American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons

429 Pages·2004·10.246 MB·English

by  Mark Dow

AMERIC AN GULAG

’
AMERICAN GULAG

INSIDE U.S. IMMIGRATION PRISONS

MARK DOW
University of California Press Berkeley Los Angeles London
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2004 by the Regents of the University of California
Frontispiece: A Pakistani and a Mexican detainee in a
holding cell at the Baltimore INS office, where they
were brought from Maryland’s Wicomico County Jail,
2002. Photo: Steven Rubin.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dow, Mark.
American gulag : inside U.S. immigration prisons / Mark Dow.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-520-23942-3
1. United States—Emigration and immigration—Government
policy. 2. Immigrants—Government policy—United States.
3. Alien detention centers—United States. 4. Human rights—

United States. 5. Emigration and immigration law—United States.

I. Title: Inside U.S. immigration prisons. II. Title.

JV6483.D69 2004

365'.4—dc22 2003026179

Manufactured in the United States of America
13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication meets the
minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992
(r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).
for the prisoners
CONTENTS

Prologue: “Let This Be Home” ix

1. Invisibility, Intimidation, and the INS 1

2. September 11: Secrecy, Disruption, and Continuity 19
3. Another World, Another Nation:

Miami’s Krome Detention Center 48

4. “Enforcement Means You’re Brutal” 68

5. The World’s First Private Prison 89

6. “Keeping Quiet Means Deny”: A Hunger Strike

in Queens 110

7. The Art of Jailing 137

8. “Criminal Aliens” and Criminal Agents 156

9. Siege, Shackles, Climate, Design 171

10. “Speak to Every Media”: Resistance, Repression,

and the Making of a Prisoner 197
11. Good and Evil in New England 227

12. Out West: Philosophy and Despair 244

13. D ead Time 263

14. Mariel Cubans: Abandoned, Again and Again 285

Acknowledgments 303

Notes 307

Selected Bibliography 373

Index 383
PROLOGUE
“Let This Be Home”
“She tells it so much better than I do,” says the director of a human rights
organization, introducing the woman with her on the church podium. The
audience consists mostly of immigration advocates, along with a few jour-
nalists. “She’s asked me to interview her rather than just tell her story.”
The first question is about the young woman’s reasons for leaving her
country. The speaker explains quickly that the military kidnapped her older
sister, then came looking for her brother and her. The narrative is so rote
it sounds as if she were reading from a script. The interviewer asks about
entering the United States. “I didn’t know about the word ‘asylum,’ ” she
says. At the airport an INS official told her, “You African monkeys should
go back to your country.” She was taken to an INS detention center, where
all the inmates were asylum seekers, and made to “bend down and cough”
three times. She was menstruating at the time.
As she speaks, her long braids occasionally slip forward and she brushes
them back from the microphone on the lectern. Sometimes the inciden-
tal details seem less about explaining anything to us than about orienting
herself. On that first day in detention, for example, she was shackled to a
Spanish-speaking detainee “at around twelve in the afternoon.” She has
said it all before, to me among many others, although earlier in the day
we cut short an interview in her hotel room after several monosyllabic
answers and long silences.
ix