How We All Get Out
A Single Moment of Liberation Can Re-Define Our Lives
Have you ever seen someone regain their freedom?
Like, witnessed it up close, in person? Have you ever been there the moment they stepped out of the cage? Or gotten a call from their loved one as soon as that deep, painful hug ends and the rest of their lives begin on the other side of the walls?
If you’ve experienced this firsthand, you know that moment of psychic release that can fill up everything around you and overwhelm the spirit when a person regains control over their body, their life, their future. When they reunite with the loved ones who make life worth living. The moment they get free.
If you’ve never watched a heavy sally port door or concertina wire fence slide open to release a soul battered, scarred but alive, you should. I believe it’s among the most transformative things we can experience. It certainly transformed me.
Today I’m taking a break from FOIA records and carceral death-making to talk about how playing tiny roles to help people get free changes ourselves and the world. I’m doing this to help remember how important it is that we (okay, that I) try hard not to focus only on the terrifying images of masked agents violently kidnapping people from communities, disappearing them into unmarked vehicles, stashing them in federal building basements, and then transporting them to for-profit prisons—or worse.
I’m going to share a story or two of freedom and liberation hoping it’ll kindle a firestorm of curiosity, solidarity, discussion and resilience among us.
If that’s not your bag, no worries. I’ll be back this week with FOIA litigation training videos for newcomers, an analysis of the Wired 911 piece, and insights on ways to drain some swamps.
It Felt Like a Jailbreak
The first time I watched a man regain his freedom was so powerful it ruined me financially. 15 years ago, I was on track to become a litigator at a BigLaw firm in San Francisco with a base salary of $160,000 a year plus bonuses. My view getting off the elevator on the 38th Floor was of the Golden Gate Bridge to the west, the Bay Bridge to the East, and everything in between below us. I lived steps from the office on California Street and ate sourdough bread and delicious cheeses at the Ferry Building during lunch breaks. That job in that city was the culmination of everything I thought I’d worked for and dreamt of when I went to law school. It would have meant a comfortable—if deeply conflicted—life and a prosperous legal career.
But because the Great Recession led my to firm defer our start dates from September to January, I delayed moving from Nashville and did some work for an immigration lawyer named Elliott Ozment. During Labor Day weekend, Elliott tasked me with drafting a state habeas petition for a lawful permanent resident (Green Cardholder) who was being illegally detained in a county jail on an ICE detainer. Another immigrant from Mexico had died in that jail not long ago as he too was awaiting arrest by ICE. The 48-hour period federal law allowed the jail to hold Elliott’s client had long expired; but the Sheriff’s jail administrator refused to let him out. So we drafted the habeas petition, filed it in Circuit Court, and on the Tuesday after Labor Day, drove down I-24 East to the Civil War-era courthouse in the middle of the quaint square where lynchings were once a regular occurrence.
In the hallway outside the courtroom a man in a suit spoke sternly into his cellphone: “Get [the Sheriff] on the phone NOW.” He was shook. It was invigorating, seeing the urgency on his face and realizing the words we typed into a document and printed and filed had caused it. It felt like the tables were turned, and the power was shifting.
Two deputies walked our client into the courtroom. He wore an orange jumpsuit and smelled like he hadn’t showered in days. His hands were cuffed and chained around his waist. His ankles were chained, too. He was, at this point, charged with no crime. The sole legal basis of his incarceration in the jail was the ICE detainer. The deputies sat him down and we talked. He was a bit confused about why he was there. His brother had hired Elliott, and there was a real concern that ICE agents would simply walk into the courtroom, snatch him, and send him to Louisiana.
Judge Bart Stanley took the bench. Young, handsome, and stern, he told everyone he’d read the petition, and instructed the parties: “Call your first witness.” The woman who’d been assuring us for days that the jail couldn’t let the man out because ICE had lodged a detainer raised her right hand and swore to tell the truth in her thick southern drawl. It was sweltering outside and her shirt was a bit damp in the armpits. She wasn’t nervous. She knew she was in the right.
After introducing the ICE detainer as an exhibit and having her read it aloud, Elliott asked her, “What does 48 hours mean to you down here in this County?”
“It’s an order from ICE that we cannot let him out.”
“Does it mean five days?”
“That’s not my area. I just honor the detainers.”
“Does it mean two weeks?!”
Elliott was, he would later tell me, twisting the knife. He’d read the judge’s expressions in response to the jailor’s verbal acrobatics and knew he had him. Being a former preacher, state legislator, and healthcare sales exec, he had a flair for the dramatic that carried well in this tiny southern courtroom where the Klan used to burn crosses.
“Alright. I’ve heard enough,” Judge Stanley interrupted.
“I’m going to grant the petition and order your client released forthwith.”
It wasn’t over. The deputies escorted Elliott’s client from the courtroom en route back to the jail. I wanted him, and them, to hurry the fuck up. But the man’s feet could only move so fast with the chains linking his ankles.
Our fear was that ICE had been called and this whole victory would by pyrrhic.
We drove to the jail—a single-story affair that looked like an elementary school wrapped in concertina wire. The client’s brother was in the parking lot, waiting to pick him up, but still skeptical that any of this could work.
Sitting in the hot lobby watching a flurry of activity behind thick plexiglass, minutes felt like hours. There’s no way this was going to work. They’d defy the court’s order just long enough to let ICE arrive, then tell us their hands were tied. Elliott told the deputy at the reception window that if his client didn’t walk out in two minutes, he’d be calling the judge seeking an order holding the Sheriff in contempt.
“It’s not that simple, sir. We can’t just let people go. There’s a process,” a lazy Tennessee drawl spouted back through a metal circle with a speaker in the middle of the glass.
“How long does it take?” Elliott shot back.
“Could take hours. We’re short-staffed today. Holidays and everything,” the deputy responded.
More time passed, made all the more difficult by our inability to have our phones in the lobby.
And then it happened.
A sharp buzz behind the door. The deafening sound of it sliding open. The man, reborn in his street clothes, walking out smiling. He felt like a different person. His brother came into the lobby and they hugged.
Elliott told them, “Now let’s get the fuck outta here.” I told him on the way home, “It felt like a jailbreak.”
We watched the brothers walk to their truck and leave, perhaps in disbelief, as we put our suit coats across the back seat of Elliott’s SUV. Then a guy in a blue polo shirt and khakis walked quickly from the parking lot to the jail door. I’d later sue him on multiple occasions for illegally entering immigrants’ homes and arresting them. But today, he was too late.
Driving back home, and for weeks after that, I could not shake the overwhelming feeling that this is what law degrees are for. This sort of thing is what I was meant to do. And there could be no higher use of the privilege of being able to walk into jails and talk to people confidentially or of being able to bother judges with Labor Day filings than helping people get free.
It wasn’t nominative determinism, as so many might suggest.
It was a deep, intuitive sense that helping people regain their freedom is how you’re supposed to spend your time, if you’re lucky enough to be able to do that sort of thing. So that’s what I ended up doing instead of helping rich people sue each other for money in between eating sourdough at the Ferry Building. No regrets.
The Accretion Effect
Over the next decade or so, I got to help people regain and keep their freedom again and again.
Dozens of Occupy Nashville arrestees ordered released night after night to the shock and dismay of Tennessee Highway Patrol Trooper William Matunga, whose testimony proved unavailing in the face of the First Amendment and an honest night magistrate.
A Tennessee father on Thanksgiving day whose young daughter suffered from a rare and extremely painful vision disease. Asylum-seeking mothers and their severely ill children locked away in hot South Texas trailers, hastily assembled by Obama and his private prison partners at CoreCivic back when it was the Corrections Corporation of America, before Shane Bauer’s expose.
It all added onto itself, snowballing toward the conclusion that these humans never needed or deserved to be caged in the first place. That cages for humans were evil and largely unnecessary. Still, I was not yet an abolitionist.
Then Trump won, and all hell broke loose.
Reuniting parents with their children meant helping regain different kinds of freedom— but not liberation. The sharing of their experiences fast, wide, and wild provoked mass opposition and civil uprising that ended “Zero Tolerance” and won ungrateful liberal democrats the midterms and later, Congress and the White House. They immediately abandoned the commitments they’d made, and scaled up the infrastructure of captivity.
The drive toward freedom-making found me helping people free themselves from Border Patrol lockups in Tijuana, Otay Mesa, and other ports-of-entry across the U.S.-Mexico border, always knowing how fragile, conditional, and temporary those freedoms might be.
It propelled me and others to spend years trying, and failing, and trying again to help people secure their freedom from forced labor and wage theft in ICE prisons, occasionally being able to watch them walk out of the places they were suing and back into their very messy and uncertain lives.
The trauma being locked inside these hellholes inflicts on captives, their families, guards, and surrounding communities literally takes years off everyone’s lives. People in prison towns lead shorter, worse lives than everyone else. Being close up to this trauma and realizing how unable I was to meaningfully interrupt or stop the toll it took on people’s lives nearly led me to end my own. It has no doubt shaved years off the time I’ll spend here.
And then Irwin came.
During the height of COVID, the folks caged inside that place by ICE banded together to support one another against some of the most horrific evils you can imagine. I won’t describe it all here, but suffice it to say, that place and the system that created it produced generational harm that nobody can undo. So they freed each other and let us help.
Through support and solidarity inside and a clear, daily practice of being in direct, physical contact with them outside, we stopped deportation after deportation and helped person after person go free. Until the whole fucking jail was so scandalized and judicially scrutinized it became unusable.
The power of their stories and their belief in one another held a force that ended ICE’s contract with LaSalle and put a stop to the horrors inflicted on them. Their demand to “heal in a place where healing is possible,” and their understanding that “freedom is not liberation” required more of us as advocates and co-conspirators.
The only thing better than experiencing one person regaining their freedom is experiencing a lot of people organizing together to stop the systems that stole it from doing so again. Because it’s not all joy and elation when people get out. It’s also a deep sorrow and anger at the fact that they had to leave people behind, and that those people are still suffering.
We’re meant to forget that as we scroll ceaselessly past the images of modern-day slave-catchers snatching people from the streets. But we shouldn’t. It is no accident that the full force of the US government has been turned toward billions in financial investments aimed at putting more people in the only place publicly traded corporations and state governments still claim the power to legally enslave them under the US Constitution. And it will be no surprise when the Fugitive Slave Act known today as the Big Beautiful Bill produces similar resistance and revolt.
More unfree people just means more chances for collective liberation.
Positive Actions We Can Take Now
Support a Bail Fund. One of the sick features of late stage capitalism is you can literally buy someone’s freedom for them. You just have to pay their bail. Keeping hundreds of thousands of people behind bars simply for the crime of not having enough money to pay bail is a weakness this system allows, borne of greed and arrogance. If you can afford to buy a person’s freedom, or to support a campaign that can do so, you should. If you know people who can be shined or shamed into doing so, shine them or shame them. Here’s a list of bail fundshttps://www.communityjusticeexchange.org/en/nbfn-directory.
Engage in Accompaniment. Being present for the violence of the system — putting yourself between the predator’s jaws and its prey — can sometimes be all it takes to lead them to seek out sustenance elsewhere. This is dangerous work these days, but it’s righteous work, too.