(Director’s note: Joseph Mai, Associate Professor of French, with an affiliation in World Cinema, team teaches with Angela Naimou, Associate Professor of English, a Creative Inquiry group,“Stories of Refuge, Detention, and Hospitality,” dedicated to understanding the stories of immigrants, the conditions of detention, and creative practices of hospitality. This is Clemson Humanities Now.)
If you are as privileged as I am, the current pandemic has meant inconvenient but bearable modifications to daily life: wearing a mask, more time at home, Zoom meetings, perhaps an ill-starred attempt to cut your own hair. But for immigrants held in US mandatory detention centers, the freedom to make such basic choices in healthcare does not exist. For some, the situation has been catastrophic.
I have been thinking of this because, over the past year, my colleague, Dr. Angela Naimou (English), and I have been mentoring a group of students conducting research on the stories that immigrants tell about detention. One of their central activities is to participate in a visit, organized by the El Refugio hospitality house, with people detained at the Stewart Detention Center, located in Lumpkin GA. Stewart is the second largest ICE detention center in the United States, a country with the largest immigration detention system in the world. During our conversations, which take place in English, French, Arabic, and Spanish, we learn a great deal about life in detention, including much about medical distress.
Here is one alarming recent story, though only scarce details are available. On May 24, Santiago Baten-Oxlaj, a husband and father to three children, became the first person to lose his life to COVID-19 in the Stewart facility. Santiago had been arrested at home in Marietta, Georgia on March 2. By March 26 he had requested and been granted voluntary departure to his home country of Guatemala. By April 17, the 34-year-old was sick enough to require a month-long hospitalization, at the end of which he died. Santiago was clearly not a flight risk. His unnecessary death exposes much of the dysfunction and callousness inherent in immigrant detention.
Like most ICE detention centers, Stewart is operated by a private company (CoreCivic), whose main priority is to increase returns for its shareholders. Much of the company’s cost cutting directly affects people’s health and living conditions: low-quality food, sometimes dirty drinking water, extremely overcrowded sleeping and washing facilities, and a lack of medical technology, medicine, and health-care personnel. When immigrants complain of poor conditions or illness, the undertrained staff often respond with punishment such as solitary confinement. Even mental health incidents receive punitive responses, and two men with documented mental health issues have committed suicide at Stewart after being left in solitary confinement.
Given this structural neglect during routine times, the inability of Stewart’s staff to manage this pandemic has been sadly predictable. Just two days before Santiago was granted voluntary departure, immigrants held a hunger strike to demand more protection and possible release. But still most CDC guidelines have been ignored (staff reportedly do not use personal protection equipment, living conditions have changed little, and ICE continues to transfer people from one center to another). To make matters worse, Stewart County has such a spike of COVID-19 that it has declared a state of emergency. Unsurprisingly, the virus has penetrated deep into the facility. Of some 300 employees, over 50 have tested positive. ICE claims that 16 detainees have been infected but there are reliable reports that many cases go untested.
Indeed, it is not easy to know precisely how far conditions have deteriorated inside. The one “safety measure” that ICE has consistently enforced throughout the country has been the suspension of personal visits. This means that the only communication detainees may now have with the outside is through their attorneys (the vast majority do not have one), letters (if delivered), or telephone accounts. Those who have been detained for up to two years and have come to rely on visits from family or community members have grown more isolated.
Thinking about Santiago Baten-Oxlaj can be overwhelming at a time when we are already worried about tumultuous current events. This is especially true when we consider how Santiago and his family’s story touches upon contexts beyond the walls of the detention center: immigrants who are essential workers and who lack health care; undocumented people who fear arrest by ICE or local police participating in 287(g) agreements; people living in tents and kept just beyond our border due to the ironically named “migrant protection protocols” (better known as “remain in Mexico”); at risk incarcerated people throughout the US…
But despite this burden, our research group has continued to explore forms and practices of hospitality that struggle to affirm dignity within this system. Groups such as El Refugio, Project South, SPLC, and the Tahirih Justice Center have sought new ways to support immigrants (through providing telephone accounts, for instance) and demand accountability, transparency, and the release of vulnerable individuals. This summer our students have been thinking of how to aid these efforts and educate those around them.
Bio: Joseph Mai is an Associate Professor of French with an affiliation in World Cinema. He teaches courses on French society and French cinema and literature, and is currently completing a volume on the post-genocide cinema of the Franco-Cambodian filmmaker, Rithy Panh. “Stories of Refuge, Detention, and Hospitality” is a Creative Inquiry group, dedicated to understanding the stories of immigrants, the conditions of detention, and creative practices of hospitality.