Why Landing in Trump’s America May Be a Fate Worse Than Death, Refugees Wonder
Now locked up in the largest immigration-detention system in the world, thousands of innocents rue their status as long-term prisoners.
Front entrance of the Casa Padre child detention center, Brownsville, Texas (photo by Sarah Towle 2020)
What are They Hiding?
We were told that the first-thing a newcomer encounters at Casa Padre, a detention center for migrant kids, is a black and white image of Donald Trump drawn against the backdrop of an American flag. Alongside it, a quote from his 1987 book The Art of the Deal:
“Sometimes by losing a battle you find a new way to win the war.”
Was this for real? Or was it just a bad joke, reflecting the nightmare that is the vast network of clandestine kids’ jails, like Tornillo, that now criss-cross the USA?
Jim and I aimed to find out.
It was easy to find Casa Padre. I typed the name into Google Maps, eh voila! There it was, hiding in plain sight in a Brownsville, TX, strip-mall not far from our home-away-from-home at the Hampton Inn on the I-69E Frontage Road. It occupies a former Walmart and is run by Southwest Key, the highest paid of 61 federal government contractors that struck it rich off the detention and transportation of “unaccompanied alien children” in 2018.
It is said that Casa Padre is the largest “licensed childcare facility” in the US, housing approximately 1,500 boys from 10–17 years old. But Jim and I couldn’t corroborate that for sure, because just like US Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) before us, we were turned away before we could reach the door.
In fact, it appears that no one, other than staff bound by ironclad NDAs — and, of course, the detained — has entered the facility since federal authorities admitted a small group of reporters to tour the secretive shelter after Merkley’s June 2018 rebuff sparked an outcry.
After that, nada. Which begs the question: what are they hiding?
Authorized Personnel Only
As we pulled into the drive, we were met right away by a sentry. She’d stepped out of a little wooden hut and requested with a wave of the hand that we lower the window. We did.
“May I help you,” she asked.
“Isn’t this the Walmart?” we said, feigning ignorance.
“No,” she said, reversing her wave. “You’ll have to back out.”
“Into oncoming traffic?” Jim responded. “Not likely.” He pulled forward and took a wide tour of the parking lot so I could snap some pics. From our rear-view mirror, we could see the sentry talking into her phone, then jotting down our license plate number.
On our way back out, she waved at us again. This time indicating we should stop.
“In future, please know only authorized personnel can come in here,” she said, matter-of-factly. At which point, I just couldn’t help myself.
“This is that kids’ jail, isn’t it?” She pursed her lips.
“How do you feel about working for a company that imprisons kids? Are you able to sleep at night?”
She turned away from us, and marched back into her hut. Jim drove on. But we really, really wanted to know. So I texted Tía Cindy:
Any chance you can get us into a detention center?
She responded within seconds. Sure. I’ll put you in touch Tía Madeleine.
Angry Tía Madeleine Sandefur at the June 14, 2018 Families Belong Together rally (photo credit: Brownsville Herald)
The Unsung Angry Tía
Madeleine Sandefur calls herself “an accidental activist.” Yet, she has been at the forefront of many causes since her arrival in South Texas in 1969. She’s a voting rights advocate with the League of Women Voters; an environmentalist involved in the public protest to save South Padre Island habitats from the liquefied natural gas industry; and a fundraiser for Alzheimer’s research. She helped to organize the Brownsville Women’s March, one of 408 that swept the nation, and 673 that took place on the world’s seven continents, the day Donald Trump crossed his fingers behind his back and pledged to uphold and defend the US Constitution.
On June 14, 2018, Madeleine brought her organizational skills to bear, in league with her birder friend, Joyce Hamilton, to mount Brownsville’s Families Belong Together rally. Before the protest was over that day, she’d become the fifth Angry Tía. And because she lives just miles away from the Port Isabel Detention Center (PIDC), where Customs & Border Patrol (CBP) were then sending migrants, that became her “beat.”
Her role was to provide hope to the anguished mothers whose kids had been seized, and to liaise with lawyers, like Jodi Goodwin and ProBar ’s Kimi Jackson, who were tirelessly — and without pay — trying to track them down. To do that, she had to school up quickly on Trump & Co’s shape-shifting anti-immigrant agenda, making her the Tías’ expert in all detention-related matters today.
By the time Jim and I arrived in the Rio Grande Valley, the PIDC contained only men — 1,500 of them. Tía Madeleine serves the asylum seekers among the detainees, who are distinguishable from the more hardened criminals by their blue coveralls. The others wear red.
She secures them legal counsel, comforts them by phone or email when they lose hope, and is always there to ferry those who get out to bus or plane. She refers to them collectively as “my boys.” They all call her “mama.”
Madeleine presents a surprising package. Her petite, soft-spoken stature masks a fierce devotion and loud determination for justice. A naturalized immigrant from Zurich, Switzerland, married to a Kentucky-born US Airman, she’s now dedicated to fighting the very system that welcomed her.
“What moved you to take on such a Sisyphean challenge?” I asked her.
“Because this wasn’t what I signed on to when I became a US citizen.”
1984, Brazil, or Soylent Green?
The front entrance of the Port Isabel Detention Center with dedication to victims of 9/11 (photo: US Immigration & Customs Enforcement)
January 2020: The year after “the future” envisioned in dystopian movies of my youth — Blade Runner, Akira, Running Man — a few decades past the world of Escape from New York, and just two years from Soylent Green. None of these films portrayed an evil as banal as what Jim and I encountered at PIDC. There, where freedom-seeking refugees are locked up according to the whims of a lawless White House, Orwell’s 1984 comes closer to mind, or Terry Gillian’s Brazil. There is certainly no golden door for the wretched refuse yearning to be free at the PIDC.
Located just a few wing-flaps of a migratory bird away from the tourist beaches of South Padre Island and roughly 30-miles north of the 2000-mile humanitarian crisis stretching from Matamoros to Tijuana, PIDC provided us the key to our expanding witness. We understood instantly that Trump & Co’s manufactured immigration crisis was not limited to the Mexican side of the US border, where they simply washed their hands of any responsibility for the huddled masses and tempest-tost [sic] homeless. The crisis, it turns out, is a growing cancer inside US borders, too, where people of all ages who are innocent of any real crime are locked up in cells and cages, and tucked away from prying eyes.
Having already been denied entry to Casa Padre, we weren’t expecting much as we wound our way up the long, landscaped driveway toward the low-slung brick structures and barbed-wire topped chainlink fences raised within a federal nature preserve. We parked the Kia and walked by the stone monument dedicating the site to the victims of 9/11. We passed through metal detectors after emptying our pockets of all but the car keys, receiving nothing but polite interaction from our khaki-clad minders. I noted they were not the old, fat, white men of my expectation, but resembled more their prisoners. I marveled at the significance of this just as I reeled at my own internalized bias. We signed in and gave up the Alien Identification Numbers of the inmates we’d come to visit.
And there we were, in the waiting room of an antiseptic institution where rows of straight-backed, scoop-seated metal chairs are bolted into a cold, painted gray cement floor. A reverse ATM machine — allowing visitors to deposit money into detainee accounts for commissary purchases, like soap — nestled up against a vending machine offering bottled water, sodas, and junk food. Above them, a single soundless television monitor projected The Hunger Games — a coincidence, surely, but also a way too obvious metaphor to resist mentioning for the bizarre world we’d entered.
Locked Up & Forgotten
Detainees walking at PIDC (photo: US Immigration & Customs Enforcement)
The rule, if you’re not a lawyer, is one inmate per visit. So, Tía Madeleine gave us the AI#s of two men, one from Guinea, the other The Gambia, and both in dire need of human contact, even if through plexiglass and a 20th-century-style telephone with a crackling receiver speaker. “But just in case the guards are feeling generous,” she said, “I’ll give you a third AI# for a man from Cameroon.” He was doing better than the other two emotionally, but was lonely and bursting to tell his story.
We waited an hour. Having been stripped of our phones and notebooks, we had nothing to pass the time but each other and the muted transmission of the Mockingjay’s struggle against The Capitol. Finally, a door opened and a guard beckoned us. We were ushered down a long, institutional hall with two-toned grey-on-grey walls, through another door leading into a large room of darker gray carved up by cubicles. Inside each open-backed, gray-walled cubicle, white formica-topped facing tables, 3-ft wide by 1-ft deep, were split in two by plexiglass barriers that reached to the ceiling. And just as pictured in every prison movie or sitcom you’ve ever seen, a grey phone sat perched on the facing wall to the right. There, in this room of repeating white and grey and no natural light, we met M and K, both French-speaking African men for whom, here in South Texas, it was rare to receive mother-tongue visitors, and V, an English speaker from the mostly French-speaking nation of Cameroon.
One by one, we heard their stories, both harrowing and heroic, of fleeing certain death back home and enduring a months-long pursuit of freedom only to be shackled, clad in a blue jumpsuit with PIDC emblazoned across the back, and imprisoned. They should all have been awarded asylum for simply having survived the overland trek from Ecuador — the gateway for African migrants because it requires no visa — through Colombia, Panama, and Costa Rica to Nicaragua where smugglers passed them from cars to buses to trains all the way through Mexico, everyone getting their palms greased along the way. Jim and I were already well aware of the long, painful, arduous, and dangerous journey to the US, on foot or hanging from La Bestia, that Northern Triangle asylum seekers were taking. But we’d never before conceived of the added hardship of crossing three additional countries worth of mountains, rivers, and jungles without adequate food or water or footwear. The African migration trail to the US, V informed us, is littered with dead bodies.
To endure a voyage like that, you really would have to be running from a life most terrible. And these three were among the few lucky survivors. But some days, they all confessed, they felt that dying on the trail might have been preferable to landing in Trump’s America.
None of the three could go home again. They were well and truly stuck. M became a marked man when the opposition candidate he’d worked for lost a corrupt election. He’ll be taken from the airport on arrival and executed if made to go back. Without books to read and paper to write on, he passes the long days making wallets out of trash.
K, a homosexual in a country that considers such identities punishable by death, ran when his lover was outed and murdered by neighbors. They were coming for K next. He, too, could only survive in hiding back home, if he made it out of the airport alive.
V had managed to get on the wrong side of both sides in a vicious civil war. He named names under torture by the government and was freed. But then the rebels went after him. If he ever returns, there’s no telling which side will tear him apart first.
V, a fairly recent arrival to PIDC, had been there mere months at the time of our visit. M’s imprisonment in the US, however, had surpassed three years. PIDC was his seventh detention center. K had been at PIDC nearly two years, and he was distraught. The appeal of his previously rejected asylum claim had been denied the previous day for lack of hard evidence. Keep in mind it’s impossible to stop collect, and pack evidence of your lovers’ murder when you’re forced to drop everything and run. His pro-bono lawyer felt his case was worth appealing, meaning he’d remain in prison in the US for many months more unless he signed his own deportation papers. That was his choice: indefinite detention with no clear outcome or death. He spent the entirety of our interview shrieking, “Aidez-moi! Aidez-moi!” into the crackling phone.
The World’s Largest Immigrant Detention System
Graph by Freedom for Immigrants shows number of immigrants detained per country in 2019. The next highest country was Saudi Arabia at 250,000.
To understand why M, K, and V were trapped at PIDC, rather than at home with their sponsors — for they all have sponsors — you have to understand that under Trump & Co, immigrants are not people but product. They are pivotal to the profitability of a private prison industry that has made detaining immigrants key to their business model.
Take the Geo Group Inc, the wealthiest for-profit prison contractor worldwide. One out of five of its 850,000 US beds are in ICE detention centers. It and CoreCivic, the next-richest private prison operator in the US, faced a serious existential threat when, in 2016, Obama green-lighted the beginning of the end of privately run prisons.
But the industry’s investment in the Trump campaign — a combined $500,000 — paid off. The morning after Trump’s election, the stock values of GEO Group and CoreCivic rose 18% and 34%. respectively. In April 2017, then-Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, revoked the Obama administration’s prison-reform initiative and began requesting bids private prison operators again. That same month, the GEO Group won a $110 million contract to build the first ICE detention center under the new administration.
Then, Trump & Co allowed ICE to deftly exploit a gap in legislation that fails to limit detention duration. By 2019, 52,000 immigrants were being detained in ICE facilities — 70% operated by private contractors. The average stay in a for-profit prison is 87 days, as against the 33.3 day average in publicly run facilities.
The Price of Hate
Graph by Freedom for Immigrants shows number of immigrants detained in US by age in 2019.
M, K, and V are among 37,000 adult immigrants detained within the largest immigrant detention system in the world, one that in 2019 held more migrant children away from their parents than in any other country in the world: 69,550. That’s enough infants, toddlers, kids, and teens to overflow an NFL stadium. That’s despite the overwhelming evidence that prolonged detention is traumatic for children, causing long-term and irreparable physical and emotional harm.
These people are innocent of any real crime. All they seek is life. The only plausible reason for keeping them under lock and key — particularly in the midst of a lethal global pandemic — is the price Trump & Co have put on hate.
Take Southwest Key, the for-profit operator of the impenetrable Casa Padre: It raked in nearly $1.5 billion in government contracts in 2018 for the detention and transportation of “unaccompanied alien children.” The second-highest paid player in the kid imprisonment business that year was BCFS Health and Human Services of Tornillo fame. It pulled in almost $7 million in government business in 2018. The third-highest vendor, Comprehensive Health Services, Inc, made nearly $3 million in 2018. It’s Homestead, Florida operation housed 3,000 teens in tents at its height, and charged $775 per detainee, per day.
And here’s a Homestead “fun” fact: Prior to becoming Trump’s first Secretary of Homeland Security, John Kelly sat on the board of and worked as a lobbyist for a company called DC Capital Partners. DCCP created the private prison firm, Caliburn International. Owned by Comprehensive Health Services, Caliburn ran Homestead. Shortly after leaving his job as White House Chief of Staff in 2018, Kelly joined Caliburn’s Board of Directors.
You’ll recall that John Kelly was the first member of Trump & Co to go on the record, early in 2017, saying that the government was considering separating migrant families, “as a way to deter immigration.”
1984, Brazil, or a cancer eating out the insides of Trump’s America? You decide.
“Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.”