With stories of deportations to El Salvadoran prisons and in secret middle-of-the-night flights dominating headlines, advocates warn that detention in American immigration facilities is a harrowing punishment in itself and one that looms large over many residents of the United States as President Donald Trump’s administration has ramped up its deportation campaign.
Stefania Artega, a co-founder of the Carolina Migrant Network, helps operate a hotline that people in North Carolina and South Carolina can call to report sightings of immigration enforcement in their communities, as well as to access legal resources. She told Salon that recently some have begun calling to report emergencies — before calling the police — because they’re scared that any contact with law enforcement might lead to ICE agents knocking on their door.
“Early on, we got a call from somebody who was hiding in the bathroom from an abusive partner and was unsure if she could call 911 and called our hotline instead,” Artega said.
Fear of calling the police isn’t the only effect of Trump and the Republicans’ deportation campaign. Artega told Salon that, in the communities she works with, children are staying home from school and parents are staying home from work because of fear of ICE and what it could mean for them and their families if they’re detained.
Becca O’Neil, an immigration attorney and co-founder of the Carolina Migrant Network, described a system where detainees enjoy fewer rights than criminal defendants and one characterized by uncertainty. She regularly visits the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, one of the largest detention centers in the United States, where she said detainees regularly get stuck for years. Immigrants are typically held in a county jail or a different partner facility before being transferred to a longer-term facility, like Stewart.
“These are people who are being held purely on immigration charges, and ‘charges’ is not even a good word for it. These are simple violations. Nobody’s there on criminal charges,” O’Neil said.
Stewart is a private prison operated by CoreCivic, a for-profit corporation that makes money off detained immigrants, most of whom have no legal counsel. Unlike in criminal court, immigration courts are not required to provide detainees with an attorney. O’Neil said that navigating this system without a counsel can be confusing and difficult, an issue that is compounded for detainees who don’t speak English, Spanish or another language for which an interpreter is readily available.
O’Neil said she knew of one detainee who was kept in Stewart for 900 days while his wife and child were allowed to apply for asylum and live in North Carolina. He later won his case. However, when the government appealed his legal victory, he was forced to stay in jail throughout the appeal; about a year after his initial legal victory, he was still in detention as the appeal was pending.
O’Neil said that the best immediate outcome that people who are detained by ICE can typically hope for is to be released on bond. According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which keeps detailed data on immigration proceedings, only about 31% of detainees are released on bond. These rates also vary dramatically based on national origin, with about half of Turkish detainees being released on bond, while just 16% of detainees from the Dominican Republic are released.
Marcela Hernandez, director of organizing and membership at the Detention Watch Network, told Salon that for some detainees who are unable to be released on bond, deportation is preferable to the treatment they receive in detention centers.
“In talking with people inside or supporting people that have been released, folks have reported that there's a lot of medical neglect and overcrowding. Also, when people are trying to organize to get medical support, such as seeing a nurse because they're feeling bad or have a life-threatening condition, or for better food since it's really bad, they have been met with a lot of violence including the use of pepper spray, rubber bullets, beatings and sent to solidarity confinement,” Hernandez said.
At Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia, detainees were alleged to have been pressured to undergo unneeded procedures like hysterectomies under the first Trump administration. Hernandez said that when detainees attempt to advocate for their rights, they are sometimes transferred to other facilities.
The Detention Watch Network has compiled reports detailing alleged abuses at different detention facilities, like the use of tear gas as punishment for perceived “insubordination,” and the myriad health problems that plague detention centers. One Virginia facility, for example, experienced a mumps outbreak in 2019, which the organization says was exacerbated by unsafe and overcrowded conditions.
“We have people that are just enduring the horrible conditions detention to the point where some folks say, ‘I prefer to be deported than to be in these abuses in a detention center.’ Detention serves as a key piece of the deportation systems and is designed to be abusive so people are discouraged from fighting for their case and rights,” Hernandez said.
At the same time, it’s often difficult for the families of those detained to even figure out where their loved ones are being kept. Matt Cameron, a Massachusetts immigration attorney, told Salon that it’s easier to track a package in the mail than to locate a detained family member.
“I think most people would be surprised to learn that you can't even get anywhere near the basic level of tracking that you could get if you ordered a pair of shoes on Zappos right now, on a human being in the ICE system,” Cameron said.
Cameron said that he recently had a client who was facing a bond hearing on a Monday and disappeared over the preceding weekend. He said he’d talked to several ICE officers and “no one seemed particularly concerned about he fact that they don’t know where he is and that they don’t know where he’s going.”
“He's just disappeared, and this has been happening a lot. I'm sure you've seen stories. There's always been chaos built into the system, but this is something else,” Cameron said. “There is a detainee locator that you can use online, and if you're wire somebody's details, but that's pretty much functionally useless at this point because they haven't been updating it, and it's always been 24 to 48 hours behind.”
Cameron said that, compared to criminal custody, immigration detention has a lot less certainty for those who are detained. Cameron recounted a story of a client from a Southeast Asian country who was suffering from dementia and held for years, in part because he couldn't afford legal counsel.
“He didn’t know what was going on. He was going in and out of dementia and no one was doing anything about his situation. He was just showing up to the immigration judge, and the judge was trying to do his best to explain his rights and help him through these proceedings. But without a lawyer, especially if you don't know what's going on, it's really hard to know what to do, and I worry there are people like that getting lost in the system all the time, especially now, when we're being so careless about everything,” Cameron said.
Frankie Miranda, president and CEO of the Hispanic Federation, a nonprofit advocacy group, told Salon that the threat of both deportation and detention is hanging over the Hispanic community in the United States. He noted that it's not just immigrant communities that are affected, citing reports of Puerto Ricans being targeted by ICE.
“First of all, I can tell you that I have family members and people I know that are concerned and are walking around with their passports because they're concerned that the way they look and the language they're speaking in public will be cause for them to be detained,” Miranda said.
In response to a request for comment from Salon, an ICE spokesperson said: "U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement law enforcement activities are not conducted based on racial or ethnic profiling. The Department of Homeland Security takes all allegations of racial or ethnic profiling very seriously."
"ICE’s law enforcement actions are taken consistent with DHS and ICE policies, as well as U.S. immigration law, which prohibit the consideration of race or ethnicity when conducting enforcement actions," the spokesperson continued. "Instead, ICE relies on data-driven, fact-based intelligence to identify, arrest and remove criminal aliens from the United States. All aliens in violation of U.S. immigration law may be subject to arrest, detention and, if found removable by final order, removal from the United States, regardless of nationality."
Miranda explained that he’s worried that information that immigrants have given to the government in other contexts, like when paying taxes, may be used against them. The IRS, for example, has agreed to share the taxpayer information of immigrants with the Department of Homeland Security. Some documented immigrants, Miranda said, have expressed guilt because they’ve “provided an enormous amount of information to the government and they feel that they have put their families at risk.”
“Instead of providing resources to clear the backlog, what they have been doing is taking resources away from trusted partners in communities and investing millions of dollars in a campaign to terrorize communities,” Miranda said.
