Among the legislators condemning the order was Oregon U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley, who has been a fierce critic of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies. “Instead of pausing deportation operations, ICE is trying to get 45,000 N95 masks from the government,” he tweeted. “That’s 45,000 masks our front line health care workers desperately need to save American lives, including their own.” Rep. Earl Blumenauer, a fellow Oregonian, said according to Border Report that “it’s important that we don’t set up a parallel system that competes with critical needs of our first responders in order to prop up some of the activities of ICE, which may be inappropriate.”
But “public safety be damned” is exactly how ICE operates. Earlier this month, ICE issued a directive forcing immigration attorneys to scramble to find face masks and other protective gear in order to visit their clients, in yet another move at the expense of medical care professionals (and the due process rights of detained people). We know this directive was not put in place to protected detained immigrants but in order to keep punishing them, because Miami Herald reported at least one attorney who did arrive in protective gear was denied entry.
ICE cancelling its order frees up masks for people who actually need them, but there’s still a whole lot of shaming left to be done amid this public health crisis. ICE still has tens of thousands of people, including kids and their parents, detained in unsanitary and dangerous conditions so awful that some detainees have launched a hunger strike just to get some extra soap and toilet paper. Guards “don’t do anything,” one of the strikers said according to ProPublica. “They only yell at us and tell us that if we complain—that ‘unless we see you get really sick, or you really have a high fever, we can’t do anything with you.’”
Source: http://feeds.dailykosmedia.com/~r/dailykosofficial/~3/a2DdgyXzB3k/-ICE-cancels-request-for-45-000-face-masks-for-deportation-agents-following-congressional-pressure