Phil Eil interviews Honora Spicer on her book on Immigration Detention in Rhode Island
The new book Immigration Detention in Rhode Island from Origins to End: A Brief History is slim. It runs a little over 40 pages, including endnotes. But the story it tells is sweeping. It begins in the 17th century with an account of “how colonial settlers in Rhode Island claimed the jurisdiction to exclude other people from the Indigenous lands that they illegitimately occupied in the first place.” From there, it describes how the “state-sponsored practice of caging people for their movement over the surface of the earth” has evolved in the Ocean State. We learn about a crowded “detention pen” on Long Wharf in Newport in the early 1900s and, later, a detention station in a pier building on Providence’s Allens Ave. in the 1910s. Eventually, we arrive at the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility , which was built in 1993 as an intended revenue source for the struggling city of Central Falls. Since the start of the second Trump administration, the Wyatt has held around a hundred people on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement ( ICE ). (The Wyatt’s primary client is the U.S. Marshals Service .) Immigration detention at the Wyatt is a departure from earlier eras because the people held there are not recent arrivals. “[M]ost had been living in Rhode Island or nearby states for months, years, or decades,” the book notes. “Most had children, family, community, and lives in Rhode Island.” The last five pages of the book tell a speculative, as-yet-unrealized story about how Rhode Islanders collectively decided to end immigration detention in the state. A note reads: “At the time of printing, this history is not, in fact, past. You, reader, are part of making this text into a future document.” The book is a collaboration between the historian/poet/translator Honora Spicer (who contributed text and research) and the editor/writer/curator/teacher Gianca Huapaya (who contributed the design and typesetting). On Sunday, June 21, Riffraff will host a book launch. One hundred percent of the book’s sales will go to AMOR ’s Community Fund for ICE Detainees. I recently spoke with Spicer, who is an active volunteer with AMOR. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Philip Eil: I think the Wyatt remains for many Rhode Islanders out of sight, out of mind, and perhaps even entirely unknown. Why do you believe this place, and what happens here, matters? Honora Spicer: I would say, firstly, that it’s not the fault specifically of Rhode Islanders if the Wyatt is not something that they’ve heard of. That is a deliberate design that has been to the benefit of these bondholders , to the benefit of ICE. It’s something that we see in the way in which sites for detention centers are chosen, in terms of the visuality of the urban built environment. But it’s also something that we see in terms of the way in which it’s very, very difficult to know what is going on inside the Wyatt. There is a kind of bureaucratic obfuscation. So I think, firstly, the reaction that I have is: the fact that many people don’t know about the Wyatt is something to be curious about and not ashamed of. It’s actually [asking], “How could that possibly be that this is the case?” “How did it come to be the case that it’s difficult to learn about?” I specifically think that this is important to recognize because all detention practices are local, and the organizing that’s happening right now in relation to the Wyatt is not in isolation. At the very end of the book, I name a number of recent bills that have either passed or are being considered in many, many other states. So this isn’t something that’s happening in isolation or is unusual. But it’s, rather, really exciting to see our state as part of nationwide movements to identify the ways in which detention is harmful and is harming specific communities and groups of people, [and] is also harming democracy and is harming the accountability of local governments to the residents of a city like Central Falls. And so I feel a sense of interest and responsibility, insofar as this is a site that is near to where I live. And I see that kind of mode of relating to a local geography as something that is being replicated in many places around the country. Philip Eil: I understand that you’ve spent a lot of time studying and writing about immigration detention in Texas , near the US-Mexico border. How is immigration enforcement here in Rhode Island different from what you’ve seen down there? And how is it similar? Honora Spicer: I would firstly say that, especially in the 2010s, there was this kind of outsized fixation on the United States border with Mexico in the Southwest as the epitome of what the border is. Which is obviously not the case, and is a false narrative that serves to deflect a lot of other forms of political obsession. Rhode Island is obviously a border state. Rhode Island has always been the U.S. border, right? [And] even in the late 19th century, one of the main trajectories of entry for Chinese immigrants was actually not the US-Mexico border, but the border with New York state and Canada. And so there was a lot of entry of immigrants who were then jailed in local jails. Rhode Island has also had this kind of outsized influence on creating carceral spaces beyond Rhode Island. Not just limited to the financing of the slave trade that Rhode Island has been a really important node within, but [also via] John Russell Bartlett , for example, who was the commissioner on the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Commission . [He] was this shopkeeper in Providence who was selected based on no prior experience but simply connections to be the commissioner. And that’s why all of his drawings of the US-Mexico border are held in the library at Brown. What I’m trying to say is that the US-Mexico border is not only this kind of point of contrast with what is happening in Rhode Island, but is part of a continuous geography of nation-making. All of that being said, I would say there are ways in which part of what’s happened in the space of the US-Mexico border is the construction of a built environment, such that there are places that can be pointed to that are “The Border” or “The Wall,” or even that are spaces of detention that are really unusually large and unusually cruel. So one thing that I notice is that the organizing that is happening in relation to those spaces involves a lot more people, [and] often involves people who are coming from other parts of the country, [and] involves people who are generally more willing to take a much clearer and more vocal stance against the violence of immigration detention than anything I’ve seen in Rhode Island. And I think a lot of that has to do with this kind of false impression about where the border is and what the border looks like to begin with. Philip Eil: You write on page 24, “in 2008, Hui Li ‘Jason’ Ng was killed by ICE detention at the Wyatt Detention Facility.” I was struck by the language of that sentence: that he was “killed by ICE detention.” Can you talk about the decision to describe his death in that way? Honora Spicer: If we’re thinking about obfuscation of different forms, like I’ve mentioned, one form of obfuscation is the kind of bureaucratic language that uses the passive voice. This sentence is obviously also passively constructed using “was,” but the aim is to include an agent that allows us to understand causation as going beyond specific medical causation to [answering], “What are the conditions surrounding, not the immediate cause, but the ultimate cause of that death?” I think that we’re seeing this continuously right now, where folks who have medical conditions that have been precipitated or have begun or worsened by detention are sometimes released from detention when it seems clear that those conditions have become very serious, such that their death is not counted as a death that took place in ICE detention . And then there are other situations where ICE is – which we’re seeing at the Wyatt, too – kind of requiring this impossible standard of evidence in order for an individual to receive care. And part of the idea of specifying what the cause of death in this case was was to acknowledge the things that we know to be true without falling into the trap of needing to provide a standard of evidence that becomes a sort of distraction from the bigger picture of how that death took place. Philip Eil: What do you hope people take away from this book? Honora Spicer: Both Giancarlo and I, as we’re developing this book, see it as something that evolves. So I anticipate as we do more bookmaking workshops, also having other editions of the book itself. The [edition] that is at Riffraff is already the second formation of the book that we’ve made. So I imagine a third section that is also speculative histories of “What else might Central Falls do with this space?” “How else might we imagine Central Falls and Rhode Island after immigration detention?” And I think that kind of imagining can only be done collectively. So that is one hope I have for the book: to continue making other iterations that come out of conversations in the context of these bookmaking workshops. Really specifically, there’s information at the end of the book about the AMOR reports . A hundred percent of the proceeds go to the Community Fund for ICE detainee s , and so those are really concrete pieces in terms of having the book simply be a container to share about what is happening right now, and for people to get connected to that fund and to learn about the reports. Philip Eil: When you mention Central Falls, I want to ask what your thoughts are on one of the most noteworthy, maybe ironic, aspects of the Wyatt, which is that the lone ICE detention facility in Rhode Island is smack-dab in the middle of one of our most densely populated cities of immigrants – a town that, for most of its history, has been synonymous with immigration. What do you make of that juxtaposition? Honora Spicer: I mean, I don’t interpret it as a juxtaposition, insofar as there is also a long history of industry in that space, of the use of lands that have longer toxic and industrial histories as selected for prison sites, [and of] prisons located in towns, that for different sorts of reasons, are looking for revenue through private contracting. And then this piece that has to do with how urban geography is oriented, such that many populations in Rhode Island have the privilege of not noticing the location of the Wyatt. One piece that I do think is notable is that I’ve talked to some folks recently about attempting to understand more about how the population of the Wyatt relates to ICE arrests, actually in Central Falls or in Northern Rhode Island. And from what I’ve learned from the AMOR reports, more and more, the Wyatt is acting as this node within a national detention network. So people are finding themselves at the Wyatt from different parts of New England or are transferred to the Wyatt even from the southern border, and then are oftentimes quickly transferred to Alexandria Staging Facility in Louisiana, or to parts of Texas, Colorado, or California. And so there is this way in which obviously the site of the Wyatt is intimately connected with the financial needs of Central Falls at a particular moment in the ‘90s, and at the same time is very disconnected from the specific population of Central Falls, insofar as the national detention network creates all of these kinds of forms of separation. Share SteveAhlquist.news is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe
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