Rad Geek People's Daily

This crisis is worsened by the massive, ugly bureaucratized medical negligence and political cruelty of the U.S.’s jails in general and its immigration detention system specifically. It is also only a crisis in the first place because the U.S. government continues to insist on building institutions to hold migrants captive and keep them around in case the state might decide to deport them. Even if they were better at passing around covid vaccines, and even if all the guards wore masks as they prowled around the jail, and even if they more assiduously handed out conditional releases to people with serious pre-existing health conditions, there is no humane way to jail immigrants or hold people for possible deportation. The crisis is not something that’s happening at the jail; the jail is the crisis, and there is one easy, obvious solution: stand down, let people go, and leave them alone. All of them, immediately, completely, and forever.