After finishing his spiel, he looks up and asks, “Do you agree with the charges?”
“What charges? I had a misdemeanor—I already served my time.”
“Do you agree with the immigration charges?” he asks again.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I say, not sure if he’s asking about my conviction in May or whether there’s some new charge from immigration.
“You’re not a citizen, you were convicted of a crime, you’re deportable. Do you agree?”
“No—I don’t agree. I’m a permanent resident, I have a green card. Can I speak to a lawyer? Or do I get to see a judge?”
“You don’t get a lawyer for immigration proceedings,” he says, getting impatient. “But you’ll see a judge after you sign these papers.”
“Why would I sign something I don’t agree with? Don’t I have any rights?”
He won’t give me a straight answer and doesn’t offer me any options. He just keeps asking me to sign paperwork agreeing that I’m deportable—which I refuse to do.
“If you get deported,” he asks, turning to another page in his stack, “which country would you like to be deported to?”
“What do you mean, which country?”
“You’re in the European Community, so you can choose where you want to go—as long as they agree to take you.”
“Are you telling me I’m getting deported? I don’t understand what’s going on.”
“If you get deported,” he repeats, “where do you want to go?”
“I don’t want to get deported—I want to stay here. I’ve been here for eighteen years, my son is here, I can’t leave him.”
“So we’ll put the United Kingdom then,” he decides, totally ignoring me. I sit there in silence while he finishes filling out forms.
After he’s done, he hands me over to another agent to get fingerprinted and photographed. Then I’m led to a different desk where an Asian guy presents me with more forms to sign: confirming that the photograph is me, that I refused to sign the waiver giving up my right to see a judge, and other documents full of legal jargon I don’t understand. He doesn’t question me or leave any opening for me to question him, just silently passes papers across the desk.
By the time we’re finished, he’s got a stack of paperwork that he clips together, then stamps DEPORTATION ORDER in big letters across the top. It’s obvious that he couldn’t care less about me—there’s no sign of empathy, no emotion.
I can’t fucking believe this: I’m getting kicked out of the country. Once it hits me, I can’t help it—I put my head in my hands and start to cry.
“I’ve got a kid here, I’ve lived here for almost twenty years, my work is here, my whole life is here,” I’m pleading. “How can you do this? Isn’t there some way I can stay or file an appeal?” But it has no impact on him, he probably sees this every day.
He tells me I can make a phone call, but when I dial Anna’s number I already know she’s not going to be home. I don’t leave a message, worried it’ll count as my call, so I try Tracy—the only other number I know. She doesn’t answer, but I leave a message saying I got picked up by immigration and that I’ll call again when I can.
I don’t want the other detainees to see me crying, so I wipe my face with my sleeve as I get led back to the cell. Immediately they start bombarding me with questions.
“What happened?”
“Are you getting deported?”
“Did you get offered a bond?”
I don’t feel like talking so I just mumble something about things not looking good. I don’t really have any answers—I’m still trying to figure out what’s going on.
As it all sinks in, I feel like my whole life is suddenly being taken away. I’m trying to imagine going back to Scotland, or maybe London—where I’d go, what I’d do, how I’d manage. But it’s too overwhelming. I can’t bear to think about it. I close my eyes, as if I can block out everything that’s happening.
—
IT’S DARK OUT by the time I’m taken back downstairs in the freight elevator, then loaded onto a bus heading for the Hudson County jail in New Jersey. There’s no traffic in the tunnel or on the Pulaski Skyway, another route I know well from trips to Newark airport. But the bus pulls off the highway in Kearny—ironically, home to a bunch of Scots who came to America to work at a thread mill. I used to bring Liam here, to buy him Scottish soda and candy. Apparently it’s now a big hub for sending immigrants back.
Once we arrive, it’s too dark to see much as we’re led to intake. Detainees returning from court appearances get processed first, then the rest of us are unchained, strip-searched, and issued orange prison uniforms—plus a T-shirt, underwear, a roll of toilet paper, some soap, and a little toothpaste. Then we’re all put in a holding cell.
A guard asks if anyone is a vegetarian and I raise my hand, hoping to avoid the so-called meat I saw working in the kitchen at Rikers. So when everyone else gets a bologna sandwich, I’m given processed cheese on white bread, slathered with mayonnaise. It just tastes like a bland mush in my mouth.
This place looks like the kind of jail you see in movies, with two tiers of cells full of inmates who are locked down most of the time. I’m taken to a cell where a Hispanic guy is already asleep on the top bunk, so I crawl into the bottom bunk and actually manage to sleep for a few hours.
When I wake up, I have no idea where I am. My cellmate is brushing his teeth at the sink and I can hear somebody shouting, “Trays, trays, trays!…If you want to eat, get up and get it. If you stay in bed, you don’t get fed.” Then it hits me—I’m not at Rikers. My morning haziness quickly shifts to panic and dread.
After a guard buzzes our cell open, I follow the line of inmates heading to breakfast, hoping for a strong cup of coffee—which I already know I’m not gonna get. We’re still in intake, separated from detainees fighting their cases, so we’re all in a state of confusion. There’s no one from ICE to talk to, just guards who are much colder and more distant than any of the COs on the island. We only get let out of our cells for meals and a little time in a concrete yard facing the New Jersey Turnpike. There’s just enough room to walk in circles, staring at two soccer balls impaled on the razor wire above our heads.
The Hudson County jail is mainly a transit hub, so detainees come and go constantly. The second day, the Hispanic guy disappears, replaced by a Gulf War veteran from Guyana. He tells me he’s got a green card and has lived in America most of his life, but he got in a bar fight after he came back from Iraq and ended up with an assault charge—for defending Bush’s decision to go to war. His kids, his wife, and his mom all live here. He doesn’t know anyone in Guyana, where he might get sent any day.
Everybody has some equally depressing story. One guy keeps saying, “I’m an American, my mother is American. They can’t deport me—I’ve never even been to Africa.” He’s nineteen years old and got picked up because he missed an appointment with his probation officer.
Other than a few conversations about how people ended up here, I don’t talk much. I feel completely cut off from everybody I know. I keep worrying about what Jimmy’s gonna think when he doesn’t hear from me—probably that I relapsed—and how Liam will react once he finds out where I am. It crushes me to think I may not see him anytime soon. I still don’t know if Anna told him I was in jail.
I wish I could call somebody, but the money left in my commissary account didn’t follow me here, so I can’t buy a phone card. I could call collect, but not to a cellphone, which rules out trying to reach Tracy. And Anna is never home when we’re allowed out of our cells. It crosses my mind to try Susan, but I don’t know her number—and at this point, I’m not sure she’d want to hear from me. She’d probably just tell me that she warned me this could happen.
My only link to the outside world is the telly in the common area, which we get to watch for a couple of hours after we eat. It’s usually tuned to some mind-numbing show like America’s Funniest Home Videos, Court TV, or
Jerry Springer. Mostly the other detainees just trade rumors—we’re all getting shipped to Texas or Louisiana, or we’ll be deported from New Jersey as soon as ICE gets us travel documents. Since I lost my passport during the chaos of the last couple of years, people keep telling me I’m gonna get stuck here longer, waiting for the British government to issue me a new one.
No one really knows what the fuck is going on, and the guards don’t seem to know anything about our cases. They treat us like we’re worse than criminals—like shit on the bottom of society’s shoe, something offensive to be scraped off and thrown away. At Rikers, a lot of the COs would bullshit with us and some of the female guards even flirted, but here there’s none of that—they don’t interact with us at all. I’m bouncing between anger and total despair, wanting to scream or weighed down by depression.
Days pass—five or six, I lose count—and then it’s my turn to get woken up at 4 A.M. to be transferred. I’m herded to outtake with about twenty-five other detainees, all bleary-eyed and anxious. At first they don’t tell us what’s happening or where we’re going.
It takes hours to process us and sort us into groups moving to different detention centers. I end up on a rickety metal bus heading for Pennsylvania—once again shackled and chained. But it’s a beautiful day in late August, the first time I’ve been on a long drive in ages, so the bars on the windows don’t keep me from taking in the view. As we’re speeding along the highway, I’m thinking about possible photography projects, wondering what Liam is doing right now, trying not to dwell on everything I missed in the haze of addiction.
I’m in a seat by myself, but other people are talking to each other and shouting questions at the driver and the guard—asking where we’re going, what’s going to happen to us, and how long it’ll take to get there. The guard says all they know is that we’re going to York County and tells us again that everything will be easier if we just sign the papers.
Around noon, we pull off the highway and stop at a McDonald’s. The driver gets off and goes inside. When he gets back on the bus, the smell of fries wafts back toward us—my stomach grumbles in response. But they finish their burgers before passing out our packed lunches: a cheese stick, some pretzels, a little sandwich, and a juice box.
I manage to jab the tiny straw into the juice pack, but with my hands chained to my waist, I can’t get the straw close enough to my mouth to drink it. The bus is back on the highway by the time I get the plastic wrapper off the cheese, so when we hit a bump I drop it. Other people are complaining: “This is bullshit…how the fuck am I supposed to eat…these chains are too fucking tight.” All we had for breakfast was a mini box of cereal and a small carton of milk, so this kiddie snack we can’t eat just adds frustration to everyone’s hunger.
That’s when the hopelessness of my situation really hits me: I’m shackled in a bus being shipped from New Jersey to somewhere in Pennsylvania and I have no control over a fucking thing. I can’t tell anybody, nobody knows where I am, and I have no idea what’s going to happen to me.
This sick, chilling feeling stays with me for the rest of the ride, settling in once we pull up to our destination. York County Prison is a low-lying gray building surrounded by fences with barbed wire, but otherwise it blends in with the suburban offices and trees. It’s the kind of place you wouldn’t notice if you didn’t look closely—which just adds to the feeling that I’ve disappeared.
It can take a full day to get processed into Rikers Island—all the paperwork is done by hand—but this prison has its intake system down to a science. Everything is computerized and the staff is way more efficient. Within a couple of hours I’m back in an orange prison uniform with a wristband sliding up and down my arm. It’s got my name, photo, ID numbers, and a bar code so I can be tracked.
For all its backward bureaucracy, at least Rikers Island still felt like part of the world. You could see the Manhattan skyline, boats on the East River, planes taking off and landing at LaGuardia. Here I feel like I’m trapped inside a machine designed to move people through detention centers and spit them out of the country. We’re all tracked by our alien number, which is how the government refers to anyone who isn’t a citizen—as “aliens.” It feels like we’ve been totally removed from the world we used to know.
The dorm I’m taken to is an open rectangular room made of gray concrete blocks. There are two rows of metal bunk beds topped by thin plastic mattresses, with gray metal lockers next to each bunk. The only light comes from dim fluorescent tubes—there aren’t any windows except thin slits at the top of the room. At Rikers, light poured through the windows, I could move around between buildings, each dorm had its own personality. This place feels soulless, just gray and cold.
Even though it’s late August, it’s freezing inside. Other detainees are walking in circles with dingy blankets wrapped around their shoulders, the corners gathered in their hands. We’re in the heartland of America, but it looks like some kind of Third World refugee camp. I’m the only white person—everyone else is Hispanic, African, or Asian. I overhear bits of broken English, but I’m not in the mood to talk.
At 6 P.M., dinner is brought to the dorm on hospital-like trays. Since I said I was a vegetarian, I get a baked potato, a soy patty, and white bread—no vegetables or fruit, nothing nutritious. Without any money for commissary, I can’t buy coffee or oatmeal or peanut butter—nothing to supplement the practically inedible prison food.
After dinner, I lie down on my bunk, wrapped in a worn sheet and thin blanket. I just want to fall asleep, but the TV is blaring and even at night the lights are barely turned down from their dim daytime setting. I toss and turn, trying to find a position that’s slightly more comfortable, but every thought that enters my mind makes me more and more anxious.
Mostly I keep thinking about how long people have told me they’ve been locked up fighting their cases. I’m not sure I can spend a whole week in this place, never mind months or years. I’ll sign the papers if it comes to that, and I guess that’s the point—to make us feel so isolated and traumatized that we beg to leave.
—
MY SECOND NIGHT at York County Prison, I’m woken up by guards rousing people at 4 A.M. They’re walking around the dorm pointing flashlights in detainees’ faces, saying, “Pack up…pack up…pack up.” Lying there with my eyes half-open, I wait for them to approach me.
I can hear the sounds of lockers opening and shutting, people whispering, the metal bunks squeaking, feet in prison-issue slippers padding around the floor. After I close my eyes for a few minutes, the footsteps come nearer—it must be my turn.
“Yo, Scotland!” someone says. I open my eyes: It’s one of the young black guys I met at Hudson County, who also got transferred here.
“We’re getting moved,” he says. “Probably to Texas or Louisiana, but I’m not sure. They’re not telling us much except that we should pack up to leave.”
I’m still groggy, wondering why the guards haven’t approached me.
“Thanks for the boxers and T-shirt,” he says. He wasn’t issued any underwear when he got to York—supposedly, they’d run out—so I’d given him one of my two sets.
“No problem,” I tell him, propping myself up so I can shake his hand. “Good luck, maybe I’ll see you down there.”
“Yeah, maybe—if I haven’t been moved somewhere else by then.”
The next morning, the dorm is practically empty—most of the bunk beds stripped, the mattresses folded in half. I ask one of the guards where everybody went.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “We’ll be filled up again by dinner.”
It’s a real mind fuck, all these people getting taken away in the middle of the night. It’s the kind of thing you see in movies or hear about in repressive countries. I’m sure most people have no idea it’s happening here.
—
OVER THE NEXT few days I get to know some of the detainees who come and go. Since I don’t speak Spanish and many of them don’t speak English, ther
e are a lot of people I can’t talk to, but some of these guys have stories that are way more depressing than mine.
A blond guy from Lebanon tells me he’s getting deported for insurance fraud, after putting his aunt on his company’s medical plan so she could get kidney dialysis. He already spent two years in jail, paid $130,000 back to the insurance company, lost his house and his business—and now he has to move his American wife and kids to the Middle East, where he hasn’t lived for twenty years. He fought the deportation order for eleven months before losing his case.
An old man from El Salvador tells me in broken English that he once owned a car dealership but lost everything fighting to stay here, so he’s getting deported with just $190. When I ask him what he’s going to do, he tells me he’ll buy some flowers and apples and sell them on the street until he makes enough money to get a room. If that doesn’t work out, he’s not sure how he’ll manage.
A middle-aged Italian guy won’t talk to anyone except to say he got busted for a DUI. He seems like he’s got money—he has a green card, so he probably had a decent job. Whenever people try to engage him, he acts like he’s in a state of shock.
I get why he’s keeping to himself. Every time I get to know somebody, they end up getting transferred somewhere else, so after a while I stop making the effort. It’s too upsetting to make friends at dinner and then wake up to find out that they’re gone.
There isn’t much to do except pace around or play cards, but with just one deck we all have to take turns. There’s also a chess set that’s seen better days—a piece of toilet paper wrapped with Scotch tape fills in for a missing rook. I can’t remember the rules so I just watch other people play, trying to memorize how all the broken pieces are allowed to move.
Time passes so slowly I want to cry every time I look at the clock. When I’m sure an hour has gone by, it’s only been fifteen minutes. If I think it’s almost lunchtime, the hands point at 10 A.M. Just waiting around with nothing happening is really fucking with my head—I feel like I’m about to erupt.
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