Climate Refugees in Toxic Immigrant Jails Are Victims of Environmental Racism
This article details the horrible conditions that climate refugees face in detention centres in the United States of America, which is another part of the prison-industrial complex.
This is experienced by climate refugees around the world, and those who experience this will increase, as human-caused climate change’s environmental effects in the future will lead to a massive increase in climate refugees, which will lead to them seeking asylum in countries that they have not traveled to before, such as here in Aotearoa/New Zealand.
The first way to address the problem of imprisoning climate refugees is the abolition of prisons, police and law courts as well as the establishment of new forms of dispute resolution such as transformative justice, community accountability etc. as detailed in our book Abolitionist Demands (http://ift.tt/2rOsK0G).
What also needs to occur is to engage in environmental and climate justice through addressing the social causes of the existence of climate refugees, which is human-caused climate change, with human-caused climate change being caused by social relations of exploitation and oppression such as capitalism, nation-states, white supremacy, patriarchy etc. and the establishment of post-capitalist and post-state social relations:
“In April, the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington, again made headlines after more than 100 immigrant detainees launched a hunger strike to protest the conditions inside the for-profit immigration jail.
The demands reflected many of the concerns originally raised by detainees when they went on strike in 2014: abuse from guards, maggoty food, inadequate access to medical care and exorbitant commissary prices, to name a few. The detainees were also protesting the fact that they were running the prison’s basic services for wages of just $1 a day, some reportedly receiving only a bag of chips in exchange for waxing the prison’s floors.
Conditions at the immigration jail have drawn in local climate activists and other allies, who, in 2015, blockaded three exits where buses and vans usually carry out detainees for deportation. The activists’ interest in the jail is not only grounded in concerns about basic human rights – it’s also about environmental justice.
The 1,500-bed immigration jail, operated by the private prison giant GEO Group, sits adjacent to a federal Superfund cleanup site where a coal gasification plant leeched toxic sludge into the soil for over three decades. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) took over the site in the early 1990s as part of its Superfund cleanup of the tar pits, which included monitoring groundwater wells, and stockpiling and capping contaminated soils, according to the News Tribune, Tacoma’s main newspaper. Today, the site is still dotted with drainage ditches, retention ponds and a capped waste pile….
Toxic Jails for Climate Refugees
When it comes to detention and environmental injustice, one great irony is that many of the immigrants the US government locks up in for-profit immigration jails are environmental refugees. This is especially true for immigrants fleeing the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. These refugees have often been pushed to leave their homes by factors that are either directly and indirectly prompted by ongoing climate disruption.
At the peak of the influx of families and unaccompanied children arriving at the US’s southern border, 68,541 unaccompanied minors and 68,445 families were apprehended at the border during the 2014 fiscal year. That year, Central Americans apprehended at the border outnumbered Mexicans for the first time. They did so again in fiscal year 2016, according to Customs and Border Protection.
Many of these families were fleeing skyrocketing homicide rates and rampant gang violence, but these are not the only forces pushing Northern Triangle refugees to risk the perilous journey to the US. In tandem with spiking rates of violence, these countries have also suffered some of the worst droughts in decades, causing farmers to lose their livelihoods and pushing up food prices for everyone else. In fact, in 2015 a World Food Programme study found that drought-induced food insecurity was a main driver of migration out of the Northern Triangle. Dry conditions have continued to batter the region in recent years.
Studies have shown that warming-enhanced drought can contribute to and exacerbate social strife and civil violence, such as in Syria, which was also battered by a drought at the onset of the civil war. Researchers are increasingly concerned that future migrations from Central America and Mexico into the US are likely to be much larger, spurred by the intensifying impacts of climate disruption and climate-exacerbated violence.
As more children and families arrive at the border, at least in part driven by climate-related factors, the US can either welcome them or continue to lock them up in polluted, for-profit immigrant jails.
Either way, more – and larger – migrations are on the way as anthropogenic climate disruption continues apace. Expanding an environmentally racist detention apparatus to greet future migrant influxes won’t stop them. Rather, it perpetuates the socially and environmentally toxic conditions that create climate-driven mass migrations in the first place, while cruelly twisting the real solutions to the crisis – climate and environmental justice – on their heads.”