Exhibit documents prison conditions of US immigrant detention

When documentary photographer Greg Constantine describes the immigration detention system in the U.S. as a prison system, he’s not using his own words. He says every person he talks to about being detained, not only those who are detained themselves, but their family members, lawyers, advocates, and volunteers, refer to it as that. There are mass incarceration centers at the southern border and other places, but county jails all over the country are renting space to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, contributing to what he says is a self-perpetuating, for-profit system. Constantine is presenting his photographs in a three-day pop-up exhibit called “Seven Doors,” the first of which is in Portland at Zidell Yards. He joins us to tell us more about the project he began in 2017, and the larger questions and conversations he intends to spark, including human rights, racism and the power of the state.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller:  Over the last five years, the documentary photographer Greg Constantine has taken 10 extensive road trips in 25 states. He’s traveled 30,000 miles and done 150 hours of interviews, all to get a better understanding of the U. S. Immigration detention system, the largest system of its kind in the world. Now he is back on the road, this time to show people what he has learned. He created a pop-up exhibit called seven doors. It has photographs, audio and projections in and on a 26-foot long truck to be taking the show around the country. His first stop is in Portland. The truck will be at Zidell Yards in Southwest Portland this Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Why did you decide to focus on immigration detention systems, especially in the U. S. but also in other countries as well?

Greg Constantine:  I’ve spent my career working on very long term projects about human rights, the power of the state and injustices. And when I was finishing my last project, which I spent 12 years on, called Nowhere People, I had met a lot of people in Europe who had gone in and out of immigration detention and I thought I’d heard every story that there is imaginable for that particular project. But there are stories of this cycle of going in and out of immigration detention and the trauma that it causes people [that] really compelled me to kind of launch into this new project.

And it just happened that the timing of all that happened when the Trump administration was just getting into office. I knew that the centerpiece of the whole entire project would have to be back here at home in the United States and so launched into it to try to explore what it actually looks like and the kind of impact and trauma that it has on individuals and communities around the country.

Miller:  Can you give us a sense for the scale of the U. S. immigration detention system?

Constantine:  I think it’s a system that I think a lot of people, the public in the United States has heard about and is familiar with. But I don’t think that they have any sense of just the size and the scope of it. It is a network of prisons and county jails across the whole entire United States. I mean along the west coast and the southern border and some on the east coast, you have massive privately owned corporate driven detention centers, more detention prisons that hold hundreds, sometimes thousands of people at a time.

Those are built in the middle of a desert or farmland or buried away in the middle of an industrial area, like in Tacoma Washington. So people are very familiar with that. And a lot of it’s because of the attention that is spent on border issues and immigration along the border. But in the midwest and in the interior of the country, you have scattered across this geography of the U. S. county jails all across the middle of the United States that are basically renting out bed space for county revenue. And they’re renting out those bed spaces to ICE to detain immigrants. So this network is just so vast and I think just people don’t recognize just how huge and immense it is.

Miller:  And what about just the sheer number of people at any given time? Obviously it fluctuates from year to year. But how many people are in these lockups in any given year?

Constantine:  It’s not like it’s a new phenomenon. This is something that’s been going on since the Reagan years. Every president since then helped expand the immigration detention system. But I think during the Trump years it took a fury and a force that nobody has seen before. So at the height of the Trump years in 2019, I mean there were roughly 50,000 people per day being detained by ICE in all these different facilities across the US.

In 2019 alone, almost over 500,000 people were going through ICE detention centers in county prisons. COVID had a big impact on that. And even though we see the numbers now, much less the reality of it is that, you know, this policy is still happening today. There’s almost 20,000 people per day being housed in immigration detention centers and county jails across the United States.

Miller:  What does it mean to call these detention centers as opposed to prisons?

Constantine:  What I have experienced and I’ve met so many incredible people over the past five years, from people who have been in detention to families who have someone in detention to people who are working on the frontlines. Whether it be a small grassroots organization or people involved in volunteer visitation programs or working hotlines or immigration lawyers across the country, the reality of it is when most people talk about it, they don’t really particularly talk about them as detention centers. They talk about them as detention prisons because really, that’s what they are.

They’re a form of incarceration that basically removes an immigrant from society, from having access to adequate legal aid to being able to talk with family. It just makes them almost totally invisible to the world. I mean, immigration detention, people might say, is something that is holding immigrants for administrative purposes. But it’s actually, I’ve found through my experience, is something that’s punitive. It’s very much in line with the incarceration system in the United States. It is there in so many ways to punish people and to break people down.

Miller:  What are the various reasons that people end up in these facilities?

Constantine:  Since I’ve been working on this project over the past five years there’s no one particular reason. Every single person has a different story. Every single person has a different story that brought them here to the United States to seek sanctuary and safety. And every single person has a different reason why they’re in detention or why they languish in detention. So I wouldn’t want to generalize it. But the fact is most of the people who I’ve met with and have talked with are people who fall into a couple of different categories. They’ve made their way to the southern US border. They’ve presented themselves, presented themselves to a border official claiming asylum. And the next step for a lot of them is that they get sucked into this huge immigration detention system and languish for however long until their case is won, which is a very very small amount or they sign their deportation and go back home or are deported.

But in the midwest you also find people who have been living in the United States for a long, long time contributing to the economies. They have families, their children are US citizens. And for one reason or another, they end up being found by ICE, being hunted down by ICE, being pulled over in a traffic stop and finding out that they don’t have documentation. And then that ends up leading them into spending time in the immigration detention system as well. It’s all very different.

Miller:  I want to play part of an interview that you did with a man from Sierra Leone who sought asylum when he entered the U. S. From Mexico. Let’s have a listen to part of what he has to say.

Sierra Leone Detainee:  When I entered the United States, I presented myself to the immigration post in Brownsville. I was with two other Africans and we asked for asylum and one of the Border Patrol agents came and opened the door to us. And unfortunately when we enter into the United States Territory, they asked us to take our personal information which we did after that they put handcuffs on how they chain our hands, our waist and our feet. And they sent me into detention where I spent almost a year and eight months. It was very painful that I don’t even want to remember what happened to me. There is no word that can describe the barbaric acts they are treating people in that place.

So it’s like they just want to keep you isolated from the world so that nobody will know if you exist or you die. And I believe there are people that died in those detention. Their family has no information, what happened to them, if they are alive or they are dead. I’ve never been to the United States. I don’t have a family and I’m there suffering, [with] nobody to help me. For me, it’s got to the extent that I myself, it was the last thing I wanted to do to happen in my life to be deported. But I voluntarily asked for it. I told my lawyer after the board of immigration denied my asylum. I told her there is no need to spend another three years for a federal appeal. My life. It’s been destroyed. My family has been destroyed. Let me go back.

Miller:  Did that man tell you more about what he saw and what he experienced when he was in detention for nearly 20 months?

Constantine:  We talked for well over an hour and this was all done through a call with him back in Sierra Leone. He gave a lot of details about that experience. And one thing that I found that was very common across his story with the 100 plus other people that I’ve talked to is that so many people go through the trauma of why they are having to flee their home country. They go through the trauma of getting from their home country to the US border where they believe there is human rights and there is justice and there is sanctuary and safety. And then they come into the United States, they’re put into immigration detention, they languish in immigration detention. And unfortunately, it’s that experience of being in immigration detention that actually breaks them. And it’s pretty amazing to think that this is the place where people break and they do exactly what that gentleman did. The system itself is meant to fail people. When you have all these other people working in the United States to try to support them, the system is there, is built, in a way to fail people. And it did for this gentleman and dozens of other people that I met. And the experience of detention is a huge part of that process.

Miller:  When you set up the pop-up exhibit in Portland in a 26 foot truck, you’re going to be something like a mile, at most, away from the ICE headquarters in Portland. Was that intentional?

Constantine:  No, it wasn’t intentional. Not at all. This project is there for a purpose - to inform people, to use documentary photography and storytelling as a platform for people to become more informed and to create discussion and debate. That’s the purpose of it. And it is just by chance to be held at Zidell Yards and Charlene Zidell and everyone has been absolutely incredible about permitting me to hold this pop-up exhibition there. And there’s been a number of other organizations and people in Portland who have been so incredibly supportive, from Rural Oregon to the Never Again Coalition, who have been really supportive of this.

And I think that’s the purpose of this. I’m a documentary photographer and a storyteller and it’s my responsibility to the people who I’ve met with and who I’ve interviewed to find a platform to share their story. And today it’s so incredibly difficult to find avenues and outlets for big projects like this in a very, very meaningful way. So it’s almost my responsibility to create these platforms and these opportunities for these stories to engage with people. And it just happens that fortunately we’re going to be at Zidell Yards.

Miller:  You said that after people see this, you want them to have conversations, you want to start debate. What do you hope people will do after they see your work?

Constantine:  I think it’s projects like this and the reason why I do this is to spark people to want to know more, to ask questions. There’s a number of organizations in Oregon that are doing such incredibly exciting and groundbreaking work. I mean, you look at Innovation Law Lab in Portland and a number of other organizations who are partners with them and working alongside of them - Oregon based. I hope people can turn to them to find out more information and find out what more they can do on a local level or a national level - learn more and act a little bit and be a little bit more engaged. And I think those are the organizations that really are the experts and what can be done. And I turn to them to be the ones to help people find that path.

Greg Constantine is a documentary photographer. His new pop up exhibit seven doors is focused on the US immigration detention system. It’ll be at Zidell Yards in southwest Portland this Thursday, Friday and Saturday. You can see his artists talk there on Thursday at seven PM.

Contact “Think Out Loud®”

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show, or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook or Twitter, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.