If you had looked for me Friday night last Halloween weekend, you would have found me dressed as the Scooby Doo of a Mystery Gang-themed group out on the town, lightheartedly hopping the plentiful parties as critical to Halloween for college students as candy and animal costumes are for kindergarteners. If you had looked for me the year before, you would have found me cruising on a Greyhound bus through 300 miles of cornfields to University of Iowa to surprise a friend on his birthday and stay up all night watching Arrested Development. If you looked for me on Halloween weekend’s opening night last night, however, you would have found me in a similar-looking Greyhound Station to the one I stepped off in a bus into at Iowa City two years ago, but for a very different purpose.
The other Border Studies students and I spent our Friday night at Tucson’s slightly creepy and chillingly cold Greyhound Station with the local peace and justice house Casa Mariposa. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) has a nasty habit of releasing undocumented detainees from nearby immigration prisons at the Greyhound Station late at night without money, phones, food, or a place to stay if they can’t get on a bus, and the house sends volunteers every night to lend a helping hand and listen to detainees’ stories.
We passed the ICE prisoner-transit van on the way in, a big pick-up truck with a cramped armored compartment on the back that looks like it’d be difficult to fit kids in, much less the adult men who typically get picked up for immigration violations. Only three men got out of the van, a light evening—often 15 or more people spill out of ICE’s armored clown cars—and as the St. Louis Cardinals won the World Series on the TV, we waited around awkwardly with our boxes of food and water and our cell phones ready to lend until the three of them came inside.
At first, I thought that not much could come out of talking to just three released detainees. An hour or two in the station proved me wrong.
My fairly limited Spanish kept conversation with two of the men somewhat utilitarian, as the men borrowed our phones; turned down food, as ICE had, for once, fed prisoners before releasing them; and bought bus tickets to Phoenix and California with money their families had wired. In spite of the language barrier, however, we had some notable conversations.
The man off to Phoenix was quiet. He was from El Salvador and had been stopped while driving in Arizona and turned over to ICE (a process that’s in legal limbo in the state). He had been released with a court date because, due to an obscure bit of 1980s immigration law, he could be considered a refugee, as he left his country while it was still in civil war. He had been in immigration prison for two years and two months, and seemed dazed to be outside.
The man off to California was more talkative. He was from Mexico and had been released on bond with an immigration court date. He had papers to be here but didn’t have them on hand when stopped by California police, who turned him over to ICE (an illegal detention and a process California law doesn’t actually provide for). Of his four U.S.-born children, one is serving in the Army, one in the Navy, and one in Marine Corps, with the last stationed in Iraq. And this detail is a little silly to have taken such notice of, but it struck me perhaps the most of all that the man works as a strawberry picker, one of the legion of invisible workers who help provide my favorite food, somebody your average upper-middle-class college student depends on but never sees in the flesh.
The longest conversation I had, however, was with someone I wouldn’t have expected to see in immigration custody: a Mormon from Fiji living in Oakland, California who spoke perfect English. (I felt more than a little bit stupid when I first addressed him in Spanish.) He had been arrested at home when his wife called the police during an argument. She immediately dropped the complaint, but he was found by Secure Communities—a Homeland Security program that searches out undocumented immigrants in local prisons (some convicted of crimes, many simply detained for a short time) in prisons and transfers them to ICE custody for deportation—and sent to one of Arizona’s many immigration detention centers.
He had spent the past several months working one of ICE’s $1/day jobs in a prison where $7 buys a 12-minute phone card, $4 buys a single serving of coffee creamer, $3 buys a packet of ketchup, and $70 buys a tiny dollar-store radio. (He showed us the prison’s price list, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bigger racket—the only thing which didn’t cost 10x its market value was the postage stamps sold at face value.) The guards from the prison’s private security contractor treated prisoners well, even bringing in forbidden items past Homeland Security. ICE employees, on the other hand, treated detainees as both inferiors and criminals, especially the man I talked to, because the police had put the label Domestic Violence on his case. (Perhaps the most chilling quotation from an ICE agent I heard that night was: “So you like to hurt the females? Well, you can do that in your own country; go back and do it there, not here.”)
Detainees lived in fear of “segregation” (i.e. being put in living quarters with suspected gang members), and had to bargain their only personal items, shoes and watches, for access to phone cards. ICE personnel spent much of their time trying to get immigrants to sign voluntary-deportation forms in clumsy bits of subterfuge. But perhaps the most heart-rending thing I heard from this father of five was his description of the first time he went in front of a judge in detention, making the plea I can easily imagine making in his position: “You can break me, but please don’t break my family.” I wanted to ask what he thought his chances were in immigration court in California, but I knew it was more important just to listen…how much else can you do for someone in the situation?
As we left, I thought back to when we were driving to the Greyhound Station that night: I had half-wished I was back at the college for an evening of festivities, or even hanging out at Tucson’s costumed Halloween parade we passed on the way. But just shaking that man’s hand before he got on his 18-hour Greyhound ride to Oakland was more than I could have asked from a holiday so full of frivolity as Halloween.
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