Health & Safety Guaranteed?
The health of migrants at the Southern border is a bigger cause of concern than is currently realized
Race is a construct. We have all been told that countless times before. However, it is hard to ignore America’s relationship with race as our country engaged in a 246-year practice of slavery, followed by a century of de facto and de jure racial discrimination policies. The election of President Obama in 2008 was thought to have signaled that we were living in a post-racist society. However, if the election of Donald Trump in 2016 meant anything, we are the furthest from it. Within the four years he was in office we have seen not only an increase in instances of police brutality among Black and Brown bodies, but we have also witnessed racially discriminatory and xenophobic policies like the travel ban and child separation at the Southern border being implemented.
However, the worst policy to come out of the Trump Administration was the forced hysterectomies of migrant women at the Southern border. A New York Times article reported that a woman was told the morning of that “she would be having surgery that day” and that a doctor had told her “that the menstrual cramping she had was caused by large cysts and masses that needed to be removed.” Upon her deportation to Jamaica, doctors there revealed to the woman had invasive, unnecessary surgery. This woman’s story exposes to plight many other migrant women face while in government custody. Many have unknowingly or did not fully understand the procedure that was presented to them. Furthermore, these allegations expose potentially the extent, or more so, the lack of which the government treats those that are not considered its own citizens.
Stories similar to the one reported above are unfortunately common. According to Politico, between 2013 and 2018, 22 people have died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody. This number is high, and given that there have been continuous calls to upgrade the medical technology and record-keeping systems that the Department of Homeland Security and ICE maintain, those deaths should never have occurred. What these deaths combined with the surgeries described above show is not only maltreatment, but it highlights what migrants have gone through in order to come to the United States. Although much of the rhetoric around this topic is divided, I think everyone can agree that more can and should be done to ensure that the health of a person in the custody of the government should be protected.
Renowned social justice advocate and scholar Dorothy Roberts invites us all to consider that “race is not a biological category that naturally produces health disparities because of genetic differences,” but rather “race is a political category that has staggering biological consequences because of the impact of social inequality on people’s health.” This is insightful when one takes into consideration what is currently going on with immigration patterns not only at other points of entry but also of people of other racial and ethnic backgrounds. According to Pew Research, “more Asian immigrants than Hispanic immigrants have arrived in the US in most recent years since 2009.” This trend is increasing, despite rhetoric from President Trump who believes that most of the country’s migrants are coming from the Southern border and ‘shithole countries.’ While in office, it was reported that Trump preferred that “more immigrants come from places like Norway at an Oval Office meeting” in 2018. These comments are dangerous in the fact that they are not only overtly racist but in hindsight of the deaths that have taken place in ICE custody as well as the forced/pressured hysterectomies of predominantly Latinx migrants the implications are quite glaring.
