We Built the Wall Page 8

  Brenda Castro, then twenty-three, had a very different experience. In October 2013, Brenda had to leave her life in Juárez. Her brother Santos, twenty-one, had witnessed a murder at a business near his home, and he had been wounded by a gunshot in the incident. He was taken to the hospital for treatment, where he had to give a statement on what he had seen. A short time later, the family got a message: they were all going to be killed. They did not think twice. Brenda, her parents, Santos, his wife, and their newborn baby girl went to the border gate to request asylum. Brenda’s mother, sister-in-law, and her baby were released on their own recognizance. But Brenda, Santos, and their father were still behind bars a month and a half later, even though they had passed the “credible fear” test at the beginning of November.

  “I went on a hunger strike to see if they would let me out quick that way,” Brenda tells me over the phone, after Delmy spreads the word to her fellow detainees that a journalist is interested in their stories. “They say if you stop eating and start getting sick, they rush to let you out, because they don’t want anyone to die in here.”

  The third woman I spoke with, Rosario Hernández, forty-six, was also born in Juárez, and had a story similar to Brenda’s. One day several armed men paid a visit to her son-in-law, and told him they were going to kill his entire family. The Hernández family went to the Judicial Police, but were told that all they could do was register a complaint.

  “I told them, if we did that, they would come back and kill us all over again,” Rosario says firmly, sounding a bit more composed than her companions in detention with whom I spoke. “So the police officers themselves told us we should go surrender to U.S. authorities. We came here, we passed the credible fear interview on September 15, and look, three months later we’re still in here.”

  After talking to the women on hunger strike, I called Leticia Zamarripa, spokesperson for the detention center, which is under the jurisdiction of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Friendly and approachable, Zamarripa acknowledges the criticisms from Dreamactivist and other activist organizations. But, she says, the lengths of time detainees spend in detention is determined not by local authorities, but by the U.S. Customs and Immigration Service (USCIS), an agency which includes the judges who are assigned to the immigrants’ cases. The staff managing the detention centers deal with the consequences of the backlog caused by the federal immigration courts.

  According to USCIS policy, cases are assigned to judges according to their workload, so there is no specific timeframe in place for processing cases. But most immigration lawyers agree that three weeks in detention tends to be the norm for detainees released on their own recognizance in jurisdictions like Arizona and other parts of Texas.

  “Aside from the backlog in immigration courts, there’s another issue,” Santiago tells me a few months later. “The ones operating the detention centers are making money off of the people in there. They receive federal funds for each person, and the longer they are in there, the more money they get.”

  The U.S. government spends over $2 billion every year detaining undocumented immigrants. This figure doubled from 2004 to 2013. For each day that a person is held in detention, the operator of the prison receives $164, and up to $298 for family detention centers. The El Paso center receives more than $130,000 a day to keep its 800 detainees confined within four walls.

  The immigration detention system in the United States has grown drastically, from fewer than 10,000 beds in 1999 to 34,000 in 2014 in 250 centers, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). In 2010 the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) held 363,000 immigrants in detention throughout the country. Six of every ten of these detainees were held in prisons operated by two thirty-year-old private companies: Correction Corporation of America (CCA), now CoreCivic, and GEO Group.

  Headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, CoreCivic has over 15,000 employees. In 2013 the company reported income of over $700 million and a profit of $300 million, of which 100 percent came from government contracts funded by taxpayers. According to a shareholder report, the president and CEO of CoreCivic, Damon T. Hininger, who is paid an annual salary of over $700,000, made over $3.2 million in 2013, including earnings from company stock and three other types of compensation. For their part, GEO Group, with headquarters in Boca Raton, Florida, is the leader in the international market, with almost one hundred detention centers and 18,000 employees in the United States and around the world, according to their corporate reports. Operating under the name Wackenhut Corrections Corporation in its early years, GEO reported earnings of $1.5 billion in 2013. Together, the two corporations have annual earnings of over $3 billion, of which at least $2 billion come from taxpayers.

  This is possible because of a policy first implemented in the 2007 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Appropriations Act, known as the detention center quota. The provision requires ICE to hold a minimum number of detainees every year to guarantee that the private corporations that run the detention centers make a sufficient return on their investment. The measure would not have been implemented without years of intense lobbying efforts by the private prison corporations themselves. According to the Detention Watch Network (DWN), in 2013 GEO Group’s lobbyists spent $1.2 million to convince Congress to act in their interest. The company spent an additional $880,000 on outside lobby groups.

  In the Public Interest (ITPI), a research and policy center in Washington, D.C., focused on concessions and privatization, has analyzed private prison contracts. The center found that 65 percent of private detention center contracts include a clause requiring the contractor be paid between 80 and 100 percent of the cost of operating at full capacity, even if there are empty cells. This contractual mechanism is called a “low-crime tax,” through which taxpayers guarantee that the corporations’ earnings do not decrease. The states of Arizona, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Virginia guarantee the highest prison occupation rates: between 95 and 100 percent.

  A report by DWN asserts that the quotas encourage immigration agents to focus on certain populations in order to ensure that beds in the detention centers are occupied and that “Congress and ICE … treat immigrants as numbers to fill a quota and as products to be bought and sold.” As information on the quotas has circulated more widely, other organizations have joined the call for a stop to the business of locking up immigrants. In 2014 the National Immigrant Justice Center, a human rights organization, released a series of recommendations which included eliminating quotas and substituting detention with alternatives like remote monitoring systems, which would allow people to be with their families as they wait for their cases to be resolved. Alternatives to detention such as electronic monitoring bracelets, however, would only allow prisons to charge between seventy cents and $17 per day, per person—much less than the $160 per individual held in a detention center.

  The GEO Group and CoreCivic both have long histories of abuse charges, human rights violations, labor exploitation, and a lack of transparency, some of which have resulted in fines and facility closures. The most widely known episode involving CoreCivic took place at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, Texas, outside of Austin. The center functioned as a “family residence,” holding families with children in detention until 2009, when the Obama administration closed it under pressure from activists who documented the conditions there, including children dressed in prison uniforms with no access to education or medical attention.

  As for GEO, its Coke County Juvenile Justice Center, also in Texas, was sued by twelve families for “multiple rapes of minors by adults.” A few of the employees were sanctioned, and the families were awarded a financial settlement, but no senior managers were punished. One of the victims, who had been raped when she was fifteen years old, committed suicide on the day the settlement was announced. In 2007 the center was closed due to unsanitary and unsafe conditions, including excessive use of pepper spray to “control” detainees, a lack of educational programs, feces in cells, unhea
lthy food infested with insects, and a lack of sufficient personnel to adequately manage the facility.

  According to DWN, 165 people died in immigration detention centers between 2003 and 2016, mainly from heart and respiratory conditions although some from kidney failure, cancer, and suffocation. Organizations that monitor private prisons have denounced the lack of preventative care and medical treatment inside these facilities. During the same period, CoreCivic and GEO spent over $32 million combined to lobby Congress, according to Grassroots Leadership. These lobbying efforts had an effect on the Obama administration, which approved an expansion project for family detention centers and even opened two new centers in Karnes and Dilley, Texas. The first was awarded to GEO, and the second to CoreCivic.

  What do people held in immigration detention centers do all day? Their daily routine takes them from the dormitory to the cafeteria, and back again. Meals are served at 6:30 a.m., 11:30 a.m., and 4:30 p.m., and after meals they go back to their beds. The alternative to this monotony is the detainee voluntary work program.

  According to ICE policy, this program was designed to give detainees “the opportunity to earn money” and so that “the negative impact of confinement will be reduced because of improved morale, and fewer incidents requiring corrective action.” Detainees can opt to work in the kitchen or clean the dormitories or bathrooms. They are paid $1 per day for their work—a real bargain, considering the minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. The great irony here is that some detainees who are there and wind up “working” for the federal government were initially detained because they were found to be working illegally without documentation. To organizations monitoring the corporations that run the immigrant detention centers, the creation of the work program has little to do with addressing human rights concerns, but rather resembles a cost-cutting measure intended to boost profits.

  On October 22, 2014, a group of people detained at the Immigration Detention Center in Aurora, Colorado, operated by GEO, filed a class action lawsuit against the corporation, claiming that they had been exploited as cheap or free labor while they were detained. The plaintiffs, Alejandro Menocal, Marcos Brambila, Grisel Xahuentitla, Hugo Hernández, Lourdes Argueta, Jesús Gaytán, Olga Alexaklina, Dagoberto Vizguerra, and Demetrio Valerga, all detainees or former detainees who were imprisoned and employed by the GEO Group, filed the suit on behalf of themselves and others in similar situations for unpaid wages and forced labor, as well as illicit enrichment.

  Since according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) directives, the work performed by those who decide to participate in the program is strictly voluntary, there has not been any legal measure put in place to stop it. That is what the lawsuit seeks to do by charging that the program results in exploitation and forced work.

  The lawsuit states that “in the course of their employment by GEO, Plaintiffs and others … cleaned and maintained GEO’s on-site medical facility, cleaned the medical facility’s toilets, floors and windows, cleaned patient rooms and medical staff offices, swept, mopped, stripped, and waxed the floors of the medical facility, did medical facility laundry, swept, mopped, stripped, and waxed floors throughout the facility, did detainee laundry, prepared and served detainee meals, assisted in preparing catered meals for law enforcement events sponsored by GEO, performed clerical work for GEO, prepared clothing for newly arriving detainees, provided barber services to detainees, ran the facility’s law library, cleaned the facility’s intake area and solitary confinement unit, deep cleaned and prepared vacant portions of the facility for newly arriving detainees, cleaned the facility’s warehouse, and maintained the exterior and landscaping of the GEO building, inter alia.” They received $1 per day for their work, and those who refused to work were put in solitary confinement. They were required to clean their own cells, or “living pods,” for no pay. Given the federal minimum wage, the corporations running the centers saved $28 per detainee in labor costs for every four hours of a detainee’s work. GEO has responded through its spokesperson that its facilities comply with federal government rules and standards.

  On February 27, 2017, at the onset of Trump’s presidential term, the federal judge in charge of this case ruled that a class action lawsuit against GEO could proceed. The suit could include as many as 60,000 plaintiffs, all immigrants who have been detained in that company’s facilities over the last decade.

  Part Three

  Impunity

  8

  Preserving Memory

  In one room of a one-story building, on a wide, dusty avenue of Juárez, workshops for children are held. The workshops began in 2011. Once a week, little boys and girls, four to eight years old, come through the doors of the building to attend a workshop.

  They are workshops in pain.

  The sessions are designed to help these children whose fathers, or mothers, or both, have been shot to death, kidnapped, stuffed into trunks, dismembered, or dumped on a deserted field to rot, or all of the above. Some of these children watched their parents being murdered. Some of them are traumatized simply because they live in Juárez.

  There are also mothers in Juárez who come to the building, who have not been murdered, but easily could have been. Women who know what a bone breaking sounds like. Who get here by a miracle, and when they go home, they walk fast, looking over their shoulders. They meet up with other women in the building, as they have for the past fourteen years when Casa Amiga was founded, to offer protection and counseling to victims of domestic or gender violence. Twelve years ago, the “Juárez murders” started appearing in newspaper headlines. But now, the nature of the violence here has changed: the so-called war on narcotrafficking means that extreme violence against women has blended in with other homicides, extortions, and mass executions. Now it’s not just women coming here. Men come too. And families. And children who have no families left.

  Every day at Casa Amiga, proof walks through the door that no one is safe here, that the city of Juárez has been abandoned, left for dead.

  It’s a Monday in January 2013, late afternoon. The dusty avenue is bathed in a strange light under a grayish-pink sky, eerily underscoring the feeling of abandonment palpable throughout the city. We arrive at Casa Amiga, a building constructed of cement blocks, its outside walls painted in vibrant shades of blue, yellow, and purple. It looks entirely out of place on the avenue.

  Our little group must look very odd to the locals. The two men responsible for us being here are a Mexican, a Chicano-looking professor in his fifties with expressive eyes behind glasses, and another professor, a gringo in his sixties with a slender build and a serious, formal demeanor. The three of us came from Los Angeles. A local photographer is with us, tall, with a dark complexion and a look of having seen it all—and, in fact, he has seen it all—and an American woman, an academic-activist of short stature and a bossy attitude that reminds me of the mother, played by Frances McDormand, in the film Almost Famous. We are just finishing up our first day of this trip—my first visit to El Paso–Juárez to do research for this book—but I feel like I have been listening to heartbreaking tales of pain for weeks. The photographer parks the car; without saying a word we get out, take a deep breath, and walk through the front door.

  A few minutes later a door opens and out steps a slender woman looking much younger than her thirty-six years, her outward appearance not even hinting at her profound inner strength. With horrific stories constantly coming and going at Casa Amiga, only the strongest of the strong last long.

  Irma Casas is the director of Casa Amiga. She gives us a tour, showing us the rooms filled with children’s books and toys. She tells us that Casa Amiga has been serving approximately 20,000 people per year, victims of every kind of violence.

  “Juárez is in a postwar situation,” Irma explains, her long, chestnut hair worn loose, her fair complexion free of makeup, eyes very open, her face serious. “We are confronting the pain of children with two dead parents. We understand that the cost of what we are experiencing to
day will be seen in ten, twenty years.” Rates of violence among minors are alarming; there are reports of attempted homicide involving eight-year-old children. In Guadalupe Valley, an area on the outskirts of Juárez where organized crime has taken over, suicide rates among young people have risen. Teens use words that didn’t exist ten years ago, made up to describe new crimes: bicicleteros (bike thieves), boteros, carjacking. When the military began arriving in 2008, the number of human rights violations rose to the highest ever recorded; when federal forces began arriving that year, cases of sexual violence against women, including young women being raped and tortured, increased markedly.

  Kent Kirkton could be the star of a TV series, and not just because of his alliterative name that sounds like it was dreamed up by a Hollywood agent. When he walks through the halls of California State University Northridge (CSUN) in Los Angeles, everyone knows him as the professor who, after spending years in the journalism department, now runs the Institute for Arts and Media. But before he was an academic, Kent—with his fair complexion, his head sparsely covered with white hair on the back and sides, with a goatee to match, his affable nature apparent in his eyes behind glasses—played other roles.

  Kent was born in 1945 in Gredley, Illinois, a small Midwestern town with less than a thousand residents. At that time, half of the townspeople lived on farms, and when Kent graduated from high school in 1963, there were only thirty-six students in his graduating class. Even though they lived in a conservative community, the Kirktons could be described as progressive. Kent’s father was the manager of a carpentry business, and his mother, who had started out working in a butcher shop, went on to be an assistant paralegal in a law firm. Their family hosted exchange students, and, according to Kent, his parents were closet Democrats.