The teenager is fourteen. The intake line at Delaney Hall does not stop. The steam in the holding area is thick enough to swallow a scream before it leaves a throat. You signed the document that put them there, Geo Group. You called it a contract. You called it facility management. You called it a solution. You starve, spray, and lock human beings behind bars to feed a profit ledger.
Three hundred detainees — women, teenage girls, men — have now smuggled letters out of the Newark ICE detention center describing maggots in the food, mandatory labor at a dollar a day, and medical care dispensed with the precision of a meat-packer. The Department of Homeland Security has dismissed the reports as a “hoax,” the rhetorical flourish the apparatus reaches for when its management of the externalities begins to slip. Geo Group, through the same accounts, acknowledged a single “physical altercation” that involved “limited use of chemical agents” — clinical phrasing that buries the bruising while the chemical sting still hangs in the air. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, after a restricted congressional visit, called the conditions “a depraved indifference to human life.” DHS responded by denying full access to families, attorneys, and state health inspectors. Tom Homan, the President’s border czar, threatened that guards would force-feed the hunger strikers; ICE secretly moved one strike leader to another facility in violation of a court order. The city imposed a curfew and a protest buffer zone. The processing line did not pause.
Tom, hear what you have done. The men and women in the Delaney Hall cell block did not ask to be locked behind wire mesh. They did not ask to be forced to work on the line for a dollar a day. They did not ask for the chemical spray to be deployed against them by the managers of a company that sells their confinement to the highest bidder. They asked to be left alone.
Your swallow catches when you think of the hunger strike. There is a metallic taste under your tongue when you raise a glass of water — the taste of the chemical agents your managers sprayed into detainees’ eyes, the taste of the force-feeding you are threatening. It goes down your throat and sits there. It does not leave. Your jaw aches at dinner as if you have been holding your teeth shut against a screaming mouth. Your shoulders pull tight with the weight of three hundred bodies pressing against a lock that should not be there. Your hands, reaching for a fork, feel the phantom ache of the bruised ribs of the teenagers you have locked up.
Geo Group, you pay a dollar for a human life. You take the dollar and you hold it. The dollar burns your palm. The dollar is the sting of the spray. The dollar is the taste of spoiled food. The dollar is not clean. The dollar is the blood that has not yet been washed from your fingers. The intake algorithm processes human-shaped variables, and the dollar-a-day labor is an efficiency gain, and the chemical sting in the air is a maintenance cost not yet high enough to trigger a settlement. To the corporation, the body is a unit of service. But the teenager’s lungs are not yet ready for the chemical air, and her vertebrae are not yet ready for the hours. Your ledger has accounted for every per-diem. It has not accounted for the lung-burn. The lung-burn will be there when the accounts are closed, and it will be there when the laws you bypassed finally demand an accounting of their own.
And you, Tom, with your force-feeding threats. You are a small man in a large suit. You puff your chest, but your chest is hollow. You are a bureaucrat with a baton, standing over humans you have declared to be less than human. You threaten tubes and clamps. You speak as if the body is a machine you are recalibrating, and you do not hear the sound the body makes when it is being hollowed out. The apparatus has organized the body out of the conversation, but the hunger strike of the captive is the only language remaining, and it will not be quieted by a feeding tube.
What would you say if it were your daughter in that cell block, Tom? What would you say if the maggots were in your daughter’s bowl, if the chemical spray made her eyes burn and she could not breathe? You cannot picture her there because the ledger requires that you do not. You have to keep her in your warm house, eating dinner, while you order the hunger to starve other people’s children.
He that is an hireling, and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth: and the wolf catcheth them, and scattereth the sheep.
John 10:12
The teenager is on the processing line. The steam is thick enough to swallow a scream. The morning continues.