“They gave us a good chat as to why not to do it and instead for us to write to ICE. But we told them thank you and that we would write to ICE, but we were not backing up on the strike.”

“Nos dieron una buena charla de porque no hacerlo y que mejor le escribiéramos a ICE. Le dijimos gracias y que le escribiríamos a ICE pero que no detendremos la huelga.”

In 2020, immigrant women detained at LaSalle Detention Facility released a video from detention detailing their exposure to COVID-19 at the start of the pandemic. Later that fall, Project South released a whistleblower report detailing an unusual rate of hysterectomies at Irwin County Detention Center. This is not unusual. Anti-immigrant hysteria has often centered around the wombs of women, which are seen as the source of the eventual replacement of white populations. This conspiracy theory is often referenced by white supremacist mass shooters, including the shooter in El Paso. Yet it is often sexual and state violence that forces women to leave their home countries, only to find themselves battling a court system that demands proof of already experienced harm before taking their fears seriously.

While still under-represented in stories about migration, immigrant women make up almost half of all transnational migration. According to Rachel Rosenbaum, immigrant women often replace, at great cost to themselves, the domestic labor that allow middle class families in the US and Global North to balance the demands of childcare, reproductive labor, and capitalist job markets, allowing them to keep a tenuous hold on a middle class lifestyle that seems to be slipping away. Working class families who cannot outsource their domestic labor often see immigrant men, women, and children as their chief competition in an economic system that provides few opportunities and social safety nets.

Nonetheless, immigrant women continue to expand their capacity to resist through domestic labor alliances and anti-violence campaigns. Detained immigrant women have also increased their capacity to resist, especially in family detention centers. In April 2015, 78 mothers at Karnes, initiated a hunger strike, quickly followed by another 27 women at T. Don Hutto in October, one of the first family immigrant prisons. In 2019, advocates and detainees started a campaign to Shut Down Berks. Many of these campaigns have continued, with multiple hunger strikes often going on at the same time throughout the country, even during the Trump years and under COVID-19.

Elizabeth

Jessica

Sarah was detained by ICE on a greyhound bus while visiting friends in Louisiana. Before her family could intervene, she was deported and sedated on the plane ride to Mexico.

In the letters below, Sarah writes of her experiences taking part in the third
Bring Them Home campaign organized by the National Immigrant Youth Alliance. In March 2014, along with more than 150 people, she presented herself at the Otay checkpoint and asked for a credible fear interview. Throughout the spring and summer, thousands of immigrant families began using the tactic, which NIYA had initially borrowed from them, during the first so-called “border surge.”

In her letters, Sarah recounts the experience of organizing a hunger strike, or “rain,” at the Otay Detention Facility and the measures that ICE took to tamp it down. In recent years, immigrant women have increasingly used hunger strikes as a way to make their demands heard.

March 27-28, 2014

April 4, 2014

April 8, 2014

In December 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sin Huellas members installed DETENTION NATION at Elgin Street Studios. In the space created, an ensemble of performers created the following Performance GIFs.