Guest Opinion | My Visit to a Detention Center

— from Bill Buchan —

A few weeks ago when our “so-called” President sprung his seven Muslim country travel ban on our nation on a Friday afternoon, I woke up very angry at 4 a.m. on the following Sunday morning, thinking of ways that I could meaningfully protest this action. Today, I got my chance, and attended a 400-person gathering held just outside the the Center’s fence. The format of the protest was two hours of hearing stories of those held there, each story presented in both Spanish and English.

The term “detention” doesn’t sound too bad, but it’s not “detention” as in after-school, or a place to put juveniles temporarily out of circulation; it is a prison. There are 1,600 held there, indefinitely, until Homeland Security/ICE manages to get them deported, or else some legal team can get them released. In all fairness, undoubtedly some residents are real criminals, and are worthy of deportation, but that is far from true for many, based on the awful stories we heard today—makes me ashamed for my Country. Some of those stories that I remember:

• – An illegal woman with four U. S. Citizen children worked at Taco Bell for over 20 years, working herself up to a managerial position. A new boss came in, and turned her in to ICE, who had her picked up. Taco Bell even kept her last two weeks’ pay.
• Another illegal woman with U. S. children had worked cleaning houses for 40 years. When her husband got caught up on drug charges, she was picked up also.
• Daniel Ramirez, a 23- y/o DACA (Dreamer) who was supposedly exempt, was wrongly jailed, is still awaiting hearing.
• Prisoners are allowed to have jobs in the facility for $1/day, with which they can buy supplemental food and personal items from the commissary. All goods are priced exorbitantly ($9 shampoo). The prison also makes lots of money on “allowing” toll phone calls. Food is grim, lots of beans, hence supplementing from the commissary.
  Medical care is kept to a minimum, Ibuprofen the main offering, no doctor present on Sundays. A chicken pox epidemic is currently in effect.
• No direct contact between prisoners and family visitors, only across a glass barrier.
• Immigrants caught up in the regular judicial system (often for being in the wrong place at the wrong time) believe that they are being freed at the end of their served sentence, but instead are “freed” to a waiting ICE-contract bus and transported to the prison.
• An illegal couple who had lived as members of a community for seventeen years, left their children alone for a short time, and were turned in for child abandonment; now they are in the prison, separated from their children indefinitely.
• The prison contractor, GEO Services, is part of our Government’s Prison Industrial Complex, and bills at $180/day (x1,600); this in addition to squeezing every penny out of the prisoners as mentioned above. It’s a very profitable business; Trump wants to double the 42,000 now confined. The prison corporations are salivating at this windfall, stocks sky-rocketing at this opportunity for corporate welfare.

Homeland Security’s new rules will apparently up the ante for saying who is a criminal. I believe having a fake Social Security card will become grounds. Up until now, neither Social Security Administration (SSA) or employers cared a bit about this issue—after all, employers were getting cheaper labor, and SSA was getting payments from individuals who could never draw from the system—a win-win for both; suddenly, it’s a deportable offense.

My main takeaway from this experience: I had some idea of what is going on with the Detention system, but didn’t realize anything like the whole story. For most people, it’s all under the radar. Many peaceful, hard-working families are being torn apart (most children are U.S. Citizens, and can’t be deported, or came at a very young age). It is cruel, unjust and un-American that this is happening in our state, under our noses; we should all be ashamed to let it continue; anywhere in our Country, for that matter.