Just when you thought the nationwide crackdown on undocumented immigrants couldn’t get any more brutal, the Huffington Post reports that pregnant women in Arizona and Tennessee were detained and forced to give birth while shackled to their hospital beds because they couldn’t produce identification.
The shackling of female inmates when they go into labor has been a roundly condemned practice in prisons, but local authorities are now extending that humiliation to non-violent immigrant women whose only crime was being stopped by police without a valid license:
“When I was in bed, I was begging the sheriff, ‘Please let me free — at least one hand,’ and he said, no, he didn’t want to,” Juana Villegas said in an interview with a local Nashville television station. She was describing the experience of being shackled to her hospital bed as she went into labor. Villegas gave birth in the sheriff’s custody, after she was stopped by local police while driving without a valid license.[...]
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