Recently outrage over the treatment of immigrant children in detention centers are heading the conversation about the inhumane practices that we enforce in facilities across the country. It is clear there is an undeniable connection between detention facilities, prisons (state and federal), as well as county and city jails. All of these institutions were created to keep bodies in cages and to cage as many as possible. The bodies that are being detained within These facilities are property of the profitable businesses involved. These businesses must be boycotted, we must not become complacent in allowing their existence to persist. We can clearly see how abuse and evil thrive within these institutions. More disturbingly abuse and evil are funded by these businesses and a small policy change is not going to abolish that evil. The evil and abuse that live within these institutions if they are left operational, will just evolve itself to work within any policy change. We must demand an end to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the detention of immigrants. The leaders of the national prison strike stand behind those detained recognizing that our struggle as an oppressed people is the same and the monster that we are fighting against is the same.
IWOC leaders say the connection is clear to abolitionists, “the policing caging and violence targeting immigrants is similarly aimed at subjugating whole populations and maintaining a racial order.” White supremacist ideals place black and brown bodies in the face of violence and dehumanization on a regular basis in the United States. Just as the prisoner is a dehumanized figure, the Immigrant is also a dehumanize figure. We are able to treat immigrant children like criminals because we see the immigrant body as unworthy of respect, care or concern. We’ve separated parents from their children throughout American history. In the same way that we separated the children of slaves from their parents, we continue to separate the children of immigrants from their parents. Arguably because policies have been set in place that protect this type of abuse against minorities.
When we place children into detention facilities we are grooming them for future of arrest and incarceration. A comrade told me that when he was younger he and his mother lived in a shelter for some time and after being incarcerated he realized how similar the shelter is to the prison. He saw that as young boy growing up in poverty that he was being groomed. Our society makes criminals out of certain groups of people. For as long as we allow people to be in cages, for any reason, the cages will be full. We must eliminate these elements from our society and the way to do so is by crippling those industries that thrive off of the caging of more and more people. I say this as King County, where I reside, is building a new $210 million youth jail.
America has always been a settler colonial state built on the oppression and disposition of the indigenous. It was the ancestors of those people that we are caging in detention facilities now who roamed these plains freely for hundreds of years prior to English settlement. It’s absolutely ridiculous that the foreign settlers who came here as immigrants are now labeling immigrants as illegal and incarcerating them, separating them from their children and treating them like criminals simply due to their having relocated. In response to this gross hypocrisy jailhouse lawyers speak, incarcerated prisoners leading the national prison strike, released a statement as follows:
“Solidarity with those detained (children women and men) by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the families you are forcibly kept from. You are held in those for-profit gulags, whose names are to maintain a rotten nationalist-racist-capitalistic social order. The August 21st National prison strikes called for strikes and boycotts in and against those so called immigration detentions for reason, to acknowledge for the world that our struggles are not separate.
The prison industrial slave complex is a massive dehumanization business. With the ongoing rages against the detentions, we now feel justified in our call for National strikes and outside protests against these places (immigration, federal, state, and jails) that for the most part are warehouses of human bodies.
Those occupying the so-called immigration detentions must not allow a small concession by a policy change to make you go away. You hold the keys to change. A full demand to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement should be the only resolution on the table. Otherwise the same problems will persist. Strike now and strike hard while the momentum is going. August 21, thousands of prisoners in other places of detention will be joining at all costs. We will keep the beam on the so-called immigration enforcement.
No let up.
Educate, organize, mobilize! Resist!
Abolish ice!”
-Jailhouse Lawyers Speak
