The suspected killing of the 39 year old Salvadorian father Edwin Lopez Corenjo by America’s ICE, reflects the ways the removal of medical access works as a tool of oppression, revealing the authoritarian tactics of the USA’s immigration police force.
A father dies away from everyone who loves him
Edwin Lopez Corenjo a 39-year-old — with no criminal record — working in a packaging company was taken by ICE and detained in Delaney Hall, under suspicion of being undocumented. His family, including his mother and 12-year-old daughter, were repeatedly denied visits despite their numerous attempts. Then on Saturday the 1st of August he died in detainment.
His family have spoken out in grief and his case has sparked outrage from protesters and Human rights advocates. This is due to Edwin having told his family merely a day beforehand that his medical needs weren’t being met. He stated that half his face and his right hand had gone numb, but wasn’t being given the appropriate medical help. Edwin also had been suffering from several health conditions, including epilepsy, high blood pressure and diabetes, before his detainment. That he was reliant on several medications to keep his symptoms under control. And through conversation with his family during his detainment, he repeatedly reported the “staff” at his detention center neglecting to appropriately administer his required medication.
ICE on the other hand have denied all claims of medical neglect and eschewed all responsibility for his death. Ruling that Edwin’s cause of death was undetermined. That when Corenjo experienced his “medical emergency” that the ambulance was immediately called and he was quickly sent to the hospital to be given care. However, their account blatantly contradicts the reports from the hospital that his heart had already stopped beating by the time he had come into their care. It also runs counter to the family’s statements that Edwin’s medical needs were neglected long before this, and that he wasn’t hospitalised even after reporting numbness in his face and hand.
ICE — America’s own gestapo
However, the most damming evidence against ICE comes from the fact that this has happened to several individuals before, in the very same dentation centre. With ICE even hiding the identities of those who had died within their “care”. Delaney Hall, owned by private billion dollar company GEO, had been already protested for months for the conditions detainees had been reportedly living in.
It is blatantly clear that now under Trumps administration, the already oppressive police force is now being used as America’s own gestapo. Rounding up “unwanted” civilians, particularly people of colour, and subjecting them to inhumane living conditions.
ICE has repeatedly tried to deny all claims and evidence against them. Stating to provide “high quality”, “safe” and “humane” living quarters for their detainees. However, despite these claims, the centre has reputedly blocked all investigations and inspections on its living quality. ICE has also felt the need to consistently falsely state that Delaney Hall is only used to hold the most vile perpetrators, such as sex traffickers, rapists and murderers. This is despite widely available statistics showing that 88% of those imprisoned have no criminal record at all. Raising the question of why they felt the need to lie about this if the detainee were being treated well regardless.
This, coupled with a recent ICE policy that appears to absolve the agency of responsibility if detainees die after being released, suggests these deaths are not accidental but a systemic outcome of the detention centres’ operations. That these facilities purpose is to torture and torment the people imprisoned through poor living conditions and medical neglect and systemically kill whomever the nation deems “illegal”. And this tactic is far from new. It being a common method of concentration camps throughout history.
No one has medical needs in a concentration camp
Tactics similar to the ones deployed by ICE can be also found in the infamous Nazi Germany. With their camps not only having horrific conditions with prisoners stuffed in overcrowded facilities, straw beds, forced labor and physical and sexual abuse, but being designed to keep prisoners medically compromised. As quoted from the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial and museum:
The overall conditions of camp life ensured that many people fell sick from the very first months, and their numbers rose steadily over time.
Torture and abuse left people severely injured, while overcrowding and unsanitary conditions allowed disease and illness to spread rampantly. With diseases such as Malaria, meningitis, pemphigus, pneumonia and infections being common place in the encampment. And the SS soldiers would completely deny them any medical necessities or care. Allowing the prisoners to slowly succumb to their injuries and illnesses.
ICE — Humans are not illegal
To be clear, ICE’s corruption is far from new. It preexisted even the conceptualisation of Donald Trump as a political figure and instead is a manifestation of the systemic dehumanisation of people of colour (POC) in America. Always having acted as a weapon to treat POC immigrants as animals to be rounded up, imprisoned and deported. However it is undebatable that this institutionalised abuse of POC, undocumented civilians and fully-fledged citizens has increased in the last two years. And the detention centres use of the classic authoritarian tactic of weaponised medical neglect, symbolises a shift in the United states into a more blatant refection of its supremacist colonial core.
The abuse within Delaney hall is found, not only throughout all of the 220 detention centres used by ICE, but through all of the police forces operations. With them murdering immigrants and citizens alike in broad daylight and refusing prove their status as they kidnap people of the streets with their faces hidden. It shows America becoming the racial police state it was always built to be. A place where the systemic dehumanization of its non-white citizens has inevitably created an authoritarian government to the disadvantage of all its citizens.
However inevitability does not equate to apathy. But if the mass backlash against ICE, the global voices against dehumanisation, and the words of victims’ loved ones can create anything, perhaps it can be the means to overturn this centuries-old, inhumane system.
Featured image via Instagram
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