https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2018/08/us/ice-detention-stewart-georgia/?utm_content=chapter_01
Catherine Shoichet reports for CNN;
Miguel Montilla was in the law library when the banging started.
Over and over he heard it – the sound of a man screaming as he pounded the wall of the cell next door.
When a guard came by, Montilla listened. The man in Cell 102 said he was suffering from psychosis.
“I hear voices talking to me,” he said. “And they’re bothering the shit out of me.”
Montilla climbed on a toilet and spoke through a vent. He wanted to offer some words of comfort to a fellow detainee – to tell him things were going to get better.
“Hey, man. You OK, man? Calm down. Don’t worry about it. You’re gonna be out of here soon.”
But things got worse for the man in Cell 102.
Two weeks later, Montilla heard a jarring noise again – the sound of a man ramming into the wall of his cell.
Boom.
This time, there would be no words of comfort.
Jeancarlo Alfonso Jimenez Joseph, the 27-year-old who’d been locked inside Cell 102 for 18 days, hadn’t just banged into the wall of his cell. He’d tied one end of a white bed sheet around a sprinkler head and the other end around his neck.
The night he died in May 2017, Jimenez was one of more than two dozen people in solitary at the Stewart Detention Center, a hulking complex just outside Lumpkin, Georgia, that can house nearly 2,000 immigrants.
He was the fourth detainee to die in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody in 2017 and the 170th since the agency began in 2003.
. . . .
*************************************
Read Catherine’s entire article at the link.
Yes, prior Administrations are also to blame for this miscarriage of justice. But, the information on the dangerousness and lack of justification for most immigration detention was well-developed and readily available when Trump took over. Instead of dong what a rational Administration might have done, curtailing detention with an eye to phasing it out altogether except in unusual circumstances involving dangerous criminals, Sessions and Trump decided to “double down” on what they knew was a deadly and unnecessary practice.
PWS
08-24-18