A State of Captivity: Immigrants Detained Repeatedly for Old Crimes
Photo: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
On a Wednesday evening this April, I pick up the phone to hear the voice of Houth “Billy” Taing, a 43-year-old immigrant from Cambodia who has lived in the U.S. since he was 5 years old. Despite the static and crackling on the line, I can make out his relief at having reached me. He’s calling from Adelanto Detention Facility, ninety miles northeast of Los Angeles, where he has been held for over six months. Detainees such as Taing can only place phone calls, not receive them. They are also prohibited from leaving messages. Before this call, Taing had tried to reach me three other times.
“Detention” is the incarceration of immigrants who are not authorized to be in the U.S. and who face deportation. Detainees await in prison-like facilities for immigration authorities to decide whether to release them back in the U.S. or to repatriate them to their countries of origin. Taing lives in a small cell with seven other men, in a two-story building that looks like a warehouse, where detainees are shackled whenever they are being transported to other facilities, where barbed wire slices the sky, and where solitary confinement is a form of punishment. He calls me from the common area, which is so loud that we’re forced to raise our voices to hear each other. The detainees’ lives are also regimented like prisoners’. Detainees are allowed outside in the fresh air only four times a week. A few times a day the guards count the detainees, who rise each morning before 4 a.m. for breakfast. Taing says even the meals resemble prison food. He would know. The detainees’ crimes, for which many have already served time, are announced by the color of their jumpsuits: red for the most serious, and orange and blue for the lesser crimes. Taing’s is red.
In 1994 when Taing was 19, he and two others tried to rob a tourist bus headed for Las Vegas. They boarded the bus disguised as sightseers, but then stole money from the other passengers, ultimately forcing the driver to go to a
