#i was thinking about that panel of taylor standing up to the operator recently

[lemondoddle]

Can you can draw Jessica and Taylor?

I absolutely can

[imdoingthismspaintadventure]

Worm 2.7 - In which we go to the lair of the teens

As I agreed to join the Undersiders, there was some whooping and cheering.  I felt a touch guilty, for acting under false pretenses.   I also felt pleased with myself, in an irrational way.

Taylor is in a maelstrom of very confused emotions right now. She feels guilty for betraying them all in the future...them being these  villains she shouldn’t feel bad about betraying if she was truly 100% convinced they needed to be taken down. She’s also pleased and doesn’t know why...

I think she’s using the “I’m gonna betray them later” as an excuse to herself for becoming friends with a group of villains, and as a way of saying “I’m still totally on the heroic path”.

She’s pleased for being accepted into a group, for having non-hostile non-fatherly people to talk to who aren’t actively judging her.

On the other hand, I think there’s a part of her that truly wishes to be recognized by the hero community and have this be her first big act, so the “betrayal” isn’t a complete self-lie. It’s just...

It’s complicated

“Where do we go from here?” Lisa asked Brian.

“Not sure,” Brian said, “It’s not like we’ve done this before.  I suppose we should let Rachel know, but she said she might work today.”

“If the new girl is okay with it, let’s stop by our place,” Lisa suggested, “See if Rache is there, celebrate the new recruit and get her filled in.”

“Sure,” I said.

Oh so we’re gonna visit their hideout! This plan is going very well for our protagonist.

“It’s just a few blocks away,” Brian said, “But we would stand out if you came with in costume.”

I stared at him for a moment, not wanting to comprehend his statement.  If I took too long to respond, I realized, I would ruin this plan before it went anywhere.  Whatever the case, I could have kicked myself.  Of course this was the natural progression of events.  Joining their team would mean I would be expected to share my identity, since they already had.  Until I did, they wouldn’t be able to trust me with their secrets.

Well, yeah. If you’re gonna join them, your secret identity is a necessary sacrifice, for trust reasons and so no-one can rat their secret identities without also being exposed (ahem...)

I could have blamed the lapse in judgement and foresight on my lack of sleep or the distraction of the events earlier in the day, but that didn’t change matters.  I had maneuvered myself into a corner.

Fact: You were emotionally and mentally compromised with everything that happened recently

Also a fact: This plan you made has so many critical points where it could fail that experts say it could have already failed and the world isn’t aware of it yet

“Alright,” I said, sounding calmer than I felt.  I hoped.  “This costume is kinda uncomfortable under clothes.  Can I get some privacy?”

“You want an alley, or…” Lisa asked, trailing off.

“I’ll change here,  just take a minute,” I said, impulsively, as I glanced around.  The buildings on the street were mostly one and two stories tall, with the only buildings taller than the one we were on being the one half a block away, and the one right next to us. There weren’t any windows on the building next to us with a great angle for seeing me change, and I doubted anyone on the distant building could see me as more than a figure two inches tall.  If someone could see me change out of costume and make out enough details to identify me, I’d be surprised.

Where is a phonebooth when you need one? Probably Protectorate trademarked though, so let’s not risk a lawsuit

As the three of them headed to the fire escape, I pulled out the clothes I’d stuffed into the backpack.  Armor panels aside, my costume was essentially one piece, with the exceptions being the belt and the mask. I kept the mask on as I undid the belt and peeled off the main costume.  I wasn’t indecent – I was wearing a black tank top and black biking shorts underneath, in part for extra warmth.   Silk wasn’t the best insulator on its own.  I stepped into my jeans and pulled on the sweatshirt, then rubbed my arms and shoulders to brush off the mild chill.  I put my costume and the plastic lunchbox in my backpack.

I already mentioned this, but the individual parts of this whole operation (such as the costume over clothes, backpack, etc...) are well-executed. It’s just the thing as a whole that seems incredibly dangerous and reckless.

It’s like a perfecly calibrated mechanism made of interlocked cogs and masterful precision that just ends up punching a tiger in the face with you right in front of it.

I felt a stab of regret at not having chosen better clothes to wear than a loose fitting sweatshirt and jeans that were too big for me.  That regret quickly turned to a pang of anxiety.  What would they think when they saw the real me?  Brian and Alec were good looking guys, in very different ways.  Lisa was, on the sliding scale between plain and pretty, more pretty than not.  My own scale of attractiveness, by contrast, put me somewhere on a scale that ranged from ‘nerd’ to ‘plain’.  My opinion of where I fit on that scale changed depending on the mood I was in when I was looking in the mirror.  They were cool, confident, assured people.  I was… me.

Taylor is not only worried about unmasking because her secret identity is going to be compromised, she’s also worried because the bug mask is a mask in more than one way.

When she went out in costume, she distanced herself from Taylor the human with her personal problems. She became Taylor the cape with cape-related problems, and it was, in a way I think, a moment of respite for her.

So now that she’s taking off her mask, her “bug” persona, she’s going to expose her normal self to people belonging in the “powers” part of her life. She’s gonna merge those realities she doesn’t want to merge.

I stopped myself before I could get worked up.  I wasn’t regular old Taylor, here.  In the here and now, I was the girl who had put Lung in the hospital, accidental as it was.  I was the girl who was going undercover to try and get the details on a particularly persistent gang of supervillains.  I was, until I came up with a better name to go by, Bug, the girl the Undersiders wanted on their team.

She seems to be clinging to her “Bug” identity though, and distancing herself from normal life again.

If I said I made my way down the fire escape filled to the brim with confidence, I’d be lying.  That said, I had managed to hype myself up enough to get myself down the ladder, mask still on, costume in my bag. I stood before them, glanced around to make sure nobody else was around, and then pulled off my mask.  I had a few terrifying heartbeats where I was half-blind, their facial features just smudges, before I put on the glasses I’d had in my bag.

This glasses beat, where she is momentarily blind until she puts them on again, fits perfectly with the “scared without her persona, so she puts it on again” thing I was just mentioning.

“Hi,” I said, lamely, using my fingers to comb my hair back into order, “I guess it wouldn’t work if you kept calling me Bug or new girl.  I’m Taylor.”

Using my real name was a big gamble on my part.  I was afraid it would be another thing I would be kicking myself for five minutes from now, much like the realization that I’d have to go uncostumed.  I rationalized it by telling myself that I was already in this wholesale. Being truthful about that one thing might well save my hide if any of them decided to do some digging on me, or if I ran into someone I knew while in their company.  I figured, hoped, that by the time this whole thing was over, I could maybe pull some strings with someone like Armsmaster and avoid having them leak my real name.  Not impossible to imagine, given the level of security around some of the prisons they had for criminal parahumans.  In any event, I would cross that bridge when I got to it.

She used her real name though!! So at least a part of her wants to retain some part of her true self, that’s good.

Also yeah, it’s best not to stack lies on top of lies, or something’s bound to slip.

Alec offered the slightest roll of his eyes as I introduced myself, while Brian just grinned.  Lisa, though, put one of her arms around my shoulders and gave me a one-armed squeeze of a hug.  She was a little older than I was, so she was just tall enough to be at the perfect height to do it.  What caught me off guard was how nice the gesture felt.  Like I had been needing a hug from someone who wasn’t my dad for a long time.

Oh taylor you poor thing. You are definitely doing this for the friendship. Worst secret mole ever, but I love you.

We walked deeper into the Docks as a group.  While I had lived on the periphery of the area my entire life, and while most people would say the neighborhood I lived in was part of the ‘Docks’, I had never really been in the areas that gave this part of the city such a bad reputation.  At least, I hadn’t if I discounted last night, and it had been dark then.

Seems like Brockton Bay has a very divided higher and lower class.

Also you are still dividing your different personas a lot, saying that it’s your first time coming here, and then thinking “Oh well, but the other time was in costume so it doesn’t count”

It wasn’t an area that had been kept up, and kind of gave off an impression of a ghost town, or what a city might look like if war or disaster forced people to abandon it for a few years.  Grass and weeds grew between slats in the sidewalk, the road had potholes you could hide a cat in, and the buildings were all faded, consisting of peeling paint, cracked mortar and rusty metal.  The desaturated colors of the buildings were contrasted by splashes of vividly colored graffiti.  As we passed what had once been a main road for the trucks traveling between the warehouses and the docks, I saw a row of power lines without wires stretching between them.  At one point weeds had crawled most of the way up the poles, only to wither and die at some point.  Now each of the poles had a mess of dead brown plants hanging off of them.

There were people, too, though not too many were out and about. There were those you expected, like a homeless bag lady with a grocery cart and a shirtless old man with a beard nearly to his navel, collecting bottles and cans from a dumpster.  There were others that surprised me.  I saw a woman that looked surprisingly normal, in clothes that weren’t shabby enough to draw attention, herding four near-identical infant children into a factory building with a faded sign.  I wondered if they were living there or if the mom was working there and just couldn’t do anything with her kids but bring them with her.  We passed a twenty-something artist and his girlfriend, sitting on the sidewalk with paintings propped up around them.  The girl waved at Lisa as we walked by, and Lisa waved back.

Certainly one of the poorer parts of town. The nature covered dilapidated buildings and structures are kind of pretty in their own way though.

Seems like the gang knows some of the people around here as well, they seem interesting.

Our destination was a red brick factory with a massive sliding metal door locked shut by a coil of chain.  Both the chain and door had rusted so much that I expected that neither offered any use.  The size of the door and the broadness of the driveway made me think that large trucks or small boats would have been backed up through the entryway back in the factory’s heyday.  The building itself was large, stretching nearly half the block, two or three stories tall.  The background of the sign at the top of the building had faded from red to a pale orange-pink, but I could make out the bold white letters that read ‘Redmond Welding’.

An old abandoned factory serving as a cover for a supervillain lair is such a classic. I love it.

Brian let us in through a small door on the side of the building, rather than the big rusted one.  The interior was dark, lit only by rows of dusty windows near the ceiling.  I could make out what had been massive machines and treadmills prior to being stripped to their bare bones.  Sheets covered most of the empty and rusted husks.  Seeing the cobwebs, I reached out with my power and felt bugs throughout.  Nobody had been active in here for a long time.

“Come on,” Brian urged me.  I looked back and saw that he was halfway up a spiral staircase in the corner.  I headed up after him.

It even looks and probably is a real factory inside! And then I assume going up the staircase leads to the real lair.

After seeing the desolation of the first floor, seeing the second floor was a shock.  It was a loft, and the contrast was startling.  The exterior walls were red brick, and there was no ceiling beyond a roof and a skeleton of metal girders overhead to support it.  In terms of general area, the loft seemed to have three sections, though it was hard to define because it was such an open layout.

The staircase opened up into what I would have termed the living room, though the one room alone had nearly as much floor space as the ground floor of my house did.  The space was divided by two couches, which were set at right angles from one another, both facing a coffee table and one of the largest television sets I had ever seen.  Below the television set were a half dozen video game consoles, a DVD player and one or two machines I didn’t recognize.  I supposed they might have a TiVo, though I’d never seen one.  Speakers larger than the TVs my dad and I had at home sat on either side of the whole setup.  Behind the couches were tables, some open space with rugs and shelves set against the walls.  The shelves were only half filled with books and magazines, while the rest of the shelf space was filled with odds and ends ranging from a discarded shoe to candles.

Oh god their base is rad.

It just screams rebel teenagers and freedom and hanging around playing games or watching movies while eating pizza.

Unironically comfy.

The second section was a collection of rooms.  It was hard to label them as such, though, because they were more like cubicles, three against each wall with a hallway between them.  They were a fair size, and there were six doors, but the walls of each room were only eight or so feet tall, not reaching all the way up to the roof.  Three of the doors had artwork spray painted on them.  The first door had a crown done in a dramatic graffiti style.  The second door had the white silhouette of a man and a woman against a blue background, mimicking the ‘mens’ and ‘womens’ washroom signs that were so common.  The third had a girl’s face with puckered lips.  I wondered what the story was, there.

This part seems to be the individual room of each member? The whole base has an urban gang aesthetic that I really like. The crown could be Regent’s? The second one seems to be the bathroom. Third one possibly Tattletale’s?

“Nice art,” I said, pointing at the door with the crown on it, feeling kind of dumb for making it the first thing I’d said as I entered the room.

“Thanks,” Alec replied.  I guess that meant it was his work.

Oh cool. Alec is the one who does the graffiti. He seems the most laid back and chill of the group so far.

I took another second to look around.  The far end of the loft, the last of the three sections, had a large table and some cabinets.  Though I couldn’t take a better look without crossing the whole loft, I gathered that their kitchen was in the far end of the loft.

Maybe the planning table? To gather around and talk heists? And with a kitchen and bathroom this place actually functions as a good resting place.

Throughout, there was mess.  I felt almost rude for paying attention to it, but there were pizza boxes piled on one of the tables, two dirty plates on the coffee table in front of the couch, and some clothes draped over the back of one of the couches.  I saw pop cans – or maybe beer cans – stacked in a pyramid on the table in the far room.  It wasn’t so messy that I thought it was offensive, though.  It was mess that made a statement… like, ‘This is our space.’  No adult supervision here.

Hah, Taylor made the same observation I made.

Pure teen spirit.

“I’m jealous,” I admitted, meaning it.

“Dork,” Alec said, “What are you jealous for?”

“I meant it’s cool,” I protested, a touch defensively.

Taylor still probably carries the trauma of the bullying close to the chest as she reacted defensively to playful banter. Alec is constantly giving me Amethyst vibes for some reason. As in like, lazy teen, walking disaster.

Lisa spoke before Alec could reply, “I think what Alec means is that this is your place now too.  This is the team’s space, and you’re a member of the team, now.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling dumb.  Lisa and Alec headed to the living room, while Brian walked off to the far end of the loft.  When Lisa gestured for me to follow her, I did.  Alec lay down, taking up an entire couch, so I sat on the opposite end of the couch from Lisa.

“The rooms,” Lisa said, “Far side, in order of closest to farthest, are Alec, bathroom, mine.”  That meant Alec’s room was the one with the crown, and Lisa’s door had the face with the puckered lips.  She went on, “On the side closer to us, Rachel’s room, Rachel’s dogs’ room, and the storage closet.”

I was right about those rooms!

The other rooms are a closet, and two that belong to Rachel, one for her dog’s specifically.

I do wonder how she’s going to react to the new member, given that the webpage warned of hostility and antisocial behaviour.

Lisa paused, then glanced at Alec and asked, “You think she-”

“Duh,” Alec cut her off.

“What?” I asked, feeling lost.

“We’ll clean out the storage closet,” Lisa decided, “So you have a room.”

I was taken aback.  “You don’t have to do that for me,” I told her, “I’ve got a place.”

Lisa made a face, almost pained.  She asked me, “Can we just do it anyways, and not make a fuss?  It’d be a lot better if you had your own space here.”

I must have looked confused, because Alec explained, “Brian has an apartment, and was pretty firm about not needing or wanting a room here… but he and Lisa have been arguing regularly because of it.  He has nowhere to sleep but the couch if he gets hurt and can’t go to his place, and there’s no place to put his stuff, so it gets left all over. Take the room.  You’ll be doing us a favor.”

“Okay,” I said.  I added, “Thank you,” as much for the explanation as for the room itself.

I find it funny that Taylor’s joined a villain group but she still needs to come back home for dinner like a good girl (and so Danny doesn’t have a heart attack. Poor Danny)

So she will have a second room here, for if she ever wants to have her own space to rest when she’s at the base. That means you’re officially a member of the group, Taylor!

“Last time he went up against Shadow Stalker, he came back here and bled all over a white couch,” Lisa groused, “nine hundred dollar couch and we had to replace it.”

“Fucking Shadow Stalker,” Alec commiserated.

Shadow Stalker? Are they a Hero? With a name like that, they would certainly be an edgy hero. Maybe a competing villain? Seems strong, too.

Brian came back from the other end of the loft, raising his voice to be heard as he approached, “Rache’s not here, and neither are her dogs. She must be walking them or working.  Dammit.  I get stressed when she’s out.”  He approached the couches and saw Alec sprawled on the one.

“Move your legs,” Brian told him.

“I’m tired.  Sit on the other couch,” Alec mumbled, one arm over his face.

Brian glanced at Lisa and I, and Lisa scooted over to make room. Brian glared down at Alec and then sat between us girls.  I shifted my weight and tucked one leg under me to give him room.

“So,” Brian explained, “Here’s the deal.  Two grand a month, just to be a member of the team.  That means you help decide what jobs we do, you go on the jobs, you stay active, you’re available if we need to call.”

“I don’t have a phone,” I admitted.

They are surely hyping up the possible confrontation with Rachel, here.

Alec’s still being an Amethyst.

Brian’s explaining the pay and the work, and how does Taylor not have a phone?

“We’ll get you one,” he said, like it wasn’t even a concern.  It probably wasn’t. “We generally haul in anywhere from ten grand to thirty-five grand for a job.  That gets divided four ways… five ways now that you’re on the team.”

I nodded, then exhaled slowly, “It’s not small change.”

Brian nodded, a small smile playing on his lips, “Nope.  Now, how on the ball are you, as far as knowing what we’re up against?”

I blinked a few times, then hedged, “For other local capes?  I’ve done research online, read the cape magazines religiously for a few years, more since getting my powers… but I dunno.  If the past twenty four hours have taught me anything, it’s that there’s a lot I don’t know, and will only find out the hard way.”

Brian smiled.  I mean, really smiled.  It made me think of a boy rather than a nearly-grown man.  He replied, “Most don’t get that, you know?  I’ll try to share what I know, so you aren’t caught off guard, but don’t be afraid to ask if there’s anything you’re not sure about, alright?”

Wow they gain a lot of money

And Taylor’s pragmatism and preparedness seem to resonate well with Brian’s carefulness. He likes this new adittion to the team.

I nodded, and his smile widened.  He said, through a good natured chuckle, “Can’t tell you how much of a relief it is that you take this stuff seriously, since some people -” he stopped to lean over and kick the side of the couch Alec was lying on, “-need me to twist their arms to get them listening, and some people,” he jerked his thumb over his right shoulder, “think they know everything.”

“I do know everything,” Lisa said, “It’s my power.”

“What?” I said, interrupting Brian.  My heartbeat quickened, though I hadn’t exactly been relaxed to begin with, “You’re omniscient?”

Lisa laughed, “No, no.  I do know things though.  My power tells me stuff.”

Oh we finally get LIsa’s power!!! YES!!

Ok so it’s not omniscience, so you aren’t totally fucked. Her power seems to make her understand the true nature of things/ inform her of details/ give her consant information of her surroundings or what she pays attention to.

So you could still be pretty fucked

Swallowing hard, hoping I wasn’t drawing attention by doing so, I asked, “Like?”  Like why I was joining their team?

Lisa sat forward and put her elbows on her knees, “Like how I knew you were at the library when I sent me the messages.  If I felt like it, and if I had the know how, I’m sure I could have figured it out by breaking into the website database and digging through the logs to find the address you connected from, but my power just let me skip that step like that.” She snapped her fingers.

“And why exactly did you mention you knew where she was?” Brian queried, his voice a touch too calm.

“I wanted to see how she’d react.  Messing with her a little,” Lisa grinned.

“God dammit-” Brian started, but Lisa waved him off.

“I’m filling the newbie in,” she waved him off, “Yell at me later.”

Lisa is awesome and fun, and terrifying at the same time. Her power makes her an expert hacker and codebreaker, among other things I’m sure.

Not giving him a chance to reply, she turned to me and explained, “My power fills in the gaps in my knowledge.  I generally need some info to start from, but I can use details my power feeds me to figure out more stuff, and it all sort of compounds itself, giving me a steady flow of info.”

I swallowed, “And you knew that a cape was on the way last night?”

“Yeah,” she said, “Call it a well educated guess.”

“And you knew the stuff about what happened in the PHQ the same way?”

Lisa’s smile widened, “I’ll admit I cheated there.  Figuring out passwords is pretty easy with my power.  I dig through the PHQ’s digital paperwork and enjoy a little reality TV by way of their surveillance cameras when I’m bored.  It’s useful because I’m not only getting the dirt from what I see, hear and read, but my power fills in the details on stuff like changes in their routine and the team politics.”

So she basically has super-intuition!! Like some Sherlock Holmes-level shit!

Her power let’s her hack her way into sources of information, which further boosts her power allowing her to know even more things about even more people and the world, which I imagine could still lead to even more ways of gaining information.

Her power seems really OP under the right circunstances. If she had 1984-style camera surveillance she could actually be functionally omniscient , but even in her current state, she is fearsome

I stared at her, a good part of me horrified that I’d gotten into an undercover situation opposite a girl with superpowered intuition.

Taking my silence for awe, she grinned her vulpine smile, “It’s not that amazing.  I’m really best with concrete stuff.  Where things are, timing, encryption, yadda yadda.  I can read something out of changes in body language or routine, but it’s less reliable and kind of a headache.  Enough information overload without, you know?”

I did know, her explanation echoed my own thoughts regarding my ability to see and hear things through my bugs.  Still, her words didn’t make me feel that much better.

Oh so she has a limitation! She has a harder time reading social emotions and human behaviors. That might be the reason why she (possibly) hasn’t clued in on the fact that Taylor is a double-agent. That and also that Taylor isn’t so sure herself, subconsiously.

“And,” Brian said, still glowering at Lisa, “Even if she knows a lot, that doesn’t mean Lisa can’t be a dumbass sometimes.”

Lisa punched him in the arm.

Hehe.

“So what are your powers then?” I asked Brian and Alec, hoping for a change in topic.

Brian seems to be darkness-based. I have no idea about Alec’s.

They didn’t get a chance to tell me.  I heard barking from downstairs.  A matter of heartbeats later I was standing, three paces from the couch. Three snarling dogs had me backed against the wall, drool flying from their mouths as their teeth gnashed and snapped for my hands and face.

WAIT WHAT?

DID RACHEL JUST ATTACK HER OUT OF NOWHERE?

I knew she was antisocial but holy hell

Sicking your dogs on the newbie?

Does she want her out or dead? Or whichever happens first?

Of course this is where the chapter ends!

Aaaaaaaa

[progressiveparty]

American Gulags - Ice Detention Centers - Immigration Prisons

Communities across the country push back on immigration prisons. In June 2018, Kelly Leibold was among the many residents of Pine Island, Minnesota, caught by surprise when its city council passed a resolution supporting a for-profit prison company, Management & Training Corporation, that wanted to locate a detention facility for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. She responded by helping local residents organize a “No ICE in PI” campaign. “I don’t believe that a detention facility is morally correct,” Leibold explains. “People all have immigrant lines in their family. I don’t think a detention facility in Pine Island will say good things about our community.” She and about three dozen other activists organized via social media. They formed a Facebook group to coordinate strategy and compiled a fact sheet making the case that this was a bad investment in Pine Island’s future. In August 2018, the city council unanimously rescinded its welcoming resolution. Leibold, twenty-three, who in addition to her activism on this issue is director of the local chamber of commerce, went on to get elected to the city council last November. In Taylor, Texas, former ICE detainee Jeymi Moncada is working with Grassroots Leadership, a national nonprofit group, demanding the shutdown of the T. Don Hutto Residential Center, where she was held for thirteen months. “You can describe the conditions as a house of terror,” Moncada says. A survivor of domestic violence, with scars to prove it, forty-two-year-old Moncada fled Honduras in 2004. She was able to start a new life in Texas but ended up in the Hutto facility in 2010 after being detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That happened after she risked returning to Honduras to bring her children here, according to court papers. They would have joined Moncada’s daughter, Jeimi, who was born in Texas. But immigration officers in Mexico stopped Moncada and made her return to Honduras with her other children, who had been cared for by her sister. Unsafe in Honduras, Moncada returned to the United States only to be apprehended by Border Patrol agents and sent to the Hutto facility. She was confined for more than a year until an immigration judge gave a favorable ruling in her asylum case, withholding deportation because she faced a “clear probability” of persecution if forced to return to Honduras. But Moncada’s detention left her with bitter memories—including seeing Jeimi, then four years old, traumatized by visits to Hutto. “She would scream and cry and say she wanted to be with me,” Moncado recalls. “Eventually, they would stop bringing her to visit me because it was too difficult for her.” CoreCivic, the nation’s second-largest private prison operator worth $2.4 billion, runs Hutto for ICE. But while the government in Williamson County, where this facility is located, last year voted to terminate its agreement with Hutto, ICE struck a deal directly with CoreCivic to keep the center open.

Grassroots Leadership Protesters in Austin, Texas gather in opposition to Williamson County's contract with the T. Don Hutto Residential Center. The Hutto facility is just one of more than 200 detention centers throughout the United States. Most of the larger ones are run by for-profit companies. The ICE detention population has risen from a daily average of 6,785 in 1994 to about 54,000 in June. And these numbers will continue to grow, as Trump treats immigrants as political fodder. By kicking off his reelection campaign with a promise of mass arrests and deportations, followed by a threat of raids on homes and workplaces of undocumented immigrants in targeted cities, Trump has made clear his disregard for human rights. The ICE detention figures don’t count the unaccompanied children being detained in more than 100 Department of Health and Human Services shelters, most under state supervision. HHS has expanded this capacity from 6,500 beds in October 2017 to 14,300 this past April and has since obtained funding that would allow for an increase up to 23,600 beds. Youths are kept in these shelters until they are placed with sponsors, usually immediate or extended family, while they await their asylum hearings. Disregard for providing “safe and sanitary” facilities reached a low point in June when the Trump Administration argued before a federal court panel that detained children do not have to be given such basic items as soap and toothpaste, and that sleeping on a concrete floor is not a violation of these standards. The administration’s answer to overcrowded detention facilities is to build even more detention centers, relying on for-profit prison companies—a boom industry under Trump—for construction and management. Not a thought has been given to why people fleeing persecution and seeking a better life should be put under lock and key. “Taking away someone’s freedom is a very extreme act,” says Alina Das, co-director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at New York University School of Law. Immigration detention, she adds, has become a form of “preventative incarceration—a very frightening concept.” When Jonathan fled El Salvador seeking asylum in the United States, he didn’t think about having to spend an indefinite period of time in immigration detention. Safe haven was needed, he says, because he was repeatedly threatened by the gang MS-13. But as soon as he was apprehended by a Border Patrol agent near El Paso, Texas, shortly before Trump’s Inauguration, Jonathan got a glimpse of what was in store. He says the agent warned, “We are getting a new President who is going to deport you.” For sixteen months, Jonathan (who asked that his last name not be used) was locked up in a series of detention facilities. Baffled by being treated like a threat rather than as someone fleeing persecution, he tells of his frustration and trauma. “The uncertainty of not knowing: Am I going to be moved again? Am I going to be deported? Are they going to release me? What’s going to happen to me?” says Jonathan, who was finally freed on a $10,000 bond in May 2018 and now lives with relatives in the New York City area as he awaits resolution of his asylum case. Jonathan’s detention started with two dreadful days in one of the Border Patrol’s crowded holding units, known collectively by immigrants as La Hielera, “the Icebox,” because of the cold and brutal conditions. He had to sleep sitting upright on a metal seat without even a blanket. He was transferred to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement El Paso Processing Center, then spent a stint at the Cibola County Correctional Center in Milan, New Mexico, before being transferred back to the El Paso Processing Center. Here, Jonathan says, he worked an eight-hour kitchen shift, beginning at 4:30 in the morning, for $1 a day. He saw other detainees put into solitary confinement—“the Hole”—for making their bed the wrong way or not eating fast enough. Immigration detention is “something you never went to relive—ever.” Immigration detention, says Jonathan, is “something you never went to relive—ever.” At the national level, immigrant rights activists launched the Corporate Backers of Hate campaign in 2017. Holding protests and gathering petitions, the campaign has demanded that the likes of JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo stop bankrolling for-profit prison companies such as the GEO Group and CoreCivic. “Let’s shame the corporate leaders standing by Trump by exposing the way they benefit from Trump,” says Ana Maria Archila, who, as co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, is one of the campaign’s organizers. Less than a month after activists held a Valentine’s Day “Chase Break Up with Prisons” protest outside the home of JPMorgan Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon in New York City, the investment bank and financial services company announced, “We will no longer bank the private prison industry.” Meanwhile, Wells Fargo said two years ago it had decided to “exit” its banking relationship with private prison companies. When then-CEO Timothy Sloan was pressed on this issue by U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, at a March hearing, he acknowledged that the company was ending its relationships with CoreCivic and the GEO Group but that the termination process had not been completed. A Wells Fargo spokesperson told The Progressive that this is still expected to happen. In June, Bank of America said it would stop lending to companies that run private prisons and detention centers. This announcement came after Bank of America officials visited the Homestead facility for unaccompanied immigrant children in Florida. And SunTrust Banks recently said it won’t provide financing to companies that manage private prisons and immigrant-holding facilities. Pressure to divest is also coming from the American Federation of Teachers, which has within the last year issued a two-part report detailing public pension links to immigrant detention and urging divestment. The union created a “watch list” of asset managers who hold significant shares in the prison industry. As one activist, quoted in the first part of the report, expressed, “This industry has turned human suffering into a billion-dollar business.” Detention and deportation have often been used for racist and political reasons, but not until the 1980s did a network of detention centers emerge. This is due in part to changes in federal law, beginning with a 1988 statute requiring mandatory detention for those in immigration proceedings convicted of aggravated felonies. The list of offenses covered by mandatory immigration detention was greatly expanded by a 1996 federal law. The for-profit prison companies were more than willing to step in and provide additional detention space. “We really outsourced our immigration to private firms,” says Lauren-Brooke Eisen, author of the 2017 book Inside Private Prisons: An American Dilemma in the Age of Mass Incarceration. She estimates about 65 percent of immigrant detainees are currently in for-profit prisons; other estimates run as high as nearly 75 percent. Over the past year, at least seven children have died in U.S. immigration custody or after being detained by immigration agencies at the border. But that only begins to tell how deplorable conditions have become in a system that, according to Detention Watch Network, has seen 189 people die in detention from 2003 to this past April. In May, unannounced visits by the Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General to five Border Patrol detention sites in the El Paso, Texas, area found that “overcrowding and prolonged detention represent an immediate risk” to detainees’ health and safety.

AP Images Families held in a pen erected by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to process migrant families and unaccompanied minors in El Paso, Texas. Of particular concern was the El Paso Del Norte Processing Center, where a cell with a maximum capacity of twelve had seventy-six detainees. Detainees were observed standing on toilets in cells, to gain breathing space, because of crowded conditions. The death of Mariee, a toddler from Guatemala, shows how detrimental detention can be. This nineteen-month-old was in good health when she and her mother, Yazmin Juárez, who is seeking asylum, were sent to the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley on March 5, 2018. By the time Mariee was released twenty days later, she was in failing health, according to a lawsuit filed on behalf of her mother this past March in U.S. District Court in Tucson, Arizona. “This was not merely an error in medical judgment. It was active neglect of a very sick child,” says the lawsuit, which spells out the details of the case. The defendant in the case is the Arizona city of Eloy, which, despite being 900 miles from Dilley, was allowed to take responsibility for the Dilley facility by modifying its contract with CoreCivic, then called Corrections Corporation of America. Under this arrangement, the lawsuit says, Eloy was to be paid $438,000 a year for overseeing Dilley. Upon their arrival at Dilley, Mariee and her mother were put in a crowded room with other sick children, and Mariee became ill with upper respiratory symptoms. The lawsuit alleges that Mariee was inadequately and improperly treated, and that her condition continued to deteriorate. She was acutely ill on March 23, when the nurse who examined her said that Mariee would be referred to a medical provider. That never happened because the mother and her ailing daughter were released March 25 and put on a plane to New Jersey. ICE’s record says Mariee was “medically cleared” by a licensed vocational nurse but no medical personnel examined her, according to the lawsuit. The following day, Mariee was admitted to an emergency room in New Jersey with acute respiratory distress. Over the next six weeks, Mariee was transferred to two different hospitals and received specialized care for respiratory failure, but she died May 10 while on advanced life support. Although the city has denied any culpability for Mariee’s death, it has subsequently severed its ties to the Dilley facility. Mariee’s mother has also filed an administrative claim for wrongful death against the United States, seeking $60 million. The deplorable conditions of detention are also evident in hunger strikes at U.S. facilities—at least six in the first few months of this year alone. In a class-action federal lawsuit filed last year on behalf of three detainees at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, the Southern Poverty Law Center is challenging the way CoreCivic has run its “voluntary” work program. “CoreCivic’s economic windfall, and profitability of its immigration detention enterprise, arise from its corporate scheme, plan, and pattern of systemically withholding basic necessities from detained immigrants,” says the lawsuit. One of the plaintiffs, Wilhen Hill Barrientos of Guatemala, alleges that he was required to work seven days a week and was put in the medical segregation unit for two months after he filed a complaint that he was forced to work even though he was sick. Detainees can be paid as little as $1 a day, according to ICE’s detention standards. The lawsuit alleges detainees are sometimes forced to pay for scarce basic necessities, such as toilet paper. By the center’s count, eight other lawsuits have also been filed challenging work conditions at detention centers. While the sheer number of immigration apprehensions prevents ICE from locking up everyone, U.S. Attorney General William Barr is clearly trying to lock up as many as possible. He has directed the denial of bond for undocumented immigrants who did not enter the United States through a port of entry, even if they have shown a “credible fear” of persecution. On July 2, a federal district judge blocked implementation of Barr’s order. And the use of parole to let detainees out of facilities has dropped dramatically. Liz Martinez, director of advocacy and strategic communications at Freedom for Immigrants, a California-based nonprofit, describes immigration detention as a system of “disappearing people,” forcing them to linger in limbo until their day of deportation comes. Take the case of Rachel, an asylum seeker currently awaiting a decision by the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is reviewing her case. She fled her homeland, the Central African country of Cameroon, in 2016 because she feared being killed for refusing a forced marriage. She says a relative in Cameroon was recently killed because of his support of her. Rachel, who doesn’t want her last name used, turned herself in at the Mexico-U.S. border in January 2017, asking for asylum. She has since been in immigration detention, even though she could have been released to a sister and relatives in Ohio. She has spent most of this time in the El Paso Processing Center. Her plea for asylum was rejected by an immigration judge and dismissed by the Board of Immigration Appeals. A reversal by the Fifth Circuit could be her last hope. “I live in fear—in depression and confusion,” says Rachel in a telephone interview from the detention center. “I don’t know what is going to happen, today or tomorrow. They come and get people up at night and deport them.” She says that once in February and on two occasions since she filed her notice of appeal to the Fifth Circuit in March, a detention center officer has unsuccessfully tried to get her to sign papers authorizing her deportation. “I told him I can’t go back because my life is in danger,” Rachel says. “He told me he doesn’t care. He is doing his job. I should sign.” Sidebar: ‘We Don’t Want to Participate in Abusing People’ Proposals for immigration detention have sparked grassroots opposition strong enough to prompt for-profit prison companies to withdraw detention proposals and persistent enough to get local governments to rethink their welcome. This resistance began before Donald Trump took office but has intensified under him. Here are some examples of successful resistance efforts: Wisconsin: Community opposition recently helped defeat Immigration Centers of America’s proposed 500-bed detention facility in New Richmond, Wisconsin, about forty miles from St. Paul. “We don’t want to participate in abusing people who are here because they were abused in their home country,” says Dan Hansen, who was part of the resistance. Hundreds of postings against the center appeared on Facebook pages, Hansen says. The city’s Facebook page was also targeted. Fliers, shared online and handed out in person, provided information for contacting public officials. “These were people who got together and pushed back and pushed back hard,” says Emilio De Torre, who, as director of community engagement for the ACLU of Wisconsin, helped mobilize the resistance. In April, city officials issued a lengthy report concluding that the proposed facility did not fit New Richmond’s city plan, and Immigration Centers withdrew its proposal. Illinois: In June, legislation was enacted  prohibiting state and local government from entering into agreements with for-profit companies for immigrant detention centers. The measure was prompted by the Village Board of Dwight voting in March to annex eighty-eight acres, clearing the way for an Immigration Centers of America detention facility. The proposal came after activists successfully organized against possible detention centers over the past eight years at three other Illinois sites—Crete, Joliet, and Hopkins Park—as well as four sites in northwest Indiana: Hobart, Gary, Elkhart County, and the Roselawn community of Newton County. Whether such efforts succeed in keeping immigration detention centers out remains to be seen. Typically, a detention center involves the local government working with ICE and a for-profit prison company. But over the past fourteen months, local governments in places such as Adelanto, California, and Williamson County, Texas, have cut their ties to detention centers. However, this paves the way for ICE to then work directly with the for-profit prison companies to keep the detention centers open. Illinois might not be able to stop such an arrangement, but its new law does prevent localities from getting reimbursed for providing infrastructure and other services for a detention facility. Michigan: Last fall, a proposal by Immigration Centers of America to convert a former state prison in Ionia into an ICE detention facility was picking up speed under then-Republican Governor Rick Snyder, whose former chief-of-staff, Dennis Muchmore, was reportedly lobbying for the company. “I don’t think you should be making money off of people suffering,” says Oscar Castaneda, who, as an organizer for Action of Greater Lansing, helped mobilize the opposition. With Democrat Gretchen Whitmer’s election as Michigan governor in November, the dynamic changed. She reportedly demanded that Immigration Centers of America agree, as a precondition, not to take separated family members—a commitment the company could not make. Governor Whitmer, who had control over the project because it would be built on state land, blocked the deal in February, with her spokesperson saying that “building more detention facilities won’t solve our immigration crisis.” But the governor does not have sway over the GEO Group, which recently struck a deal with ICE to “reactivate”  the 1,800-bed North Lake Correctional Facility in Baldwin, Michigan, for housing noncitizens sentenced for immigration offenses and other federal crimes. Wyoming: In 2017, the Evanston City Council and Uinta County Commissioners passed resolutions in support of Management & Training Corporation locating a detention center in this part of Wyoming. That led to the creation of #WyoSayNo, a coalition of eight state-based activist groups that has held public meetings and contacted public officials to oppose a detention center. “We just remind Wyoming people of our values,” says Antonio Serrano, an organizer with the ACLU of Wyoming. “We don’t like people—especially big companies like this—coming in and telling us what we should or should not be doing.” Serrano also reminds residents that the state should not repeat its blatant disregard for human rights during World War II, when it housed a Japanese American internment camp. And, Serrano says, “We don’t want to be part of this big deportation machine that this administration is pushing. Being out here in Wyoming, we are better than that.” This Piece Originally Appeared in Progressive.org Read the full article