Due to overcrowding in detention facilities elsewhere, immigration officials are jailing a significant number of vulnerable asylum-seekers in a private prison run by CoreCivic, a company that has had such a long history of abuses that it changed its name as part of a PR makeover. But this Mississippi prison is so secretive that it’s unknown exactly how many Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees are even there. “Congress required ICE in 2018 to publish basic information about the jails and detention centers it uses,” Mother Jones reports, “but the agency has kept Tallahatchie off that list.”
Since Mississippi does not have a history of immigration detention, access to legal counsel at Tallahatchie is severely limited; the American Immigration Lawyers Association’s website lists no immigration attorneys within 50 miles of the prison. Lawyers who have worked at the facility say there are not enough Spanish-speaking staff members at the prison, let alone those who speak the native languages of asylum-seekers from Africa and South Asia.
A Southern Poverty Law Center attorney said that “if someone wanted to build a jail where asylum-seekers lose otherwise winnable cases because of lack of access to the outside world, that jail would probably look a lot like Tallahatchie does now.” Last year, the group sued the private-prison profiteers running Tallahatchie, accusing CoreCivic of forcing immigrants jailed in Georgia “to work for as little as $1 a day to clean, cook, and maintain the detention center in a scheme to maximize profits.” Conditions at Tallahatchie are also dire.
Last weekend, a Wyoming man detained at Tallahatchie died by apparent suicide. One month ago, a Cameroonian immigrant who tried to hang himself with a bedsheet was saved by a fellow detainee, who was a paramedic in Nicaragua. Isaac Molina had fled after being shot by police, after he had assisted demonstrators who were injured in an anti-government political protest. Once he arrived in the U.S., Molina passed his initial asylum interview. He has U.S. family he can be released to, but ICE continues to keep him detained. “As soon as I left my country, I knew I wasn’t going back,” he said. “Maybe when my papers are in completely in order, I can go back to having a normal life. That’s what I want the most: to have a normal life.”