The Blog of Jesuit Refugee Service/USA

Two days before New Year’s 2010, Homeland Security shocked New Yorkers when the agency detained community leader Jean Montrevil. Now held in Pennsylvania’s York County Prison, Montrevil is beginning a hunger strike. “I am fasting side by side with nearly 60 other detainees to take a stand against this horrific deportation and detention system that is tearing families apart,” Montrevil says. Montrevil entered the U.S. from Haiti in 1986 as a legal permanent resident.

Meanwhile prominent clergy and elected leaders are calling on the feds to return Montrevil to his wife Janay, an African-American school teacher, and his four U.S.-born children.

“Jean represents all that is right about our nation and wrong with the deportation system,” says Rev. Bob Coleman of the historic Riverside Church. “He made a mistake. He paid his time. He represents a restored life. Who benefits by stripping him of his legal status?” Rev. Coleman is a leader of New York’s New Sanctuary Movement, a faith-based coalition for immigration reform that Montrevil himself co-founded in 2007.
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In an article that could have been written by Franz Kafka, The Nation reports on “America’s Secret ICE Castles,” a system of detention centers throughout the country.

“If you don’t have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but you think he’s illegal, we can make him disappear.” Those chilling words were spoken by James Pendergraph, then executive director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Office of State and Local Coordination, at a conference of police and sheriffs in August 2008.

The challenge of being unable to find people in detention centers … is worsened when one does not even know where to look. The absence of a real-time database tracking people in ICE custody means ICE has created a network of secret jails. Subfield offices enter the time and date of custody after the fact, a situation ripe for errors, … as well as cover-ups.

It’s also not surprising that if you’re putting people in a warehouse, the occupants become inventory. Inventory does not need showers, beds, drinking water, soap, toothbrushes, sanitary napkins, mail, attorneys or legal information, and can withstand the constant blast of cold air. The US residents held in B-18, as many as 100 on any given day, were treated likewise. B-18, it turned out, was not a transfer area from point A to point B but rather an irrationally revolving stockroom that would shuttle the same people briefly to the local jails, sometimes from 1 to 5 am, and then bring them back, shackled to one another, stooped and crouching in overpacked vans. These transfers made it impossible for anyone to know their location, as there would be no notice to attorneys or relatives when people moved. At times the B-18 occupants were left overnight, the frigid onslaught of forced air and lack of mattresses or bedding defeating sleep. The hours of sitting in packed cells on benches or the concrete floor meant further physical and mental duress.

Alla Suvorova, 26, a Mission Hills, California, resident for almost six years, ended up in B-18 after she was snared in an ICE raid targeting others at a Sherman Oaks apartment building. For her, the worst part was not the dirt, the bugs flying everywhere or the clogged, stinking toilet in their common cell but the panic when ICE agents laughed at her requests to understand how long she would be held. “No one could visit; they couldn’t find me. I was thinking these people are going to put me and the other people in a grinder and make sausages and sell them in the local market.”

Read the full article here.