‘We Are Like Sitting Ducks’
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Before dawn one morning last week, Karlena Dawson waited in line for her medications at the Tacoma Northwest Detention Center, an immigrant lockup outside Seattle. Surrounded by more than 20 other detainees and guards, she began to worry that no one was practicing social distancing.
“We are like sitting ducks,” Dawson told me in a phone interview later that day.
Even after more than a year in detention, she has an easy laugh, her native Jamaica still audible in her voice despite her having spent most of her adult life in New York. Her daily uniform is a pair of scrubs, with a bandana covering her hair—both yellow, the facility’s color-code for low-risk detainees. Dawson is short and slight, but she’s unafraid to speak her mind and advocate for herself and others, another detainee, who is one of her friends, told me.
“My fear is what happened in the senior home here in Kirkland is going to happen in the detention center,” Dawson said, referring to a COVID-19 outbreak at a nearby suburban nursing facility that has . Washington.
