In June, women held at Eloy Detention Center, a private immigration prison in Arizona owned and operated by CoreCivic, began to write down what they were going through. The letter writers did so despite the threat of retaliation, because, they said, people had to know what was happening. “You can’t speak freely here,” one woman wrote.

The letters have gone out to clergy, lawyers, volunteers, and family members. At neighboring La Palma Correctional Center, advocates collected mass letters describing horrible conditions, fear of contagion, and reprisal by guards. Bob Kee has visited detainees at Eloy for years and gives out his number and address to many of the people he meets. When bimonthly community volunteer visits to the prison were suspended in early March, he got occasional phone calls from friends inside. Their accounts of the conditions alarmed him. He asked one woman he knew, “Will you write me a letter, and she said, ‘I will,’ then two weeks later I got this big manila envelope with 40-odd letters.” Kee and other advocates shared many such letters with me, on the condition that the women’s names not be used.

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