Solitary confinement is torture, but that’s exactly what Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials from a private detention center run by prison profiteers CoreCivic are subjecting detainees to for refusing “voluntary labor,” a.k.a. modern-day slavery:
Shoaib Ahmed, a 24-year-old who immigrated to America to escape political persecution in Bangladesh, told The Intercept that the privately run detention center placed him in isolation for 10 days after an officer overheard him simply saying “no work tomorrow.” Ahmed said he was expressing frustration over the detention center—run by prison contractor CoreCivic—having delayed his weekly paycheck of $20 for work in the facility’s kitchen.
While “a number of state prison systems have taken steps to limit or end their use of solitary confinement because of mounting evidence of its detrimental effects,” reported The Washington Post last year, “CoreCivic has said that its practices of segregating detainees in individual cells are humane and has disputed the term ‘solitary confinement.’” But listen to Ahmed’s account:
Ahmed said that because no one outside his room could hear him talk at a regular volume, his only opportunity for human interaction would often be to shout out, though he was prohibited from raising his voice—an infraction that would only cause his sentence in isolation to be extended. “Sometimes I think my head is not working, and I think I want to loudly call them: ‘Release me. Please, take me to some open site,’” Ahmed recalled. “Sometimes I think the segregation will kill me.”
That’s the point. According to the American Immigration Lawyers Association, ten immigrants died while in ICE custody in 2017—including three in the span of three months at the privately run Adelanto Detention Facility in California—with Human Rights Watch reporting “dangerous and substandard medical care” for detainees in federal immigration custody. Read the rest of the disturbing report from The Intercept here.