An Interview with Silky Shah
Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network, on economies of detention, alternatives to detention, and the integration of detention and migration.
Source: Cinthya Santos Briones
Hello again! Today's newsletter is a brand new interview with Silky Shah, the Executive Director of Detention Watch Network. This conversation focuses specifically on the use of detention for migrants and immigrants in the US. The detention component is particularly compelling. It, of course, touches on issues of asylum and human rights, but there is another factor at play here that complicates local politics further: the economy born from these industries, the economic development, and opportunities that come to struggling communities have now made them dependent on the industry. It's not an unfamiliar situation, but one that is continuously manipulated for political gain — especially on the campaign trail.
This interview with Silky Shah was conducted by Tatti Ribeiro for franknews.
I'm Silky. I'm the executive director of Detention Watch Network. I’m also an organizer; I've been working on issues related to migrant and racial justice for about 20 years. A lot of my work has focused on concerns around the growth of the detention system and how local counties and cities are dependent on the expansion of these detention systems for their revenue.
When you talk about detention and immigration, for people who are unfamiliar, what does that mean? What are the different sorts of detention? Why do immigrants find themselves in detention?
There are many different ways that immigrants are caught up in the mass system of incarceration that we have in the US.
The way ICE detention works is people are either apprehended within the US from interactions with the criminal legal system or through ICE raids or they are apprehended at the border and transferred to ICE from CBP.
When we're talking about Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention, people are there to wait on a hearing on their case or await an appeal on their case or are awaiting deportation. These are folks who are often trying to determine if they can be granted asylum in the US. In this way, all detention is indefinite because people don't know when they're going to be released or deported.
So to be clear – do those seeking asylum get held in detention while they wait to see whether or not their claims will be accepted?
Yeah, they do.
Is that normal?
Yes. It's very normal. The majority of people who are in detention currently are actually people who are apprehended at the border and who often have asylum claims.
Those seeking asylum have to pass a credible fear interview to determine whether they have the right to seek asylum. And they go through their proceedings. Oftentimes this all happens while they're in detention.
One of the things we have pushed for is for people seeking asylum to be released. Like, they have already gone through pretty serious trauma, detention is only going to exacerbate that trauma. They should be released and they should be able to be in the community and get the resources they need while they're going through their process.
What we've seen, actually, is despite people passing their credible fear or reasonable fear interviews, people will stay in detention for months longer, after they pass. There is not a strategy to support them getting released. I mean, a lot of the decisions that ICE makes about detention are very arbitrary and dependent on the bed space that exists.
I'm not an expert in this, but I have spent some time in El Paso. Local jails serve as temporary detention for people being processed through immigration systems. Is that problematic in any unique way?
I don’t know if I agree that it is something to pay attention to. I actually think that all of these systems of incarceration are a problem. There are three different types of facilities that ICE uses. One that people are most aware of is private prisons that are often just dedicated to immigration detention itself. Then you have a whole bunch of county jails that are contracted out. And then you have ICE facilities where even though most of the services in the facility are outsourced, technically it's ICE owned and operated. El Paso is a place where there is an ICE facility.
The thing about detention is the intention is not for people to stay in these places for months or years, but people do stay for months or years. As I said, detention is indefinite. So what ends up happening is that these short-term county jails are being used for long-term stays. For instance, the Etowah County Jail in Alabama – which they actually recently stopped using after a decade-long campaign against it – had zero outdoor recreation. I mean, I knew people who had spent over five years there, and never went outside.
I think the broader issue is that one, you don't actually have to detain any of these individuals. The federal government actually has a huge amount of discretion to release anyone and everybody. And two, then you have these facilities sometimes when you have people who are staying for many, many years, sometimes, in facilities that are meant for short-term detention. That situation in and of itself is really bad. I think a lot of people are like, oh, the private prisons are worse. And it's like, no, that is not actually true. Like they're bad, but the county jails are equally as bad. It is not just private companies that are trying to make a profit, these counties are dependent on the revenue coming in from the federal government, so they're making decisions about care and what these facilities look like based on that rather than acting for the people that are in their care.
When you say that we don't actually need to be detaining anybody, what does the alternative look like?
Yeah. I mean, I think the incoming process is tough largely because the immigration laws in the US are really problematic. And in fact, even the possibility of getting asylum is really hard. People coming, and people who are here, should have opportunities for relief. The fact that the immigration judges tend to be quite conservative and right-wing, like these are harsh conditions. Even if we removed some of these systems, it would be hard for people to get the status that they deserve because of how problematic the system is.
A lot of folks think of detention as a necessity – like these people have to be in there so that they show up to their hearing – and we don't think that that's true. We think they can be in community while moving through this process. There are a lot of different ways to get people to their hearing. You could send a text message with the information, for example.
Part of the problem with ICE is that they're so terrible about providing information to people who are in their custody or who are then released from their custody about when their hearing date is. Lawyers could also do that, but there aren't enough lawyers in the world to provide support to the number of folks that need it.
And I don't think spending a lot of time on just creating a legal apparatus for this is necessarily gonna solve the problem. I mean, the immigration laws in the US are really problematic – even getting asylum is really hard. I think we actually have to change the laws to make this a much more humane and simple process than it is right now.
You mentioned counties being dependent on the economy of detention. How does that happen?
There's a really good book that has been written about this phenomenon in California by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, which I encourage folks to read. It points to the fact there was a period of time where due to bigger moves towards mass incarceration in the 80s, a lot of rural counties started to see incarceration as “industries of last resort” – as opportunities for economic development. A lot of people who are pushing for mass incarceration made it seem like a good way to bring jobs into the community. And now so many counties are so dependent on this industry.
In Louisiana, for instance, there was this big push for justice reinvestment for moving away from prisons. Louisiana had the highest incarceration rate in the world, and they decided they wanted to cut the capacity by 10 percent. But, they didn’t have a plan to deal with all the people who are losing jobs or the counties that were losing revenue. During the Trump administration, ICE detention became an alternative option; they added an additional 6,000 or 7,000 beds in Louisiana within a few years.
This goes to show that when we don't have a transition plan out of a carceral economy, we end up with a situation where the jail beds or the detention beds or the prison beds get recycled to another agency, whether it's the juvenile justice system, ICE, or the state system – there are all these different entities that incarcerate.
I think what that points to for us, and this is really a framework that's come out of the climate justice movement is like, what is a just transition out of a carceral economy without thinking about how some of these facilities can be repurposed? What are the other opportunities for economic development in these communities that aren't harmful? In the climate justice space, it's definitely moving towards a more green economy. But I think for the sort of carceral system that we have, there is a lot we have to think through there. There has been this sort of symbiotic relationship between the federal government and these local counties that are now just fully dependent on the US Marshals and ICE detention to increase their revenue. How can we think about maybe the federal government offering support to these counties in a different way? We have a report on this I can share.
What are some examples of that?
We did a report on just transition from detention economies, and there is another report from The Sentencing Project on repurposing facilities. Like one became a movie studio, one became like a distillery … there are different things that can happen. It's also just thinking about things like moving more towards a job guarantee or something that can incentivize this idea that actually we don't need to have these really harmful systems.
I think it’s a big question for us generally: what is the economy without the military-industrial complex and prison industrial complex? How do we move away from this?
Overwhelming…
It's very overwhelming to think about, but the truth is that there is a lot of opportunity. They're already starting to reduce detention beds because of a lot of the organizing that we've done, which is really exciting to see, even in the context of things being so grim. This is about local fights that can help change the national conversation. I think one of the things that has been hard about the border is how little investment there has been to support communities there to be resilient, to sort of figure out the strategies to organize against this. And I think there needs to be a lot more investment in that because ultimately this is about those communities and our ability to show how this could look different.