[Pnews] The Tornillo 16: Reflections on Migrant Detention and Incarceration at the U.S.-Mexico Border

[Prisoner News]

https://therednation.org/2020/02/10/the-tornillo-16-reflections-on-migrant-detention-and-incarceration-at-the-u-s-mexico-border/ 



  The Tornillo 16: Reflections on Migrant Detention and Incarceration at
  the U.S.-Mexico Border

February 10, 2020
------------------------------------------------------------------------

By Nicolás Cruz

On May 20th, 2019 16-year old Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez died in 
a concrete cell in McAllen, Texas of the flu. After travelling with his 
sister from Guatemala through Mexico and across the border near Hidalgo, 
Texas, Carlos was detained by Border Patrol agents on May 13th. That 
same day, about 600 miles away along the same border, I turned myself 
into the El Paso City Police Department after they put out nationally 
televised warrants for the arrest of 16 activists including myself. Our 
crime: protesting the actions of the Border Patrol and the mistreatment 
of migrants in detention.

The previous February, I and several members of The Red Nation took part 
in the weekend of Revolutionary Love 
<https://therednation.org/2019/03/05/the-red-nation-tornillo-the-occupation-coalition-a-weekend-of-revolutionary-love-part-1/>held 
by Tornillo The Occupation, a collective of activists from around the 
country who gathered on Christmas 2018 to protest the child migrant open 
air prison in Tornillo, Texas. Along with a series of other actions 
around Valentines Day, we held a protest at the Border Patrol Museum in 
El Paso.

The museum is funded and run by the union of Border Patrol agents along 
with a staff of their sympathizers, but is located on Fort Bliss Army 
Base property. We chose this museum because of what it represents: the 
celebration and dominant narrative of the colonial border and its 
so-called protectors. I told my father, who migrated to the US from 
Mexico as a child, about the museum and its exhibits of weapons, 
uniforms, and vehicles used by Border Patrol and the items confiscated 
from detained migrants. He exclaimed, “they would never build a museum 
celebrating the Nazi SS!” Yet they probably would, had it been the US 
who carried out the genocide, or if Germany had won the war. Yet both 
are exactly what has happened here.

The United States has more or less been successful in erasing the 
ongoing occupation and colonization of Indigenous lands. That most 
people living in America cannot name the tribe whose land they live on 
is a testament to the near-total replacement of hundreds of Indigenous 
nations with the European-American settler nation known as the United 
States, along with its mythologies of freedom and justice and divine 
providence. But Indigenous people are still here struggling against 
colonization and challenging the U.S. settler state as it oppresses 
others fleeing their homelands.

This is a reflection of how I came to share a cell with people who also 
went up against the Border Patrol and were criminalized for it. Our 
disparate experiences speak to the arbitrary nature of citizenship yet, 
also, in the case of Carlos and so many others who have died on their 
journey to the United States, its mortal impacts. I hope this will serve 
as a call to fellow U.S.-born people to take increased action in a time 
of escalating exploitation, detention, and deportation.

Four of us self-surrendered to the El Paso Police Department in May 2019 
after mobilizing legal representation and funds in response to our 
warrants. Many of us learned of our imminent arrest on the news or, in 
my case, from family and friends who saw my photo in the local news and 
called to ask what was going on. The police, working off the museum’s 
claim that we caused $3,000 in damage during our action, charged us with 
state felonies, which coincidentally require a minimum of $2,500 in 
damage but come with up to $10,000 in fines and two years in jail. Since 
many of us live out of state, we debated turning ourselves in or 
awaiting the signing of extradition orders and arrests in our state of 
residence. The four of us who turned ourselves in that day decided to 
initiate our case and self-surrender as a group, in solidarity.

When we arrived, the police officers immediately recognized us as the 
group who had “vandalized the border museum.” Many expressed knowing 
about our action and repeated the claim spread on the news. It has 
caused quite a commotion in El Paso, Texas, a border town city that our 
local comrades have pointed out rarely sees much protest beyond rallies.

Upon our arrest, police took us to the back of the substation, where 
they searched us, removed our shoelaces and hair ties, and handcuffed us 
to metal benches behind chain link fencing. These one- or two-person 
cages faced officers’ workspace, which allowed them to gawk at us while 
they worked. I remember the first time I was arrested. I was protesting 
the expansion of an oil refinery in Swinomish treaty land in Western 
Washington, sitting there in handcuffs and ankle chains realizing that 
the state had total control over my bodily autonomy. I also realized 
incarceration meant a whole lot of waiting at the mercy of arbitrary 
jailers.

As we sat there for almost three hours handcuffed, having a stare off 
with the police officers, some looked at us and asked what was going on. 
Their colleagues responded, “they’re 99’s from the Border museum”— 
self-surrenders. Others avoided eye contact even though I stared at 
them, most of them bilingual Latino men in uniform. Their patches, I 
noticed, included three side-by-side figures: a feathered Native man, a 
bearded conquistador, and a blonde cowboy. Which they imagined 
themselves to be, it was unclear.

97730c54-370f-46a3-a588-8aba34ef7f49-2_Solitary_Cell_El_Paso_County_Jail

/Wall of manacles and handcuffs used to chain prisoners in El Paso 
County Detention Facility./

Finally they fingerprinted us, took our first set of mugshots, and then 
walked us across the street to the county jail, what they call the 
Detention Facility. As we walked in handcuffs, flanked by two officers, 
passersby watched us with varying reactions of curiosity, indifference, 
and concern. It’s unlikely they recognized us as the people who took 
over the museum, but it’s interesting to think about how normal this was 
for them, to see four people in chains walking in downtown El Paso.

Border towns in Texas have likely become more familiar with life under 
occupation by Border Patrol, where migrants are being detained both in 
jails and in makeshift camps. We also were not the first activists 
arrested for protesting the injustices related to enforcement of 
exclusionary migration policy, escalating (though not beginning) with 
the current Trump administration. Several months before we surrendered, 
activists with No More Deaths were charged with felonies for leaving 
water for migrants crossing the desert. In a widely shared video, Border 
Patrol agents were filmed slashing and discarding gallons of water and 
food left for migrants who otherwise could starve or die of dehydration. 
As border patrol locks down on more accessible routes across the border, 
people are pushed to more and more isolated, and therefore dangerous, 
areas of the desert and mountain passes. For their crimes of providing 
life-saving aid, the No More Deaths activists were threatened with 
several decades of federal prison. Thankfully, they have all been either 
acquitted or their cases dropped before even reaching trial, but the 
message is clear: the settler government intends to freeze any and all 
resistance to its detention, deportation, and family separation policies.

In fact, incarceration has long been a tool to contain dissent. On my 
way to El Paso from Oakland, California where I currently live, I pored 
through the writings of political prisoners in /If They Come in the 
Morning/… /Voices of Resistance/. I found the tattered book randomly at 
a used book and record store in Alameda, California and bought it 
because I was seeking guidance from other political prisoners, which I 
was about to get a small glimpse of becoming. But as Angela Davis, a 
contributor to the book, explains, all prisoners are political prisoners 
“in the sense that they are largely the victims of an oppressive 
politico-economic order.” And the incarceration of disproportionate 
numbers of Black, Indigenous, and Chicanx people serves as both evidence 
and reinforcement of the colonial domination that structures this 
society. And before we even entered the jail, I met other political 
prisoners though they had not partaken in any protest like mine.

We were taken into the small magistrate courtroom where a judge was in 
the process of reading charges to multiple people— already in orange 
jumpers. One young man was brought in later and was sat next to me, both 
of us handcuffed behind our backs. Before our names were called, he 
asked me what would happen here. I told him what I knew, that they’d 
read the charges of the others and asked if they had a lawyer or needed 
to be assigned a public defender. He shared with me that he’d been 
arrested because of his baby, because he hadn’t been able to buy a car 
seat. A young woman in an orange jumper was charged with something 
similar, an older man for a minor traffic violation. I realized then 
that people were thrown into jail for the inability to pay off a 
speeding ticket before the next, or for otherwise minor infractions 
that, piled on top of each other with the continual harassment by 
police, led to incarceration. This, we know, often leads to loss of 
jobs, housing, and assistance benefits, keeping many already 
socioeconomically oppressed people in precarity.

Seeing that the four of us had gone up already, the young man asked me 
what he should say and all I could offer is that he should ask for a 
public defender, knowing that this often is a failing defense strategy 
with an over-stretched and sometimes unsympathetic public defense 
attorney system. We talked throughout the day, as we progressed through 
the labyrinth of holding cells, intake interviews, mugshots, and 
fingerprinting in the El Paso County Jail.

As I said earlier, waiting seemed to be a major part of incarceration. 
Waiting to be weighed and measured. Waiting to be fingerprinted. Waiting 
to be interviewed by a nurse who wanted to know every tattoo, scar, and 
health history to better identify you in the future. In our time waiting 
for the next step in the process, I had time to reflect on what I have 
learned about incarceration, about jails and policing, and the 
experiences of political prisoners.

I remembered one line in particular that James Baldwin wrote in his 
letter to Angela Davis while she was jailed in 1970. I was in the last 
and final holding cell awaiting either bail or intake to the upper level 
of the jail, when his words returned to me: “One might have hoped that, 
by this hour, the very sight of chains on Black flesh, or the very sight 
of chains, would be so intolerable a sight for the American people, and 
so unbearable a memory, that they would themselves spontaneously rise up 
and strike off the manacles. But, no, they appear to glory in their 
chains; now, more than ever, they appear to measure their safety in 
chains and corpses.” At that moment, a row of Latino men in blue and red 
jumpsuits chained together at the wrists, waists and ankles were marched 
past the window of our large holding cell. In the very back of this 
chain–many who my cellmates recognized as fellow migrants who were 
detained while crossing–were two young Black men, either my age or even 
younger, chained as their ancestors had been before them. And I knew 
that Baldwin was right, that the prison and the jail must be burned to 
the ground and abolished, that we cannot continue to allow so many 
thousands of people to be swallowed by its labyrinth of hallways and 
cells, hidden away and lost from public view. My commitment to prison 
abolition was solidified then and there, watching those two young Black 
men and the migrant and citizen Latino men chained alongside them.

It was, however, also the people being detained alongside me that had a 
large impact on me. There were two cells, lined with two benches and a 
partially exposed toilet, of male-identified prisoners being held, and a 
smaller cell down the hall with four female-identified prisoners, 
including the two who surrendered with us. This was where we ended up, 
after at least five hours of being cuffed, released from our manacles 
only long enough to eat cold bologna sandwiches, apples, and a bag of 
chips.

I shared my cell with four men from Cuba who had traveled through Mexico 
starting in Chiapas, all the way up to the desert between El Paso and 
Chihuahua, where they were detained. The youngest of them, a 17-year old 
Afro-Latino kid, sat huddled in his thin shirt, shivering and gloomy. I 
listened as his three older companions talked to a Mexican-American man 
about their journey, straining to keep up with their fast Spanish. I 
understood the most talkative one to say, “you know, they say America is 
all about freedom and justice and when you get here, it’s just— 
handcuffs right away,” holding his hands out in surrender.

He and some of the other detainees were in surprisingly good spirits, 
despite having been held for days or even, for some, weeks in that cell. 
I couldn’t imagine the agony of sitting, waiting and sleeping in that 
cold cell for so long. Still, they made jokes, were curious about me and 
my comrade (“You turned yourselves in?”), and shared stories and laughs. 
While I couldn’t share the details of our action, telling them that it 
was likely that our cell was being recorded, I did tell them that we 
were being detained for protesting the actions of the Border Patrol.

There were three young men, one of them 19 years old, who had come all 
the way from Guatemala. They had taken an arduous journey with one of 
the caravans through Mexico, and their solemn demeanor reflected the 
challenges they had faced. When I shared that I had been arrested for 
protesting a museum that celebrated /la migra/, they came and sat down 
next to me and one of them quietly asked me questions. Where are you 
from? Where’s your family from? Why did you turn yourself in?

I asked them about their journey, how old they were, and where and how 
long they were detained. They had been in the cell with no shower, no 
beds, and no blankets for over a week. After we exchanged these 
questions, the young man said something that has stuck with me. “/Este 
país es muy bonito para los que tienen papeles/.” While I believe that 
this settler nation, this country built on slave plantations and stolen 
land, is not beautiful for all of its citizens, I knew what he meant. We 
were being detained side by side, but I would be bailed out to await 
trial while he would be either punitively incarcerated or deported. I 
had no words for him, nothing that I could say in response but nod my 
head. We sat in silence for a while and I think he eventually got up to 
move around and look out the large window like many of the men did. The 
prison guards, young Hispanic and older white men, watched us and talked 
amongst themselves outside the glass wall.

I remember several of the migrants sharing their surprise that so many 
of the Border Patrol and ICE agents, as well as prison guards and 
police, were brown like they were. So many of those young men in 
uniform, the other prison uniform, looked like they could have been my 
cousins or brothers. I was not surprised–but of course disappointed–that 
so many Hispanic men of Mexican-descent participated in the detention, 
incarceration, and deportation of Mexican, Central, and South American 
people. They were merely the latest generation of settlers, or wannabe 
settlers, in a white supremacist society that will never accept them 
fully, who were seduced by the promises of America at the cost of 
participating in its colonial genocide. They were willing to separate 
children from parents, brothers from sisters, and indeed kill migrants 
just as soldiers had done in the Indian Wars, in the campaigns of 
genocide and expansion of the American West. These Guatemalan migrants, 
themselves Indigenous peoples fleeing their homelands, were entering a 
society with a long history of anti-Indigenous violence.

I wanted to tell them all of this. I wanted to learn all their names and 
try to track them through the bureaucratic maze of the El Paso County 
Jail and Immigration and Custom Enforcement systems. Instead I told them 
that we were a part of a movement against their detention and 
mistreatment, that there were people on the outside fighting for them 
inside. But while we sat there, a guard opened the sliding door and 
called my name. It happened quickly and I remember trying to form some 
words in Spanish about how I hoped the best for all of them. I wanted to 
say how sorry I was that I was leaving them, sorry that I was being 
bailed out after just hours. I nodded to each of them in shame mostly, 
but also in solidarity.

Even to this day I look back to that moment, being guided by the guard 
out of the holding cell while the young men watched me, and feel a great 
flush of guilt. I think of the words of W. E. B. DuBois, quoted in the 
forward of /If They Come in the Morning/, who said, “What turns me cold 
in all this experience is the certainty that thousands of innocent 
victims are in jail today because they had neither money, experience nor 
friends to help them. The eyes of the world were on our trial despite 
the desperate effort of the press and radio to suppress the facts and 
cloud the real issues; the courage and money of friends and strangers 
who dared stand for a principle freed me; but God only knows how many 
who were as innocent as I and my colleagues are today in hell.” I, too, 
knew the disparity in attention that the 16 of us who received warrants 
for our protest received compared to the more than 42,000 adult migrants 
and 12,000 children being detained in this country (not to mention the 
millions of prisoners). I spent nine hours in the EL Paso County Jail 
while children have spent weeks or even months in detention.

And while I believe that the criminalization of protestors of 
immigration policy is a waste of resources by the government, I don’t 
believe this has been for nothing. In their attempt to silence us with 
threats of incarceration and fines, they have actually strengthened our 
resolve. I have seen the interior of those looming structures that house 
so many stolen siblings, parents, and friends, and I know that they must 
fall. That the threat of incarceration, to be returned to the same 
holding cell as my distant kin, does not discourage me from acting out 
again is their ultimate failure. Baldwin spoke to Angela Davis as I wish 
I could to the migrants in detention, “If we know, then we must fight 
for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render 
impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they 
take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.”

And this is my call to all of you, those with citizenship and with the 
capacity to act. Make this injustice indefensible. Make the route to 
deportation and detention impassable. You do not need to be arrested. In 
fact, the work that so many others are doing beyond protest is the most 
critical. The ones feeding migrants as they’re dropped off by ICE on the 
streets, the ones defending their rights to trial, the migrants 
themselves who are speaking out against their own mistreatment, are 
doing the most necessary and long-term work. If you cannot throw your 
body into the corridor, then throw your energy, your time, and your mind 
into the movement. We cannot wait for more people to die. Never again 
must be now.

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 https://freedomarchives.org/
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