Welcome to America: It Only Costs a Leg
Sometimes we focus so much on the country's abuses abroad, we forget about those committed at home. Please read the story of Moises Carranza-Reyes....it will make you sick....and angry. Here's just a snippet:
He has never been charged with a crime, in this country or in his native Mexico. Yes, he did enter the United States without an invitation in 2003....."I was trying to find a better life," he explains, speaking through a translator. "I've worked all my life. I don't care what kind of work I do. I feel humiliated if I can't work. I will do any honest work."
He never got the chance. So far the only entity to make a buck off Carranza-Reyes is the Park County (Colorado)Jail, which houses alien detainees under a contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Carranza-Reyes spent eight days at the jail shortly after entering Colorado two years ago. The experience cost him his left leg below the knee and almost cost him his life. And it's left him -- and Denver taxpayers -- with hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills that he has no way to pay.
He didn't get in a fight or an accident. It was the filthy jail conditions and lack of medical treatment.
Carranza-Reyes says he was handed a soiled uniform and assigned to a foul-smelling mattress on the floor between two other prisoners, in an open cellblock containing upward of fifty immigration detainees.
Many of the prisoners were sick. There were two toilets for the entire unit, both spattered with vomit and feces. People coughed up phlegm or blood into wads of toilet paper and tossed them on the floor. Then other people would step on the wads in their flip-flops, tracking the fluids across the room. The two men on either side of Carranza-Reyes were so weak they couldn't get up for meals; he had to bring them their food.
The prisoners had no way to keep the cellblock clean. A group of them demanded cleaning supplies and clean clothes. The guards told them don't worry, something will be worked out, but it wasn't.
When he finally collapsed and had to be rushed to a hospital,
The doctors determined he was suffering from pneumonia, sepsis, abnormal blood chemistry, and who-knows-what-else from the virulent stew of streptococci and other contagions raging in the detainee ward.
Moises has now sued. I hope he makes a mint.
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