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

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.

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