Neglect indeed by the reporters of this massive frontpage article that whines and moans about the health care we give people who break into America.   The ‘above the fold’ photo is of the dead body of 34-year-old Yusif Osman in a white bag awaiting a Muslim burial.  

The subheading to this overly long story is:  “As Tighter Immigration Policies Strain Federal Agencies, The Detainees in Their Care Often Pay a Heavy Cost.”    Implicit in the entire story is that any of us who want to secure our borders are causing the deaths of innocent, poor and downtrodden people of the world.

Here is how the article begins:

Near midnight on a California spring night, armed guards escorted Yusif Osman into an immigration prison ringed by concertina wire at the end of a winding, isolated road…..

Then we are told that there were medical screw ups and Osman died.  The Post says that he might have had a health problem that government medical personel didn’t notice.  His family says he was healthy.   He was 34 years old afterall!  Post reporters then declare and set the tone:

Osman’s death is a single tragedy in a larger story of life, death and often shabby medical care within an unseen network of special prisons for foreign detainees across the country. Some 33,000 people are crammed into these overcrowded compounds on a given day, waiting to be deported or for a judge to let them stay here. 

So, I’m wondering how this African guy (supposedly from Ghana, but his name sounds Somali to me) was detained coming across our southern border.   To find out the reader must go through what seems like thousands of words to get to what Osman did to get himself locked up.

Yusif Osman had been living in Los Angeles as a legal resident for five years when he was detained crossing back from Tijuana in 2006 with a passenger, also from Ghana, who had a false ID. Osman was arrested on a smuggling charge, which he denied and was fighting while locked up at Otay Mesa. 

If Osman was here legally he most likely was a refugee resettled by the US State Department and a volag.  Or, he himself was smuggled into the US and gave a credible-sounding story about being persecuted and then granted asylum. 

We have this ‘Pavlov’s dog’ response to the word asylee, it connotes suffering and persecution,  when increasingly those seeking asylum are just a glorified version of illegal alien who have come up with some great story that usually involves watching his or her (she would have been raped) family being killed somewhere by some bad guys.  And, we are such suckers for this stuff.

So, note to Washington Post,  Osman’s story is not one I would have started my whine fest with. The guy was living in America legally and should have been grateful for that chance and instead he was caught coming across the border escorting an illegal alien.  It is not the fault of health workers that he was in detention center in the first place.

I thank the Washington Post for one thing—the article alerts the public that illegal Muslim smuggling is happening on the Mexican border.