It was reported by local newspaper The Willamette Week that undocumented immigrants detained in Oregon by Immigration and Customs Enforcement are being held in a county-run jail in the state instead of the proper detention centers in Washington. The jail consists of small windowless cells surrounded by barbed wire in an industrial district in the town. The Northern Oregon Regional Correctional Facility (NORCOR) was not intended to be a detention center for deportees, but it has become just that, and is only expected to grow in significance as ICE’s contribution to the budget is expected to double over the next fiscal year, from $579,000 to $1 million.
What’s more, immigrant activists protesting Trump’s crackdown on the immigrant community have been sent to the jail as punishment before being deported.
“We suspect at least one was transferred down because of his role as an organizer in the [Tacoma hunger] strike,” ACLU Oregon representative Matt dos Santos stated.
Donald Trump, campaigning on code-word ridden promises to bring ‘law and order’ to the United States, has targeted America’s 11 million undocumented immigrants for deportations. His immigration policy is more than an effort to deport undocumented immigrants from the United States, it is a full orchestrated plan to instill terror in the immigrant community in order to send a message to foreign immigrants to dissuade them from entering. Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly practically stated as much in an interview with CNN when he layed out the administration’s policy on detering immigration, which involved seperating children from their parents while the parents remained in detention centers around the country.
“I would do almost anything to deter the people from Central America getting on this very, very dangerous network that brings them up from Mexico.”
One such case occurred to asylum applicant Ms. L, who fled with her 7-year-old daughter from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Several day upon arriving and being cleared as a “credible-fear” candidate for asylum, she was detained by ICE officials who separated her from her daughter for a period of four months until they were reunited last March after public outcry. The ACLU complaint claims that “Ms. L could hear her daughter in the next room frantically screaming that she wanted to remain with her mother.”
The Homeland Security Investigations manuals state that it is ICE policy not to make arrests in “sensitive locations”, but despite this, ICE agents have staked out courthouses, school bus stops, and hospitals. Countless immigrants, following the legal track put down by past administrations, have been detained at their scheduled meetings with immigrations officers. ICE agents have been entering the residencies of alleged undocumented immigrants without search warrants. They have even posed as Amazon workers to try and sneak into university residences. No qualifications prevent one from being removed from the country; not children, parents, veterans, or the elderly. Neither a clean criminal record nor a lifetime of residing within the country keep one from deportation. The idea is to send a message to the others. In fact, as the NORCOR case makes clear, the justice system is so clogged with deportation cases that detainees in many cases have to wait for months on end before they are even brought before a judge but this does not prevent the administration from rounding up as many undocumented families as possible. At what point do we as a people continue to put up with these abuses?