Force-Fed by ICE(theguardian.com) |
Force-Fed by ICE(theguardian.com) |
Should ICE or whomever else just like the people on hunger strikes die? Or should they continue force-feeding the people on hunger strikes? Neither seem like a good solution but I don't know what the alternatives are, besides giving in to the hunger strikers, which is most likely never going to happen otherwise everyone would hunger strike to get whatever they want.
If EMTs or a hospital found someone who is not eating, they would feed them. They would feed them medically with any coercion required to keep them alive. Uncooperative patients can be legally restrained, compelled, and coerced into life-sustaining medical treatment; food and water are at the top of this list.
The bottom line is that food and water are not "extraordinary means" of life support. They are always considered ordinary means. It is not optional for a health care professional to feed and hydrate a patient. It is their solemn duty to the state.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Force-feeding_(suffr...
I once stumbled across an extraordinary image of a suffragette being force-fed in her prison cell. I am not sure if it's a photograph, a drawing, or a retouching, but it apparently depicts a very real and routine practice of dealing with hunger-striking activists a century ago.
Now that we are on the right side of history, we see suffragettes as the righteous victors, and so would we rather that the government had allowed them to die from hunger-strikes, in contrast to ordinary life support for medical patients?
It is also important to note that labor can be compelled from prisoners in the United States. Slavery was not abolished here after the Civil War, it was redefined! The XIII Amendment specifically states the circumstances for legal slavery, and chief among them is for prisoners. All the criminals today who willfully and voluntarily commit crimes? They are offering themselves as slaves to the state. They are recapitulating the lives, often lives of their ancestors, who were unwilling slaves, by sacrificing their freedom to become voluntary enslaved by the state in prison. Therefore, enslavement of prisoners is routine, widespread, safe, and legal in the United States, and this won't exclude illegal, criminal aliens.
https://www.aclunorcal.org/publications/resistance-retaliati...
Some of the issues it highlighted:
- forced labor in order to afford to eat. The $1/day "Voluntary Work Program" is the only way to get enough food to live. And if you refuse to work or try to protest, ICE doesn't have to give an excuse to send you into solitary confinement. CoreCivic sells this labor to companies
- extensive use of solitary confinement often for "minor disciplinary infractions or as a form of retaliation for participating in hunger strikes or for submitting complaints"
- dozens of documented deaths from forced labor and medical neglect
All of these conditions have only gotten much worse.
The people paying illegal immigrants minimal wages under the table are far more analogous to slave owners in my mind.
This is unfortunately incredibly unlikely, at least when it comes to the people who are really responsible.
Some of the foot soldiers working in these prisons might get some punishment assuming we in the US still live in a functioning democracy (IMO until after the midterms happen, this is actually an open question) and if power is able to shift away from the current administration, but the people really responsible for this are above federal law, which is a thing we allow in the US.
They will all be mass pardoned by Trump before he leaves office.
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