More than a year later, the coronavirus pandemic has sealed the borders these groups once crossed. Some wait for asylum in the U.S. or in Mexico; many work on the fringes of the informal economy. The virus has frozen their applications, and with it, their futures. The cramped camps where they live are said to…
Etowah County has a unique role in ICE’s architecture of detention and deportation. For more than two decades, the agency has provided the local sheriff’s department with a steady stream of funds for housing hundreds of immigrant detainees at a time. “The contract between Etowah County and ICE has one of the lowest per diem…
Crews huddle in the morning to hear instructions, then prune trees, tie up branches and replant orchards, often in close proximity to one another. Those who want to wash their hands — vital workplace safety in the age of the novel coronavirus — need to bring soap from home, and until recently their own water, according to…
Some of the most vulnerable people right here in Western Washington are the prisoners at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma. This is a privately run for-profit prison where immigrants are detained. Long before the COVID-19 came, many of us were actively protesting: most of the prisoners are not criminals (unless you think being born…
Daily living and working was already dangerous and precarious for hundreds of thousands of farmworkers and immigrants before the onset of COVID-19. ICE has terrorized our communities and powerful growers have suppressed workers’ efforts to organize. Generations of environmental racism have contaminated poor neighborhoods and caused lifelong health impacts in communities of color. This pandemic…
