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'Everything Is Not Fine': The Immigrant detention system is ruining the lives of innocent people
The long, windowless one-story warehouse blends into an industrial zone near Newark Liberty International Airport. But this building is not storing boxes of things: it is storing living, breathing human beings who yearn to be free and to return to their heartbroken families.
As I head inside the Elizabeth, NJ Detention Center (EDC), I see mothers pushing babies in strollers to visit their fathers before they are deported. Once inside, I present the number of the detainee I am scheduled to meet, I relinquish my ID and wait. Then, empty-handed, I go through the security check, stepping inside the lock-up room. The sound of the heavy door clanging shut makes it clear: This is not a “detention center,” but undeniably a prison.
For a few moments, I stand between two worlds, unable to escape. The door on the other side opens and I step into the visitors’ room. It is organized into booths with chairs and a single phone on each side of a Plexiglas barrier that separates visitors and detainees.
I pick up the phone on my side of the booth. The statuesque 19-year-old college student from Africa takes the phone on her side. She is so happy to have a visitor. She wants me to know that it is an important job that we volunteers are doing to lift their spirits. She has been detained at EDC for two months, waiting for her community college visa to come through. I try to put on a poker face to hide my shock. She seems so young to be incarcerated — and for no good reason.
“What keeps you going?” I ask.
“I know that God must have put me here to protect me from something really horrible on the outside,” she replies.
I take a deep breath. “I’m glad that your faith sustains you,” I say.
“I am a Muslim, but I also learned about Christianity when I was at school,” she continues, telling me she loves to read and that her favorite novel is Silas Marner, by George Eliot, the story of an outsider forced to flee his community after being falsely accused of a crime.
Operated by the Corrections Corporation of America, the EDC can hold as many as 360 people. Each dormitory has up to 44 single beds. The detainees eat, sleep, shower and use the toilet without any privacy or respect for their various cultural norms and prohibitions. Their lives are no longer their own.
I come to EDC to listen, and it is impossible to forget the stories I have heard.
A grandfather in his 50s chats on the phone through the heavy Plexiglas barrier. He is neatly shaven with gray hair. Like the other detainees, he wears two-piece hospital- like scrubs and has a plastic bracelet around his wrist with a photo ID attached to it. We talk about his favorite foods; he has been a successful restaurateur here in the United States since getting his green card 25 years ago. He has created jobs, paid taxes, and supported the economy.
Over the years, he has periodically returned to his home country to visit family and friends. Unfortunately, his homeland in South Asia is now wracked by political violence. Despite his Green Card, he was recently detained at John F. Kennedy International Airport. A look of confusion, disappointment and dismay spreads across his kindly face as he describes the ordeal. I keep listening. His pain is evident.
“How are things going for you here?” I ask.
Suddenly, through the glass I see the tears stream down across his cheeks. I want to hug him through the barrier.
“No, no,” he started to say. “It’s … I spoke with my family this morning and they asked me how I was. I told them not to worry, that everything was fine, but everything is not fine. It’s my diabetes. My feet are burning and my eyes, my vision is bad. They give me pills. They won’t give me my insulin.” I tell him I will pass on his message to others who may be able to help.
PEACEMAKER
A West Indian man with a broad smile tells me he has been working hard for 20 years to live the American dream. He found a niche cleaning cars and works with grit and integrity. His friends pooled their funds to hire a lawyer, but the lawyer does not visit him. He does not know the lawyer’s name. I ask how he spends his days. He is a peacemaker, of sorts. There are so many troubled souls inside. Some take the cramped living conditions badly. He tells me he reaches out to the ones in pain. He tries to intervene to soothe the anger, to help make the living easier. You have found a calling here, a purpose, I say. Then, I have to leave. My heart seems to swell as our hands touch the glass to say goodbye.
Of my three friends, the first is now a student at a New York City community college, and the second has returned to his family and business. The third has been deported to his country of origin. These are our friends, neighbors and coworkers who are being deprived of their most basic freedoms for no good reason. We don’t need to make this system of mass incarceration of immigrants kinder and gentler, as the Obama administration proposes to do. We need to end it. The first step is to acknowledge the common humanity we share with the people stuck on the other side of the Plexiglas. They are ready to share their stories, if only we will listen.
Comments
Diane,
Very good, heartfelt story which get across the inadequacies of our present immigration polices and laws. Terrible impact upon the most vulnerable.
Tell us if you wish to see the even more inhospitable facilities at the NJ county jails which hold twice the number of immigrant detainees. Mass detention is unaccepatble and should be known by the public.
Peace, greg sullivan
It's because of the federal governments irresponsible behavior by not enforcing our immigration laws that we are in this mess. Obama is just as responsible; just ask his illegal alien Aunt who is still sponging off of the American taxpayer!
Before you say "it"! Our immigration system is NOT broken. It doesn't need to be "reformed" comprehensively or otherwise. The laws only need to be enforced and our borders locked down. Simple, very simple. But I guess our "politicians" are to simple minded to realize that.
The United States Constitution, Article IV, Section 4:
The United States shall guarantee to every State in the Union a Republican form of government, AND SHALL PROTECT EACH OF THEM FROM INVASION; and on Application of the legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic violence
Our Federal government failed to do what Article IV, Section 4 requires it to do.
The United States Constitution, Article III, Section 3:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in ADHERING to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same OVERT act, or on Confession in open court.
The entire Federal government and any others who are aiding and abetting the illegal alien invasion are guilty of treason according to the above article and section of our U.S. Constitution. I know I can get a heck of a lot more witnesses in court than the 2 required to swear to their treasonous acts.
The people who are "invading" our country are also picking our fruits and vegetables, washing our dishes, mowing our lawns, cleaning rich people's mansions and doing various other exhausting and poorly paid tasks that few white people can be bothered to do while paying out far more in taxes than they will receive in return. Senor Terrell's diatribe is a perfect example of the blindness of white privilege - the people who do our shit work for us tend to come from countries that U.S.-backed free trade policies have helped wreck; yet in Terrell's worldview once here "the illegals" are to be criminalized and persecuted even; moreover we are even entitled to indulge in the paranoid fantasy that the migration of dispossessed and beleaguered peasantry of Mexico and Central America is somehow akin to a military invasion. Thank god for the actions of people like Diana Stewart who represent the best in our own national tradition ("Give us your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.") but the best of the human spirit and its capacity for solidarity.
borders are totally arbitrary constructions - let's do away with them entirely! don't forget that we are ALL immigrants here and we will continue to have newcomers who should be welcomed - not shunned or punished.
thank you for writing this mom! so proud of you!
love,
dawn
"Everything is Not Fine" is well written and verifies the impressions that I have gotten when visiting EDC. I just want to add that every time I have visited, the detainees complain about only being served fried food. "No matter how much I exervise, I gain weght, because all we have to eat is fried food." And the complaint of the diabetic is not new. ONe detainee I spoke with complained of rectal bleeding. He said that every morning he put in for sick call, and it was ignored.
Underlying the issue of detaining illegals is the far more serious issue of privatized prisons. They are done for profit, not for public servis\ce. There is no accountabilty. I first visited prisoners at the CCA jail in Indianapolis, Indiana. When CCA first came to Indianaplolis it was full of promises: "We'll see that our staff is trained", but we saw that deteriorate within a few months. Guards became lax and careless. Visitor procedures were not maintained carefully, and every time we visited (monthly) there new guards. We could tell they were new because they were more slipshod, and sometimes rude to us. The prison chaplain told us of his disgust with the way things were going; porer food, no exercise or very little, crowding, etc. He spoke of the guards union in California, which opposed early release for non-violent criminals because it might jeopardize their job security, and how CCA encouraged them to oppose such legislation.
There used to be a company called the "Container Corporation of America" and they adverstised in one or theleading business magazines. They also called themselves "CCA" long before there was a Corrections Corporation of America.. But today's CCA could change its name to that of the original CCA and it would be more accurately named, because they don't do anything to "correct" detainees.
Government run prisons run the gamut of criticism, but there are now positive words for privatized prisons. They're inherently evil and not what I want my tax dollars to support. I'm for prisons that make an effort to correct their inmates behavior, and where pbkic weat is benefitted by accountability.
I was to read this story that conveys the horrible conditions that people are living in these centers and glad to hear that two of the people visited won their release, I am so sorry for the third man and hope that he has someone to help him in his former home land, most likely a very foreign place to him right now. thank you for this article.
there is no point to "locking down" our borders. as long as we are a nation of prosperity- prosperity which comes in large part from the cheap labor offered by millons of immigrants, illegal or otherwise- poorer people will emigrate here. It won't matter if we build a wall 1 million feet tall. There will be a ladder that is 1 million and 1 feet tall, and they'll use it.
Prisons do not need to be reformed, they need to be abolished. The criticisms of overcrowding, ineffective rehabilitation = (the "revolving door" problem), and abuse or laxness by the guards and administration, are all problems that have been criticized since the 17th and 18th century, when prisons became the go-to penal institution. Whatever people have been suggesting up until that time hasn't worked. The point of prisons is not to correct, it is to produce an underclass of disenfranchised people who can be exploited by the rest of us. This why ex-cons can never get jobs, because we insist on letting everyone they associate with know they are ex-cons, and they have a hard time "reintegrating themselves into society" (as though they are somehow not part of it), and because prison reinforced their criminality in most cases, they turn back to crime and go to prison. The so-called "delinquents" are here to serve us, the non-delinquent "productive members of society". The prisons are supposed to create these people, not eliminate them. (read discipline and punish by michel foucault.)
Now in the case of immigration, we have people who we have no real reason to deny them entry into the country except that we need to enforce our borders. How can one deny that this is institutionalized xenophobia? We are also turning them into delinquents because we are detaining them indefinitely and spitting them back out at some other time with their lives interrupted or ruined, creating a much greater chance they'll be forced into the crappy low wage job that we like immigrants to take, because it ensures that we don't have to. it also causes problems in acheiving citizenship later on, because it gets them flagged. All that means they get to participate in the american economy, but benefit less from it.
so why would america want to get rid of this kind of thing the article is about? its working great for us!
furthermore!
all this is not even mentioning the nearly free labor we get from them while they are in the prison, which is, in a way that is almost absurdly satirical, run for profit. If you didn't believe that the interest in prisons and immigration being in their current state, surely the existence of this place, taken in the context of the whole industry of literal actual wage slavery for profit must convince you somewhat.
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