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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <font
size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://therednation.org/2020/02/10/the-tornillo-16-reflections-on-migrant-detention-and-incarceration-at-the-u-s-mexico-border/">https://therednation.org/2020/02/10/the-tornillo-16-reflections-on-migrant-detention-and-incarceration-at-the-u-s-mexico-border/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">The Tornillo 16: Reflections on Migrant
Detention and Incarceration at the U.S.-Mexico Border</h1>
February 10, 2020</div>
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<p><span>By Nicolás Cruz</span></p>
<p><span>On May 20</span><span>th</span><span>, 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 13</span><span>th</span><span>.
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.</span></p>
<p><span>The previous February, I and several members of
The Red Nation took part in the </span><a
href="https://therednation.org/2019/03/05/the-red-nation-tornillo-the-occupation-coalition-a-weekend-of-revolutionary-love-part-1/"><span>weekend
of Revolutionary Love</span></a><span> 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. </span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><img data-attachment-id="2869"
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data-orig-file="https://therednationdotorg.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/97730c54-370f-46a3-a588-8aba34ef7f49-2_solitary_cell_el_paso_county_jail.jpg"
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data-image-title="97730c54-370f-46a3-a588-8aba34ef7f49-2_Solitary_Cell_El_Paso_County_Jail"
data-image-description=""
data-medium-file="https://therednationdotorg.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/97730c54-370f-46a3-a588-8aba34ef7f49-2_solitary_cell_el_paso_county_jail.jpg?w=300"
data-large-file="https://therednationdotorg.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/97730c54-370f-46a3-a588-8aba34ef7f49-2_solitary_cell_el_paso_county_jail.jpg?w=723"
src="https://therednationdotorg.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/97730c54-370f-46a3-a588-8aba34ef7f49-2_solitary_cell_el_paso_county_jail.jpg?w=723"
alt="97730c54-370f-46a3-a588-8aba34ef7f49-2_Solitary_Cell_El_Paso_County_Jail"></p>
<p><em>Wall of manacles and handcuffs used to chain
prisoners in El Paso County Detention Facility.</em></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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. </span></p>
<p><span>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 </span><i><span>If
They Come in the Morning</span></i><span>… </span><i><span>Voices
of Resistance</span></i><span>. 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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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. </span></p>
<p><span>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. </span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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 </span><i><span>la migra</span></i><span>,
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? </span></p>
<p><span>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. “</span><i><span>Este país es muy bonito para
los que tienen papeles</span></i><span>.” 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.</span></p>
<p><span>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. </span></p>
<p><span>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. </span></p>
<p><span>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 </span><i><span>If They Come
in the Morning</span></i><span>, 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. </span></p>
<p><span>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.”</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
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<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863.9977
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://freedomarchives.org/">https://freedomarchives.org/</a></div>
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