Charleston Gazette-Mail, Thursday, February 20, 2020 3A

In his order Wednesday, Bury wrote that the Border

Patrol and its parent agencies, or the defendants in the case, “administer a detention system that deprives detainees, who are held in CBP stations, Tuc-son Sector, longer than 48 hours, of conditions of con-finement that meet basic hu-man needs.”

Conditions that migrants — who are considered civil detainees, not criminal — are subjected to after 12 hours are “presumptively-punitive and violate the Constitution,” and are even worse than a criminal jail or prison, the judge wrote.

Bury has been critical of the agency, saying it has done lit-tle to remedy issues, especial-ly around overcrowding and migrants’ inability to sleep.

“Nobody has done anything. Is that why a court has to jump in?” Bury asked during the last day of trial on Jan. 22. “It just seems like the lack of a response to these numbers just calls for a court order.”

Government attorneys said

in their closing arguments last month that plaintiffs didn’t prove the agency violated any constitutional rights. It says many things are out of the agency’s control, such as whether other agencies in-volved in taking migrants have capacity.

Its facilities were built of short-term stays, for adults. Holding cells are in odd shapes, reducing the number of sleeping mats that can com-fortably fit on the ground. On nights when agents arrest large groups of people, or when other agencies involved in immigration don’t have the capacity to pick them up, cells become extremely overcrowd-ed.

A video displayed on the opening day of the trial showed a man walking over body after body as he tried to make his way to the bath-room. Once there, he realized all stalls had people sleeping in them.

READERS’

Vent——

■ Are the same legislators who are try-ing to bankrupt the state by doing away with property taxes the same who refuse to move the state forward by passing cannabis laws?

■ One question I’d like to ask any Legis-lator is why does the Legislature never seek to raise the taxes on beer, wine and liquor? I’m fine with raising taxes on tobacco. But why are they afraid of any raise on alcohol products? To me, it’s a no-brainer. Like tobacco, alcohol is a luxury or choice item. You don’t have to have it to live your daily life.

■ Once again or Republican leaders try to shove this new layer of the judicial system down our throat. We don’t need it. More high paying jobs at the taxpayer expense. More outrageous re-tirements. West Virginia’s population has dropped by more than 200,000 people in the last 70 years. And they think we need this? We have managed fine with the system we have, thank you very much. More, more, more for big money and the little guy paying for it.

■ I see where the Greenbrier East girls team played at GW Tuesday night. So, at least our governor was in Charleston once this week.

■ Anyone who didn’t read Phil Kabler’s column on Wednesday missed a bril-liant summation of West Virginia’s un-happy economic history. He placed the blame where it belongs, on legislators who are beholden to corporate fat cats.

■ No one likes paying taxes but to phase-out property tax collections would devastate the state. Perhaps our esteemed elected officials would take measures to move the state forward rather than continue the race to bank-rupt the state.

■ If you wonder what Medicare for all would be like just look at what is hap-pening in West Virginia. Just over half of our population is on Medicare and Medicaid. The low reimbursement rates are causing hospitals to lose money and close throughout the area. Medi-care for all would bankrupt the nation’s entire medical system.

■ I wish our local Democrat know-it-alls would make up their minds. One day they complain we need more compa-nies to move to West Virginia. Next day they complain we give too many tax breaks to out of state companies. I can’t blame companies for bypassing West Virgina on their way to North Car-olina and Tennessee. Too many old school Democrats here.

Make your voice heardExpress your opinion on any sub-ject you wish. The volume of vents and space restrictions prevent pub-lications of all comments.

Email readersvent@wvgazettemail.com or mail to Readers’ Vent, 1001 Virginia Street E., Charleston, WV 25301.

F. BRIAN FERGUSON | Gazette-Mail

Danny’s BBQ Shack, which opened Wednesday in the 1000 block of Quarrier Street, had a full house during the lunch rush. Charleston’s former mayor Danny Jones was a restaurateur, among other things, before he was mayor. The restaurant is open for lunch only and features barbecue sandwiches and ribs.

NEW BBQ SPOT FILLS UP PDQ

By Lacie PiersonStaff writer

Elections for county pros-ecutors will become a non-partisan affair under a bill approved in the West Virgin-ia Senate Wednesday.

The Senate approved Sen-ate Bill 204 in a 30-4 vote Wednesday.

If the bill becomes law elections for county prosecu-tors will work similar to ju-dicial elections. Prosecutors

would be elected during the May primary election, and their political party wouldn’t be listed on the ballot.

The proposed prosecutor elections would be different from judicial elections in one way: in the event that a prosecuting attorney candi-date fails to get a majority of the votes, the two candi-dates with the most votes would advance to a run-off election during the general election in a given year.

Sen. Charles Clements, R-Wetzel, proposed the run-off provision during the Senate Judiciary meeting on Feb. 13, saying he didn’t want to repeat a situation like the 2018 Supreme Court special election in which the people who were elected to the court each received less than the majority of the vote in a field of more than 20 candidates.

Justice Evan Jenkins was elected after receiving 36

percent of the votes cast in his division, and Justice Tim Armstead was elected after receiving 26 percent of the votes in his division.

During the Feb. 13 Senate Judiciary Committee meet-ing, Sen. Mike Romano, D-Harrison, said the lack of a run-off for the Supreme Court election was “danger-ous” given the weight and authority of the position.

In the House of Delegates, House Bill 2008 would estab-

lish a general election run-off in Supreme Court elec-tions. The House Judiciary Committee approved the bill on Jan. 9. It was referenced to the House Finance Com-mittee, where it has been since Jan. 10.

Senate Bill 204 will ad-vance to the House for con-sideration.

Reach Lacie Pierson at lacie.pierson@wvgazettemail.com,

304-348-1723 or follow @laciepierson on Twitter.

Senate votes to make prosecutor elections nonpartisan

By Brady McCombsThe Associated Press

SALT LAKE CITY — Brigham Young University in Utah has revised its strict code of con-duct to strip a rule that banned any behavior that reflected “homosexual feelings,” which LGBTQ students and their al-lies felt created an unfair double standard not imposed on heterosexual couples.

The university is owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which teach-es its members that being gay isn’t a sin, but engaging in same-sex intimacy is.

BYU’s revisions to what the college calls its honor code don’t change the faith’s oppo-sition to same-sex relation-ships or gay marriage. The changes were discovered by media outlets Wednesday. BYU issued a statement saying the updated version of the code aligns with a new handbook of rules unveiled by the faith, widely known as the Mormon church.

A phone call to BYU offi-cials seeking more information about the change wasn’t im-mediately returned.

The faith has tried to carve out a more compassionate stance toward LGBTQ people over the last decade, while adhering to its doctrinal belief that same-sex relationships are a sin.

An entire section in the code that was dedicated to “homosexual behavior” has been removed. The clause that upset people was the part that said “all forms of physical in-timacy that give expression to homosexual feelings” is pro-hibited.

Mormon-owned BYU eases rules on ‘homosexual behavior’

By Astrid GalvanThe Associated Press

PHOENIX — Conditions at most Border Patrol facilities in Arizona are punitive and unconstitutional, a U.S. judge in Arizona said Wednesday while ruling in favor of mi-grants who have long-com-plained about inhumane and unsanitary conditions in hold-ing cells.

The ruling came weeks after the conclusion of a sev-en-day trial in which attor-neys for migrants who sued in2015 argued that the agen-cy holds immigrants in ex-tremely cold, overcrowded, unsanitary and inhumane cells.

The order makes perma-nent a preliminary injunction that U.S. District Court Judge David C. Bury issued in 2016 requiring the Tucson Sector to provide clean mats and thin blankets to migrants held for longer than 12 hours and to allow them to clean them-selves.

It also bars the agency from holding migrants more than 48 hours if they’ve been fully processed, which is common when other agen-cies involved in taking the migrants, such as Immigra-tion and Customs Enforce-ment, don’t have the capacity to pick them up in a reason-able amount of time.

Bury is also banning the use of bathrooms for sleep-ing, which came to light during the trial this year, when video was shown of a man trying to reach a bath-room but failing to because migrants were sleeping in them.

“Today’s decision is a tre-mendous victory for commu-nities everywhere fighting courageously to uphold hu-man dignity and the rights enshrined in our Constitu-tion,” Alvaro M. Huerta, staff attorney at the National Im-migration Law Center, said in a statement.

The center was one of the advocacy groups that brought the case forward. It was ar-gued in court by attorneys for

the law firm Morrison & Fo-erster.

“We are enthused that our justice system has intervened in a meaningful way to insti-tute much needed change and hold CBP accountable,” Huerta said.

Customs and Border Pro-tection didn’t immediately respond to a request for com-ment.

In his order, Bury said there’s no evidence CBP in-tends to create punitive con-ditions, but that the agency has stretched resources to “provide the best conditions of confinement available un-der the circumstances.”

Although the lawsuit pre-dates last year’s surge in immigrant arrivals, it illus-trates some of the challenges posed when migrants are detained, especially if they are children. Reports of hell-ish conditions circulated in many parts of the Texas bor-der last year, where thou-sands of immigrants — large-ly families — crossed over from Mexico. In El Paso, an inspection by the govern-ment’s internal watchdog found there were 900 people crammed into a 125-person facility at one point in May.

US judge sides with migrants in case against Border Patrol

U.S. Border Patrol via AP, File

This image made from U.S. Border Patrol surveillance video shows a child crawling on the concrete floor near the bathroom area of a holding cell, and a woman and children wrapped in Mylar sheets at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection station in Douglas, Ariz., in September 2015.

SMITH’S HARDWARE

423375