Lamar Smith, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, is currently presiding over a hearing on new guidelines for immigration detention in the USA that were issued last month and are now beginning to go into effect.

If you think the way the immigration department treat detainees here is bad, in the USA, it would appear to be atrocious.

In an article that appeared in The New York Times last Tuesday (27) under the title “Detention Is No Holiday” you will find everything that goes against basic human rights the USA trumps out it stands for.

Mr. Smith thinks nothing is wrong and he and his six other members (Smith is a republican from Texas) even says the USA “is too nice to the immigrants it detains. We are being too generous in deciding to give them safe water, an hour a day of recreation, and off-site medical care if they are in danger of dying.”

The truth belies that statement. The writer of the article, Edwidge Danticat, cites the case of his uncle who arrived in Miami after fleeing Haiti, was 81 years old and a throat cancer survivor using an artificial voice box. Although he had a valid passport when he requested political asylum, he was arrested and taken to the Krome detention centre in Miami. His medications for high blood pressure and an inflamed prostate were taken away, and when he fell ill during a hearing, a Krome nurse accused him of faking his illness. When he was finally transported, in leg chains, to the prison ward of a nearby hospital, it was already too late. He died the next day.

There are other cases mentioned: Rosa Isela Contreras-Dominguez, who was 35 years old and pregnant when she died in immigration custody in Texas in 2007. She had a history of blood clots, and said her complaints regarding leg pains were ignored. Mayra Soto, a California woman who was raped by an immigration officer. Hiu Lui Ng, a 34-year-old Chinese immigrant with a fractured spine was dragged on the floor and refused the use of a wheelchair in a detention centre in Rhode Island.

The article states there are “30,000 vulnerable people in USA jails and detention centres” and Smith and his panel say they deserve little right to proper medical care, that their very lives are luxuries, and that it is not the USA’s responsibility to protect them.

I have had to rethink my feelings towards immigration here.