Immigrants held in immigration detention facilities are not just dying because of bad management, callous guards and understaffing.

They're dying because the situation of undocumented people in the United States bears more than a passing resemblance to that of blacks under Jim Crow.

Call it Juan Crow: the matrix of laws, social customs, economic institutions and cultural messages that underlie the exploitation of undocumented immigrants.

The deaths and neglect suffered by immigrants in detention — recently documented by the New York Times, the Washington Post and “60 Minutes”— would not be possible without the now routine dehumanizing of immigrants on TV and radio.

And the almost daily raids on homes and workplaces instill terror. Even schools and childcare facilities are no longer free from the looming presence of heavily armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

Given the extremes to which our government is going in its war on immigrants, it should come as no surprise that, since 9-11, more detainees have died in immigration detention here in the United States than have died in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib combined.

The surge in Latino migration in the Southeast, home to the fastest-growing Latino population in the United States, is resurrecting many of the old Jim Crow institutions. Along with the almost daily arrests, raids and home invasions by federal, state and other authorities, newly resurgent vigilante groups are exercising intimidation.

It’s not just the Ku Klux Klan. A couple of hundred anti-immigrant organizations have cropped up in the past three years, mostly based in the South, and they are harassing immigrants as a way to grow their ranks.

Meanwhile, the catastrophic conditions in immigrant detention centers rely on a legal regime of distinctions between the rights of undocumented immigrants and citizens. Contrary to what KKK members and right-wing media personalities assert, immigrants have legal and human rights by virtue of being human.

Federal laws that allowed local and state authorities to pursue blacks under the Fugitive Slave Act resemble the Bush Administration's Agreements of Cooperation in Communities to Enhance Safety and Security (ACCESS) program, which allows states to deputize law enforcement officials to chase, detain, arrest and jail the undocumented.

But like its predecessor, Juan Crow has inspired a powerful call to unity.

"There are many differences between our experience and that of immigrant Latinos, but there is a family resemblance between Jim Crow and what is being experienced by immigrants,” says the Rev. Joseph Lowery, a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr. “Both met economic oppression. Both met racial and ethnic hostility. But the most important thing to remember is that, though we may have come over on different ships, we're all in the same d--- boat now."

All the more reason for us — and every person of good will — to row together.

We need to end Juan Crow, just as we ended Jim Crow.

Roberto Lovato is a New York-based contributing associate editor with New America Media and a frequent contributor to The Nation magazine and the Huffington Post. He blogs at www.ofamerica.wordpress.com. He can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org.