The Human Cost of Immigration Detention - Dr Greg Constantine

Thank you very much Chris and Gresham College for having me here today, and it's a, a pleasure to see all of you here this afternoon, some familiar faces and uh, a lot of people who I haven't met. So thank you very much. Um, I'm gonna be showing a lot of photographs during this lecture today, and I'm gonna kind of start with a pause that will set hopefully the tone. The Gresham College lecture that you're listening to right now is giving you knowledge and insight from one of the world's leading academic experts making it takes a lot of time, but because we want to encourage a love of learning, we think it's well worth it. We never make you pay for lectures, although donations are needed, all we ask in return is this. Send a link to this lecture to someone you think would benefit, and if you haven't already, click the follow or subscribe button from wherever you are listening right now. Now let's get back to the lecture. When I met him at a public library in Liverpool, I expected we to walk to a park or some other space, but he wanted to talk in the library. We looked around in all the tables around the perimeter. The ones with more privacy had already been taken in an open area. Clearly the children's section of the large library, a large group of small children were gathered together sitting on the floor together, proud parents stood with their jackets, folded in their arms and circling the children. I could hear the voice of the woman leading the activities. Surprising to me. He chose to sit at a table near the entrance, visible to everyone, nearly every person who walked into the library past us. There was no privacy. We sat across from each other, but we leaned into the middle of the table and talked in a hushed tone. Um, during our conversation settled, we introduced ourselves and had some small talk, and then he started to tell me his story. He was in his early thirties, originally from West Africa. He told me the reasons for fleeing his home country and how he got to the uk and when he started to go into the details of his troubles in the uk, the small group of children started to recite and sing nursery rhymes. In unison, twinkle, twinkle little star. After a few verses, the group would cheerfully clap together and then start a new one. He continued talking, sharing with me when home office detained him, the struggles he had, trying to find a way out, his confusion for why he was kept in detention, how his detention was a struggle for everyone in his life. Itsy bitsy spider went up the water spout, the group of children recited together down came the rain and washed the spider out. He kept sharing his story uninterrupted and unfazed. A few minutes later, a musical recording started pushed out of a small muffled speaker. Wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round or whatever the UK version of that same song might be. For me, it was torment the clapping, more rhymes, more clapping and cheering and woven through the background of these young children just being children. The hushed voice of an articulate young man speaking to me about the trauma he had survived while in detention in the UK for one year and six months. Eventually the rhymes in music stopped. He still spoke in a hush voice. The home office is not accountable for anything. He said, it's a game. They're just gambling with your life and they play with it. Then he started to talk to me as if he was talking to and directly to someone from the home office. It's like you take a 95-year-old man and you put him in a boxing ring with a 20-year-old man. What do you expect? He's going to get knocked out, isn't he? You put this burden on vulnerable people and you sit down somewhere and you just watch me and make fun. You already know what the answer is. It's David versus Goliath. You can release me. He said, why are you keeping me? You just watch me. You refrain from releasing me because you don't believe I'm a human being and you still make fun of me. You are the one who kept me. You put me in there. You are the ones who the burden should be on, not me. What is your interest? Is your interest to give people a, a chance to legalize their stay or is your interest about victimizing people? Is that it? Then he said, I've always tried to be positive. I've always dreamt to show love to people and to receive love back as a human being, but most of those things they want to instigate in the minds of people is hatred. They couldn't push me to that. He said, no matter how hard they tried, they couldn't push me towards hating other people, but if you ask me, they pushed me to the extent that you start to question yourself, to question what is humanity? We walked out of the library and I could see he was tired. I asked if I could take his photograph in a way that concealed his identity. I found a private spot near some stairs and a walkway. I described to him how I would take his photograph and he said, I'd feel more comfortable if I could put on your coat. It will cover my clothes. The simple request spoke volumes. He put on my coat, may, I made a photograph. I showed it to him on the back of my screen and he was comfortable with it. We said our goodbyes. I'll never forget talking to him. This was immigration detention in the uk. Colin Brook Immigration Removal Center is one of seven immigration detention centers in the uk located adjacent to Heathrow Airport. But well out of view from the public, there are three meter high fencing with barbed wire fences enclosing it, and those inside can hear the planes coming and going. Each roar of a plane, a reminder of their own possible fate on the other side of the world, a one hour drive outside of Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, similar fencing and barbed wire surround an immigration detention center holding several hundred immigrants per day in the United States, which has the largest immigration detention system in the world. Immigration prisons are spread across the west coast and southern border and southeast isolated in the middle of a of nowhere in central Texas, or buried in the vastness of a desert in New Mexico are out of view within the buildings of an office park in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado. While in the interior of the United States, local jails serve as the primary apparatus for detaining immigrants. Some of the jails are placed far out of sight in agricultural farmlands, while others are placed right in the center of a typical small town Midwestern county square, like in Brazil, Indiana, in European countries like Belgium, Greece, the Netherlands and Italy, these sites of immigration detention take on many different forms from that of, of a facility next to a metropolitan airport, to military bank, uh, barracks in a remote mountain forest or even to an ordinary looking apartment complex in a suburb. The physical forms and shapes of these places often vary creatively, so from one place to the next. These systems of incarceration and injustice often elude definition to the public. But one of the constants through all of these places, processes and systems, regardless of location, is the emotional and psychological trauma they have and with with those men, women and children who experience them and even those local citizens who work to assist them, and this trauma often alludes public attention as well. These are some of the places that I want to take you to during this lecture. The voices and stories of those who I've met in these places will serve as our guides and doorways into the human cost of immigration detention. Uh, I'm a documentary photographer, visual storyteller and independent scholar, and I've dedicated 20 years of my career to long-term projects that explore the intersection of human rights, inequality, injustice, genocide, identity, and most importantly the power of the state. Through books, exhibitions, film, performance, multimedia and other non-traditional modes of dissemination. These projects often result in collaborations that cross over into multiple disciplines. My work on immigration detention came about organically. It was a natural extension of an 11 year project I worked on from 2005 to 2016 called Nowhere People. The project documented the struggles of stateless communities and people around the world who had been arbitrarily depl, deprived or stripped of their citizenship, mostly as a result of state driven discrimination and racism. The project attempted to show the effects statelessness had on people in these communities as well as the consequences of the deprivation of nationality had on their access or lack of access to any number of different rights and opportunities. Nowhere people was a project about human rights, identity and belonging, but it was also a project about the power of the state to arbitrarily exclude entire communities with total impunity from the very fabric of modern society using citizenship as the weapon weapon to accomplish this. Towards the end of that project, I was documenting the stories of people in Europe, Italy, Malta, Serbia, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands. Many stateless people shared stories, um, of the vicious cycle of immigration detention they had experienced because of the lack of documentation and they could not be deported back to some, to anywhere across the table from me inside the detention center at the Rome airport, a Palestinian man told me every time I come here, my health gets worse. He had lived in Italy for over 30 years. It was his seventh time being detained on a rooftop in Malta. I stood with a man from Sierra Leone, a group of pigeons swooped overhead. He looked at the birds, closed his eyes, and then he smiled. I could only imagine where his thoughts took him at that moment. I felt like I would never get out of detention. He had said to me earlier that day, and he had spent almost two years incarcerated sitting on a couch rolling a cigarette in an apartment in the Netherlands. A man originally from Uzbekistan says, I can't trust people anymore. It doesn't matter who you are. Detention changed me. My wife calls me an oyster. You're always shut. She says, I used to be cheerful, but I'm grouchy these days. I can see it in myself. I just don't feel stateless sometimes I simply don't know who I am anymore. Detained multiple times he had spent three and a half years of his life in detention. Their stories were unlike any I'd heard before and exposed yet another trauma inflicted by a form of structural and systematic violence. I felt demanded more investigation and attention. I knew immigration detention would be that next project. Learning about those experiences of immigration detention at the time also raised a number of questions. For me, attention is almost always dedicated on documenting the journey and the injustices people face in the countries they flee from, and the arduous journey they take to get to that place where they can seek safety and security. And in many cases, the story stops there, they've made it or they haven't. Today. Millions of people worldwide continue to flee wars, conflicts in, uh, human rights, abuse, the collapse of states and economies and climate change and have left their homes in search of a better life simultaneously, the B, the debate over issues of immigration and national security have grown more intertwined, intolerant and extreme, but for hundreds of thousands of people arriving at that place after, after they have spent months and sometimes years and during violence, insecurity, the trauma just to get to that destination where they will believe they will be extended safety and sanctuary turns out to be another traumatic phase in that continuing journey. For decades, men, women, and children have been apprehended and locked away for months and even years for nonviolent civil immigration offenses detained administratively as their cases are being heard or as their asylum claims are being considered, or as they await deportation, they're removed from society and languish in an ever expanding web of prison-like immigration detentions. The psychological trauma and collateral damage detention has not only on the detained but also on family, friends, and others is long lasting and often paralyzing. For many immigration detention oftentimes is that point in a person's journey where they are pushed to their breaking point. Systems of injustice are often elusive in form and shape policy structures, governments put in place that fuel the detention of vulnerable. Non-citizens are often opaque, disorienting, and ever changing. This makes them more challenging to understand, which makes them more challenging to combat, which makes those who are caught in them even feel more powerless. The coverage and discussion of issues of migration in immigration are often reduced down to black and white. Yet in reality there's a lot of gray in between and this is the space where I have always worked as a photographer, my role is to show and visually translate what these systems actually look like and how they impact people. I spent the next seven years exploring policies, practices and the geographies of immigration detention in several countries around the world and it's through this journey. The work not only documents the topography of immigration detention but ultimately looks beyond the physical architecture of detention through the stories of the people that I met along the way, the project asks us to expand how we think about detention and the incarceration of immigrants from not just about the physicality of the walls of the detention center, but to the emotional, psychological and mental impact these places and policies have on people and communities. What happens to people once they arrive at that place are long after they arrived in that place where the idea of safety and sanctuary is often a myth. How is the very existence of immigration detention and its current placement with an immigration and asylum policy, a reflection on countries that profess ideals of freedom, tolerance, democracy, rule of law, respect and opportunity. I was drawn to explore this because I was born in one of those countries and this prestigious lecture hall is located in one of them as well. For 11 years, I've embedded myself into the issue of statelessness, supported the grants and fellowships. I'd managed to sustain that project to document the lives of stateless people in 18 different countries. Little did I know that statelessness would introduce me to the issue of immigration detention having lived and been based in Southeast Asia all of those years, the journey for this next long term project on immigration detention would become the project seven doors and it would begin in Malaysia For decades now, Burma has been the largest producer of migrants and refugees in Southeast Asia. Ethnic groups indigenous to Burma like the Chin Man, Rohingya Han, Karen and Kain have been subjected to human rights abuse, religious persecution and brutal oppression and conflict from the Burmese military for the Rohingya genocide has pushed hundreds of thousands out of the country. Malaysia has been the adopted sanctuary for many. Malaysia is not a signatory to the UN convention, uh, refugee convention and its unsympathetic. Immigration laws do not recognize the difference between a refugee, a asylum seeker, a stateless person with that of up to 3 million undocumented migrants living and working in Malaysia. They all shoulder the the stigma of illegality in the eyes of Malaysian policy and as a result, refugees in a asylum seekers have no legal status in Malaysia and no right to protection as well. Regardless of being registered with the U-N-H-C-R or not, Malaysian policy has left tens of thousands vulnerable to exploitation, abuse, arbitrary arrest and detention in one of Malaysia's 20 immigration detention centers. Immigration raids are a co regular occurrence in Malaysia, in cities, in tourist areas, in workplaces. These raids have been ongoing for decades. Images I took of immigration raids in 2007 and 2017 are just as relevant today as they were then. A recent human rights report states to how over 800 enforcement operations were held in January of this year, resulting in the arrest of over 4,000 people in Malaysia. There is no maximum amount of time someone can spend in detention the same as here in the United Kingdom. And as a consequence, a constant state of fear along with the looming threat of the detention permeates throughout the day-to-Day life of refugees and asylum seekers. Here are two stories from a two week period of time in February, 2017, the morning of the 25th of February, one of my contacts from the Chin ethnic community in Kuala Lumpur called me about a raid that had just happened at an apartment complex in the middle of the night when I arrived, residents were still in shock. Between 50 and a hundred immigration officers and police arrived last night. One of the residents told me they went from apartment to the, from apartment to the department asking to see everyone's documents.

00 AM I when I, uh, at least a hundred people were arrested, I was introduced to the uncle of 20-year-old do Chung. The young man had arrived in Malaysia two years earlier after fleeing abuse from the Burmese military. I was the one who had to take care of him and look out for him. The uncle had said he anticipated his nephew would be in detention for three to four months and then deported back to Myanmar. Then he said, we live in fear of being arrested. We live in fear all the time. We walked up one floor, knocked on the door and a man let us into the apartment. The apartment was hot and narrow with two or three rooms, stale air, claustrophobic yet clean. He took me to one of those rooms and pointed out a large hole in the ceiling. Then proceeded to tell me the story of a young woman who managed to evade the the raid but was injured. She was staying in this small room. He said they were banging on the door to the apartment downstairs. Eventually they broke the door and then broke the doors to many of our apartments. She was so scared of being arrested. She climbed up into the ceiling and hid there until after they left. After they left, she fell through the ceiling. This is the hole that she fell through just a week earlier. Another raid. This time at a factory outside of Kuala Lumpur resulted in several people being arrested and put into Lan gang detention center, including 24-year-old woman and mother from the Chin community. I'm sitting in front of the woman's husband and 6-year-old son in their two room apartment. There's no furniture, just a few thin mattresses rolled up in the corner since my wife was arrested and put in detention. The man tells me my son is in a very dark place. He cries all the time. He never leaves my side and for the hour or so that I spent with him, the young boy never left his father's side. All I think about is finding a way to get her outta detention. They sentenced her to 10 months and I don't know for what reason, but it is too long. She shares a room with 13 other people and she's the only one who speaks Burmese, so she has no one to talk with. Now I can't contact her, so I am so worried about her every day. Several other trips were occurred over Malaysia and I would meet people from most of the ethnic communities in Burma, all living in fear of arrest and for me, the hole in the ceiling, the stare from that 6-year-old boy and the loss in the voice of his father came to represent life of migrants and asylum seekers from Burma in Malaysia. For me, the measures they would take to avoid detention and the trauma of family separated because of detention in many ways. Malaysia set the tone for the next four years of this project, which would be the United States. Carnes County Residential Detention Center is located in the middle of nowhere, just over one hour's drive from San Antonio and Texas. This was the first long field mission in the United States for the project, and Carnes was one of the first large immigration detention centers I had ever seen. A one hour drive is nothing for anybody who's grown up in the United States, but the drive from San Antonio to Kanes felt like ours. The turnoff of Texas State Highway 180 1 is one I will always remember. On the corner sits Kanes County Correctional Center, a medium security level prison holding US offenders of state and federal crimes. Through the chain link fencing, I could see and hear large groups of men in prison uniforms scattered and moving about in the outdoor recreational area, sitting and talking with each other or playing basketball in the midday sun. Adjacent to the prison, a few hundred meters down the road is Carnes County Residential Detention Center, an immigration detention center operated by the private prison company Geo Group. It's an expansive, solid white structure surrounded by multiple layers of wire of barbed wire security fencing. A security van slowly made its way around the perimeter. We parked the car on the side of the road and turned the engine off. I opened the door to the car and nothing silence mixed with a dry and hot light wind across the Texas landscape that felt vacant and empty and empty. The prison down the street had windows and a recreation area and beyond the security fencing displayed the landscape. Carnes was windowless and open. Any open air recreational area inside was enclosed by solid exterior walls removed from the view of anyone inside with a rolling fields of swaying green grass surrounding the detention center. An oil rig slowly bobbing up and down or a car or a truck or a motorcycle or even a yellow school bus passing by on the distance. In highway 180 1, white clouds about as white as the exterior walls of the of the facility floated in the sky. But for anyone inside, they would never see how these clouds stretched all the way to the horizon. The silence was eerie to me. This windowless fortress said to all of those people inside, I have no windows and this is deliberate. You might be here in the United States, but this system will do everything in its power to never permit you to stay. We won't even let you see what is beyond these walls. Go ahead. Imagine what it might mu might be like out there. What your life might by be like out there will never let you have it. Don't even think about it. You are here but you don't exist to us. I always knew the centerpiece of the Seven Doors project would be the United States. Since the Reagan years, the US has developed the largest immigration detention estate in the world, and at that time, the election of Donald Trump, it was clear the use of detention would expand and become more aggressive. After living and working in Asia for nearly 20 years, my partner and I relocated back to North America and set out to see for ourselves what this system looked like in the United States, how it was being used and how it was impacting the lives of people, families, and communities. Over the next four years, we would drive our car across 40,000 miles of interstates, highways, and country roads, travel to 25 states, photograph 34, immigration detention centers along the west coast, southern border, and southeast, including three children, migrant camps and 35 county jails scattered throughout the states in the center in Midwest. I'd also conduct over 200 hours of interviews. The visual representation of this extensive web of immigration detention, uh, prisons in the United States usually comes in the form of an illustrated graphic map or infographics. This leaves most with an abstract and intangible picture that is left merely to the imagination to then construct what the scope and scale of this system actually looks like. I wanted to translate the geography of this system and create for the first time a visual survey, a photographic atlas of this system, and hopefully address my own questions like how vast is it? Where are these places, how isolated are they and how does the intentional isolation of them reflect the emotion and mental isolation of those people who are detained inside of them? And so from the Pacific Northwest, we start a little bit of a condensed journey of that trip in Tacoma, Washington where a detention center is buried in an industrial area and Sheridan, Oregon where the detention center's out in, in a farming area or in the desert of Adelanto California or just along the border in outside of San Diego, California or in the nothingness of scrub brush in San Luis Arizona or directly adjacent to an over 55 community mobile home park in Florence, Arizona or in the vastness of the landscape of Sierra Blanca in Texas or in Del Rio, Texas, or next to a baseball diamond in Taylor, Texas or lost in the night in Dilley, Texas, which is the largest children, uh, family detention center in the United States or buried behind a grain elevator on a rural highway in Basle, Louisiana or in the forest in Jenna, Louisiana or out in the middle of nowhere in not just Mississippi or probably one of the most isolated places I've ever been to in Lumpkin, Georgia or in Farmville Virginia or in a warehouse section right next to the Newark Airport in Elizabeth, New Jersey. The isolated desolate location of these immigration detention centers is representative of the strategy ICE and DHS has taken to assure these facilities are outta the sight of the American public, difficult for families to reach and visit, challenging for civil society to monitor and demanding for lawyers to have access to their clients. Most of all it does everything it can to erode the ability of those being detained from maintaining their own sense of personhood and their connection to the world, their communities and the lives they had or the life they were hoping to have. And this same strategy is present in nearly all of the countries that I've visited, including here and at least in the United States. They're also representative of the entangled relationship between political interest, power, and profit driven corporate America. As 90% of the people held today in immigration detention are held in for-profit detention facilities owned and operated by multi-billion dollar companies. I met and interviewed people whose lives have impacted and traumatized by detention. This would include individuals who were in detention, people who had been in detention and released on bond or who had been in detention and deported to countries all over the world, not just to Mexico or South America, but to Africa, the Middle East, the uh, the Middle East and Asia. Stories of women who had been abused in detention while pregnant of individuals from the Chan transgender community who said the discrimination they were subjected to by security personnel in detention was worse than the violence and discrimination they faced back in their home country, which was the primary reason for leaving for fleeing to the United States of families, separated of stories of those crushed by the experience of detention and left shellshocked and lost after being deported. These interviews would expand out to people who were immigration lawyers, mental health workers and volunteers and visitation programs, as well as those individuals and groups who carried out small and large acts of resistance to push back on detention and the system for all these people, these US citizens, assisting people in detention, seeing, feeling and listening to their stories, while also confronting the realities of the US Immigration and asylum system. It all had a deep impact on their lives, their stories and perspectives provided even more invaluable doors into immigration detention. The mechanics of the system and the injustices of it all. I've made no attempt to photograph inside any of these facilities. Why almost every person I talked to who shared their story with me talked about that moment in detention in the United States when they were forced to shed their personal clothing and assume a label of criminality by wearing a color coded prison uniform. Nearly all these people I spoke with had never been in jail before or prison before and had never committed a criminal act in their entire life. This moment in the United States was an intensely traumatic experience for them. It provided access. My movements would be monitored and the only photos I would be able to take of people in prison would be of people in prison. Uniforms, which was counter to how the people I spoke with felt about themselves or wanted to be represented and it would also feed into politicized narratives. I chose to take exper exterior photographs, almost like portraits and when paired with quotes and testimony, I felt the combination of the two could help expose people into the interior experience of what individuals endured inside these places and also how the impact of these experiences found its way outside into the lives of others. I was hunted by my government. He explained to me over the phone the man was 33 years old and he was from Cameroon. My life was in danger, so I smuggled myself out of Cameroon to Nigeria. I took a flight out of Nigeria to Ecuador. From Ecuador, I moved to Columbia. From Columbia, I moved to Panama, Panama to Costa Rica, Costa Rica to Nicaragua, Nicaragua to Honduras, Honduras to Guatemala, Guatemala to Mexico. In Mexico. I was in a detention center for close for seven days. He said to me in Mexico, I told them I'm moving to the United States where I knew I was going to have international protection. That's how I found myself at the US port of entry in El Paso. I knew if I got to America, he said I would be safe. That's why I had to take that journey to get to the Texas point of entry. He continued When I was walking through that tunnel at the US point of entry, I thought I was walking towards the gate of freedom. Little did I know I was walking towards the gate of hell. I presented myself right at the port of entry. I told them I'm coming to the United States to seek asylum because I'm running away from my home government who wants to kill me and my family. And on that fateful day, my hands were cuffed and my legs were chained and I did nothing but move from process to process to process all in chains. Otero County Processing Center is located in an isolated stretch of highway in the desert in New Mexico. I drove out to Otero on the morning before the surge of the summer heat, though only an hour's drive out of El Paso, its remoteness and low profile among the sand and scrub brush obscures its presence from the public. Within the emptiness of the surrounding landscape, I made a point to always stand on public property. When I took photographs of these places, I've already cased out the best vantage point to accomplish this with at tarot. But while I was changing the film in my camera, a group of security guards from the facility came out surrounded and questioned me, asked for my personal information, which I didn't provide, took photographs of my license plate and threatened to call the sheriff. This petty intimidation often happened throughout the work in the United States. I took my photographs and months later I was introduced to this man from Cameroon. He continued. I was transferred to Otero without any information. The system only once deportation. It was clear racism was a part of it because I was a black man who could ask questions. I realized I needed the hand of God to help me because the hand of man would fail me because of the rate of which racism was practiced in Otero was alarming. So what happened to this 33-year-old educated teacher from Cameroon? After he walked up to that formal port of entry, presented himself to customs and border patrol and was then placed in immigration detention, we spoke for over an hour. He explained how he couldn't afford a lawyer and he had to. He had no other option but to represent him himself. He described, he described how in detention, he prepared his case and navigated the overwhelmingly complex legal process. He presented his story and asylum requests to different judges and different jurisdictions within immigration courts. He spent more months appealing their detentions, their their decisions. After one year and three months in two different immigration detention prisons, his efforts were unsuccessful. Immigration and customs enforcement deported him back to Cameroon. As I talked with him, he explained how he, his wife and family were back in hiding again. His government still looking for him, our WhatsApp connection, crackling as I spoke. And then he said to me, ask my wife and she will tell you I was a different person before I left. For the US US detention messed me up. Discussions of immigration in the United are always usually historically defined by the politicized optics of border crossings. But what happens in the interior of the country in central and Midwestern states is often overshadowed by the media attention, almost always focusing on the southern border. I was born and grew up in the Midwest immigrant communities built and and developed the Midwest. Yet in many places, the mid in the Midwest, they these very communities are threatened. What many people don't know as they drive through expansive, rolling farmlands and farming communities of Iowa, Kansas, or Nebraska or through the charming town square with its library and county courthouse and small family run businesses in Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, or Wisconsin. What I didn't even know at the time was that scattered across these skates, dozens of sheriff departments and county jails earn millions of dollars in revenue each year by renting out bed space in their jails to ice for the detention of immigrants. The county jail in ho, in mountain home, Idaho earns $60 per day per immigrant. Plat Smith, Nebraska $65 per day. Montgomery City, Missouri, $50 per day, Juno, Wisconsin, $86 per day. Cottonwood Falls, Kansas, $52 per day. Brazil, Indiana, $55 per day. Monroe, Michigan, $75 per day. Tiffin, Ohio, $58 per day, Woodstock, Illinois, and right across the street from the local Norwood High School, $95 per day over multiple trips, months were spent traversing thousands of miles from one state to the next. Chaos is one of the strongest words I can use to describe what was happening at that time and what it felt like. Meeting families and communities traumatized by what had happened to them in their communities. Workplace raids in Nebraska, apartment complex raids in Ohio, targeted arrests of specific immigrant communities suddenly deemed by the government to be undesirable in Michigan, even routine traffic stops. These were happening every day and in the aftermath, another mother, father, brother, and community member. Many having lived in the United States for years and oftentimes the head of a family of US-born children who are US citizens were being removed from society and absorbed into invis invisibility within the US Immigration Detention System. I felt like I was kidnapped. I was kidnapped and thrown into a van like you see in the movies. A 34-year-old man originally from Medin told me of his detention in Indiana. Our lives didn't matter. We became numbers. These guys just take you, take part of your life, put you in the middle of nowhere and put you there for an undefined period of time. They moved her four times. This was all in four months. An 18-year-old young woman said of her mother being detained after a workplace raid at this tomato greenhouse in Nebraska. I didn't know where she was when I would call the detention center. She wasn't there anymore. When we got to the jail, she sounded like she was giving up. She said, just let me get deported. We told her that we can't. We're going to fight for her. Do whatever it takes. We're going to help fight through this. An 18-year-old young woman described about the detention of her mother after a traffic stop in Remote County Road in Ohio. She and her three siblings, all US-born citizens were trying to make sense of what had happened and what was next. Everything in my life became about making sure my dad didn't get deported, making sure that no matter how hard ice tried, they didn't break him into his, his spirit in detention. Everything every part of my life revolved around making sure my dad didn't go beyond that point of no return in detention. The daughter and us citizen of a man from the Iraqi community in Michigan shared with me. My husband drove around the block and ice stopped him. It was five 30 in the morning. It was difficult for my family to tell me and I couldn't describe what was going on in my head. I was eight months pregnant. A 33 3-year-old woman, an asylum seeker from Guatemala, shared with me on a cold winter afternoon. Her beautiful newborn baby girl was sleeping peacefully on the bed in their small apartment outside of Denver, Colorado. I knew it would be hard for him to be locked away. She continued, but then they told him he would be deported without seeing the baby, but she was born early. There was one time I could go and see him, but there was no time. He was so happy just being able to see her through the glass. We only had 15 minutes. I dressed her in a bright, in a bright pink onesie. She was really beautiful and she looked at him after the visit, he called and said he would call later that night. He didn't call. He was moved to Arizona then he was deported. I didn't hear from him for five days when he called, he was back in Guatemala for almost four years. I immersed myself in this chaos that was happening in the United States, especially related to immigration detention. My partner and I were constantly on the move, learning, asking questions, listening to as many people as we could. After talking with someone about the isolation and loneliness they felt being detained in some remote county jail. We would drive a thousand miles to see this jail for ourselves like this county jail on the upper peninsula along the border with Canada and Sioux Saint Marie, Michigan. And even as this system started to take on a shape and reveal itself to me, I felt disoriented and lost in its enormity and I came to realize it is much more sinister than I ever could have imagined. I often revisit what an immigration lawyer from Ohio wrote to me about detention and the bleakness of how it is so entrenched into US immigration system. He wrote to me quote two days ago. I was able to convince a judge to give my client a little more time to prepare his case. My client was happy I could help him, but there's so much he doesn't know. He doesn't know that statistically his chances of ever getting out of detention are slim to none, that his odds of ever actually winning silence asylum are even more remote. He doesn't know that hundreds of miles away in our nation's capital educated, highly paid government lawyers are right now discussing strategies to make his case even harder to win and we'll make it even less likely for him to be able to ever find a way out of that system. He doesn't know that he's trapped inside a giant wealth transfer machine that ruthlessly nickles and dimes working class Americans and asylum seekers alike in order to enrich shareholders who will never in their lives see the inside of a prison or no hunger or find themselves in need of asylum. All he knows is that for the first time since he left his country and spent weeks crossing Mexico barefoot with no money and no food, for the first time someone is, is on his side, knowing only this he's happy, but I know all the things he doesn't know and that makes me sad. Tucked away in the mountains of northern Greece, a man from Pakistan looked at me and said, I don't know why I have been here for so long. His fingers are clenching the high metal fence that can find him and what can only be described as an open air prison camp. This is the Perinos immigration ca camp in the uh, drama region of northeast Greece with his asylum came, rejected yet again. A man from the Democratic Republic of Congo shared a thought about his six months. He spent in two immigration detention centers in Belgium. Detention here was psychological torture. He said, now I don't go outside much at a tea shop on a sidewalk in Athens. A 3-year-old asylum seeker from Afghanistan says, you try not to think about the past and you try not to think about the future. I was not expecting detention to be a part of my journey, and it really affected me psychologically. For a long time I lost myself the way I thought about a civilized community. It changed. He was detained in Turkey and in Greece for 11 months. The idea for the project, seven doors began in Europe. At the same time, large numbers of migrants, refugees in asylum seekers from the Middle East and Africa were desperately turning to Europe for safety and a better life. European nations would expand their deliberate use of immigration detention to inflict yet another traumatic experience on their journey. Years later, I would return to Europe to work on the project in the European Union and the broader Council of Europe. There are numerous regulations, directives, treaties, and laws that regulate member states' responsibilities towards migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, including with respect to the use of immigration detention. And while member states are bound to these policies, their implementation or lack of implementation can vary widely from country to country. Across Europe. The use of immigration detention has intensified and expanded since the 2015 migrant crisis. It has also grown in neighboring regions, often backed by European funding and pressure, including countries like Libya and Turkey with the intention of prevent present or preventing migrants and refugees from reaching Europe's borders. But for thousands of those who do reach Europe, detention center, removal center, transit zone, reception center, closed center, open center, pre removal center, police station, border station, prison, hotspot tent, village, asylum seeker Center, family location detention comes in various guises sitting in a small room. He watched his two children play together originally from Burma. He's a Rohingya and he has lived in the Netherlands for more than seven years. All of his asylum claims have been denied. He and his family have lived in a family location center for the past three years. I came from a place where we had no freedom. He tells me everything in our life was controlled by others. Here I came for freedom, but we are controlled and controlled again. He says, people think you are living for free. You have a house, you don't have to work. You are getting everything for free. But they don't know the truth of how we are suffering. In this situation. People say This is an open camp because you can go outside and come back, but that is not true. We have to inform every day. We have to tell them when we go and when we come back again the same day. We can't stay overnight outside of this place.

00 AM The people here have to line up in front of the office just to report and get stamped. We report daily. Here I am. Here's my card. Here I am. I'm not going anywhere. I'm here in this refugee camp. I'm still here. I'm still alive when I line up. I feel like it's a prison. Mentally you become sick day by day. We spent several hours together. It started to rain. When he walked me ba back to the nearby bus stop, it would take me three more hours by train to return back to Amsterdam. And as we exited the ordinary looking gate to the family location center, I asked to take his photograph from the outside. This place where he stood and where other families seeking asylum have been placed didn't look like a detention center. However, with all of the rules, restrictions, monitoring and control opposed upon them, it was just another form of detention dressed up as being more humane. Five hours south of Amsterdam by train in central Brussels, the flags of the European nations fly outside of the European parliament. It's early morning and I meet with Ruben at his apartment. He's an accredited visitor with a local organization assisting people in detention. We walk to the central train station. The streets are relatively quiet. We meet up with one of his colleagues on the train, the two catch up and talk. And as time progresses, the city disappears. We pass through suburbs and then into villages. I'm accompanying them on their journey out to Carole Detention Center on the outside of Brussels airport. The farther we travel, the calmer their conversation gets. When we get off the train, we walk towards a, a very small village and then into and then into fields. The sun is out the morning. Sky is a beautiful blue and early morning fog is settled over the fields and in the faint distance, like an artificial line of trees on the horizon. The fencing for the next 30 minutes or so, we just walk. And with every 50 meters, Carole and the Notorious 1 27 Beast Detention Center next to Carole get larger and larger and more defined. He says to me, there's a huge amount of emotions that go through me. I do the walk every week. I go from Brussels on a train than to a small village center and then into those fields and all that's left are those concrete walls and chain link fences. I feel like I'm physically detaching myself from civilization in almost a literal sense. As soon as I press the doorbell on the front gate, he says, I know from now on, it's no longer in my head or it's no longer my thoughts before I have that calm. But as soon as I press that button, you have to expect the unexpected. You have to turn on all of your senses and really pay as much attention as you can to everything because it's all about these small, very small details and what people share with me. He continues. I feel like I bring some humanity to the centers. I feel that's the primary reason for me to be there. It's the difference between not seeing them as a file or as part of a case like anyone from the government sees them. I try to challenge some of that cruelty inside the system by giving them back a name, giving them back a story rather than seeing them as people who don't have documents that gets connected to all kinds of prejudices. What we do is come and listen without prejudice, and then he tells me something. Sometimes I wish I could just scream out all the injustices, but you are also realizing that maybe it wouldn't make a difference. Maybe once I start screaming out these stories, the world will just not listen or care. I think that is a different realization. You can't add more stories and expect moral outrage about these things. The system will just continue because it's so ingrained. And then he says, and that makes it difficult to realize that I'm not just doing this necessarily to be the one that changes everything. I'm doing this because I feel it's necessary, necessary that someone is doing it and I want to be that person. I find this an evil system, but I don't find Belgium an evil country. So I wonder at what stage do you develop an evil system that becomes evil? What is the motivation behind upholding that system? What goal does it serve? Nobody knows about this and nobody seems to care. He said his questions are questions I have asked myself almost constantly while conducting this work. The Trump years might have seen an assault on immigrants as well as an unprecedented expansion in the use of immigration detention where the number of immigrants being detained per day reached 50,000. But Biden's promises to reduce immigration detention have failed to materialize specifically in the past two years when the numbers of those being detained each day has nearly doubled today. Ice detains up to 40,000 immigrants per day when it comes to detention in Europe, despite its promise of a better, more just union and Oprah borders, it turns out to be little different than other places. The agreement from representatives of the eu, EU governments in late 2023, known as the EU Pact on migration and asylum looks to expand and even normalize the use of a mandatory detention along eus borders, which rights groups say will intensify the suffering of migrants and asylum seekers turning to Europe for protection and a future. While here in the uk, the detention estate continues to serve as a key component to immigration and asylum policy. The opening of Dert Side Immigration Removal Center in Durham County, a facility detaining only women, the proposed reopening of camps filled detention center, the use of hotels, ex-military barracks, and the highly controversial Rwanda plan for offshore detention. But as someone who works advocating for the rights of those in detention said to me here in the United Kingdom, people don't realize how pointless detention is and how a very small minority of cases detention actually fulfills its stated objectives. And that is to remove people from the uk. Detention doesn't do that. Then there's the question, what does detention actually do? In 2022 of the people detained in UK's seven detention centers, nearly 80% of them received bail and returned to their communities while detained. It cost 120 British pounds per day to detained them, and at the same, same time home office ended up paying out more than 12 million pounds in claims for unlawful detention. So what does detention actually do? Several things have become clear throughout all the years of working on this project when the use of immigration detention is prescribed and entrenched into policy states, including the United States and the UK will push the boundaries of its use as far as they can. More times than not, states will use detention to harm people and the harm immigration detention inflicts on people stays with people. I'll end with a story of a man I met here in the UK at the very beginning of this project. I didn't have a title for this project at the time, but after meeting him I did. And the framework for the entire project was developed entirely around what this man said to me. We met in a public park. The man was originally from Guinea in West Africa. We sat together on a bench for a while. I had my audio recorder on my knee and then we walked together through the park. He said, I heard the UK had the best democracy in the world. Yet after arriving, he was confronted with the reality that would push him to the closest he had ever been to a breaking point for this one man. Immigration detention was like a jungle, easy to get your el self into, but nearly impossible to find your way out of. He described he had seen people try to commit suicide, witness others struggle with serious mental health challenges. As a result of detention, watched men descend into unimaginable depths of depression. Detention is mental torture. He repeated several times as we spoke, and then he said, when they put me in detention, I remember walking through only one door at the detention center. I was in detention for three and a half years. When they let me out, I remember they walked me through seven different doors from my cell to the last door where they said, you are free, but how could I be free? He said, I'm still not free. Those seven doors said, you will not forget this. You will always feel like you are in detention. Thank you very much.