From the New York Times:
Migrants in Custody at Hospitals Are Treated Like Felons, Doctors Say
Border control policy is interfering with the medical care that immigrants are receiving.
As apprehensions of migrants climb at the southwest border, and dozens a day are taken to community hospitals, medical providers are challenging practices ” by both government agencies and their own hospitals ” that they say are endangering patients and undermining recent pledges to improve health care for migrants.
The problems range from shackling patients to beds and not permitting them to use restrooms to pressuring doctors to discharge patients quickly and certify that they can be held in crowded detention facilities that immigration officials themselves say are unsafe. Physicians say that needed follow-up care for long-term detainees is often neglected, and that they have been prevented from informing family members about the status of critically ill patients. Agency vehicles parked conspicuously near hospital entrances, health providers say, are also stoking fear and interfering with broader immigrant care.
Whether these people are refugees legally entitled to be in the country to seek asylum, or whether they entered the US illegally, everyone is entitled to decent medical care.
I also feel that every person who is in custody should be treated respectfully and with dignity, I suppose some people may make an exception to those guilty of heinous crimes, but surely simply entering into the country illegally doesn't rise to that level of "heinous"?
It says something about the qualities of our current president that the best argument anyone has made in his defense is that he didn’t know what he was talking about. -- Paul Krugman
™ Version 4.2
