New American Media : After Years In Limbo -- More Immigrant Detainees Choose 'Voluntary' Deportation

Saturday, August 19, 2006

After Years In Limbo -- More Immigrant Detainees Choose 'Voluntary' Deportation

from a comment by M.C. | August 19, 2006

The immigrant goes to the overcrowded and degrading ‘Krome Processing Centre’ ... some kind of “concentration camp” located behind treacherous snake-ridden swamps, alligator-infested moats, miles of barbed wire, under the watch of armed guards and countless security cameras ...

They say that places like Krome are not prisons. However, you get there with handcuffs, if you are lucky only your hands but I heard people who was brought there wearing one of those chains that bind you hands and feet together, which some call ‘shackles’, similar to those worn by African slaves brought to work on American plantations, generations ago.
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In Krome, I was sharing a dormitory with a large number of other people from all over the world, a multi-toilets bathroom not separated by walls or doors, so while you are brushing your teeth, other people may be sitting on the toilets close to you, some more showering, and a long line of people waiting for the next available toilet or sink or shower, all in the same room. You better stop thinking about hygiene and privacy or you will drive yourself crazy. There are several cameras in the dormitory observing you 24 hours, and two officers every eight hours sitting there, and you only go out on recreation one hour or so a day under surveillance of a number of officers, and that’s if doesn’t rain. Still they tell you that you are lucky to be there and not in a “real” prison.
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The temperature in Krome’s dormitories is kept to 68/70 degrees, the officers wear a jacket, the detainee a short sleeve “shirt” and he is prohibited to get into the bed for warmth during the day. Along with a Syrian detainee, I used to sit close to the retractable steel door, warmed up by the outside sun.

Nobody tells you what happens or where you are going and for how long. You wake up the next morning and your next-bed buddy, the one you have been talking, crying and sharing with, had just silently ‘disappeared’ in the middle of the night. What a horrible feeling! For some reason, it brought back to my mind what I read about the Gestapo.