Why #DetentionKills? Vol. 2022-2
An introduction to our vision and practice of direct, document-driven, abolition democracy-oriented movement lawyering and legal organizing.
“‘#DetentionKills,’ huh? Pretty jarring imagery, isn’t it? Why not follow the time-tested linguistic practice of summarizing the change you’re seeking in a couple words, so that people who might otherwise be turned off might have a clearer way to approach a solution, as opposed to simply feeling the violence of the problem?”
It’s a fair question. You’re here. You’re reading it. Perhaps you’ve seen or shared the hashtag or the stories accompanying it on social media. Perhaps you’re a skeptical, if open-hearted, institutionalist or a proceduralist who believes in the power of public servants working creatively and accountably to address harm and improve the existing systems of exclusion, surveillance, capture, arrest, detention, and expulsion the U.S. immigration legal enforcement regime uses. Perhaps you’re someone whose job it is to report on this regime and these systems for a broad enough audience that your readers depend on an accurate presentation of facts and at least a perception of fairness—if not objectivity. Perhaps your job is to try and remove humans from the violent clutches of these systems, or, hopefully less likely, to put humans through this violence.
If you’re here, it means something about the violence of the state’s efforts to exclude humans from belonging makes you feel. It might even mean you’re bringing your humanity to this space, and that means you probably recognize our general moral consensus as humans that life is precious. Perhaps you believe wherever possible, we should try and limit suffering and promote well-being. Maybe that belief even comes from a place in your spirit that recognizes the value of human life without referencing bordering or nationalizing ideologies that have constructed our present, violent reality.
Detention kills. We’re all here, in this space, because of that truth. Each year, hundreds of thousands of humans encounter the U.S. bordering apparatus, and its deadly Deterrence policy. Under that policy, anything making life a bit more survivable for humans on the move without advance state sponsoring and permission must be severely limited, if not eliminated. That includes luxuries like free phone calls in custody, free lawyers in court, and free movement while defending yourself against an the assertion by the state of the power to send you to a place where your life could end.
Most of the discourse around deaths occurring each year in hold rooms, lockups, processing areas, detention centers, prisons, and jails operated by or for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) assumes the lethality of these spaces as part of the status quo. Nothing fundamentally changes in the existence or operation of a government-contracted facility where people die preventable, predictable deaths. It’s not we—the organized legal and advocacy formations supporting organized communities and movements resisting the causes and mitigating the effects of fatal state violence—who are the speakers of “Detention kills”; it is the state.
Why don’t things fundamentally change when predictable tragedies occur over and over and over again in predictable ways as a result of conscious decisions by government officials? Why don’t the revelation of fatal systems errors, replicated again and again across the system, lead to permanent removal of the actors who advance their careers or profit despite (and perhaps, because of) these deaths?
Among the first revelations of our transparency practice (which forms a core element of the praxis we engage in to resist fatal state violence and build power for the abolition and reimagining of institutions and practices inflicting it) was the recommendation by an independent oversight body - DHS OIG - that a private contractor’s employee be criminally prosecuted in connection with the death of Jean Jimenez. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Georgia declined to prosecute these alleged crimes. Based on the audio recording of the employee’s interview—which was conducted not by ICE, DHS, OIG, OPR, CRCL, or the DOJ, but by, of all agencies, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation—it’s fairly clear what the employee’s defense would have been: I missed cell checks and falsified logs about it because I was overworked and understaffed. There were too many humans locked inside cells by themselves with too many competing needs and too few of us to watch them. Had his defense proceeded along these lines, it’s fairly easy to see why the USAO - which defends Stewart, ICE, and its contractors in habeas litigation - would be conflicted out of deciding whether to prosecute that employee. The USAO concluded they weren’t conflicted out, and the prosecution recommendation from OIG was rejected. So much for deterrence.
If deterrence is supposed to work for migrants, and if policies like “Zero Tolerance” and a brutal “Consequence Delivery System” are truly warranted to deter irregular migration, where are the deterrence policies for preventable deaths in custody?
In the case of Stewart, less than a year and a half after the death that prompted OIG to recommend prosecution, another death occurred in solitary after another guard failed to conduct the required checks and falsified the logs about that failure. This time, there was no (known) prosecution recommendation. As was the case, apparently, in the death of Mr. Tran’s death after his confinement at CoreCivic’s Florence and Eloy facilities.
“Detention Kills?” responds the system. “Get over it.”
Or, for the present crop of senior executive staff and in-the-know congressional aides and oversight counsel, maybe it’s: “Detention kills,” sure, “but that’s not its purpose, and we do everything we can to reduce the rate at which it occurs because we value human life. We’re not operating death camps any more than we’re operating concentration camps.”
Whether you find yourself in the “detention kills . . . and we’re going to keep doing it” camp, or the “detention kills, but we can fix it” camp, you are no loner arguing about or questioning whether detention kills. Because you can’t. Because it does. When that stops, we’ll go away.
What you personally believe about the reality that #DetentionKills, and what you believe it takes to stop this preventable fatal state violence, probably depends on how you relate to the people who are dying, as compared with the system that’s killing them.
Perhaps people inside have some ideas worth listening to on the subject? Perhaps official government records corroborating and validating those ideas so it’s no long some one-sided, fact-free swearing contest is a way lawyers can help people inside in struggle? Our answers to these questions are a key reason for why we started #DetentionKills Transparency Initiative.
How we relate to the name we’ve given our project, whose current political and organizational home is Al Otro Lado, probably depends on how much personal exposure we’ve had to the lived experience of surveillance, arrest, caging, and banishment of alleged migrants and refugees within the United States and those approaching its presently asserted territorial boundaries around the globe. Todd Miller quite thoroughly documents this space as an Empire of Borders.
So, to people new to our starting thesis—that #DetentionKills—and to those with whom we’ve joined in struggle to see to it that detention kills even marginally less, until it stops killing at all, we felt compelled to offer something of an explanation for how we arrived at a place where the first thing we say about the system is that it can kill and does people. Because those are the stakes, whether we acknowledge them or not.
Through our work and the ways we talk about it, we are striving to meet the call of people living inside and outside the sites of fatal state violence. In the roughly two dozen death investigations we’ve conducted, assisted, or researched since mid-2017, the demands from family members, communities of people inside, and those who support them from the other side of the wall, are broadly consistent:
“We want Justice for our loved ones who died. We define justice as a lifelong process of reclaiming and honoring the humanity and dignity the U.S. government steals from the departed in the days, months, and years after their death through misleading press statements, opaque and incomplete death investigations, functional impunity for documented violations of law, and continued operation of systems the government knows to cause harm.
We demand to know what happened to our loved one. We want to truth. And if the truth is that the system claimed our loved one’s life, we demand that the system cease to operate in these ways. Because ours is not simply a project focused on the tragedies that bind our families together, but on the hopes we have for the living. That we may alleviate suffering through extracting and exposure the truths about how and why Detention kills, so that people can make better informed decisions about whether detention can or should exist at all. Above all, we simply refuse to accept the every day invitation policymakers extend for us to forget the lives this system has claimed, because we know that it is only through our collective forgotting that it will claim even more.”
We want to begin with the premise that #DetentionKills so that survivors of the fatal state violence it inflicts are not saddled with the burden of performatively reliving trauma in service of unlocking the consciences and imaginations of people new to the phenomenon.
So that’s how we got our name. Detention killed. It kills still. So #DetentionKills. Don’t like hearing it? Change it. We simply refuse the daily invitation to collectively forget this feature (not bug) of the system until the system stops responding to these deaths with a collective shrug.
Our shared work proceeds largely from this observation about reality. Much of it seeks to uncover and denormalize and share the “how” and “why” of fatal state violence. This is, in part, a response to the continued assertions of exceptionality by the state in the wake of a death, and in larger part, a call to protect the living.