Immigrants in ICE’s detention facility staged a hunger strike in solidarity with George Floyd.
What We Know:
- While the world is in an uproar over the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Abery and most recently Robert Fuller and Rayshard Brooks, those who are being detained by the government for being in the country illegally are protesing against police butality and racism even as they themselves are being held in captivity.
- Immigrants being held at the Mesa Verde immigrant detention center in Bakersfield, California decided to stage a hunger strike in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement sweeping the nation.
- Our Prism reported people of African descent make up the majority of those detained in immigrant holding facitlities even though most immigrants portrayed in the media are non-Black Latino. Across the country, Black immigrants from Cameroon, Mexico, Ghana, Haiti, Jamacia, Ethiopia, Brazil and other countries are detained in ICE facilities.
- Those being held have a high sensitivity and support to the civil unrest that the rest of the country is participating in.
- A Bangladesh immigrant named, Asif Qazi, who has been in captivity since February, handed a gaurd a written statement about the strike. “We, the detained people of dormitories A, B, and C at Mesa Verde ICE Detention Facility, are protesting and on hunger strike in solidarity with the detained people at Otay Mesa Detention Center,” Qazi wrote.
- “We begin our protest in memory of our comrades George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Oscar Grant, and Tony McDade. Almost all of us have also suffered through our country’s corrupt and racist criminal justice system before being pushed into the hands of ICE,” the statement read in part.
- It was reported by Quazi that everyone in the 70-person dorm had joined the strike.
- He advised that he, like others in the strike, see their struggle for justice in ICE detention as aligned with the Black Lives Matter movement. “We support their cause for protesting against a corrupt justice system and corrupt law officials,” he said. “We’re trying to intertwine our causes in one general fight for justice, and we believe ICE falls in the category of corrupt justice officials.”
- An Oakland-based Pro Bono legal service, Centro Legal de la Raza, that specializes in helping detained immigrants statewide, supported the hunger strike as a means for these individuals to engae in peacful activism and protest.
Lisa Knox, the managing attorney says she has seen many of the black immigrants involved in leadership on the inside. She stated “Perhaps it’s because folks who are the most marginalized are the most willing to speak up; and they’re often the most aware of how systems of oppression work.”
