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Welcome back to Cruel and Usual! I’ve been taking a little break from writing to adjust to my new work schedule and race a lot of bikes.
I’ve recently realized, though, that I am the boss of this newsletter, so if I want to send out a single block quote and a link, I can do that.
From earlier this month in California Sunday Magazine:
Not so long ago, with occasional exceptions — prior arrangements made with family or friends living in the United States — the immigrants stood stranded on this nowhere street, uncertain where they were, with no means to contact anyone. In 2015, a creaky, old RV appeared at the curb, the property of the nonprofit Advocates for Immigrants in Detention Northwest, or AIDNW. Since then, volunteers from the organization — nearly all retirees in their 60s and 70s — watch the gate every weekday and pour out of the faded blue-and-white mobile home to greet the newly released inmates.
Each migrant has exactly what he or she possessed at the time of arrest. If ICE picked someone up in Houston last August wearing a T-shirt, he now stands on East J Street in the T-shirt, even in the middle of a cold and wet Pacific Northwest spring. His cellphone, if he had it with him, is now dead. It rests in a clear plastic bag along with a wallet that holds little if any cash.
“The phone calls begin immediately.” Released from a detention center, by James Ross Gardner // Photographs by Ricardo Nagaoka
(As a side note, when I represented people at the Elizabeth Detention Center in Columbia’s immigration clinic last spring, we had to counsel clients potentially getting released to expect to be kicked out the door without warning in the middle of the night. They might get a phone call, maybe not, depending on how the officer working the night shift was feeling. Detainees aren’t allowed outside, so most didn’t know that they were in a downtrodden industrial strip without any sidewalks just south of Newark airport, let alone how to get out of there. How any of them found their families I don’t know. ICE is truly evil.)
Ed. note: the email version of this post includes an errant apostrophe, a regretful error I’m sure at least one man will point out to me in a reply or a tweet.