Florence Detention Center

With the horrific realities of Operation Streamline still etched in our minds, our group witnessed yet another manifestation of immigrant criminalization and commodification this past Friday. After a 90-minute drive north from Tucson, we arrived at the fenced-in complex of Florence Detention Center in the rural community of Florence, AZ. Roughly half of the town’s 17,000 inhabitants are confined within its 12 correctional facilities (split between federal, state, county, and private ownership), and this prison economy keeps much of the remaining population employed. Florence has a long history as a prison town – the Florence Detention Center originally incarcerated German and Italian prisoners of war during World War II. Now operated by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the remodeled facility holds male undocumented immigrants who are awaiting court cases and deportations.

After a thorough ID check at the gates, a guard led us through the complex and into a conference room for a pre-tour information session. Our host, a jovial facilities supervisor named Marty, rushed through a glossy PowerPoint with the obvious goal of subduing our skepticisms. As he highlighted the detention center’s diverse religious services and outdoor recreational space, Marty assured us that it’s “nothing like a prison or jail, but more like a college campus.” While this facility is doubtless the most visitor-friendly of Florence’s immigrant detention centers, the college campus comment went too far. As students, some of us may “imprison” ourselves within the library by choice, but that hardly compares to the forced incarceration and impending deportation of people on a massive scale.

While Marty (and a pack of four or five guards) led us on a tour, we walked past detainees wearing solid-color uniforms corresponding to their so-called “levels” of criminality. As we filed into the dining hall during its lunch-time peak, the room briefly quieted while prisoners turned their heads to gaze at this spectacle of college students. I was painfully aware of my visibly white appearance, my many privileges. Perhaps I should have looked back and smiled to acknowledge our common humanity, but I could only bear to glance down and walk quickly to the door, unable to own up to my general complicity within the whole system.

We continued on to the special housing unit, a relic of old-fashioned jailhouse configurations with bars substituting for interior walls. In what felt like a stark violation of privacy, we passed by detainees in see-through “segregation” cells (who Marty assured us were simply in medical isolation) as they napped and killed time. I felt as if we were walking through a human zoo, cage by cage. The regular housing unit wasn’t much better, sporting a large dormitory of bare-bones bunks where the room-occupancy ratio is designed to equal 5 feet of space per person. Although Marty claimed that the average length of stay at Florence Detention Center is 17-21 days, some people have languished here for years.

Visiting the detention center was yet another reminder of the ways that immigrants are construed as criminals and “threats” to the United States. Unfortunately, the prison industry profits from this national mindset each time an immigrant gets caught in the system, at the expense of taxpayer money. The cycle continues as these corporate interests lobby for more anti-immigrant legislation in the political realm. Yet the workers at Florence Detention Center seemed indifferent to this commodification of human beings. Like the Border Patrol agents we spoke with a few weeks ago, Marty claimed impartiality in his work and emphasized that it’s his job to simply enforce the laws. Despite his problematic detachment from the larger human rights implications, it’s understandable that he’s found ways to justify his work. For people like Marty, these prison jobs provide steady income and benefits within a rural economy that lacks other options. What would it look like for Florence to transition to a more socially constructive economy, one that doesn’t rely on the criminalization of impoverished brown people to bolster its revenues and keep local residents employed?

More questions emerged when we visited with a representative from the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project over lunch. Our host, Dorien, and her colleagues offer pro bono legal services to people detained by ICE in Arizona, since the federal government does not provide lawyers for immigrants in deportation proceedings. Because of this shortcoming, 86% of detainees do not have an attorney and must learn to represent themselves within one of the most complex categories of U.S. law. Members of the Florence Project strive to provide immigrants with a variety of legal tools by talking with people about their options, giving know-your-rights presentations, offering one-on-one preparation for hearings, supplying small law libraries in the detention centers, and partnering with other advocacy organizations.

It was refreshing to visit candidly with Dorien, since she frequently navigates the multilayered settings of the Florence Detention Center and other ICE facilities (like the Pinal County Jail) that harbor even worse conditions. She compared the Florence Project’s work to operating an emergency room, as these detention centers are places of continual crisis for the people that inhabit them. Given this reality, the triage-style application of direct legal services is necessary but not exactly transformative. Despite the difficulties in balancing immediate needs with long-term change, Dorien has focused on finding small-scale solutions to concrete problems while maintaining relationships with organizations that pursue broader social transformation. Yet she also admits that the Florence Project frequently deals with failure: many clients can’t win their cases in a system that is stacked against them. For people in direct service roles, sometimes the most essential work involves meeting individuals on a human level and bearing witness to the impossible situations that they struggle through.

Another important message from Dorien’s visit was the necessity of nonviolent communication across-the-board. In the Florence Project’s work, maintaining respectful relationships with prison employees is the key to accessing clients and gaining the necessary rapport for constructive conversations regarding daily injustices. Furthermore, outright anger toward detention center workers could create a ripple effect and be redirected toward the detainees. This is a lesson I will carry with me as I continue on this journey with Border Patrol officers, prison workers, and others who are making a living in this complex world. In order to overpower the culture of distrust and imprisonment, we – as activists – need to set the precedent for a radical society founded on love and openness.

-- submitted by Elsa Goossen

Operation Streamline

On Friday February 21 we headed to downtown Tucson to a non-descript gray building, the federal courthouse, to witness Operation Streamline. Operation Streamline is a criminal proceeding, which, every day, turns 70 migrants into criminals, forced to serve jail time for attempting to cross the border into the United States. Private industry and prisons make lots of money off of these proceedings, but it has not been shown to deter people from crossing the border, one of the justifications for its existence. Although we had read a bit about the history of Operation Streamline and some detailed accounts of what goes on in a hidden courtroom on the second floor, nothing could prepare me for one of the heaviest things I have witnessed in the borderlands.

I cannot adequately describe Operation Streamline in written language. It was already clear to me that justice does not exist in the US. Witnessing Operation Streamline offered more evidence of the unjustifiable and arguably unconstitutional practices that happen every day, stripping individuals of their humanity. Depressing, sad, confusing, angering, horrific, awful, inhumane…none of these words can replace the sight of 70 brown bodies in chains, largely in cloths worn crossing the desert, all personal items stripped from them. While witnessing the proceedings, I tried to see each migrant as an individual with a face and a name and a home and a history and a context and a family, all of which is ignored, suppressed and denied for the sake of the “security” of the US. What is presented to the audience are 70 largely expressionless faces, headphones in to hear the Spanish translation, backs to the “audience.” The courtroom is silent save the almost constant clatter of chains. The only occupants of the space are us, lawyers dressed in suits and high-heels (suffice it to say many are old white men), the magistrate, the marshals and perhaps a few others. After opening comments 70 individuals are asked the same mechanical questions to which they answer “si” (yes) or “no,” and “culpable” (guilty). Occasionally a question is asked, or a concern raised. One man has an arm dislocated by border patrol. Another suffers extreme dehydration. Another has a serious heart condition and has left his medication in the desert. They are told to tell the medical examiner when they get to prison, as if prisons have ever provided proper medical care. Another man asks to not be returned to immigration. Some answer immediately. Some pause before responding. In the space of several hours 75 individuals plead guilty to entering the US illegally and are sentenced to up to 6 months in prison before they are deported.

Through this process beautiful, respectable human beings are reduced to ghosts or the faceless, nameless “criminal” or “alien.” There is one man there who several of us spoke to in Altar, Mexico. Towards the end, two young women are called up who are indigenous and not fluent in Spanish. Little effort is made to ensure they understand what is going on. Their lawyer, a large white man, towers over them. The magistrate treats them like babies, admonishing them for crossing the desert, telling them they were lucky they didn’t die, asking them what their mother’s would think. At the end their lawyer offhandedly says to us “they cried at just the right time haha.” And then the proceedings close.

I think I will be processing for many months or years what I saw here, what to think, and how to respond. Who/what is to blame and who/what should or can I direct my anger or disgust at? How am I, a white, female, healthy US citizen implicated in these proceedings? What is my responsibility having born witness? The facts are clear, as laid out by readings and our talk with a Federal Public Defender who we talked with for a few hours before witnessing the proceedings. This lawyer discussed the history of Operation Streamline and her thoughts about what is behind it.  She also talked about her place within it, giving me a lot to think about concerning her role in the system and her argument that people calling for public defenders to step down and not play a part in Operation Streamline is actually harming the cause, and that it is important to have decent public defenders who speak Spanish involved. It is clear who the primary beneficiaries of this spectacle are: the local economy, private corporations, prisons and the CCA (Corrections Corporation of America), among many others. The impulse to stand up and interrupt proceedings, to shout, to throw something, are suppressed while sitting motionlessly on the wooden benches. While we were there, I was thinking back to Simon Sedillo and his idea that we are in a “prison of peace and tranquility.” How are we to break down the walls of this “prison”? Operation Streamline put many pieces to together for me, linking what we saw in Arivaca, at the Border Patrol Station and at the migrant shelter in Altar. It adds one more face to the journey of migrant realities.

Operation Streamline highlights many of the themes, trends and realities we have been learning about. The real power in the US, private corporations, are implicated here. Operation Streamline is part of the capitalist enterprise. It’s about money, the migrants are commodities. Another theme here is the creation of the “other,” the “criminal,” and the “alien.” I think the construction of these identities and labels facilitates Operation Streamline, hides it, and makes it palatable for much of the public at large. The discussion with the public defender added complexity and highlights the different worldviews and ways of understanding the system and one’s place within it. I believe that the public defender was arguing for reform from within the system. She made a clear distinction between “good” and “bad” or more humane vs. less  humane public defenders. Although it is difficult for me, after witnessing the proceedings, to not see her as part of the system or machine, facilitating what is Operation Streamline, she is a respectable human being with certain opinions and I do want to put serious thought into what she says considering she has been operating from within the system for awhile. This all relates back to the question of what social change is, or should be, from where change can come, and what sorts of jobs and activities may strengthen the system they are trying to combat. Operation Streamline and the public defender's role also highlight the limits of law and ways it can be bent to serve powerful interests.

I do not think I will forget the faces I saw today, especially the last two young women around my age. I want to try to not let the memory of the individuals in chains I saw today be relegated to the memory of ghosts. I want to further consider my place within or against this system and want to remember that this is a reality that has been happening and may very well continue to happen every day for months and years.

-- contributed by Sylvia Woodmansee

Arivaca

            On Valentine’s Day 2014, the Border Studies group embarked to a migrant trail near Arivaca AZ, a small border town about 60 miles south of Tucson. In order to arrive there, we were required to drive through a border checkpoint, although the border patrol agents let us pass through with little harassment or difficulty (this definitely is not the case for all travelers). As we drove through the rolling desert hills, I had little anticipation for the emotional scope of the day ahead of me and I calmly viewed the beauty of the wild desert landscape, dotted with cacti and shrubbery. After arriving into the town of Arivaca, we were joined by Paula and John, two seasoned volunteers with No More Deaths, a desert humanitarian camp that participates in water drops along migrant trails on the border. Both also live and work in Casa Mariposa, a migrant hospitality house in Tucson.

From there we began the 1.5-mile hike through the land, largely overseen by AZ Game & Fish Department, and stopped at a small clearing along the way to give some introductions and prepare for the experience ahead. John told us to “think with our hearts, not our heads” in order to perceive the day ahead with compassion as well as to eradicate the conceptual borders that exist between our ears. Thus, we diverged from the canyon trail by passing through a barbed wire cattle fence, and began to enter a migrant route. Immediately, I noticed signs of life that were absent from the first half of our walk—a flannel shirt hung on a branch, shoes left to decay in the dirt, and empty water jugs. I thought about how each of these remnants carries a story, how each represents the footprints of a person in the midst of the treacherous journey north. As I imagined myriad histories and fates of the individuals who carried each item, I was simultaneously struck by the impossibility of knowing—it was as though I was communicating with ghosts.

I carried this emotional space with me as I continued walking, constantly imagining myself stumbling over this rocky terrain in the unforgiving darkness, branches hitting my face, tripping and falling, getting lost, listening to the ominous drone of military planes overhead… However, at the same time, in the midday sunshine of the warm desert spring, this was merely a leisurely hike for our group. The natural beauty of the canyon and the splendor of the mountains surrounding us betrayed a false sense of peace. I considered how I can access these spaces with so much ease and comfort, while for countless others, the fear of death and danger looms around every corner. The opposition was jarring.

Within about 20 minutes, after climbing over several large boulders, we arrived at a migrant shrine in a small clearing. The shrine was essentially an alcove in a large rock wall, and was filled with rosaries, candles, prayer cards, and photographs. Compared to the ghosts of fear and uncertainty that seemed to haunt the rest of the trail and amidst the hostility of the terrain, the shrine gave me a beautiful sense of hopeful energy. Under the shrine, the canyon wall was lined with water jugs left by humanitarian organizations, each bearing hopeful and heartening messages written by volunteers. I learned later that in addition to providing encouragement to migrants passing through, the purpose of these messages was to affirm that the water was not a trap. Indeed, in an increasingly militarized borderlands and such a hostile and xenophobic country, it would be difficult to know who and what to trust.

          In the clearing our group quietly acknowledged the sacred nature of the space, and offered a few reflections on how we positioned ourselves within it. Paula read us an excerpt from the book “Crossing With the Virgin: Stories from the Migrant Trail” about a young woman who was abandoned by her group en route to the US, left in the desert with a twisted ankle and little food or water. As the very environment that the testimony described was all around us, it was impossible to be immune to the emotional weight of the desert. After listening to Paula, we all silently wrote messages on jugs of water and cans of beans that we brought to leave at the shrine, and wordlessly began the hike back to our vans.
          From there we headed back to the town of Arivaca and stopped at volunteer-run organization called People Helping People in the Border Zone that focuses on educating the community about humanitarian aid and eliminating the border checkpoint in Arivaca. Although the town of Arivaca is largely white and the population has mixed opinions about immigration issues, the opposition to the checkpoint is broadly based because of concerns of militarization and harassment in the community. In addition to the negative ways that the checkpoint affects the Arizona citizens, it is a direct causation of migrant deaths in the area, because it forces people to travel farther in the wilderness to avoid the checkpoint, which takes over the only road in the community. Therefore, the organization sees the elimination of the checkpoint as a tangible goal that also makes a direct impact on the well being of people crossing through the area.
          After previously having only a very faint, abstract concept of what crossing through the desert is like, the trip to the Arivaca borderlands was emotionally powerful. The experience forced me to position myself as a white, English-speaking, documented person in this migrant trail. Simultaneously, taking John’s advice to be guided by my heart, I imagined the hundreds who have traversed the same path with a dramatically different set of thoughts and feelings. Although my conception of crossing the border as an undocumented person is still hopelessly abstract, I still feel the ghosts of all of those who have walked there before and after me.

-- contributed by Nikki Johnson

Trip to Altar, Sonora: Some thoughts on studying migration and being a human

The Border Patrol Station in Nogales, Arizona is flanked by three parking lots of vans, ATVs, and horses purposed for finding and deporting immigrants entering the United States through Mexico. When we drove up to the station, it was clear to me that though we were still on the north side of the wall, we had found the other side of immigration. Border Patrol isn’t necessarily what I had imagined; a room of administrative cubicles greets incomers and a mix of civilian and uniformed agents mill about with coffee and granola bars. A wall of trophies on the back wall marks the national achievements of BP’s youth outreach program and we sit down at a horseshoe-shaped table for a slideshow about Homeland security and border enforcement tactics. The mission of Border Patrol is simple, to quote a Border Patrol agent,“[federal immigration policy] is the law of the land….our job is to do our job.” The winding cement hallways and observation room with dozens of TV screens of the quiet desert don’t leave any room for negotiation.

 Before coming to Tucson, immigration was a series of numbers and statistics with occasional clips from a documentary or two floating around my mind. Coming here put a face (or rather, many faces) to immigration, so to speak, and I guess that’s what the trip to Border Patrol could have done. Behind green uniforms and bolted trucks, there are real humans with wives, partners, husbands, golden retrievers, whatever. But walking around Border Patrol’s cool offices was shockingly far from humanizing. The agents that we spoke to operated exclusively under a duty to enforce the laws of the United States; whose laws are those? I certainly didn’t write those laws nor did my host family back in South Tucson; where was the human element in all of this?

The quick drive to Nogales, Sonora and visit to the Kino Border Initiative’s hospitality house for women and children didn’t exactly help me feel closer to immigration as it actually happens. Another PowerPoint presentation and a few more gringos report statistics; we peek inside the women’s sleeping area. I am happy that if immigration is going to be statistics and cold folding chairs, at least this time, people crossing the border get a bed and time with their children as opposed to segregated holding cells.

CCAMYN is a two-hour drive from Nogales and offers free food and housing for individuals coming from and/or going to the border. It is situated in the somewhat odd town of Altar – a place whose economy is largely centered on migration. The shops that line the plaza display camouflaged backpacks and carpet-bottomed shoe covers to hide migrant tracks from the “signcutting” border patrol. Inside this migrant shelter, I feel even further from migration. Though we are surrounded by hopeful crossers, my pale skin and accented Spanish confirms my status as a gringo who will happily coast through the Nogales checkpoint tomorrow sporting a blue passport and North Carolina driver’s license. What am I looking for? I find myself wondering, as I get increasingly frustrated with the awkwardness of this situation. Why do I even keep using these words, “far from migration,” as if it is something you can touch, immerse yourself it, experience in the raw like language immersion programs for highschoolers advertise. My social position necessarily creates a distance between my situation and that of a migrant, and I think that’s okay. But what do I do with that distance?

Immigration is, by nature, always dynamic. The migrant is moving and la migra are changing their tactics, but the students are reading the same stale articles and trying to situate themselves in a way that feels less horrible or somehow demonstrates a somber awareness of a system in which they’re so clearly implicated. For the men that Megan and I are playing Crazy 8’s with, migration is a means of being with their families or supporting themselves economically. It’s not a cultural phenomenon that they’ve cultivated and want to show off or talk about. I find solace in hearing about Alfonso’s Chinese ex-girlfriend in Florida and learning magic tricks from Oscar. Scholastic articles about how I should be behaving clog my brain, but I fall back on making fart jokes about beans and putting entirely too much hot sauce on my eggs in some weird competition with my Honduran neighbor who has completely drowned his. I’m probably behaving inappropriately.

Back in South Tucson, my host mom and I dance to Shakira’s 1998 album and her youngest daughter laughs at us. I call my mom and put Alfonso and Oscar in the back of my mind for now to talk about what my sister’s doing for her birthday. I guess I am just another vacation activist or do-gooder student. It certainly feels nice to be back home. Binders full of statistics, quotes, and half-Spanish notes stay packed away for the night and my confusion and discomfort about this system that I’m studying and my place within it lingers. But I’m glad that if nothing else, tonight I can just be a human. I know that puts me farther from Border Patrol’s locked gates, and tonight I can confidently say that that’s a good place to be.

-- submitted by Rebecca Varnell

SB 1070 and the immediate/collateral effects of anti-immigration law

Today, we met with two community leaders, Rosalva and Maria, to discuss the effects of federal and state anti-immigration laws. Anti immigration law has been proliferating throughout the United States since the early to mid-90s. Starting with prominent pieces of legislation such as Operation Gatekeeper in 1994, anti-immigration laws have been aimed at criminalizing undocumented migrants and cutting them off from social services. Reflective of some of our country’s most perverse, jingoist, and nativist tendencies, many, if not most of these laws operate with the aim of promoting attrition through enforcement (in other words, making it as difficult, dangerous, or miserable as possible to enter and/or live in the United States if you do not have documents). The most notorious of these laws include Arizona’s SB 1070. One of the first of several reactionary state immigration laws passed throughout the country following failures in federal immigration reform, SB 1070 allows police officers to as individuals to present their papers at traffic stops if officers have “reasonable suspicion” that a person is undocumented. Following SB 1070’s passage even stricter immigration bills have passed in states including Alabama and Indiana, with Alabama going as far as to demand that school children present documents when trying the obtain a public education.

To demonstrate the ways through which these brutal policies are enforced Rosalva and Maria dressed up in police and Border Patrol uniforms, respectively, and held their mock traffic stop for the Border Studies students. 5 students, myself included, were lined up in a car-like formation and were walked through the policies of SB1070, policies aimed at causing terror and separation. Once “pulled over” we were spoken to in rapid Spanish–those of us who are less in proficient in Spanish were chosen to participate in the exercise—intended to fluster and confuse, we were not read our mock traffic stop rights, and were told that we did not belong in this country. Soon transferred to a mock Border Patrol station, Maria continued to demonstrate the oppressive practices of Border Patrol as she forced us to sign documents which we could not read, upbraiding us for not speaking the “right” language. With our arms bound by bonds with words such as vergüenza (shame) or dolor (pain) written across them, we were all “deported” without real due-process, rights, or representation. However, unlike the hundreds of people who are effected by these policies and practices the white U.S. citizens were able to leave with the rights granted by citizenship, without fear of detention or deportation imparted upon us because of our skin pigmentation, and without our collective dignity systematically attacked by the (in)human institutions that have passed SB1070.

On a personal level, I must admit that my relationship to this exercise is complex, and that it continues to challenge me, and consider my position within the Borderlands. For one, the project did, indeed, leave me feeling incredibly distraught in the sense that I was given yet another insight into how unequivocally wrong the United State’s crypto-facist anti-immigrant agenda is in all of its forms. I can remember standing in front of the classroom with my hands tied. Having been shuttled through this mock process, which was so corrupt, I was left with a visceral reaction at how utterly unjust the laws and policies that govern immigration in this country are. However, these feelings were complex ones. I struggled to reconcile these feelings with the knowledge of my own position as a white male citizen of the U.S., a position that, indeed, allows me to designate this experience as an “insight”. Unlike the 11 million undocumented (and often documented) migrants people’s that live in the United States, at no point can I ever label the experiences presented by in the mock traffic stop as something I’ve ever lived. The emotions conjured during my own mock deportation were not one’s that came from the lived experience of being an oppressed, criminalized, or marginalized person. I do not truly know “how it feels” and that any attempt to express that would be voyeuristic and abusive. Not only did this exercise provide me with some insight into how perverse U.S. immigration policy, but it forced me, once again, to consider my own position and my own privilege as I continue to understand the Borderlands and how I am implicated in and even perpetuate their current state. Further, the problem encountered here is not one that pertains solely to this experience; I expect to encounter it throughout the rest of my life. However, with this problematic in mind, I continue to seek insight into how to better conduct relationships committed to listening, accountability and human flourishing. We’ll see what possibilities appear before me.

Lastly, this postwould be incomplete if I were not to thank Rosalva and María for sharing their time and personal experiences as they pertain to anti-immigration law. As two women who have experienced the jilting sensation of anti-immigration law in their own lives, I thank Rosalva and María for their courage, as they shared these stories and demonstrated situations such as the mock traffic stop: situations which they have either experienced or been affected by personally. Their stories are gifts, which take time and emotional energy to share. I thank them for sharing that which they are not obligated to share to a group of relative strangers, and for inviting us into relationship by sharing stories informed by lived experience of struggle and oppression. Not only do I thank them for sharing their stories, but I also commend them for andsupport them in their struggle against these systems of control, degradation, and erasure. Their stories play a crucial role in that struggle and give it strength. 

-- submitted by Alex Cook