Things to be Learned from Reading the Yakima Herald

Yesterday, I came across a story on the Seattlepi.com sourced from the Yakima Herald. There’s a kerfuffle in Yakima between NIMBY businesses in an industrial district upset over a new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center that’s planned for the neighborhood. The local newspaper carefully considers all important angles of the story.

What it really is:

A 4.3-acre site at the end of Presson Place is proposed for a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office complex that could include two guardhouses and cells for federal detainees…”I call it a prison,” said Neill Hauff, whose company makes wind machines and orchard sprayers and has been located on Presson Place since 1996.

How inconvenient it is:

He pointed out that the plan calls for putting bus shelters on both sides of Washington Avenue by Presson Place, and for installing sidewalks along the street, which is regularly used by trucks loading and unloading at his business and others on the street.

“This would be a huge impact on us in here,” agreed Shane May, plant manager at Wrap Pack, which is across the street from Hauff. The company manufactures tissue for wrapping produce and wine bottles.

But surely someone will think of the children?

Hauff also expressed concern about locating a detention facility next to the Carpenters Training Center, where high school students come for a construction technology program.

And, of course, important economic factors:

[ICE spokesperson Lorie] Dankers discounted the idea that a move to a more secure facility might foretell an increase in workplace raids or similar enforcement activities.

“I wouldn’t draw any conclusions based on that. I don’t think there’s any basis for that,” she said.

In the comments, the community voices its mind. There’s the enthusiastic:

ICE Building location

The city wants to build it in one place, others want it built somewhere else.

I have a great idea !!! Why not build one in both place !!!

Soon…

There’s the frightened:

No matter where it is located in Yakima. It will be safer than being out on the streets with all the gangs ! I would rather have this located next door than a gang hangout !!

And then there’s the paranoid, illiterate racist:

Well, this is God sent to those of us who are on the border of where the illegals expand. Your neighbor smiling at you and dumping their garbage on your property at the same time, can get to you. So can your car being constantly vandalized. Couple that with if you try to hold out you get a visit from an Ogre at mental health. Add to that the suspicious way that CPS only wants to grab red, white, and blue children, and I am sorry, but you become suspicious. The ones quickest to call your a racist are the loud mouthed “white Hispanics” who are profiting from “flesh peddling”. The whole thing is a big joke on us while they continue bringing more and more of very low IQ women up here who care nothing for their own children and have them running wild begging on the streets at night. Thank God for severe unemployment! The low paying service jobs that I work will always be around. There are many, many people profiting from the ruin of their neighbor on this issue, well to them I say, the good times are over. Build baby, build!

What’s missing from the discussion? Well, there were some choice details about how ICE operates in an excellent article in The New York Times yesterday.

In February 2007, in the case of the dying African man, the immigration agency’s spokesman for the Northeast, Michael Gilhooly, rebuffed a Times reporter’s questions about the detainee, who had suffered a skull fracture at the privately run Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey…But, records show, he had already filed a report warning top managers at the federal agency about the reporter’s interest and sharing information about the injured man, a Guinean tailor named Boubacar Bah. Mr. Bah, 52, had been left in an isolation cell without treatment for more than 13 hours before an ambulance was called.

While he lay in the hospital in a coma after emergency brain surgery, 10 agency managers in Washington and Newark conferred by telephone and e-mail about how to avoid the cost of his care and the likelihood of “increased scrutiny and/or media exposure,” according to a memo summarizing the discussion.

One option they explored was sending the dying man to Guinea, despite an e-mail message from the supervising deportation officer, who wrote, “I don’t condone removal in his present state as he has a catheter” and was unconscious. Another idea was renewing Mr. Bah’s canceled work permit in hopes of tapping into Medicaid or disability benefits.

Eventually, faced with paying $10,000 a month for nursing home care, officials settled on a third course: “humanitarian release” to cousins in New York who had protested that they had no way to care for him. But days before the planned release, Mr. Bah died.

Feel free to discuss.