For years human- and immigrants-rights advocacy groups have accused U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) of holding people who illegally crossed the Southwest border in processing-facility cells that are too small, dirty, and kept so cold the cells have earned the nickname hieleras, or iceboxes.
The problem has always been that few people besides those held inside and CBP officers have seen the cells. But this week, for the first time, CBP released still images taken from video monitors in the cells. The images, unsealed in a lawsuit brought by the American Immigration Council, The National Immigration Law Center, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, show concrete rooms with no mats or beds, cramped, often with the migrants wrapped in survival blankets that look like sheets of tinfoil, huddled side-by-side as if for warmth. It’s impossible to tell the temperature in the cells, but the images seem to back complaints made for years against the CBP.
[For more of this story, written by J. Weston Phippen, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/new...s-immigrants/496607/]
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