The US Police State

“I am not free. They put me in shackles,” said Ramon Mendoza Pascual, 37, who’s been held at the centre since September 2013. “Why? l don't feel like a criminal. I'm not a criminal.” Mendoza, who was not so long ago a carpenter installing doors and windows in Seattle, entered the US illegally 20 years ago to seek a better life, he said, and found it in the Pacific northwest – doing construction, buying a mobile home, marrying and raising three children all of whom are US citizens. He was arrested for driving under the influence. The charge was dropped – Mendoza claimed the vehicle was parked and his wife was coming to pick him up. He had been convicted of DUI in 2007, however, and police handed him to Ice, which categorised him “an illegal alien with a criminal record” and incarcerated him in Tacoma. An immigration judge with the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review deemed Mendoza a “danger to the community” and denied his petition for an immigration bond.  “They consider me a danger to society, but I spent all my days working honestly. Now I'm here. How can I provide for my family?”

 He is held in detention center with a high fence topped with razor wire which betrays its true function. Reception gives another clue: lockers for visitors to store possessions. To go further you must pass through a body scanner. Then a uniformed guard with a mess of keys on his belt leads you into a passageway, locks the door behind you, and leads on into a maze of narrow corridors painted bright white, locking each door on the way. In theory, the building, officially known as the Northwest Detention Center, is not a jail. Operated by Geo Group, a private company, on behalf of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), it is run by managers, not wardens, and the 1,300 men locked up here are residents, not prisoners. But such distinctions tend to evaporate for those held inside as incarceration drags on from weeks to months and years. There are no “contact visits”. Glass panes separate detainees from visiting relatives. They must speak through phones. There is a nationwide network of 250 such facilities that, together, are holding 34,000 people marked for deportation. Companies like Geo Group and the Corrections Corporation of America run the facilities, reaping billions of taxpayer dollars, some of which end up as campaign donations to members of Congress.

There have now been 2 million deportations in the five years that Barack Obama has been in the White House. Immigration reform through Congress legislation has been stalled leaving 11million undocumented mostly Latinos with no road to citizenship. Immigration authorities are detaining up thousands weekly. Little attention has been paid to the fate of deportees deposited across the border.  A New York Times analysis of internal government records published this week which found that two thirds of the 2 million deported under Obama had committed only minor infractions or had no criminal record. Last year alone, 369,000 undocumented migrants were deported, a ninefold increase from 20 years ago. Because the cases are civil, not criminal, detainees are not entitled to court-appointed lawyers.

Ricardo Sanchez came to the United States from his native Mexico, illegally, when he was nine. He grew up, got married, raised five children. During the day, he sold fruit from a stall; nights, he cooked in a restaurant, where his specialty was a steak with blue cheese, bacon and bourbon sauce that the regulars knew by his name. He built a life.

Last month, police caught Sanchez, who is now 34 years old, driving without a license, and handed him over to immigration authorities. Within days, he was in Tijuana, Mexico, a foreign city to him.  Around 40% of all Mexicans deported from the US are repatriated into Tijuana, on Mexico's Pacific coast. Just under 60,000 people arrived here last year. Religious-run shelters offer free accommodation for 15 days, after which deportees typically either leave town, move to downtown hostels, where conditions range from adequate to squalid, or head out onto the streets. Fr Ernesto Hernandez Ruiz  helps run a soup kitchen that feeds 1,200 people daily, most of them deportees.

From the Guardian