A Mother and Her Sons
“‘No matter how you spin it, these are prisons,’ said Faisal Al-Juburi of the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, a Texas-based immigrant rights group. ‘There is no way to humanely detain people, especially families.’” — Miami Herald
Earlier this year, a mother and her young sons were held in ICE family detention for over 40 days despite being derivatives of her husband’s active asylum case — a man who has documented his well-founded fear of persecution for him and his family due to his political advocacy in their home country.
Over the course of six weeks, she alleges being forced to sign untranslated documents she could not read, and faced multiple threats of separation from her boys. She recounts one son crying himself to sleep and the other constantly awaking from night terrors; both of them began to waste away.
No matter how you spin it, ICE family detention centers are prisons. There is no way to humanely detain people, especially families.
RAICES successfully pushed for their release and reunification with her husband and her family’s sponsor. But what at first appeared to be a win in favor of justice took a dark turn not even two weeks later, when she responsibly showed up to a scheduled ICE check-in without her sons, as instructed. She did what she was supposed to do.
Upon arriving at her check-in, she was promptly apprehended and sent to an adult detention center across the country — cutting her off from her family, legal counsel, and any semblance of community support. Nearly three months later, that’s where she remains.
We don’t know how this nation stands to benefit from the criminalization of mothers fighting to secure the safety and well-being of their children. But we know who stands to gain, thanks in part to a bombshell investigative report published today in the Miami Herald by journalist Shirsho Dasgupta.
This report is an eye-opening account of how lucrative immigrant detention has been over the last decade, not only for private prison contractors like the immigrant-founded GEO Group, which manages the very facility in which this mother is being held at this moment, but also for Trump administration officials, many of whom have built personal wealth lobbying on their behalf.
It is alarmingly clear that the U.S. government has created a giant, lucrative machine that profits off of peoples’ pain — and renders immigrant lives disposable. And it only stands to get worse with the $45 million earmarked specifically for the expansion of immigrant detention in the big abomination of a bill signed into law this summer.
Remember, there is no reason to incarcerate anyone simply for seeking safety and a better future in the U.S. That’s not just a moral stance, it’s a legal one too. The use of civil detention is a choice our government is making to hurt our neighbors and line the pockets of private prison companies, subsidized by our tax dollars.
