coma is not a just, proportional consequence for filching a piece of paper.)
Another asylum seeker held in NWDC (the same detention center where Saja Tunkara was held) died in Nov 2018:
ReplyDeleteWhat happened to Mergensana Amar? The Russian immigrant’s handwritten note raises questions about treatment at Northwest Detention Center (The Seattle Times, Nov 30, 2018)
Was the asylum seeker from Siberia thrown naked into a cold cell?
Roxsana Hernandez, an transgender woman from Honduruas who requested asylum at the official port of entry in San Ysidro, California, was also allegedly held in cold conditions after she was taken into immigration detention:
ReplyDeleteA fellow detainee, Stacy, alleged that Roxsana had fallen ill when she was locked up for 5 days in a notoriously cold holding cell, nicknamed an ice box.
Stacy claimed that Ms Hernandez was refused access to a doctor despite coughing, vomiting and suffering from diarrhoea and severe pain all over her body. "The ICE officials yelled at her" because she was sick, Stacy was quoted as saying. (BBC News, 31 May 2018)
Roxsana died in ICE custody on May 25 2018. An independent autopsy found that she had been beaten. "Piecing together the timeline and dating the injuries based on the pathology, it seems that the injuries (happened) when she was handcuffed and in custody," said Andrew Free, a civil rights attorney representing her Ms. Hernandez's family. (Journal Sentinel, Nov 27 2018)
If the goal of law and order is to create a safe society, where is the safety when the main breadwinner of a family is suddenly ripped away? In the case of taking Saja away from ShaCorrie and their children, ShaCorrie said: "Since my husband has been detained I have entered a financial vortex..." Despite working full time, she struggles to pay for basic necessities for her family.
ReplyDeleteFor those few Americans who believe that people who don't share the same nationality as them deserve fewer rights and protections than they do, it might be worth reminding them that ShaCorrie and her children are U.S.-born citizens.
Unfortunately, the Tunkaras' plight is not unique. A Mississippi family with U.S. citizen children had their husband and father taken away "when [the] family was at its most vulnerable – just home from the hospital with a baby only five days old." The father Jorge had told ICE about the baby. Still, the agents left the mother Rita alone with her three children and without so much as a call to local domestic support agencies, which is routine for local police.