Coronavirus Fightback: Immigrant Detainees Wage Hunger Strike
On today's episode of Loud & Clear, Brian Becker and John Kiriakou are joined by Juan José Gutiérrez, the executive director of the Full Rights for Immigrants Coalition.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, has broad powers to detain and hold people indefinitely at the country’s borders. It has the power to imprison them, to expel them, or to release them to their families in the United States. In the age of the coronavirus, however, ICE also has the power to decide who lives and who dies. It has the power to decide who enters the country and who must deal with the ravages of the disease in the agency’s teeming, filthy, and overcrowded border prisons. That’s what’s happening in California, where some detainees are on a hunger strike.