American Gulags (1)

The US, which shamelessly brags about human rights while trampling basic liberties within its borders, and yet feels no inhibitions in accusing independent countries refusing to follow its dictates as violators of human rights, has in reality turned into a land of prisons.

It is housing the largest number of inmates anywhere in the world, besides incarcerating in substandard and unhygienic conditions tens of thousands of innocent immigrants by cruelly separating parents from children, several of whom die as a result of lack of affection, undernourishment, diseases, psychological trauma and physical abuse by guards.

Now we have the first part of a 2-part feature that appeared on ‘The Progressive’ site, titled: “American Gulags”.

The writer James Goodman is an associate professor at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.

Communities across the US are pushing back on immigration prisons as a result of the oppressive policies of the administration, especially after the quixotic Donald Trump was propelled to the White House.

In June 2018, Kelly Leibold was among the many residents of Pine Island, Minnesota, caught by surprise when its city council passed a resolution supporting a for-profit prison company, Management & Training Corporation, that wanted to locate a detention facility for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

She responded by helping local residents organize a “No ICE in Pine Island” campaign.

Leibold explains: “I don’t believe that a detention facility is morally correct. People all have immigrant lines in their family. I don’t think a detention facility in Pine Island will say good things about our community.”

She and about three dozen other activists organized via social media. They formed a Facebook group to coordinate strategy and compiled a fact sheet making the case that this was a bad investment in Pine Island’s future. In August 2018, the city council unanimously rescinded its welcoming resolution.

The 23-year old Leibold, who in addition to her activism on this issue is director of the local chamber of commerce, went on to get elected to the city council last November.

In Taylor, Texas, former ICE detainee Jeymi Moncada is working with Grassroots Leadership, a national nonprofit group, demanding the shutdown of the T. Don Hutto Residential Center, where she was held for thirteen months.

She says: “You can describe the conditions as a house of terror.”

A survivor of domestic violence, with scars to prove it, forty-two-year-old Moncada fled Honduras in 2004. She was able to start a new life in Texas but ended up in the Hutto facility in 2010 after being detained by US Customs and Border Protection. That happened after she risked returning to Honduras to bring her children here, according to court papers. They would have joined Moncada’s daughter, Jeimi, who was born in Texas. But immigration officers in Mexico stopped Moncada and made her return to Honduras with her other children, who had been cared for by her sister.

Unsafe in Honduras, Moncada returned to the United States only to be apprehended by Border Patrol agents and sent to the Hutto detention center. She was confined for more than a year until an immigration judge gave a favorable ruling in her asylum case, withholding deportation because she faced a “clear probability” of persecution if forced to return to Honduras.

But Moncada’s detention left her with bitter memories—including seeing Jeimi, then four years old, traumatized by visits to Hutto. Moncado recalls: “She would scream and cry and say she wanted to be with me. Eventually, they would stop bringing her to visit me because it was too difficult for her.”

CoreCivic, the nation’s second-largest private prison operator worth $2.4 billion, runs Hutto for ICE. But while the government in Williamson County, where this facility is located, voted last year to terminate its agreement with Hutto, ICE struck a deal directly with CoreCivic to keep the center open.

The Hutto facility is just one of more than 200 detention centers throughout the United States. Most of the larger ones are run by for-profit companies. The ICE detention population has risen from a daily average of 6,785 in 1994 to about 54,000 in June.

And these numbers will continue to grow, as Trump treats immigrants as political fodder. By kicking off his reelection campaign with a promise of mass arrests and deportations, followed by a threat of raids on homes and workplaces of undocumented immigrants in targeted cities, Trump has made clear his disregard for human rights.

The ICE detention figures don’t count the unaccompanied children being detained in more than 100 Department of Health and Human Services shelters, most under state supervision. HHS has expanded this capacity from 6,500 beds in October 2017 to 14,300 this past April and has since obtained funding that would allow for an increase up to 23,600 beds. Youths are kept in these shelters until they are placed with sponsors, usually immediate or extended family, while they await their asylum hearings.

Disregard for providing “safe and sanitary” facilities reached a low point in June when the Trump Administration argued before a federal court panel that detained children do not have to be given such basic items as soap and toothpaste, and that sleeping on a concrete floor is not a violation of these standards.

The administration’s answer to overcrowded detention facilities is to build even more detention centers, relying on for-profit prison companies—a boom industry under Trump—for construction and management.

Not a thought has been given to why people fleeing persecution and seeking a better life should be put under lock and key.

Alina Das, co-director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at New York University School of Law, says: “Taking away someone’s freedom is a very extreme act. She adds: “Immigration detention has become a form of preventative incarceration—a very frightening concept.”

When Jonathan fled El Salvador seeking asylum in the United States, he didn’t think about having to spend an indefinite period of time in immigration detention. Safe haven was needed, he says, because he was repeatedly threatened by the gang MS-13.

But as soon as he was apprehended by a Border Patrol agent near El Paso, Texas, shortly before Trump’s Inauguration, Jonathan got a glimpse of what was in store. He says the agent warned, “We are getting a new President who is going to deport you.”

For sixteen months, Jonathan (who asked that his last name not be used) was locked up in a series of detention facilities. Baffled by being treated like a threat rather than as someone fleeing persecution, he tells of his frustration and trauma.

says Jonathan, who was finally freed on a $10,000 bond in May 2018 and now lives with relatives in the New York City area as he awaits resolution of his asylum case: “The uncertainty of not knowing: Am I going to be moved again? Am I going to be deported? Are they going to release me? What’s going to happen to me?”

Jonathan’s detention started with two dreadful days in one of the Border Patrol’s crowded holding units, known collectively by immigrants as La Hielera, “the Icebox,” because of the cold and brutal conditions. He had to sleep sitting upright on a metal seat without even a blanket.

He was transferred to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement El Paso Processing Center, then spent a stint at the Cibola County Correctional Center in Milan, New Mexico, before being transferred back to the El Paso Processing Center. Here, Jonathan says, he worked an eight-hour kitchen shift, beginning at 4:30 in the morning, for $1 a day. He saw other detainees put into solitary confinement—“the Hole”—for making their bed the wrong way or not eating fast enough.

Immigration detention, says Jonathan, is “something you never went to relive—ever.”

At the national level, immigrant rights activists launched the Corporate Backers of Hate campaign in 2017. Holding protests and gathering petitions, the campaign has demanded that the likes of JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo stop bankrolling for-profit prison companies such as the GEO Group and CoreCivic.

Ana Maria Archila, who, as co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, is one of the campaign’s organizers, says: “Let’s shame the corporate leaders standing by Trump by exposing the way they benefit from Trump.”

Less than a month after activists held a Valentine’s Day “Chase Break Up with Prisons” protest outside the home of JPMorgan Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon in New York City, the investment bank and financial services company announced, “We will no longer bank the private prison industry.”

Meanwhile, Wells Fargo said two years ago it had decided to “exit” its banking relationship with private prison companies. When then-CEO Timothy Sloan was pressed on this issue by US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, at a March hearing, he acknowledged that the company was ending its relationships with CoreCivic and the GEO Group but that the termination process had not been completed. A Wells Fargo spokesperson told The Progressive that this is still expected to happen.

In June, Bank of America said it would stop lending to companies that run private prisons and detention centers. This announcement came after Bank of America officials visited the Homestead facility for unaccompanied immigrant children in Florida.

And SunTrust Banks recently said it won’t provide financing to companies that manage private prisons and immigrant-holding facilities.

Pressure to divest is also coming from the American Federation of Teachers, which has within the last year issued a two-part report detailing public pension links to immigrant detention and urging divestment. The union created a “watch list” of asset managers who hold significant shares in the prison industry. As one activist, quoted in the first part of the report, expressed, “This industry has turned human suffering into a billion-dollar business.”

Detention and deportation have often been used for racist and political reasons, but not until the 1980s did a network of detention centers emerge.

This is due in part to changes in US federal law, beginning with a 1988 statute requiring mandatory detention for those in immigration proceedings convicted of aggravated felonies. The list of offenses covered by mandatory immigration detention was greatly expanded by a 1996 federal law.

The for-profit prison companies were more than willing to step in and provide additional detention space.

Lauren-Brooke Eisen, author of the 2017 book “Inside Private Prisons: An American Dilemma in the Age of Mass Incarceration”, says: “We really outsourced our immigration to private firms.” She estimates about 65 percent of immigrant detainees are currently in for-profit prisons; other estimates run as high as nearly 75 percent.

Over the past year, if the official figures are to believed: At least seven children have died in US immigration custody or after being detained by immigration agencies at the border.

But that only begins to tell how deplorable conditions have become in a system that, according to Detention Watch Network, has seen 189 people die in detention from 2003 to this past April.

In May, unannounced visits by the Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General to five Border Patrol detention sites in the El Paso, Texas, area found that “overcrowding and prolonged detention represent an immediate risk” to detainees’ health and safety.

Of particular concern was the El Paso Del Norte Processing Center, where a cell with a maximum capacity of twelve had seventy-six detainees. Detainees were observed standing on toilets in cells, to gain breathing space, because of crowded conditions.

AS/ME