Well, not Obama, of course, but, Trump
Trump is normalizing an inhumane system for monitoring migrants
As the government struggles to reunite hundreds of immigrant children with their parents after almost 3,000 of them were separated at the border by the Trump administration, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has reportedly turned to GPS-equipped ankle monitors to keep track of the parents while their cases proceed in court.
Ankle monitors are sometimes touted as a substitute for immigration detention — they cost less than $6 per person per day compared to $208 per person per day for detention, and they give immigrants a degree of freedom while ensuring they show up for their court dates, which is the main purpose of immigration detention in the first place.
But ICE’s reliance on ankle monitors raises serious concerns.
Immigrants who have been placed on ankle monitors provided by the private company, BI Incorporated, report pain, discomfort and hospitalization related directly to the ankle monitor units themselves. A 2016 complaint filed with the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General describes the case of a Honduran woman who experienced electric shocks, bruising, hair loss, headaches and difficulty breathing after she started wearing an ankle monitor.
Another woman, a mother from El Salvador, suffered inflammation and bleeding around her ankle and numbness in her leg due to her ankle monitor. A third woman, from Mexico, was hospitalized for the sores that spread over her body after her ankle monitor was put on. These are not isolated cases. For years, both immigrantsand U.S. citizens whom the government has shackled with GPS-equipped monitors have reported negative physical side effects.
Who was president in 2016? In fact, the word Obama doesn’t appear anywhere in the article. So, they’re basically assigning problems under Obama to Trump. Had this been happening in 2010, the media would have blamed this all on Bush.
Invasion of privacy is another concern since we know almost nothing about the ways ICE handles the data from these devices, whether it’s what information is collected, how long it’s retained by the government, who has access to that information or for what purposes it’s used.
Altogether, who cares? If they do not want to wear the potentially uncomfortable ankle monitors or have their “privacy” invaded, they can leave the U.S. They can just not come here illegally to start with.
