From Miami Herald:
Commentary: A cry for help inside Alcatraz’s cages | Steve Bousquet
Gov. Ron DeSantis graduated from law school at Harvard — with honors.
So, you would think he would remember the basic principle that every defendant has the right to legal counsel. It’s embedded in the Constitution but it means nothing if a defendant and a lawyer can’t talk to each other.
This is the latest atrocity at “Alligator Alcatraz,” the mosquito-infested monument to the trampling of human rights in America.
One lawyer after another has driven out to the $450 million remote cluster of cages in the Everglades between Miami and Naples, only to be refused admittance and turned away.
They are beyond frustrated by bounced-back emails, unanswered telephones, endless bureaucratic forms and police checkpoints far from the camp. The ACLU, Americans for Immigrant Justice, Florida Keys Immigration, and other groups want a federal judge to step in and protect the rights of detainees to confer with attorneys.
They filed suit in U.S. District Court in Miami, seeking to find the state and federal governments in violation of the First and Fifth amendments to the Constitution by violating the inmates’ right of freedom of association and their procedural due process rights.
“No protocols exist at this facility for providing standard means of confidential attorney-client communication, such as in-person attorney visitation and phone or video calls that are available at any other detention facility, jail, or prison,” the lawsuit claims. “The only way detained people can communicate with the outside world is via infrequent access to collect pay phone calls that are monitored and recorded, and last approximately five minutes.”
The 38-page complaint is full of detailed accounts of the incredibly frustrating barriers imposed by the state and the lavishly-paid no-bid contractors it hired to run the camp.
From the lawsuit: “Detainees can go for days without access to basic hygiene items such as toothbrushes and toothpaste, and water shortages limit opportunities to bathe. The tents are overrun by mosquitoes and other large insects, subjecting people to frequent and painful insect bites. Lights are turned on at all times except during power outages, leaving detainees disoriented and unable to sleep. Food portions are extremely small, sometimes full of maggots, and detainees suffer from frequent hunger. Officers have confiscated religious materials from detainees, including Bibles.”
It’s beyond appalling that these immigrants, some accused of non-criminal traffic violations, must sit in fetid cages with little food and no medical attention, and can’t even talk to a lawyer because the DeSantis administration refuses to let lawyers inside.
Katie Blankenship is a lawyer who represents a detainee named Michael Borrego Fernandez.
“I can’t get to him,” Blankenship told CNN in an interview Friday.
Borrego, a non-citizen from Cuba, the lawsuit states, was stopped by police in Miami-Dade on June 10 and held as a probation violator because of outstanding traffic violations.
The suit says he began bleeding profusely and was taken to a hospital on Friday, July 11. On his return, he said, the camp did not give him the post-surgical antibiotics that doctors prescribed.
According to the complaint, attorney Blankenship went to the camp Thursday, July 10, and waited for two-and-a-half hours in her car before a contract worker handed her a “visitation request form.”
The next day, she said she got an email confirming a one-hour virtual visit on Saturday, July 19, which was followed by a message that the camp was having “technical difficulties,” forcing the virtual visit to be cancelled.
The case, C.M. et al v. Kristi Noem et al, has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Rodolfo Ruiz II, one of the youngest federal judges in Florida.
Ruiz, a Trump appointee, is the son of Cuban immigrants who fled the Castro regime for Miami in the 1960s. The parents endured first-hand “the suppression of civil liberties” in their homeland.
In an interview posted to the website of the Federal Bar Association’s South Florida chapter, the judge said of his parents: “They, along with so many Cubans, found themselves in the grip of a dictatorship and witnessed, first-hand, the suppression of civil liberties and the absence of freedom of speech and of the press. So, it is no surprise that my family’s experience has also imprinted upon me the importance of liberty and due process.”
Due process. Trapped inside the cages at Alcatraz, that’s what they want — and deserve.
Steve Bousquet is Opinion Editor of the Sun Sentinel and a columnist in Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale.
2 comments:
Don't do business with the police state. They don't have human beings best interest at heart and target mostly workers using all sorts of laws and policies. Also upside down taxes in Florida. It's class oppression under a plethora of dishonest guises.
In southern prisons and places like this Florida concentration camp for workers with darker skin, they hand people Bibles instead of educational material. That just goes to show you the utter disregard that they have for human advancement. Human rights and dignity aren't too far behind.
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