Donald Trump does not want you to see Immigration Nation. In fact, according to filmmakers Christina Clusiau and Shaul Schwarz, his administration tried to strong-arm them into delaying their Netflix docuseries on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) cruel implementation of the president’s zero-tolerance immigration policy until after the 2020 election. “There were so many asks that just were completely out of line,” Schwarz tells The Daily Beast. “After some pushes and shoves that didn’t work, we were asked by the ICE spokesman to delay it to November [after the election]. They tried to pin it on the fact that we said […]
Immigration and Customs Enforcement
5 posts
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement guard at an immigration jail in Virginia knelt dangerously on the upper back of a man already bleeding from his head, two detained men who said they saw the disturbing incident told The Daily Beast. “It was like seeing George Floyd all over again,” said one detainee, whom The Daily Beast will call Glenn. Since the incident on Monday, July 13, the detained men said that they have not seen the beaten man, identified as 31-year old Carlos Rivas Monsano. “Right now, we don’t know where he is,” a second detainee, whom The Daily Beast will […]
At the end of April, Florida federal Judge Marcia Cooke ruled that Immigration and Customs Enforcement prisons were such a tinderbox for the novel coronavirus that ICE had to begin efforts at letting people out. The dangers of the pandemic inside three immigrant-detention centers in the state threatened to put ICE on the wrong side of constitutional prohibitions on cruel and unusual punishment. Thousands of miles away, in Arizona, several lawsuits on behalf of people detained by ICE were in various stages of advancement. One, brought in April by the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, sought to release at least […]
If the sky is the limit, as the saying goes, a striking performance this weekend will harness those lofty ambitions quite literally. “In Plain Sight” is a complex and politically-charged nationwide choreography that involves skytyping powerful phrases, selected by 80 artists and activists, across the United States. With a sense of irony and provocation, the performance is timed with Independence Day weekend on July 3rd and 4th. These dictums and calls-to-action will pointedly hover above American venues loaded with a poisonous history or deeply problematic present: immigrant detention centers, sites of former internment camps, borders, and incarceration facilities. Three fleets of […]
Federal immigration authorities are refusing to release an HIV-positive man who has been held in a Minnesota detention facility since January, despite the fact that the man has already won his case for release before an immigration judge—and despite his severe risk of medical complications from the coronavirus outbreaks that have spread inside detention facilities across the country. “I’m dying, slowly, even with my medication,” said William Zacarias Marroquìn, a 32-year-old restaurant worker, calling from inside the Sherburne County Jail in Elk River, Minnesota. “I don’t know if they care or not, but I can be spending my time with my […]