Violations expose "U.S.-style human rights" hypocrisy: CSHRS

The United States' extremely harsh immigration policies and violations of the basic rights and personal dignity of immigrants have laid bare the hypocrisy of "U.S.-style human rights," the China Society for Human Rights Studies (CSHRS) said in an article published on Thursday.

Protesters participate in a Black Lives Matter rally march to Downtown Pittsburgh from Mount Washington to protest the death of George Floyd, June 7, 2020. [File Photo: AP]

The religious, cultural and racial discrimination against immigrants has kept developing and become increasingly intense in the United States, said the article titled "Serious Discrimination Against and Cruel Treatment of Immigrants Fully Expose Hypocrisy of 'U.S.-Style Human Rights'."

The article said that the U.S. government has treated immigrants violently and arrested and detained them on a large scale in border areas.

The U.S. "zero-tolerance" immigration policy has resulted in the separation of children from their parents, the article said, citing data from the American Civil Liberties Union from last year.

According to a tally by the institution, since July 2017, more than 5,400 children had been separated from their parents at the Mexico border.

According to official data, immigration arrests at the U.S. border with Mexico soared 88 percent in fiscal 2019. Border arrests for the fiscal year ending in September reached an 11-year high. Southern border apprehensions and rejections combined totaled 977,509.

Nearly half all those detained in September were children or families, many of them led by human-trafficking cartels, according to U.S. Custom and Border Protection.

U.S. President Donald Trump has made restricting immigration a centerpiece of his first term and his 2020 re-election campaign, and U.S. officials and immigrant advocates alike say his policies and cooperation from Mexico have contributed to four straight months of declining arrests.

While Trump's supporters cheer his crackdown on illegal border-crossings, critics have attacked his policies as cruel, resulting in overcrowded detention facilities and the separation of children from their parents.

U.S. policy has targeted asylum seekers, most of them from the impoverished Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador where violence is widespread.

Two conflicting mentalities, namely intolerance and doubt concerning the ethnic characteristics of immigrants, and the ideal of and self-confidence in assimilating immigrants, have been embodied throughout the development history of the U.S. immigration system, the article said.

"They have also become the theoretical basis for the U.S. government's immigration policies featuring assimilation or exclusion of immigrants," it noted.

As anti-immigration ideology occupies the mainstream position, xenophobia is pushed to the extreme, the article said, adding that the unilateral immigration policy of the United States has caused the situation of illegal immigration in border areas to continue deteriorating.