This is essentially a health-care issue; it is not an issue of torture or human rights or discretion on DHS' part.
If EMTs or a hospital found someone who is not eating, they would feed them. They would feed them medically with any coercion required to keep them alive. Uncooperative patients can be legally restrained, compelled, and coerced into life-sustaining medical treatment; food and water are at the top of this list.
The bottom line is that food and water are not "extraordinary means" of life support. They are always considered ordinary means. It is not optional for a health care professional to feed and hydrate a patient. It is their solemn duty to the state.
I once stumbled across an extraordinary image of a suffragette being force-fed in her prison cell. I am not sure if it's a photograph, a drawing, or a retouching, but it apparently depicts a very real and routine practice of dealing with hunger-striking activists a century ago.
Now that we are on the right side of history, we see suffragettes as the righteous victors, and so would we rather that the government had allowed them to die from hunger-strikes, in contrast to ordinary life support for medical patients?
It is also important to note that labor can be compelled from prisoners in the United States. Slavery was not abolished here after the Civil War, it was redefined! The XIII Amendment specifically states the circumstances for legal slavery, and chief among them is for prisoners. All the criminals today who willfully and voluntarily commit crimes? They are offering themselves as slaves to the state. They are recapitulating the lives, often lives of their ancestors, who were unwilling slaves, by sacrificing their freedom to become voluntary enslaved by the state in prison. Therefore, enslavement of prisoners is routine, widespread, safe, and legal in the United States, and this won't exclude illegal, criminal aliens.
Most people in immigration detention haven't been duly convicted of any crime, and thus the 13a loophole doesn't apply. Jails cannot force people waiting for trial but not convicted of any crime to work involuntarily either.
The bigger moral issue is: Why do we continue to allow the 13a even to have a slavery loophole? Slavery should never be allowed in any context. And neither should "voluntary" servitude for below minimum wages for "commissary" goods essential to life and human decency the for-profit corporate scum prisons fail to furnish. All companies that use prison slave and so-called "voluntary" labor below minimum wage need to be outed and boycotted.
Comments
This is essentially a health-care issue; it is not an issue of torture or human rights or discretion on DHS' part.
If EMTs or a hospital found someone who is not eating, they would feed them. They would feed them medically with any coercion required to keep them alive. Uncooperative patients can be legally restrained, compelled, and coerced into life-sustaining medical treatment; food and water are at the top of this list.
The bottom line is that food and water are not "extraordinary means" of life support. They are always considered ordinary means. It is not optional for a health care professional to feed and hydrate a patient. It is their solemn duty to the state.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Force-feeding_(suffr...
I once stumbled across an extraordinary image of a suffragette being force-fed in her prison cell. I am not sure if it's a photograph, a drawing, or a retouching, but it apparently depicts a very real and routine practice of dealing with hunger-striking activists a century ago.
Now that we are on the right side of history, we see suffragettes as the righteous victors, and so would we rather that the government had allowed them to die from hunger-strikes, in contrast to ordinary life support for medical patients?
It is also important to note that labor can be compelled from prisoners in the United States. Slavery was not abolished here after the Civil War, it was redefined! The XIII Amendment specifically states the circumstances for legal slavery, and chief among them is for prisoners. All the criminals today who willfully and voluntarily commit crimes? They are offering themselves as slaves to the state. They are recapitulating the lives, often lives of their ancestors, who were unwilling slaves, by sacrificing their freedom to become voluntary enslaved by the state in prison. Therefore, enslavement of prisoners is routine, widespread, safe, and legal in the United States, and this won't exclude illegal, criminal aliens.
Most people in immigration detention haven't been duly convicted of any crime, and thus the 13a loophole doesn't apply. Jails cannot force people waiting for trial but not convicted of any crime to work involuntarily either.
The bigger moral issue is: Why do we continue to allow the 13a even to have a slavery loophole? Slavery should never be allowed in any context. And neither should "voluntary" servitude for below minimum wages for "commissary" goods essential to life and human decency the for-profit corporate scum prisons fail to furnish. All companies that use prison slave and so-called "voluntary" labor below minimum wage need to be outed and boycotted.