Again after many hours and hundreds of miles, we pulled into a large commercial truck stop for rest and refueling, and once more our van is maneuvered up to the door of a SHU coach to allow us to use the toilet at the back of the bus. Ever more Kevlar clad, carbine toting ICE goons abound in paramilitary fashion, taking up position, securing the perimeters of the parking lot, striking poses as they cradle their souped up mini-16s and looking very, very serious. Meanwhile, the regular ICE who we knew from the Port Isabel Detention Center were busy doing what cops always do, feeding their faces with coffee and donuts. The contrast was comical. We tried and tried to bribe our drivers into a couple of cups of java at our own expense to no avail.

The entire area had filled with white coaches and security which blocked whatever view there might have been. We hobbled back up the steps of the SHU bus to relieve ourselves and there is Bravo who hasn’t moved, in the same isolated seat at the front of the bus with the same motley crew at the back. But seated up near Bravo is another face from my old dorm, Delta One, my old bunkie, Giovanni, a Colombian kid from Brooklyn, NY, who I first met in the Port Isabel SHU and who befriended me when he saw that I’d been brought out of isolation after four months to his dorm.

 We greeted each other and exchanged some small talk. “How’d you get here,” I asked, but his answer was garbled due to a fat lip. Bravo told me he’d been in a fight on the bus he was riding on so they moved him here. After using the head, I returned to the front seats and since the cops didn’t seem in a hurry to get us back to the van, spoke with Giovanni and Bravo for a good while.

 Outside on the grounds, I could see a group of the Keviar ICE troops readying to come on board. Shortly before they arrived, a tall dredded Jamaican detainee was brought on the bus due to being in a fight with someone who was already at the rear of the bus and was led past us manacled hand and feet as were all on the SHU bus. Belize and I were just chained at the feet.

 Then the Kevlar ICE goons came on and started barking orders to get our heads down after Giovanni let out a stream of invective against one of their number, the asshole who’d slugged him on the other bus. “Motherfuckers, bitch-ass faggots, I ain’t got no respect for you! NONE! If I ever see your faggot asses in New York, you’ll know about it!” The leading goon came up and tried to lord over him, yelling to, “Shut the flick up.” but Giovanni was in no mood to back down and kept his end of the exchange going. “I ain’t got no respect for you for what you did! Without your guns, you’re just shit, you punk motherfuckers!” And maybe because they didn’t have their guns with them, as this wasn’t allowed, they did, in fact, retreat and left the bus. Now I know why he was so mad and after about 10 minutes of talking to Bravo, I turned around and Giovanni was stretched across two seats, laying down, probably exhausted by the episode. I couldn’t blame him.

To my surprise, the bus started up and began to move and I thought perhaps we’d be staying, but it was only being repositioned to where our mini-van was waiting. There were two bagged lunches for us in the van, but I was maxed out on dry turkey and cheese. We drank the juice and ate chips as we waited to start for San Antonio.

 The onward journey were more monotonous hours trying either to rest on the metal benches or staring at the headlit road ahead to see what progress we’d made still unaware of our final destination. We repeated the rest stop procedure again in San Antonio, being allowed on the SHU bus again with ever more confining teams of security units, vehicles being parked and reparked until everyone was ready for the next leg of this already interminable trip. Once it became obvious we were not staying in San Antonio, El Paso was next on our list of possible destinations. Where else could we be possibly be going?

We drove all that night into the next sunrise and a few hours after that, another fuel and bathroom stop. Only this time, when we boarded the SHU coach the few who had been on board for fighting on the other busses were gone, including Giovanni. Bravo quickly explained they’d been dropped off at San Antonio and that was the first evidence that we were not on a continuous loop until Port Isabel was ready for us after the hurricane.

 Also, news of what actually had happened due to Hurricane Dolly was essentially unknown to us and even what we did hear was greatly misinformed, so our ideas and about what was happening there were equally mistaken. But what else did we have to do but endlessly speculate about ICE’s intentions toward us?

 Who remained in the convoy traveled west on Interstate 10, El Paso bound, or so we believed. After one or more pit stops, we hit El Paso County at about 4:00 pm and it took almost an hour to reach the outskirts of the city proper which turned out to be much bigger than I had thought. We fmally pulled off the highway and took a number of city streets into what looked like an industrial section of town and then headed for open country once again. After an hour or so we turned right and a short distance ahead loomed a large enclave, our final drop off.

 The whole convoy pulled into the huge parking lot and our mini-van cut out of line and made its way past all the other coaches to a set of sliding gates that opened to allow us through. One hundred yards further on, I could see a half dozen or so figures waiting for us. Our reception committee.

The place we found ourselves was the Otero County Immigration Processing Center in Chaparral, New Mexico, a brand new privately owned and built (mostly through publicly funded bonds), for profit detention center, one of the many mushrooming throughout the border states to facilitate the growing number of people who are being rounded up in ICE raids and through criminal record filtrations going back decades.

 After alighting from the back of the dark mini-van into the harsh New Mexico afternoon light and marched into a very large warehouse-like structure which was partitioned into a warren of corridors where door windows along the corridors each revealed separate large inhabited dorms of differently color clad prisoners. We must’ve passed dozens of those before we entered what was a wider corridor with cell doors on each side, obviously the Special Housing Unit. We passed through three doors and were still in the SHU. All tolled, I figured between forty and fifty cells in this SHU. The SHU in Port Isabel has seven cells by comparison. We were the first of the entire convoy to enter this detention center and it was straight to the SHU. A little while after the occupants of the Port Isabel SHU coach arrived and were put in the cells around us. There were only eight cells in this portion of the SHU because it was the smallest unit; the two other units were larger, about twenty cells each.

The interior of the entire building was painted cinderblock with heavy metal doors and window frames, ubiquitous in modern prisons and jails. They’re almost cookie cutter in materials and basic design and are practically indestructible. Everything is bolted to the walls or floors so you can’t use anything to damage anything else, the design is refined to the point that even a prison riot won’t make a dent in the physical structure of the facility. These are truly depressing places to spend any time. But even so, there’s no problem finding enough people to staff them. Oddly, many of the staff look as though they’re graduates from the detention centers or they were recruited from the street gangs themselves. Some of them sport tattoos that cover their arms or sprout from the necks of their black issued t-shirts with the word “Corrections” in white front and back accompanied by the initials, MTC, in smaller caps indicating the parent company.

 Belize and I were put in a cell together. Luckily, I was able to retain all my belongings even after having them searched by the new guards. I quickly settled on the bottom bunk and tried to adjust to our new surroundings. The cell didn’t bother me at all but Belize was not happy and was having a hard time. Once again, he was incensed at being singled out and put in the SHU and tried in vain to convince the guards that he should be in the main population, only to get the same response.

 Then came officers to take what money we were carrying, saying that if they searched us later and found any cash, we would forfeit it. I’m not sure that’s legal, but they called our bluff and of course, they never searched us again. We were issued receipts, but it was still unsettling watching that female lieutenant pocket my money like she had just fleeced me.

 We were fed what passed for dinner; it wasn’t great, but there was plenty of it and we were glad to be rid of the bagged meals, so it was a surprise when at 9:30 we were fed another dinner. Shortly afterwards, we were horizontal, headed for the arms of Morpheus. To our disappointment, the lights were left on all night, but I’d become accustomed to fashioning an eyeshade from the small towels we’re issued so I was asleep quickly.

 By the time I lay down, I was not feeling well and had a slight cough. When I awoke the next morning, my discomfort was acute. At 8:00 am, I put in a written medical request to see a doctor or nurse and repeated requests as the day went on. I continued to feel worse and I felt considerably weaker through the rest of that day and night. My repeated entreaties for medical care were brushed off, often with the lie that the doctor was on his way. By the time the pill call came with the actual doctor from Port Isabel in tow, I was in a bad way and had to argue with the doctor who was initially not going to treat me and convince him of my condition. He said he knew nothing of any requests made by me. After a heated argument, he left without treating me and I had little recourse but to return to my bed and wrap myself in my blanket to stem the chills and shivers that were now wracking my body.

 To my surprise and relief, the doctor actually did return and I was called out to see him at the end of the wing where two chairs had been placed, him occupying one of them. I was brought to the other seat and I then started to tell him of my symptoms and of my journey in the van with the heat fluctuations. He listened and said the reason he came back was because he believed I was not well and gave me an assortment of pills for aches and a shot which he said was a decongestant and which would put me to sleep within a half hour.

Returning to my cell and bunk I wanted quickly to be asleep but instead I tossed and turned for the better of three hours before exhaustion overtook me. The excuse I was given later for the delay in treating me was that since we were from another facility and had our own medical support unit, the host facility was not responsible for my health care. What if I or anyone else had suffered a heart attack or other life threatening event? What then??

 The next day, I was moved across the wing into Bravo’s cell whose black cell mate was moved in with Belize. Bravo was pleased to have me as his cellie. We had been in Delta One in Port Isabel together and played chess and shared books and crosswords together, so we had common interests. He was an ex-gangbanger who had come through the state system and was now being put through ICE’s program of clearing out anyone in prison or jail who were not naturalized citizens. Bravo was unlike Carlos, whom I’d spent time with in the Port Isabel SHU. Carlos was also an ex-gangbanger from the streets of Compton in the greater LA area, and was the most heavily tattooed fellow I’d ever laid eyes on; even the whole of his neck and face adorned. I had anticipated that he would be typically loud and boastful, but he turned out to be quiet, reserved, almost introverted.

 Bravo, on the other hand, did not looking like a regular cholo or vato, since he was bigger, about 5’9” and bulkier without being overly muscular but he did sport some spectacular tats of his own with the usual gang insignia on the front of his torso and arms. But on his entire back was a single drug themed mural of some intricacy which was multicolored, giving it some depth and contrast. Ironically, the theme was anti-drug in nature with skulls sucking on eastern style water pipes that surrounded beautiful topless women with come-hither expressions (whom he explained was his then girlfriend) and a pair of guns crossed at her feet. Still, once he donned a sweater or tunic, it covered nearly all the gangland giveaways and he could have passed for a regular Joe. Since we were last in the dorm together, he’d acquired a pair of dark glasses which made him resemble a heavy faced Elvis Costello. All of this belied who Bravo really was. He was a hard-hitting, no nonsense, intelligent, well read, ex-gangbanger who played a rough game of basketball and who fought at the drop of a hat (especially with blacks who thought him racist). He also loved to talk about his fights and his prison experiences and about the different gangs he knew. The Nostra Familia, the Aryan Brotherhood, the Norenos and Surenos, MS 13 to name just some of the most notorious.

 But my stay with Bravo was to be brief, less than twenty four hours as it turned out. We noticed that the black kid who’d been in with him and then put in with Belize, had been moved into a solo cell and I was told I’d be moved as well. Bravo was crestfallen as he’d just finished making an improvised chess set and drawing a board on the little cell table with pencil. I, too, was unsettled at the thought of being moved and set about gathering my things. Bravo quickly reverted to survival mode, “OK, Brennan, what books can you let me have”? He had been forced to abandon his personal library at Port Isabel and was envious at what I had managed to bring along. I had just loaned him a small novel on the story of the San Patricio Battalion, Irish nationals who fought on the Mexican side in the Mexican-American War, but now he was looking for something more to last him. As luck would have it, I had just finished a book on World War 1 and its effects on English literature. I left it with him. 

To my surprise, I was moved out of that small portion of the SHU and taken down the length of it through two doors into the initial part which we had come through two days prior. I was put into an empty cell and again put my belongings away and made up the bottom bunk for myself. It was now Saturday and I was only to spend two more nights there at Otero, but I didn’t know this and as I took account of where I was and how long I thought I’d be there, I tried to make the best use of the time I had. I was able to get the use of the mobile dolly phone similar to the Port Isabel SHU phone that is wheeled to one’s cell door and used through the access hatch in the door. I was lucky enough that I was able to make collect calls to friends back home and tell them of my location and my experiences. I was still feeling a little unwell and it told in my voice.

 I couldn’t, however, get in contact with my wife, Joanna, as the phone cards I had left from Port Isabel didn’t work at Otero and I couldn’t make collect calls to her cell phone. Both she and her mother had themselves been outrunning Hurricane Dolly in the large Sportsmobile van which was performing the service we’d bought it for, evacuating her mother and escaping any hurricane that came towards the Texas Gulf coast in a vehicle that could be self-contained in an emergency. I was able to contact friends in California who were in contact with them and in this way were could relay our situations to each other. Isn’t technology wonderful in these circumstances?!

 Since this SHU unit was much larger in size and numbers, it was consequently much noisier. Some of the invective coming from behind those cell doors was disturbing. Much of it I couldn’t follow completely, either because it was heavily accented ghetto English or because it was in Spanish; but the insults and tone of what was being communicated were unmistakable. If I hadn’t have heard it all before, it may have disturbed me even more, but as it was, it was just noise and directed at others and wasn’t my problem. Plus it was two doors away and could do me no harm.

 I got myself settled quickly and went through my stuff again where I retrieved my writing materials, extra paper and a black pen that I picked up just before the move from Port Isabel and somehow had survived the many searches and inspections throughout the journey. So I started to put down all I could about the experience since I’d promised Bruce another story and I needed to fill the dead hours.

 Over the the next two days, I used up my time reading my books and writing which beat back the boredom that SHU life brings in spades. Monday was a usual day and nothing untoward happened right up until I was told at 6:00 pm to roll it up and pack my stuff. I asked where I was going and given, “I don’t know, I was only told to move you out”.

I originally thought I was to return to general population there, but I was taken out of the main building, out through the sliding gates surrounding the complex and over to an auxiliary structure that housed the intake center for arriving and outgoing detainees. After almost four hours of waiting, I was changed into my civilian clothes which had been brought up from Port Isabel in my property box and I was given the property left in that box, shackled hand and foot by Kevlar clad ICE agents, so it was obvious I was leaving. On the transfer sheet I had to sign, it said I was to be brought to Pearsall, Texas, which for some reason I believed was close to El Paso, perhaps an hour or so away. My big fear was that I’d be put back in that sardine can of a van for my journey over there. To my surprise, my transport was a larger van with cushioned bench seats and a clear view out the front window and sides though the side windows had a mesh screen covering them, but it was a vast improvement. When I was secured in the transport vehicle, I observed my two drivers speak with another two ICE officers similarly dressed in Kevlar, cradling M16 carbines as were my own drivers plus the additional Glock 9mms in their holsters. The other two agents were to be our escort and would be riding in an unmarked SUV behind the van I would be taken in alone.

 We left Otero at approximately 10:00 pm and drove throughout the whole night stopping perhaps three or four times to refuel and for a single restroom stop for me, which turned out to be a 7-11 type convenience store that I was escorted into fully shackled and surrounded by my armed guards much to the open mouthed gapes of the customers as I shuffled by. A small boy standing close to the candy stand was totally transfixed at this spectacle. I gave him a conspiratorial wink as I passed him when re-immerging from the men’s room. My requests for coffee and a donut as I was escorted back out through the length of the fast food counter and coffee dispenser while loud enough for everyone to hear, were duly ignored by the ICE guards even as they carried their own food back out to the van and SUV.

In total, we were to drive over ten hours practically nonstop and I was awake the entire night; I couldn’t rest or fall asleep. We reached Pearsall at around 8:30 am the next day as it is located roughly halfway between San Antonio and Laredo, many hundreds of miles between Port Isabel and Otero.

Pearsall is yet another large detention center recently thrown up in South Texas to accommodate the Bush administration’s devastating immigration policies that are processing mostly people of color through them at an alarming rate. Many of those new in the system have been here practically all their lives save for the years they were too young to recall in their birth countries.

 Once more I go through another four hour intake procedure, most of it alone in a bare, empty, concrete holding tank. I departed New Mexico tired and hungry, and arrived in Pearsall too late for breakfast so fourteen hours had passed when I was served what passed for lunch. It was a miserable excuse of a meal, a harbinger of things to come.

 The color scheme at Pearsall is stark flat white, unlike the soft cream tones and split horizontal, bicolor system so often found in correctional institutions. As a result, it has a more clinical atmosphere. The stark whiteness drains any subtlety from the place and even more so than Port Isabel or Otero. Each facility has it’s own look and feel and it’s odd that once used to the first place you enter, all others are compared to it in your mind.

 Daily life in the dorm is a drudge. At Port Isabel there are numerous board games, table tennis, a large yard with two basketball courts, and and exercise tree There is scant opportunity in this dorm for distraction save two TVs, one at each end of the long rectangular room. The postage stamp sized yard at the end of it is too small to accommodate the two dorms it’s meant to serve and consequently, it’s rarely used.

 Food is a constant issue of contention. The second day I was here, there was and impromptu food strike initiated by the Latinos over the size of the portions. Later, the same day, a facility supervisor along with a retinue of guards and ICE agents arrived to address these grievances and actually defused a potentially serious confrontation. Also, the supervisor touched on the issue of what was happening with people’s cases and the possibility that we could be moved to Willacy County, one county North of Port Isabel, where everybody except myself had come from. He informed us that all who had signed off on their deportations would shortly be returned to their countries of origin. Indeed, over the last week, the population has thinned.

When I did arrive in the dorm and requested my medically ordered bottom bunk, I was carrying my bag of papers, a roll of sheets in a blanket plus a mattress. As I struggled to cope, I was assisted by a dark-skinned fellow who volunteered, “Here, let me help you with that”. He had an honest look, so I let him carry the mattress. At first, they tried to dislodge a Mexican kid who wouldn’t budge so I was brought back down the dorm room again and after some haggling, the fellow who’d assisted me offered his own bottom bunk and he moved above me. His name  was Zian and he was from Jordan. I was right in thinking he was Middle Eastern when I first laid eyes on him. He has been in the US since he was six months old. He’s now thirty-five and was picked up just a few months ago on a minor domestic disturbance with his wife of five years, when back in 2003 he used profanity on the phone. Who hasn’t done that at one time or another? Zian now was under a deportation order to Jordan, a place he’d never known.

 This made me realize, along with many similar stories I’d heard in the six months since my own detention, that I could have been picked up at any time by ICE, even over a traffic violation, and found myself in the same predicament. Anyone who has a violation of the law of any sort and is not technically a US citizen, no matter how long they have lived in the USA is susceptible to being picked up and put under a deportation order. That is the cold reality of life in the “Land of Opportunity”, this country of immigrants. If you’re not sure of your true immigration status, for what ever reason, I would advise you to check it before you fmd out the hard way. Many unsuspecting folks who actually don’t know their true status could be in for a rude awakening should they ever run afoul of the law, however slightly. Many who are on probation and never did a day in jail are now languishing in these centers for months and often years either waiting to leave or fighting their cases to stay in the only country they’ve known as their own.

 Consider also, the latest divisive tactic of DHS/ICE which is to round up en masse workers in meat plants in the Midwest where hundreds of people from Mexico, Central and South America toil long, hard, dangerous hours to support their struggling families. They are instead, criminally charged with fraud and falsifying documents burdened with a criminal record and incarcerated and put under deportation orders. The devastating impact on their families, their children, their communities on both sides of the border and the businesses who need them to survive is immense. To criminalize the working poor who are performing the most difficult an lowest paying jobs, ones that most Americans would not do and whose often backbreaking labor the US economy depends and profits is unjust.

 The accelerated implementation of the immigration policies of possibly the worst administration in living memory leaves me with the impression that it is the last desperate throes of an maniacal cabal determined to do as much damage as they can before they’re through. It isn’t enough that they have ruined what was left of America’s reputation throughout the world, it seems that they are keen to inflict further harm to the struggling economy by way of this racially inspired scheme to clear out anyone they consider undesirable. Once again, here at Pearsall, I am the only white guy in my dorm, and at the moment, that’s a 60-1 ratio.

 So that’s the story, more or less, up to now. The news from Port Isabel is that it will be out of commission for months; it looks like I’m stuck here. As much as I bitched about Port Isabel while I was there, it turns out to be the best of a bad lot. My court date has been postponed to the 24th of September and the prosecutor sends word she wants an extension.. Dream on. That’s it for now. My crossword puzzles are calling. More later.

Pol Brennan, Irish Detainee August 2008

August 29, 2008

Since the end of this last piece, I have once again been moved back down to south Texas, ironically just ½ hour distant from where we left from at Port Isabel. This new place is the Willacy County Detention Center in Raymondville. Willacy County is one of the most depressed counties in the country, but the town of Raymondville now boasts 4 major holding facilities – a U.S. federal lockup, or FDC, the county jail, the city jail, and now this deportation/detention center. Run by a company named MTC, Management Training Corp., they are one of the newer breed of for-profit prisons and detention companies that are now enjoying such booming business in Bush’s America. Paying their guards here at just about the federal minimum wage at $9.00/hour, it’s not surprising that they are so badly trained and ill-suited to dealing with the higher security-rated detainees from Port Isabel, who rarely comply with the guards’ directions. Every one of them are very young and inexperienced rookies.

This place is even worse than Pearsall. It seems we are sampling ever-worsening dishes of detention as we hopscotch around Texas awaiting the next storm crisis. On the positive side, my court date has been moved up to the 17^th of September and I got a new judge. Wish me luck.

Thanks – Pol Brennan, Irish Detainee