The ICE whistleblower has spoken. The people we’ve tortured deserve immediate citizenship

This week a whistleblower at an ICE detention center in Georgia came forward, alleging unsafe and unsanitary conditions at the facility, medical neglect, and a high rate of hysterectomies. “When I met all these women who had had surgeries, I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp. It was like they’re experimenting with our bodies,” one detainee said.

This is only the latest in a series of revelations of horrific human rights abuses in ICE facilities. At the direction of the Trump administration, ICE instituted a policy of removing children from their parents in 2018; thousands of children were separated before, and even after, a court ordered the policy stopped in June of that year. In 2019, the ACLU reported that poor care in ICE detention may have led to more than 25 stillbirths. In August, the Texas Tribune reported on guards engaging in systematic sexual assault in an El Paso detention center.  In the same month, The Intercept reported that ICE was putting people with Covid-19 into solitary confinement, effectively torturing them for being sick.

The ongoing reports of human rights violations strongly indicate that the purpose of the facilities is precisely to dehumanize and inflict punitive cruelty. Better oversight is not a sufficient response to deliberate, government-orchestrated atrocities. Instead, we need to close the facilities and release everyone currently held in them. As an act of reparations, and to prevent this from ever happening again, we also need to grant all current detainees citizenship.

There are several reasons why reparations for those in detention must include citizenship. The first is a matter of justice. The people in ICE custody mostly came to the US seeking asylum and a better life. Instead, the US has stripped them of dignity, of their children, of their bodily integrity. Too often, justice in US just means punishing wrongdoers, with little effort to address the victims. A first, minimal step towards justice is to give those we've harmed the opportunity to make a life here if they want it.

America has targeted undocumented people for unconstitutional and cruel imprisonment. We owe those who have suffered the assurance that we will not do this to them again. It is clear that US government promises of humane treatment are at this point worthless. The only way to protect undocumented people from the state is to give them documents. People who have been tortured, sexually assaulted, had their children stolen, undergone nonconsensual medical sterilization, or been exposed to unsafe conditions at the hands of the state clearly need protection from the state. They need citizenship to hold the government minimally accountable for past and potential future crimes against them.

Giving citizenship to those currently in ICE custody would also be a way to discourage future administrations for targeting immigrants. The goal of the Trump and his cronies in establishing inhumane policies and conditions in the camps was to deter immigrants from coming here. Many administration officials have said that the child separation policy was meant to scare parents and make them afraid to cross the border. The cruelty is literally the point, because Trump officials believe that by being cruel to immigrants who are here, they can prevent more people from entering the country. And of course the policy of nonconsensual hysterectomies is a eugenic tactic which historically has been used to try to reduce birthrates of populations the state has deemed undesirable.

Granting citizenship to those in detention creates a potential precedent, and a different set of incentives. Anti-immigrant zealots may hesitate if they know that setting up concentration camps will ultimately lead to people in those camps becoming citizens and voters. Granting citizenship to those currently in detention essentially grants potential citizenship to every undocumented person the US may torture or abuse in the future.

No one policy can address the injustice and violence of our current immigration detention nightmare. Detainees should also receive monetary reparations. ICE should be abolished. Those involved in human rights abuses, from guards in detention facilities to Trump himself, should be investigated and held accountable. But granting citizenship to those the country has wronged should be a part of justice and restitution. The people America has tortured should have a say in what America does from now on.