ALMOST 50 IMMIGRATION detainees in Central California began a hunger strike on July 11, escalating a work stoppage after detention center management cut off their once-free phone calls to the world outside.
Advocates for the detainees say the free phone calls can make a difference to legal cases and the well-being of detainees and their families.
The phone cut-off already costs Oakland resident Kassandra Silva as she tries to keep her family together.
She wears a gold-colored, crowned “O” around her neck, a birthday gift from her partner Oscar Lopez.
Immigration authorities arrested Lopez early one morning last September in Oakland, as he walked to his car in his button-down shirt.
Four hours from Silva, in the Kern County city of McFarland, Lopez is held at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center Golden State Annex.
Since Lopez’ detention, Silva has taken on a second and third job to pay for their rent, car and the telephone calls that keep Lopez connected. She estimates the phone fees total more than $500 per month, approaching $900 at times.
“It gives each other peace of mind to know we’re OK, but it’s a lot of money spent,” she said.
Analysts from the American Immigration Council, an immigration research and advocacy nonprofit, examined over 1 million legal immigration proceedings across the country. They found that detained people with legal representation had successful cases over 10 times more often than those without.
As of July 22, roughly 10 people continue the hunger strike. Organizers said the strike specifics vary among protesters, some of whom take protein shakes or limit food consumption.
Detention Watch Network, an activist coalition that wants to abolish immigration-based incarceration, counted at least five other hunger strikes across the country over ICE phone access. At Golden State, porters had already begun a labor strike. For cleaning the facility, they earn $1 per 8-hour workday, organizers said. They also protest for free phone access, improved hygiene and nutrition and an end to solitary confinement among other demands.
A San Francisco ICE spokesperson declined an interview request, citing an ongoing investigation, and referred questions to The GEO Group, a national private contractor that runs detention facilities. GEO’s representative referred questions to ICE.
Telephone line as lifeline
Both Silva and Lopez are about 30, together for roughly six years. They shared a home. Before his incarceration, Lopez took care of Silva’s son and as many household chores as possible. He finished his workday managing a janitorial company earlier than Silva, who provides through social work through Alameda County. Now, Lopez said, he helps fellow detainees who don’t speak English with his fluency.
Lopez has lived in the United States since his family arrived from Honduras when he was four. He said he feels a responsibility to speak up. That includes participating in the strikes that have punctuated life at Northern California’s two detention centers.
To manage life in custody, Lopez said that he needs to use the phone a lot. He contacts his lawyer and speaks with family. He also stays on hold with courthouses for 30 to 50 minutes at a time to fight for the custody of his preteen son, De’Angelo.
San Francisco’s ICE field office oversees the two centers: Golden State Annex and Mesa Verde.
In 2016, the American Civil Liberties Union won a temporary settlement for free, confidential legal phone calls for detainees at both of the area facilities. That settlement provided personal numbers to law professionals from 2017 through 2021. The numbers, called “Lyon PINs” because of the legal case, remained operational until inmates received a notification over the July Fourth weekend: the PINs will shut off in August.
“We’re still, frankly, shocked and deeply concerned that ICE has eliminated the programs that we had to sue over in the first place,” said Bree Bernwanger, a senior immigration attorney for the ACLU. “There’s been no explanation of how ICE is going to meet its constitutional obligations to provide people with access to counsel in custody.”
This regional cut-off corresponds with the national end of a pandemic-era initiative that gave detainees 520 free telephone minutes per month. The program ended June 9. Alex Mensing of the advocacy group California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice provided a list shared by organizers, which said 62 facilities had these free phone minutes before the change.
In a forwarded email, an ICE program analyst said that ICE made the decision to end “the 520 free minute program.” The analyst did not provide an explanation. They added that calls to pro bono representation would remain free and unmonitored.
Mensing said he hopes the CCIJ will keep a single free pro bono phone line after the cut-off. They provide pro bono legal help to detainees and had several lines available under the Lyon settlement. He said most attorneys are unlikely to get the approvals required to qualify for a free phone line.
His CCIJ colleague, attorney Priya Patel, added one of Lopez’s dormmates will not be able to reach his pro bono attorney for free. Neither will Lopez, who pays a private lawyer.
“There’s a lot of concern as to what’s coming,” said detainee organizer Eunice Hernandez Chenier of Pangea Legal, a nonprofit that provides legal immigration help. She said that they have received confusing information about phone access from ICE. She added that numerous detention center protests have occurred because, “If on paper ICE allows something … it doesn’t mean they’re actually complying.”
In addition to the question of legal rights, she added, “Sometimes what keeps people going, what gives them the motivation to continue fighting their deportation while detained, is being able to talk to their loved ones.”
Talk isn’t cheap
On July 18, the FCC provided some hope. It voted to change its regulations, called the Martha Wright-Reed Act, to cap the cost of voice and video calls at American jails and prisons. Inmates at centers like Mesa Verde and Golden State, which can house 400 and 700 people, could pay no more than 7 cents per minute for the phone. That could cut costs to a third for some people nationwide by the end of the year.
Until then, Silva foots Lopez’s bill.
She talks fast but makes time to listen to strangers who pass her on a bench next to Oakland’s Lake Merritt. When not taking her son, 10-year-old Damian, to football practice or working, she coordinates with detainees’ families who don’t understand the incarceration system. For free, she accepts bank transfers and puts the money on family members’ phone balances.
Silva said that she experiences anger frequently. But she almost always just smiles and takes care of business.
“I do what I can out here, and he does what he can in there, but sometimes it’s like, I get lost in the middle of that,” Silva said.
“Those calls help me out, too.”
On the phone, Silva gives Lopez a place to work through emotions that arise in Golden State. Lopez said he had nightmares of officers seizing him in the middle of the night, hogtying him and throwing him in the cargo hold of a plane.
“There’s people here that have signed,” Lopez said, counting at least three inmates that signed paperwork to consent to deportation, “because they went two or three weeks without being able to talk to their families and they just couldn’t take it anymore.”
Lopez participated in a hunger strike earlier this year.
He said a labor strike had been underway over the lack of hygienic supplies. After two days of a peaceful sit-in to demand a meeting, officers raided Lopez’s dormitory and used pepper spray while assaulting inmates, according to Lopez.
He said they injured his shoulder, and he was put in solitary confinement as a form of retaliation. Staff said it was because they found drugs near his bed, he recounted.
Allegations of abuse, fear of retaliation
According to a log collected by detainee advocates, current hunger strikers face retaliation — from segregation to the seizure of their legal materials. In previous years, protesters alleged through the ACLU that detention employees put them in solitary confinement for a month and performed sexually-abusive pat-downs after they participated in a hunger strike.
The private contractor GEO operates both Northern California facilities. The state banned new ICE detention contracts on government-run property in 2017. GEO’s website counts a total capacity at both sites of roughly 1,100 people.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the two SF-controlled detention centers have seen hunger strikes against unhygienic conditions. Through an ACLU class action lawsuit, protesters said they didn’t have enough soap, among other cleaning and protective supplies.
From Golden State Annex, Lopez said such problems persist.
“They don’t care whether we’re clean or not,” he said.
Lopez described days without toilet paper and old mop heads that “barely has any strands on it. We throw it away, and the next day it’s back on the cart.”
In Golden State, Lopez said he fears retaliation. But, “if I keep my head down and I keep my hands crossed, they’re going to do this to me,” he said. “They’re going to continue to do it to the people coming after me. And it has to stop somewhere”
In addition to free phone calls, current strikers demand nutritious food, improved health care, adequate hygiene and cleaning supplies, an end to solitary confinement, faster release on bond and ultimately the termination of the GEO Group’s contract by the end of 2024.
The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General published a report from an unannounced April visit to Golden State. Inspectors found that management did not answer detainees’ requests in a timely manner or in their preferred language. They said neither ICE nor GEO kept copies of these inmate complaints.
In the report, ICE pledged to be more responsive to inmates’ requests.
Inspectors also counted over $25 million paid by ICE to GEO for beds unoccupied in the year preceding their visit to Golden State.
“Because GEO is profiting, GEO has an incentive to provide fewer services and to squeeze people in custody for a profit,” said Bernwanger of the ACLU. “This is truly a system of profiting off of human suffering.”
Sometimes when Lopez hears a door slam late at night, he wakes up breathing hard, he said.
Silva admitted that she wants to break down sometimes. “I want to, but I can’t because the moment that I do, what happens to Oscar and my son, right?” she said.
About the strikes, she hoped, “Maybe this will be the start of change.”
