Austin Kocher writes about the tragic, preventable death of Emmanuel Damas, a Haitian asylum seeker being detained at Florence Correctional Center in Arizona. Damas had been complaining of a toothache for at least two weeks before collapsing and being transferred to a hospital too late to save his life. He died of sepsis. Horrifically, there are reports of staff laughing at Damas’ complaints and claiming he was faking his symptoms. DHS claims that detainees are often receiving the “best healthcare” of their lives. Kocher emphasizes, “There is no way to reconcile” this claim with “what Emmanuel Damas experienced in the weeks before he died.”

Kocher has chronicled the long, bipartisan history of preventable deaths in immigration detention. Basically, the concepts of “border security” and “immigration enforcement” have always been deadly–that’s a feature of the system, not a bug. One thing that makes it difficult to hold anyone accountable, Kocher says, is that the system is designed to ensure “that no single death can be easily traced back to a single decision or a single person.”

However, Kocher continues, “the inability to identify a direct perpetrator in any given case is not the same as the absence of responsibility. Behind every one of these deaths is a set of policy decisions made by people with names and titles and the power to have chosen differently. The deaths are, in that sense… the predictable outcome of predictable decisions, and the people who made those decisions bear responsibility for what has followed.” What a powerful call to action for all of us to hold our elected officials accountable.

(Taken from an email sent to me by Never Again Action.)