“I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me. Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” (Matthew 25:43, 45)
In 2006 and 2007 Congress failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform legislation. The number of undocumented immigrants living in the shadows increased. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) responded by raiding homes and workplaces, tossing immigrants in jail and deporting them.
Hampton Roads Regional Jail in southeast Virginia is one of more than 200 detention centers that ICE uses to house undocumented immigrants as they await deportation. Like many detention facilities, it detains both immigrants and alleged criminals awaiting trial, sometimes co-mingling the two groups.
To its credit, Hampton Roads Regional is clean and seemingly well run. A relatively new facility, it boasts an extensive medical facility not found in most detention centers.
But it is still a jail, and most of the immigrant detainees held there are not criminals or “a threat to society,” admits one of the senior officers. But they are still treated as though they are.
The Hampton Roads jail contains no outdoor recreational areas, which means detainees can only experience fresh air and sunlight through a single open window near the ceiling of their cell block’s gymnasium.
Detainees’ clothes (including underwear) are stripped from them when they enter the facility, and they are forced to wear standard correctional outfits.
Men and women—including husbands and wives—are separated and never come into contact with each other.
The immigrant detainees may spend a single day to several months or even years in the jail.
Eventually, and often without warning, most are forced onto buses or airplanes and deported.
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These are the signs of an inhumane immigration enforcement system.
On any given day, approximately 32,000 immigrants are held in detention. In the last federal fiscal year alone, ICE imprisoned over 407,000 immigrants.
At least 83 immigrant detainees have died in custody since 2003, according to a Washington Post investigation published last summer. Thirty of those deaths were likely due to medical neglect.
The Post also found evidence that ICE sedated some prisoners with dangerous psychotropic drugs before deporting them.
These facts are especially troubling since many of the detained immigrants pose no flight risk and no danger to their community. By targeting and holding them in detention, ICE is wasting resources it could be spending to focus on truly dangerous criminals operating in the borderlands who smuggle weapons, drugs and human beings.
This shameful policy of widespread and indiscriminate detention will continue until the Obama administration redirects ICE’s energies or Congress passes comprehensive immigration reform that brings undocumented immigrants out of the shadows, provides them a pathway to citizenship, and addresses the root causes of undocumented immigration.
As Christians, we cannot ignore what is happening around us while claiming to welcome the stranger in our midst.
