Portside

We must hold these dual, overlapping realities in our minds, as we strive to comprehend the interrelated horrors to which the United States — not just Trump, but the United States — subjects millions of people every day.

Immigrant-detainee suicides indicate that the Stewart Detention Center and ICE are out of step with a trend in corrections to keep seriously mentally ill people out of solitary confinement.

Donald Trump’s policy of family separation at the borders motivated an upsurge in activism, including widespread calls to abolish ICE. Now it’s time to go further, to attack the long-standing policy of separating families inside our borders.

The increasingly routine consequence of the Trump Administration’s immigration policy to separate children from parents who enter the United States without papers reminded me of a conversation I heard between Henry Kissinger and Ruth K. Westheimer.

Conditions at Adelanto Detention Center, a privately operated prison currently used to detain undocumented immigrants, are said to be grim. Nine detainees, all of whom came to the U.S. seeking asylum, were so fed up that they staged a hunger strike. Guards responded with violence and pepper spray.

Adelanto, a town of 32,000, is home to three prisons. This was not a coincidence. With a history of agriculture, excessive water use, the Great Depression, cheap vacant land filled with a military base which closed in the 1990s, Adelanto turned to prisons. During the 1980s, under increasingly stringent drug laws and harsh sentencing policies, demand for new prisons had grown. So had the belief that prisons could nourish economic development in rural communities.

Quotas create incentive for authorities to detain more immigrants than they would otherwise need to, report says

With Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention, Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist and migrant rights organizer Tings Chak peels away the invisibility of massive immigration detention facilities. In graphic novel form, she walks the reader through these physical spaces step by step.

Stewart Detention Center is operated by the private prison company, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). Problems at Stewart include the far-flung location of the facility and resulting isolation of people detained there, physical and verbal abuse, spoiled food and non-potable water, lack of recreation time, minimal access to legal materials, substandard medical care,little oversight or accountability and the absence of any meaningful grievance procedures.