D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
December
2008
A Sea of Tears
As immigration enforcement has stepped up, the number of detainees is straining the system. Sister Kathleen Erickson reaches out to the border's women in limbo.
By Marjorie Lilly
When I first met Sister Kathleen Erickson a year or two ago, she said she'd been counseling undocumented immigrants in an El Paso detention center. She described the situation as "a sea of tears."
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Sister Kathleen Erickson. Photo by Marjorie Lilly. |
Erickson, a nun with the Sisters of Mercy who lives in Anthony, NM, started doing spiritual counseling of women at the immigrant detention facility in El Paso in 2005. This year she's serving on-call at the same facility. She's also on a committee for the Border Network for Human Rights dealing with immigrant detention issues.
"We are putting in jail young women, mostly between 18 and 30 — single moms, or with husbands they stay in touch with or have lost touch with — who can't feed their kids," she says. "They're put in leg irons, shackles, prison uniforms. Women I know are emotionally and psychologically devastated."
Erickson has seen the treatment of undocumented immigrants change for the worse. "Our policy toward immigration has turned punitive and turned mean," she says.
She has spoken out about this situation to people in many churches, universities and high schools in Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Omaha, Houston and many other places.
To listeners at her talks who are uncomfortable about the undocumented immigrants' illegal status — those held in detention centers have, after all, broken US law — Erickson says, "What are you willing to do for the benefit of your family? What are your limits? OK, they were fed, but they couldn't go to school. If you have a kid, and the kid has a heart condition, asthma, emphysema, what do you do? We have lost empathy."
Political pressure to crack down on illegal immigration after 9/11 impelled the creation of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which sprang from the Immigration Reform Caucus headed by Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.). The Act authorized the goal of having 40,000 beds in detention facilities by 2010; already, detention facilities have expanded to house 32,000. Fueling this increase is the per diem payment made by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) for the beds in jail facilities, an amount several times more than the usual cost.
ICE activity is also growing by leaps and bounds. The agency deported 349,041 illegal immigrants in 2008, compared with half that number in 2003. Not only ICE, but also US Customs and the Border Patrol, are all under the aegis of the Department of Homeland Security now.
Because undocumented immigrants have no legal status, they are considered by many to have no constitutional rights. This means that when ICE agents apprehend illegal immigrants, the agents need no warrants. ICE agents do house searches freely, and can question or arrest anybody present.
When apprehended, Erickson points out, illegal immigrants often cannot make phone calls. They leave behind children or other family members who spend days or weeks frantically trying to locate their relative, who is often moved from facility to facility. Erickson counseled a woman who said she slept on a floor in some prison for three nights, but she didn't know where she was.
Immigrants often receive very limited legal counsel, or none at all. In New Mexico there is no free legal counseling for immigrants in deportation proceedings.
They have limited bail rights and sometimes spend years in the overburdened court system for filing their visa forms late or for some minor offence.
Erickson recalls when most detained immigrants were held for about three months, whereas now she says their internment runs toward five or six months. There's "uncertainty and anxiety" among inmates because they don't know when they'll be released.
Leticia Zamarripa of the El Paso Office of ICE, which covers all of New Mexico, says the average length of stay for illegal immigrants is "less than a month, if they don't appeal."
When she worked in El Paso, Erickson says, "I would go to a trailer in the detention center camp that had a private room. Some days there would be 15 or 16 women" in what was designed to be a room for one. Later the jail got so overcrowded that she couldn't use that space anymore and had to counsel inmates by phone through glass.
She counseled them to keep up their courage. "Your job is to stay healthy," she would advise them. "Are you sleeping? Are you eating? They say, 'How can I eat when my children aren't eating?' They can't stop crying. They're horribly humiliated.
"I'll try to help them see it's a finite situation. 'You will get out of here,'" she told them.
"'You have to sleep. You have to eat. You need to breathe very deeply. Every breath is a gift from God,'" she would counsel the detainees.
"These women had no idea that they would be treated as criminals," she says. "They would say, 'I didn't come here to hurt your country.'"
Erickson usually doesn't know what happens to the people she counsels after they are deported. But she got a glimpse of the aftereffects of their experience when she went to Honduras last summer. She met a woman there who had been held in a detention center in Hutto, Texas, with her children at a family facility notorious for bad conditions. "To this day the children have nightmares," Erickson says. "They can't sleep."
ICE is making dramatic workplace raids all over the country, in Florida, South Carolina, Iowa, Colorado, California and elsewhere. Outsiders got a look at what goes on inside ICE raids from the account of Eric Camayd-Freixas, a professional translator for the operation in Postville, Iowa, on May 12 of this year. This enforcement action is an example of how the US is "criminalizing" the deportation process.
Of the 307 arrested at Agriprocessors Inc., about three-quarters were Guatemalan, some in tears as they shuffled around in leg-irons. Most just wanted to be deported immediately so they could take care of their families back home.
The translator claims that out of the 983 original employees investigated for non-matching Social Security numbers, only one of the suspects' numbers had been a reported identity theft. Apparently all or most of the others used invented numbers, belonging to nobody. The law states that "identity theft" involves a person who "knowingly uses a means of identification of another person with the intent to commit an unlawful activity or felony." A typical aim of identity theft is to obtain credit illegally.
Most of these Guatemalan immigrants didn't know what a Social Security number was, or what its purpose was. They were sold a Social Security number as part of their identity packet.
The employees arrested in Postville have spent a minimum of five months in prison.
The conditions at the El Paso Detention Center are considered better than those in most facilities. People are brought there from other places, such as Spain, to see it. "It's a flagship operation," Erickson says. "It has fresh air, a library and a psychologist."
A new processing center for immigrants in Chaparral opened in June as an accessory to the regular detention center. This, to Erickson, is another story.
"It's a giant Walmart — it's a great big place without windows," she says. "There's not a window in the building. The air is all canned air. The light is all artificial light. There are no windows in the hall. There are no windows in the dining room."
She visited the place with a lawyer friend. "We were sick to our stomach," she says. "She thought she had seen everything."
The Chaparral facility was built by the largest private builder and manager of ICE-sponsored immigrant detention facilities in the US, the Management and Training Corp. The center holds 1,048 male undocumented immigrants. Privately built detention facilities are highly unregulated, according to prison activists.
The Diocesan Migrant and Refugee Services (DMRS) of El Paso has also complained about conditions at the detention center, according to the Santa Fe New Mexican. Ilian Olguin, DMRS executive director, says there are reports that non-criminal inmates have been put in solitary confinement for up to a week. Detainees report difficulty getting legal assistance.
Another report describes one inmate who lacked access to medical care. The man had been detained without medication, and "the family was frantic," according to Olguin. "His health was really deteriorating." DMRS workers appealed directly to ICE for assistance.
"There's not enough activism," says Erickson. She would like to see more local activists monitor the detention centers and counsel the inmates legally and spiritually — "people who have enough Spanish to be helpful."
Perhaps the overriding problem is that "it's a broken system. It's backlogged hugely," says Erickson.
Congress may be taking up comprehensive immigration reform again in its next session, Erickson adds. She hopes legislation will tackle providing a track toward citizenship, the right of foreign workers to bring their families, and labor rights.
"What is in it for the US to incarcerate these people?" Erickson asks. "What does all this have to do — if we're talking truth — with homeland security?
"If our only response is the militarization of the border," she says, "what does that say about us as human beings?"
Marjorie Lilly writes the Borderlines column.