Booker, tell ‘Joe D’: Dems should be above cruelty to immigrants | Editorial – NJ.com

A jail under the control of Essex County Executive Joseph DiVincenzo is treating immigrants with such cruelty that it disgusted even an inspector from the Trump administration.

The audit found rotting food, unjustified strip searches, and a careless overuse of solitary confinement.

DiVincenzo has responded mostly with lies, and with a continuing disregard for the basic humanity of these detainees. It is a great stain on this state, and it has to stop.

Now, “Joe D,” as he is known, is hosting a Friday fundraiser for Sen. Cory Booker. Some progressives have urged the senator to back out in protest.

Jail run by Democrats is even too cruel for ICE | Editorial

But nobody wants to call out “Joe D.”

We have a better idea: He needs to confront Joe D about that jail. He needs to bring the concern he’s shown for poor conditions along the border with Mexico, and focus it on his own backyard. He needs to stand up and tell fellow Democrats that they must do better.

Booker, after all, is running for president as someone who isn’t afraid to take a moral stand.

“To me, being silent in the face of injustice is the greatest threat we have,” he’s said. “I’ve spent my entire career speaking truth to power,” he tweeted recently.

Well, here’s his chance.

After hundreds complained for months about the food at this jail, an inspector for ICE paid a surprise visit and agreed that it was sickening. Conditions were so bad that a kitchen manager was fired on the spot. One man had started a liquid-only diet and was considering a full hunger strike.

A second report by the same inspector found immigrants were being strip-searched for no reason and thrown into solitary confinement without so much as a hearing to see if they’d done anything wrong. Even for an agency that deports parents in front of their wailing children, that’s a bridge too far.

Slimy lunch meat, moldy showers, strip searches. Feds find horrid conditions at N.J. ICE facility.

A federal inspector raised red flags about how immigrant detainees are being treated in ICE detention at the Essex County Correctional Facility.

Taking money to hold these ICE detainees is, in some ways, “blood money” that signals complicity with Trump’s harsh immigration policies. But it can be justified as the least bad option, since it leaves inmates near their families and lawyers.

Yet taking this money carries an obligation as well – starting with a commitment to treat the inmates with basic humanity.

Instead, Joe D has denied reality. His people repeatedly assured us his jail is the very finest; “by far the best correctional facility in the state of New Jersey and in the United States of America.”

This jail has a long record of secrecy. It failed to report serious safety lapses to ICE, and it refused to turn over its records on solitary confinement until legal advocates wrested them loose in 2016. What they revealed was that immigrants were locked away in isolation for weeks at a time, and for petty stuff like damaging an i.d. bracelet.

Booker has called solitary “torture,” and on Wednesday urged the Senate Judiciary Committee to hold hearings on its use in immigration detention. But what about its use in Joe D’s jail?

Now that he’s getting bad press, DiVincenzo claims he’s creating some form of “civilian” oversight. But will it have real teeth, and unfettered access to his jail?

He also says he’s hired an outside consultant to do inspections and a couple of new wardens. But what will these people do to actually capture the real conditions?

And how do we know the culture of abuse by guards will change?

Booker has blasted the Trump administration as cruel and immoral, and he was right. The question now is whether he will hold his fellow Democrats to the same moral standard. If he doesn’t call out Joe D, his silence will scream of hypocrisy.

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