DETAINED:
AMERICAN JUSTICE THROUGH IMMIGRANTS’ EYES
Photographs by Steven Rubin hosted during the 2003
Human Rights Film Series
 On
any given day an estimated 24,000 immigrants are locked up by the
federal government on immigration charges. Warehoused in detention
facilities or confined in federal prisons, detainees are also dispersed
into hundreds of local and county jails across the country, their
treatment effectively closed to media or public scrutiny, their
locations problematically distant from immigration lawyers or family
support. Over the course of a year, up to one-quarter million immigrants
will be detained in this manner -- making this the fastest growing
segment of the U.S. prison population. And yet in spite of these
numbers, and the surge in government expenditures required to support
them, seldom do we get even a glimpse inside these facilities.
This level of secrecy and isolation, while compounded
by the government’s response to the events of September 11th
long preceded such events. Such was the standard operating procedure
of the overburdened Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS),
a corrupt, cruel and chronically incompetent bureaucracy. These
photographs, part of an ongoing documentary project, offer a rare
view inside the agency, revealing part of its secret world. The
images show places rarely photographed, reveal voices seldom heard
and conditions scarcely seen. The work highlights those in detention,
documents detention’s impact on family members, focuses on
compelling stories of injustice and begins to convey some of the
horrific, even un-American truths about immigrant detention. Included
among this population are asylum seekers who fled persecution abroad
only to be greeted by long-term detention here, unaccompanied minors
who are jailed with adults, indefinite detainees who remain locked
in limbo, and legal permanent residents facing deportation to their
country of origin, a place many have not known since childhood.
Included as well are immigrants snared in the government’s
web prior to September 11th, as well as those rounded up in the
subsequent crackdown.
Immigrants in detention form a diverse cross section
of the world’s people in need, in motion, and in trouble.
Some are asylum seekers who have committed no crime, including people
like Hua Zhen Chen, who fled her native China and came to the United
States seeking freedom. When Chinese health officials discovered
she was pregnant with a second child, forced her to have an abortion
and threatened her with sterilization, Chen fled to the United States
convinced that only America would understand her plight and quickly
grant her asylum. Instead, the INS greeted her with nearly 20 months
in Virginia jails. Other detainees face deportation to their country
of origin due to criminal convictions, even relatively minor ones.
This group includes long term, legal permanent residents with spouses
and children suddenly facing the irrevocable loss of a breadwinner
and loved one. It also includes people like Julia Gomez, whose native
Cuba lacks a repatriation treaty with the United States. Cuba will
not permit her return and the INS will not release her here (even
though she has long since served time for her criminal convictions),
and so she sits and waits indefinitely in a succession of Louisiana,
Florida and California jails, stuck in prison limbo for five years
now and counting. Most immigrants who are detained simply lack legal
documents or valid visas. But there are also unaccompanied minors,
children as young as eight years old, who are locked up with juvenile
delinquents even though they have committed no crime. All detainees,
no matter their situation or category, face deportation while the
vast majority (perhaps 90 percent), have no legal representation
to defend and guide them through a labyrinthine system even native
English speakers find difficult to understand.
 Responsibility
for this problematic state of affairs now passes to the new Department
of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Bureau of Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE). Replacing the INS, the new Bureau is a product
of national security driven reorganization of government. Accordingly,
and in an ominous and chilling indication of what may lie ahead,
ICE’s and DHS’s first major asylum initiative, "Operation
Liberty Shield," required detaining all arriving asylum-seekers
from Iraq and 33 other countries throughout the duration of the
asylum process, a period that lasts months and often years.
Attorney General Ashcroft insists that these concerns
for the degradation of civil liberties in the post September 11th
world support only terrorists and remain empty protests over “phantoms
of lost liberty.” This exhibition will challenge such proclamations
by putting a face on the staggeringly large number of those detained,
helping to make their condition and treatment less deniable and
more real.
Immigrant detention has increased relevance in light
of the September 11th attacks, new anti-terrorism legislation and
the government’s own attacks on the civil liberties of newly
detained Arab and Moslem immigrants. It is often said that a society
is to be judged by how it treats its most vulnerable. Especially
at a time like now, when this nation struggles with its own vulnerability,
the quality of this treatment requires careful scrutiny and critical
discussion, and not quiet acquiescence. It is my wish that the proposed
exhibition can help support and sustain this critical inquiry, and
ultimately contribute to the immigration system’s badly needed
reform.
-- Steven Rubin
Steven
Rubin is a freelance photographer in the
Washington, DC area. Presently, he is a Community Fellow with the
Open Society Institute – Baltimore, where he is guiding a
new program that provides cameras, instruction and art therapy to
torture survivors. He is the recipient of a 2003 Photography Grant
from the Maryland State Arts Council, and a 2003 Puffin Foundation
grant. In 2001-02 he was a Media Fellow with the Open Society Institute,
which supported his timely photographic investigation of the Immigration
and Naturalization Service’s detention of immigrants. Previously,
Mr. Rubin was honored with a Nieman Fellowship for Journalists at
Harvard University, where he was a Fellow in residence for the academic
year 1998-99.He was also awarded an Alicia Patterson Foundation
Journalism Fellowship, and is the recipient of the Leica Medal of
Excellence, a New York Foundation for the Arts Photography Fellowship,
a New Jersey State Arts Council Photography Grant, and an Award
of Excellence from the National Press Photographers Association.
He was twice a finalist for the esteemed W. Eugene Smith Award in
Humanistic Photojournalism. His work has been exhibited in a variety
of venues throughout the United States, and has been featured at
the International Festival of Photojournalism, Visa pour L’Image,
in Perpignan, France.
Mr. Rubin’s photographs have been published
in The New York Times Magazine, Time, US News & World Report,
Parade and The Village Voice, and internationally in The London
Independent Magazine, Stern, GEO, Focus, and L’Express. He
has contributed to the books Schattenlicht -- The Best of Black
and White Photography (GEO), The Century (Phaidon), Cent Photos
Pour la Liberte de la Presse (Reporters sans Frontieres), Mothers
and Daughters (Collins), More Reflections on the Meaning of Life,
A Day in the Life of Thailand, A Day in the Life of Israel, and
The Eighties: Images of America. His clients include Amnesty International,
Human Rights Watch, Southern Poverty Law Center, The Ford Foundation,
The Soros Foundation, The Annie E. Casey Foundation and Catholic
Relief Services. He has taught Documentary Photography at the Maryland
Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland, and lectures at
a variety of educational institutions. He is a graduate of Reed
College in Portland, Oregon.
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