The US Can Move past Immigration Prisons – and towards Justice | César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández

Outside of Philadelphia,

there is an old nursing home that peaks out from behind lush trees.

Instead of caring for the old, these days, it detains the young.

Kids who came to the United States with their parents.

Inside its hallways,

a little boy named Diego went from diapers to detention.

When he was just one year old,

Diego's mother, Wendy, decided that life in Honduras was too dangerous

for them to stay.

Like people from all over the world have done for generations,

Diego and Wendy turned to the United States for safety.

If you are in the United States and you are afraid for your life,

federal law is clear that you can ask for asylum.

It does not matter where you came from or how you got here.

Diego and Wendy did just that.

Within a few days,

they found themselves inside that Pennsylvania immigration prison.

Two among half a million people

who will be locked up every single year,

while the government decides

if they will be allowed to stay in the United States.

Instead of a fair match

between a prosecutor and a defense attorney,

imprisoned migrants usually walk into court alone.

It's a high-stakes legal battle

that they are forced to fight with their hands tied behind their backs.

As the courts deliberate, the days pass.

From your community to mine, today, someone is locked up

who has not been accused of any crime.

Often, they haven't seen a judge or even a lawyer.

And yet, in most immigration prisons

that I have visited as a lawyer or a researcher,

the steel door is closed shut with the clink of confinement.

For the sake of votes,

politicians claim people like Diego and Wendy are dangerous, or dishonest.

For the sake of profits,

private corporations run prisons to house them.

It seems unimaginable today,

but we haven't always locked up migrants

who are waiting for the government to decide their fate.

At one time,

the United States stood on the verge of abolishing immigration prisons.

"This was the sign of an enlightened civilization,"

the Supreme Court wrote in 1958.

We were so close.

But politics and profits pushed us in the opposite direction.

With the support of Republicans and Democrats,

today, we lock up men, we lock up women, and we lock up children.

But in our past, I see hope for the future.

We can take clear steps toward abolishing immigration prisons.

Most people think of Ellis Island

as the place that welcomed generations of newcomers to the United States.

It did that,

but it was also an immigration prison

with an ironic view of the Statue of Liberty.

By the 1950s, the Ellis Island facility needed to be repaired,

replaced or discarded.

The government of the war hero turned Republican president,

Dwight Eisenhower,

decided to shut it down.

But then, starting in the late 1970s,

the United States built the largest immigration prison system in the world.

Republicans and Democrats worked together,

pointing to the prison's barbed wire to uphold the law to protect you ...

from me.

When Haitians started arriving in large numbers in the 1970s,

Carter turned to detention.

In the 1980s, Reagan followed by jailing Cubans and Central Americans.

George H. W. Bush turned to the military base at Guantanamo, Cuba,

to jail migrants.

President Clinton left them there.

This isn't a partisan issue.

This is a profits issue.

To local governments and private businesses,

immigration prisons are a financial spigot.

The two largest private prison corporations in the United States,

CoreCivic and the GEO Group,

get about half of their money from the federal government.

With that, they hire people in out-of-the-way locations,

where decent-paying jobs are hard to come by.

Down in South Texas, head north from the border,

and eventually, you will catch the sharp stench of onions

filling the air.

The local economy of Raymondville --

that's the county seat of Willacy County --

it runs on produce --

on produce and on prisons.

Tucked behind a state jail,

the Willacy County Detention Center houses federal immigration prisoners

in large canvas tents.

A few years ago, this facility shut down,

after inmates rebelled.

And when that happened, I was not surprised,

because back when I used to represent clients there,

stories of rape, harassment and abuse were common.

Eventually, the county lost a few hundred jobs.

Even the Walmart shut down.

But then, in the summer of 2018,

when the refurbished prison was ramping up to reopen,

the county's elected officials celebrated.

Why was the county so interested?

It owned the prison, and the private company just ran it.

Having prisoners on the inside

meant that the private company could hire guards,

and it could hire nurses,

and it meant that the county could pay its bills.

With support from Washington down to Willacy County,

it's a good time to be in the business of locking up migrants.

But we can't forget that these are people who we're talking about,

from kids who are too young to be asked their opinions,

to adults with longtime ties to the United States.

Diego and Wendy were stuck inside that old nursing home turned prison,

waiting for the legal process to slowly grind forward.

Just one when he arrived,

Diego was three by the time he got out.

Eventually, he won his legal case to stay in the United States,

but not before 650 nights passed.

And yet ...

others are not so lucky.

Kamyar Samimi ...

had a green card and 40 years in the United States,

when one day, ICE showed up at his door

and took him down to a private prison in suburban Denver.

Within 13 days,

he was dead.

The government never got around to deciding

if he should be deported.

In this topsy-turvy world,

we feel better when we lock up kids with their mothers,

or when people don’t meet the same end as Mr. Samimi.

Is this really the best that we can do?

The path to a world that's free of immigration prisons

does not begin by pretending that migrants are perfect.

It starts with a reality check.

Immigration law tells us that migrants are aliens.

But we all know that migrants are not aliens.

Migrants are just people.

And like most people,

most of the time, migrants are profoundly ordinary --

ordinary people asked to do the extraordinary:

wage your final fight to stay in this country

while you are locked up far away from family, your friends --

where lawyers are hard to come by.

To fix this and move toward a world without immigration prisons,

let's stop paying CoreCivic and the GEO Group

to lock up migrants,

and let's start paying lawyers to defend them.

(Cheers and applause)

Having a lawyer just means that the courts are more likely to reach

a fair and a just conclusion.

And when it comes to important legal questions,

let's be honest,

what's more American that a fight between lawyers?

(Laughter)

And we've done this in the past.

The government has run several pilot projects.

Every time, support has proven enough to get migrants out of prison,

to keep them on top of their court dates and away from trouble.

But we've never let these projects grow.

Politics and profits have always stamped out

the promise of freedom.

We can lock up migrants,

but we don't have to.

Instead of hoping that barbed wire and steel doors

will guide us out of the labyrinth of immigration law,

we could invest in justice.

We could make sure that every migrant

has a fair chance of putting their best legal case forward.

Because immigration prisons don't get us out of a problem.

Immigration prisons are the problem.

(Cheers and applause)

They blind us to the past, when we did things differently,

and they distract us from the moneymaking tentacles

that tie our future to the prison gates.

Well, the thing is,

liberty is too precious for any of us to lose it

because politicians want votes

and private corporations want money.

Thank you.

(Cheers and applause)