At the immigration detention center in Tacoma last week, activists carefully tended a memorial altar adorned in yellow flowers, pictures and candles created to remember the life of Charles Leo Daniel, who died at the facility.
Daniel, 61, died March 7 after spending at least three years in solitary confinement at the detention center, formally known as the Northwest ICE Processing Center. His cause of death has not yet been released.
Daniel’s death was just one of the latest manifestations of what activists and the University of Washington Center for Human Rights called a pattern of dangerous conditions for people in immigration detention at the private, for-profit site, such as poor medical care, spoiled food and excessive use of force.
Federal data analyzed by UWCHR showed Daniel’s time in solitary was the second longest of any detained immigrant nationally since 2018. The longest was also at the facility. According to the United Nations, solitary confinement longer than 15 days is considered a form of torture.
Before coming to the detention center, Daniel, who was identified by Immigration and Customs Enforcement as having serious mental health issues, served 18 years for a murder conviction in a Washington prison.
For years, people held in the center have gone on numerous hunger strikes to protest the conditions inside and activists outside have joined them in solidarity. Immigrants are held in the detention center while undergoing immigration proceedings, which can stretch on for years.
Attention on the facility grew in 2018 after the death by suicide of a Russian man. After Daniel’s death, members of immigration rights group La Resistencia and Japanese American social justice group Tsuru for Solidarity went on their own hunger strike to show their support for people inside who they said were also on hunger strike.
The two groups set up an encampment outside the detention center to let the facility operators and the people held inside know there are people watching and people who care.
For members of Tsuru for Solidarity, supporting people locked in cages is a moral imperative.
Stan Shikuma, a leader of the group, said, “The folks inside are nameless and faceless, invisible, literally invisible. And at best, they are a number.” He likened what’s happening today to the experience of Japanese Americans in 1942, when over 120,000 people were forced into incarceration camps in remote parts of the U.S. under the guise of national security.
Japanese Americans were nameless and faceless then, too, Shikuma said, with many people not knowing that the camps even existed, much less knowing anyone who was sent to them. “We experienced mass incarceration, we experienced family separation, we experienced kids being locked up. We experienced indefinite detention where we were put in a locked facility and no one can tell us how long we’ll be there. And when we talk to people inside [the detention center], it’s the same thing,” he said.
Maru Mora Villalpando, a leader of La Resistencia, was on a solidarity hunger strike for 12 days until ending it early last week. She said the protesters’ presence outside of the center has created a necessary “disruption to the system.”
Mora Villalpando said La Resistencia and Tsuru for Solidarity are doing the work no one else wants to do to create real, profound change. The groups are calling on Washington Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell to increase oversight of the facility to improve safety and accountability for the people inside. Among other demands, they want the senators to make public statements about the death of Daniel; conduct an independent investigation and hearing on the detention center and its owner, the GEO Group; and decrease funding for ICE and the detention center.
Tsuru for Solidarity co-founder, Mike Ishii, said the group wants to be “the allies we didn’t have during World War II … Nobody came to stand at the fences in protest. Nobody made big demands that this must stop. And so our mission statement is to stop this from being repeated on other communities.”
Raised in the Seattle area and now living in New York City, Ishii came to the protest at the detention center and was on hunger strike for five days before ending due to health concerns.
Ishii said part of the reason it is hard to get the public to pay attention to the conditions in the detention center is that the right wing has largely controlled the narrative around immigration and Democrats have mostly ceded that ground.
Just as was the case during World War II and the incarceration of Japanese Americans, “there’s a lot of misinformation based on fear of national security and scarcity of jobs,” Ishii said. “It’s a very beautifully weaponized narrative that has gone into the mainstream. And so everyone believes it now.”
For Japanese Americans, the narrative was “that you are unassimilable, that you are an enemy alien, that you are going to take our jobs, steal our farmlands, you’re a threat to national security. This is the exact language they used to justify the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans, many of them who were immigrants who were denied the right to naturalize. So this is a recycling of violence toward immigrants. We’ve seen it over and over again,” he said.
Ishii also said they want their presence at the detention center to offer some hope to those locked inside. “There’s a level of institutionalized racism that’s trying to erase the violence against people and immigrants of color. And that we could not tolerate,” he said. “So we’re trying to give hope to people who have lost hope, because of the violence of the state. And we’re also trying to make the state become accountable and acknowledge the violence is actually going on, right under our noses at this very moment that it’s really largely being ignored.”