Blanche DuBois would have a tough time (well, an even tougher time) in modern America, as kindness to strangers doesn’t seem to be much of a motivating factor for anyone anymore. As the New York Times reports, an Italian man coming to the United States to visit his girlfriend received the common Customs response of being treated like a criminal for no reason:
But on April 29, when Mr. Salerno, 35, presented his passport at Washington Dulles International Airport, a Customs and Border Protection agent refused to let him into the United States. And after hours of questioning, agents would not let him travel back to Rome, either; over his protests in fractured English, he said, they insisted that he had expressed a fear of returning to Italy and had asked for asylum.
Ms. Cooper, 23, who had promised to show her boyfriend another side of her country on this visit — meaning Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon — eventually learned that he had been sent in shackles to a rural Virginia jail. And there he remained for more than 10 days, locked up without charges or legal recourse while Ms. Cooper, her parents and their well-connected neighbors tried everything to get him out.
Of course, he was lucky to have well-connected people working to spring him. As his girlfriend’s father stated, “It doesn’t happen that often, except to people you never hear about, like Haitians and Guatemalans.”
A recent Washington Post article makes clear that immigrants being kicked out of the country can expect rougher treatment than some jail time without representation. As they report:
“The U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will to keep them sedated during the trip back to their home country, according to medical records, internal documents and interviews with people who have been drugged.”
That’s perfectly appropriate treatment for people who’ve overstayed their visas, right? Oh, wait:
“Involuntary chemical restraint of detainees, unless there is a medical justification, is a violation of some international human rights codes. The practice is banned by several countries where, confidential documents make clear, U.S. escorts have been unable to inject deportees with extra doses of drugs during layovers en route to faraway places.”
The practice also violates the U.S.’s own standards for sedation. Moreover, instead of being reserved for mentally ill or extremely disruptive individuals, the sedations were delivered (gleefully, the article reports) to people whose main crime seemed to be wanting to see the details of their deportation orders.
They had it coming though, right?