Elizabethan Detention
About 15 minutes is all it takes, maybe less. From Manhattan, you take the Holland Tunnel to New Jersey's Route 9/1, a left on to North Avenue and a quick right on to Dowd Avenue, and there: you've arrived at the Elizabeth Detention Center. You wouldn't be the wiser if you missed it, though.
To give you a lay of the land, the Elizabeth Detention Center is a windowless converted warehouse owned and operated by the for-profit Corrections Corporation of America, the largest private corrections company in the United States. The facility is huddled amongst the other masses of industrial buildings just down the street from the Anheuser Busch Company and across the street from the Newark International. It's hard to believe the inconspicuous facility houses 300 detained asylum seekers and other non-criminal non-citizens. These people are hidden but not forgotten.
The Sojourners Immigration Detention Visitor Program, funded by the Riverside Church, has been making visits to detainees at Elizabeth since 1999. The program also works to assist in providing post-release services for recently released immigrants and asylum seekers.
This past Saturday I joined the Sojourners’ volunteers at Elizabeth. We moved from the flurries outside into the converted warehouse, through the security and into a room for visitors, separating us from the detainees by a thick partition of glass. Sojourners’ program co-coordinator Nate Crimmins paired each of the volunteers with a detainee that had requested a visit. Then you’re there for what you came for. You sit at your individual carrel face-to-face with another human who is suited in a criminal jumpsuit, though no crime exists. You’re there to talk, or listen, as the case may be. Conversation can move from the life on the “inside” to anything as hope-filled and grand as the World Cup.
While I was there I couldn’t help but think of the most recent issue of Fellowship, particularly the article by Jacki Esposito of Detention Watch Network on the crisis of immigration detention. I was sitting in the heart of it, and this man across from me was living through it. I wondered if he thought of himself as just another number, one more immigrant to the half a million that will be detained this year and put into a facility just like this one, or worse. Did he know there are thousands just like him, spread out across the United States in detention centers because they were fleeing religious or political persecution? Did he count himself as lucky because he had representation for his trial, while the overwhelming majority, 80%, has no such luck? Mostly, I just wondered how this particular man, who had been living in this detention center for almost half a year, could smile continuously during our conversation. How does one under so much adversity find hope?
I don’t know the answer to that question, but I do know that many of these detainees continue to defy overwhelming odds to find hope. This
man did by remembering his wife and two children. Others do it by having programs like Sojourners coming to visit them. And many dream of the day they will simply know the day’s weather, not because a visitor told them, but because they experienced it for themselves.
If these detainees can do it, so can we. That should motivate us all to continue to work harder and longer for just immigration.
