Paramjit Singh arrived in the United States with a green card over 30 years ago, hungry to build a family and his own empire of gas stations in Indiana. Now, he’s in a county jail in Kentucky going blind from a rapidly advancing brain tumor, separated from his family and any advanced medical care. He’s been there for almost two months.
Excuse my interruption
Editor: I can’t get over how f**ked up it is to detain someone with a serious medical condition, refuse medical treatment or pain medication, and rob their family of getting to spend the final days of their loved one’s life with them.
This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. A woman with stage 4 cancer suffered in a detention center and was refused medical treatment the entire time. Her attorney said she’d had her green card for two years.
A young mother wasn’t given her blood pressure medication. She was eventually deported with her teenage daughter back to the country they fled to escape gang violence. She died because ICE refused to return her medication, (and they couldn’t leave the house in their home country) leaving her teen daughter alone and terrified of being murdered by the gang in front of their home (why they sought asylum in the U.S. in the first place).
A woman was detained directly from a hospital where she was being treated. Agents left her shackled and covered in vomit for 8 hours.
I could fill up several posts with all of the stories.
We need to stop this. We can’t allow the dehumanization and torture of people simply because of their ethnicity! ICE is recruiting inexperienced thugs with an appetite for violence and cruelty. The fact that this is happening in the United States of America and not a third-world country should make us all angry and ashamed. We MUST fight back and stop this. Every citizen should be out in the street. (Don’t bother commenting to say I’m inciting violence because so far, peaceful protests are still protected by the First Amendment of our Constitution. (You know, that document people on the Right used to care about?)
Back to the original article
“Last thing I heard from him was, ‘I think I’m just going to give up. I’m never getting out of here,’” his niece, Kirandeep Kaur, told The Intercept. She calls him almost every day, but she said he doesn’t talk much anymore. He’s lost over 20 pounds, his family said, and he fears he will die in detention.
The government’s argument to deport Singh appears to be built on sloppy research. The Department of Homeland Security misclassified him, his lawyer argues, as “subject to removal,” dug up his 25-year-old theft conviction, and, when an immigration judge found that Singh had done his time, pointed to a forgery case — which doesn’t seem to exist.
Singh represents one example in a growing trend of legal, document-bearing immigrants caught up in the Trump administration’s weaponized deportation system — and he’s one of the rare few relatively well-positioned to fight it.
His gas stations gave him a lucrative business portfolio: sixteen of them, plus a distribution center and an oil-supplying truck company, which earn him a yearly income in the hundreds of thousands.
So when an immigration judge found that he should be released on a $10,000 bond on August 25, his family was able to post it. But the Trump administration is using a dated mechanism called an automatic stay to override his immigration judge’s decisions, keep him locked up, and push for deportation.
His removal proceeding is scheduled for Monday, September 29.
