Vulnerable Bodies: Latina/o Health, Migration, and Security, the department’s inaugrual symposium, addressed tensions within immigration and security policies at the Asian American Cultural Center on Thursday.

During the symposium, a group of interdisciplinary scholars examined the ways in which immigration policies have enriched U.S. private business while subjecting Latin American immigrants to a multitude of human rights abuses.

“We need to think about how our policies create an environment that makes the lives of some people more rich but not the lives of others,” said Edna Viruell-Fuentes, associate professor of Latina/Latino studies. “The ways that security practices try to protect some people, make other people more vulnerable.”

Viruell-Fuentes organized the symposium, which included professors and scholars from the University of Illinois, University of Texas, University of Houston-Clear Lake and the Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Mexico.

Jason Glenn, assistant professor of medical humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch, gave an example of how immigrant suffering has become a profitable commodity for private business.

Glenn explained the history of the Reeves County Detention Complex, an immigration detention facility in Pecos, Texas, and the world’s largest privately owned prison, operated by the GEO Group, Inc. 

Ranked as one of the 10 worst prisons in the United States by Mother Jones magazine in 2013, the complex holds low-security criminal immigrants serving sentences of one to five years. Most serve sentences for drug offenses or immigration violations and face deportation upon release.

Glenn told the story of Jesus Manuel Galindo, an epileptic 32-year-old detainee at the Reeves County Detention Complex in 2008, who died of seizures while in a solitary confinement cell.

Galindo controlled his seizures by taking 25 milligrams of Topamax every eight hours.

Physicians Network Association, the Reeves County Detention Complex’s contracted medical provider, swapped out Topamax for Dilantin, a less expensive drug with more severe side effects.

The medical staff routinely missed doses, and Galindo’s medical records listed 14 of such incidents during his first month of incarceration and nearly 90 in the twelve months that he was incarcerated.

Within a week of his sentencing, Galindo began to experience headaches, followed by two to three seizures a month. Complaints of swollen and bleeding gums, known side effects of Dilantin, as well as uncontrolled seizures, resulted in little response by medical staff that took up to 72 hours to respond.

After repeated complaints, Galindo was placed in solitary confinement as a disciplinary action. He suffered at least three more seizures while in solitary, the last of which, on December 12, 2008, was fatal. Rigor mortis had already set in by the time prison guards discovered his body the next morning.

Galindo was originally detained by U.S. Customs and Border Control officers while crossing the border into New Mexico to visit his family, who had become legal permanent residents a few years earlier. Galindo had stayed behind to support his girlfriend and young daughter.

The prison facility pays the Physicians Network Association a flat fee of $6.03 per prisoner each day to supply healthcare.

“That means that the company’s ability to maximize profits depends on it not performing procedures and supplying care,” Glenn said. “Because the majority of federal immigration prisoners are sentenced to a maximum two years, PNA’s business model gambled that the more serious illnesses that could potentially become life threatening would not do so until after the inmate is released and no longer their responsibility.”

Throughout the symposium, different speakers spoke of many such human rights abuses, ranging from local incidents to federal policies.

Rebecca Hester, assistant professor of social medicine and director of the social medicine track at the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch, likened the U.S. government’s reaction toward Latin American immigration to an outbreak of infectious disease.

According to Hester, the emerging immigrant threat is depicted as a viral chaos by some policy makers.

Alicia Camacho, Sarai Ribicoff professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Race and Migration at Yale University and the keynote speaker of the symposium, explained how the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement holds undocumented immigrants in prisons until they reach a “quota” that makes it financially feasible to deport them.

The agency does not use an electronic database, which makes it harder for families and attorneys to locate specific prisoners, according to Camacho.

Camacho believes that policies such as these exist because of the depersonalized nature of immigration surveillance and enforcement.

During her speech, Camacho showed the audience an image, captured by an X-ray machine positioned at a border crossing, of illegal immigrants sneaking into the United States hidden inside a truck transporting bananas.

The image stripped the individual people of their personal characteristics and reduced them to skeletons. They no longer resembled human beings.

“It’s the removal of the need to ask a person ‘Who are you, what happened to you, tell me your story,’” Camacho said. “The presumption here is that those people in the (truck) are all the same. They conform to an existing profile. They entered this way, and they deserve to be cast out.”

Camacho compared the depersonalized enforcement to the use of drones in the military, and said that, just as the average U.S. citizen will never see the abuse present in the current system, “no one will ever know who dropped the bomb on those civilians.”

The Vulnerable Bodies Symposium explained that U.S. immigration policy, while meant to protect the rights and safety of U.S. citizens, does little to protect the health of undocumented immigrants affected by the policy.

“The U.S. collects way more from migrants here in this country than it ever gives,” Camacho said. “We’ve enriched ourselves on the labor of immigrants.”

Chris can be reached at [email protected].