ICE & Best Western
- Details
- Published on Thursday, 17 September 2020 22:22
- Written by editor
Best Western has opened its hotel doors to ICE to detain migrant children in the U.S.
Tell the hotel’s executives to stop participating in a shadowy system for secretly detaining migrant children.
A,
Since the beginning of the year, over 100 migrants — many believed to be children — have been detained at a Best Western Hotel by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contractor.
There has been no way for these kids to report neglect or abuse. No way for them to request legal help. And no way for their parents to even know where they are.
Being held in a hotel instead of a migrant detention center means that the systems put in place to protect and keep track of these children are gone. Once they walked through the doors of the Best Western, they essentially disappeared.
MVM is the ICE contractor, and has received hundreds of millions of dollars from ICE to transport migrant children and families under a shroud of secrecy, and detain them in hotels. While MVM claims that its workers are trained in how to respond to reports of physical or sexual abuse, they are not contractually obligated to do anything about the reports.
Best Western staff are the only other people who have been in a position to sound the alarm if they’ve seen children being abused while in MVM care. But they aren’t required to say anything either. And in fact, it seems like they have been willing participants in this unregulated shadow detention system.
Tell Best Western to stop ignoring the unregulated detainment of children at their hotels.
Best Western is not the only major hotel chain that ICE and MVM have used to detain migrant children and families. But Choice Hotels and Hilton executives have all made public statements that they didn’t know their hotels were being used for this purpose, that it goes against company policy, and that their franchisees have been told to stop.
Best Western still has not made a public statement saying that they won’t allow migrants to be detained in their hotels. And even when SumOfUs staff reached out directly to the Best Western corporate office for a response, we never received word back.
By remaining silent on the potential abuse that has happened at its Hotel, Best Western is signalling that its doors will always be open to MVM and ICE. And as long as hotels are willing participants in a system that loses children and ignores abuse, the horror will never stop.
Act now to demand that Best Western publicly end its relationship with MVM and ICE.
Time and time again, action by SumOfUs members in Canada has supported campaigns to push for rights and justice for migrants in the US. In SumOfUs' biggest win in Canada last year, we got the Canada Pension Plan to pull its investment from the architects of Trump's child separation camps at the US-Mexico border, Geo Group and CoreCivic, after a year of sustained pressure.
Together, we can push Best Western to stop detaining migrants for ICE if we take action now.
Thanks for all that you do,
Angus, Lacey and the team at SumOfUs
More information:
A Private Security Company Is Detaining Migrant Children at Hotels, The New York Times, August 16, 2020.
Migrant kids held in US hotels, then expelled, Associated Press, July 22, 2020.
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