The goal of the article was to bring awareness to the poor health care immigrant detainees were receiving by United States immigration customs and with more public awareness strides could be made to provide better support. In the article “Medical Advocacy on Behalf of Detained Immigrants” the authors explains how their group the CHHR attempts to get into contact with the Immigration Custom Enforcement that house illegal immigrants and provide healthcare services to these immigrants. The CHHR found it was very difficult to provide healthcare to detainees. The CHHR reported that communication with ICE was difficult and often took them awhile to respond back to their request. The CHHR also had very limited resources available to them and only had 4 physicians who were only in their residency available to help treat patients.
The strengths of this article is that the writers involved had direct contact in the process of dealing with detained immigrants. Unlike most stories that just report on the issue without coming into contact with their subjects. The writers of this article actually did get involved with their subject and encouraged the reader that it was possible to provide good healthcare to detainees if a person remained committed to the task. The weakness with this article is that it only provided one testimonial on the health conditions of the illegal detainees. The article focused on the difficulty to treat a detainee that had poor heart condition and went into very little detail about the life situations of the immigrants before they were detained. By going into the life of an immigrant before they were detained could help motivate someone to help support their cause.
This source is useful since it shows that there are groups out there that are willing to fight for an individuals’ human right, whose citizenship may be in a legal grey area. The United States sends out a message to the public that they are willing to protect human rights, but as the article shows the government is not willing to go out of its way to provide some basic human rights to their detainees.
This is an image I found on the website www.thenation.com it is a picture of immigrant children in a detention center sleeping on the floor. It is a picture that started to circulate when the border crisis was receiving a lot of news last summer. I found the image ironic since all the Red Cross could provide to the children were blankets and no form of cheap mattresses.
Human Rights in Latin America 