I took my head out of my derriere at the end of last week and stopped cycling over my knee and sleep issues long enough to take a look at an art exhibit at Museo de las Americas on Santa Fe. They're hosting an exhibit on immigrant detention done by the artist collective Sin Huellas (without fingerprints). The name, Sin Huellas, refers to a common practice of removing fingerprints through chemical burns, so the individual cannot be tracked or identified. Often, these undocumented persons vanish without a trace.
The exhibit contains videos, letters from detainees to their families, statistics, and visuals of figures in mylar blankets lying on narrow cots. The stories wrench at heartstrings: an inmate fell off his bunk and hit his head, creating an open wound that was not treated for six months. A teenage girl who moved to the US at age two was arrested and threatened with deportation to a country where she didn't know the language or a single soul.
The detention centers are run by a private company - the GEO Group - which makes between $150 and $200 per detainee per night. GEO and other private prison companies lobbied the US Government to institute a 34,000 bed-per-night-minimum, which means they can detain and hold that number of individuals each night without question. Since crossing our border without papers is a civil offense (at least on the first crossing), detainees are not provided with the due process and representation afforded to persons who have committed a crime. It's a heinous thing that we're doing.
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