The Shadow of El Centro: A History of Migrant Incarceration and Solidarity by Jessica Ordaz

Author:Jessica Ordaz [Ordaz, Jessica]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Ethnic Studies, Emigration & Immigration, Public Policy, Caribbean & Latin American Studies, United States, Social Science, Political Science, Immigration, History, General
ISBN: 9781469662473
Google: 2uPXzQEACAAJ
Goodreads: 55840922
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2021-01-15T13:46:10+00:00

Immigration officials responded to the hunger strike of 1985 by strategically isolating the demonstrators. Consequently, attorneys from the Central American Refugee Center, the National Center for Immigrants’ Rights, the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, the National Lawyers Guild, and the American Civil Liberties Union filed an injunction against the INS challenging this retaliatory action.139 Immigration authorities abruptly cut off migrants’ access to legal counsel. Advocates stated that the INS did so “in retaliation, and without justification.”140 ACLU attorney Mark Rosenbaum claimed that the “INS broke the strike by intimidation and by transferring most of their leaders to other detention centers in Denver, San Diego and Inglewood.”141 Bob Mandgie admitted that the prisoner population was reduced during the strike, with INS agents removing ninety-three inmates.142 The INS shuffled the migrant population as a tactic to challenge the demonstration, a practice that immigration officers had often used to smash dissent at El Centro.143 Immigration officials borrowed the strategy of separating detained migrants from prisons.144 Decades earlier the INS could not move migrants from state to state because there was not enough detention space, but the expansion of detention centers throughout the 1980s allowed for this new approach. INS policy allowed officials to transfer prisoners from one center to another, or from a local jail to an immigration detention center, as a form of discipline or because their appeal required longer detention.145

Following the strike California representative Howard Berman, Matthew G. Martìnez, and Esteban Torres investigated conditions inside the detention facility. They created a congressional delegation that consisted of church representatives, civil rights groups, and government officials from the Los Angeles and San Diego regions. This included Church Women United, Friends of Rescate, Interfaith Peace Center, Church of the Brethren, UCLA students, CISPES, CRECEN, El Rescate, School of Theology of Claremont, National Center for Immigrant Rights, Laverne Church of the Brethren, Comite Nacional Contra Represion, Interfaith Task Force on Central America, and the LA Equal Rights Congress. They requested that the INS be held accountable for their actions toward strikers during the demonstration.146 Delegation members inspected the facility and found major overcrowding.147 Cynthia Anderson, a representative with the church-based Southern California Interfaith Task Force on Central America, said, “The conditions at El Centro are abhorrent. Salvadorans are housed like criminals without basic tools needed to even help out in their own legal cases.”148 INS Commissioner Alan Nelson asserted that the delegations’ allegations were unfounded. He said, “Like all detention facilities, it is clean, well-kept and there is good food,” but “you must remember this is a detention facility.”149 Nelson did not acknowledge the experiences of the migrants. He suggested that the INS did not have the responsibility to provide noncitizens with humane conditions. After the 1985 hunger strike, INS officials began to allow prisoners to remain indoors during the day, and in 1986 they opened a library inside the facility.150 The Mexican government came to the aid of detained migrants because the U.S. government was abusive and neglectful. They funded a large part of the library.

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