"Cut Off: How ICE Detention Facilities Block Communication"

In fact, some of the facilities we planned to look at were operated out of the exact same buildings – and by the same corporations - that had been shut down due to their notoriety as private prisons.2 We hoped to provide migrants in these facilities with a safe space for dialogue over the phone. [...] Most of the advocates we interviewed said they had to spend personal money to speak with clients, sometimes to the tune of thousands of dollars. [...] As Angélica Salceda, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, said to a reporter, migrants in detention can be “essentially held incommunicado” due to the costs of calls.10 As one Guatemalan migrant held in the Krome detention center in West Miami-Dade put it to a Miami Herald reporter, “We are living through a pandemic; this is when we need to communicate the. [...] Advocate Andre explained that because of such interruptions, “It takes a long time to talk to somebody in order to get enough information to piece together a kind of story that then an attorney can take a look at and see whether they're able to talk to that person.” Thus, quality issues prolong legal processes and complicate the ability to consolidate migrants’ legal information efficiently in tim. [...] Yet the patterns were not new: Covid simply brought to light a set of issues that were already omnipresent, thanks to the isolation of most detention centers and the frequency of ICE transfers into remote locations.