The US can move past immigration prisons -- and towards justice | César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 27 July 2022

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Imagine seeking safety abroad and instead being detained and forced to defend yourself in a high-stakes legal battle — alone. Law professor César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández explains how the asylum process in the US became warped into what we know today and poses a question that could lead the country out of its labyrinthian policies: In place of investing in more steel doors and barbed wire, what if immigration law was infused with support and justice?

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Ted Talks daily, I'm Elise Hugh.
0:07.5	Migrants so often turn to the US for safety, but thousands who enter the US for asylum
0:13.0	are locked up even when they're still in diapers.
0:16.5	In his 2019 talk from Ted X Mile High, law professor Cesar Quattamoc Garcia Hernandez
0:22.3	gives us context on immigration prisons, and in doing so illuminates how locking people
0:27.7	up doesn't have to be the way forward.
0:30.2	Outside of Philadelphia, there is an old nursing home that peeks out from behind
0:40.3	lustries.
0:42.4	Instead of caring for the old, these days it detains the young.
0:49.5	Kids who came to the United States with their parents.
0:54.8	Inside its hallways, a little boy named Diego went from diapers to detention.
1:00.9	When he was just one year old, Diego's mother Wendy decided that life in Honduras was too
1:06.2	dangerous for them to stay.
1:08.8	Like people from all over the world have done for generations.
1:12.7	Diego and Wendy turned to the United States for safety.
1:17.2	If you are in the United States and you are afraid for your life, federal law is clear.
1:24.7	That you can ask for asylum.
1:29.6	It does not matter where you came from or how you got here.
1:34.9	Diego and Wendy did just that.
1:38.2	Within a few days they found themselves inside that Pennsylvania immigration prison.
1:42.8	Two among half a million people who will be locked up every single year while the government
1:50.8	decides if they will be allowed to stay in the United States.
	...

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