“Dignity, not detention” is the basis of the work of the Interfaith Community for Detained Immigrants, which shelters asylum-seekers and other vulnerable immigrants in Chicago’s Marie Joseph House of Hospitality in Cicero as an alternative to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention while they try to seek protection in the U.S.
Instead of detainment in an ICE facility, families can get their own bedrooms. Instead of being fed food unfit for human consumption, they get their own kitchen where they can actually prepare their own meals. Instead of feeling alone in a strange and oftentimes unfriendly country, they can get support.
Having access to a kitchen may seem every day to many, but it means the world to vulnerable families. “If they’re just arriving, they probably need to do laundry,” said Melanie Schikore, executive director of Interfaith Community for Detained Immigrants. “They’ll need help with their feet because their feet are blistered. They need a shower, a clean bed to sleep in to get some rest, a good meal.”
Alternatives to detention should be the way to go for migrant families, including those recently separated at the U.S./Mexico border due to Donald Trump’s barbaric “zero tolerance” policy. One alternative, the Family Case Management Program (FCMP), “kept families out of detention while successfully getting them to hearings more than 99 percent of the time.” It works—or used to. Trump terminated it last year.
Instead, the administration wants to ramp up family detention and jail them together in facilities like T. Don Hutto Residential Detention Center in Texas and Berks Family Detention Center in Pennsylvania, where former detainees have described suffering sexual abuse at the hands of guards. Already traumatized families, getting brutalized even more. But at places like Joseph House, it can be different.
“In addition to casework offices,” the Chicago Tribune reports, “the house has a large kitchen and a social room filled with board games where residents can chat or watch television. A second-floor chapel inside the building is filled with bags and boxes of clothing and other donations. Behind the building is a community garden where residents, many with farming backgrounds, plant and pick vegetables for meals.”
One Pakistani man “remembers crying nearly every night at the start of a 100-day stay inside an ICE detention center inside McHenry County Jail.” He was isolated from his family and feared the guards. But at Joseph House, he began “to find a sense of independence” and enrolled in English classes. “When I came to the United States,” he said, “I couldn’t speak English well. Like yes or no—that’s it.” Now he’s excelled so much that he was hired as the manager of a hotel.
“What has amazed me is,” said program director Jen Sarto, “with the level of trauma people are coming from, the ability to heal in an environment like this has been amazing to watch.” In a letter earlier this year, dozens of members of Congress called for the restoration of FCMP, in order to help more vulnerable families hopefully restart their new lives in America.
“Moreover, while restoring the FCMP would provide a critical cost-saving and humane mechanism for processing asylum-seeking families,” they wrote, “DHS already has a menu of cost-saving alternatives to detention available, including release on recognizance, parole, or bond, as well as other existing alternatives-to-detention programs.”
“Despite claims to the contrary, DHS already has the necessary tools to make both the humane and the fiscally responsible choice—to neither separate nor detain families seeking protection in the United States, absent evidence of immediate threat to safety.” And if the current Congress refuses to act, let’s sweep in a new one that will.