Tens of thousands of people held across the US amid Trump’s immigration crackdown could face an insidious hazard: broken internal clocks
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t the Northwest Ice Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington, about 1,500 people in immigration detention await their day in court. Most are held for months, living not by the rising and setting sun but under the perpetual twilight of fluorescent lights.
“We couldn’t tell if it was day or night,” said one former detainee who spent 10 months at the facility and whom the Guardian is not naming for fear of retaliation from US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) and the Geo Group, the private company that operates the detention center. “The lights were on 24/7. We maybe saw the sun twice a week.” Windows were coated in dark paint, and people made eye masks with their socks, he recalled.
Similar stories echo from other Ice facilities. Immigrants detained in “Alligator Alcatraz”, the harsh immigration detention center in the Florida Everglades; at 26 Federal Plaza, the main detention facility in New York City; and at the Los Angeles federal courthouse on Spring Street, a holding center known as B-18, have declared in class-action lawsuits against officials with Ice and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that their cells lacked windows or were flooded with constant artificial light. So have immigrants who’ve been held in Guantánamo Bay, the notorious US naval base in Cuba tapped earlier this year to hold Ice detainees. “We lost track of time,” one of the immigrants who was held in Guantánamo said in court filings. “It felt like hell.”
