The Ugly Truth About ICE’s Abusive Detention Centers
Individuals have described prolonged confinement in icy and overcrowded -free treatment cells, adequate clothes or hygiene access. Women were also arrested there for treatment despite their being only men. They had neither showers nor intimacy, and some were exposed to voyeurism by male prisoners. This treatment took place over a few days, no hours. Overcrowding has persisted beyond consumption, cells more than double their planned capacity.
The people interviewed by HRW described days and nights punishable in icy cells, sleeping on the ground without bedding or appropriate clothes. Sometimes the ice raised 30 people in a small cell. The lights were always lit. There would be a single toilet in a cell, without any privacy. A woman said that she and her cell comrades had asked for cleaning products to clean their scenological toilets for themselves, to which the officers replied sarcastically: “housekeeping will come soon.”
Despite ICE’s efforts to arrest them, people inside Krome and many other detention sites have been able to obtain the documentation of the conditions and violations of rights to the public. In New York, videos shared with the New York Immigration Coalition press show an emerging model: here too, ice uses cells that were supposed to keep people during a question of hours to keep them detained for days or more. People are forced to sleep next to the toilet, without adequate clothes or bedding. (Ice says there is no detention center in this building and denies the accusations of inhuman conditions.) In the Massachusetts, in a Burlington Ice Office which now serves as a detention center, a woman who has recently been released has described a similar situation: a freezing room where women had to sleep on the ground, one toilet. “We slept near and we are huddling together-the line of women reaching the toilet,” she told Wbur this month.
In the light of these very similar stories, as well as the new questionable contract for a concentration camp in Texas, it is not difficult to conclude that current conditions in ice detention centers are among the “mass deportations” promised by Trump, even if they show how weak these plans are. Unable to fully deliver mass deportation, ice increases its precursor: mass detention. Perhaps the administration still does not have the coordination and the ability to carry out mass deportations, which were always supposed to be punitive, always partly intended – if not mainly – as a cause for Trump supporters to come together. The abuses of each detention center exhibited, each new poor quality camp has toured, holds the promise of Trump of scapegoats and to punish immigrants. This fact does not undermine the importance of recording the brutal realities that people face in these prisons, “treatment centers” and camps, especially when stories are told from their own point of view. The accounts can help to reveal something more: that there is no “human” solution to mass detention – a project that violates the dignity of people by design – without its abolition.
