Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Gould, a writer and theater director from Brattleboro who is a professor of Peace & Conflict Studies at Brandeis University.
[I]’ve just been on an educational trip to the Arizona-Mexico border. I know you can’t make completely dependable statements based on a short visit, but I am so disturbed by what I saw and heard, that I have to share this with the VTDigger community.
I have some history with immigrant rights. As half of the theater duo Gould & Stearns, I traveled the U.S. in the 1980s performing our “A Peasant of El Salvador.” Our play helped to provide energy and funding for the national Sanctuary movement. In the same vein, last year I created the song and video “Mother of Exiles,” using the words that Emma Lazarus wrote for the base of the Statue of Liberty to raise awareness about this current crisis.
Our university group went south to meet major actors in the new Sanctuary movement: undocumented laborers, legal asylum seekers, human rights workers, border patrolers, the migrants in prison and the jailers who keep them there. We left our jugs of water in a canyon where migrants are known to come through. I thought I might write a song or play or story about what I learned. But first, I have to pen this plea:
I’m here to tell my Vermont neighbors that — in the name of protecting us and our values — the Department of Homeland Security has put in place a new form of slavery that has no moral, political or military reason to exist.
We visited a town in Arizona that has 11 prisons! State, federal and for-profit, all taxpayer-funded. The prisons offer hundreds of jobs to locals. They’re part of a growing national dragnet that has caught few criminals, while it holds all the rest, upwards of 25,000 people, innocent of serious crimes — desperate travelers, family members young and old, legally registered visitors, guest workers, refugees — in a limbo that may have no legal end. Each prisoner is a captive generator of income: in some cases, for shareholders seeking maximum profit on their investment.
The system built up to hold these people is a stain on our republic; it’s a structure with the cold inner logic of Nazi Germany, and a level of arrogant self-justification of the kind shown by slave owners in the 19th century South.
You visit these prisoners, and you walk away in tears. You ask yourself, why is Fernando in prison? What did he do? He ran from the gang slaughter in his town. He has no family here. Somehow he survived the harrowing trip to our southern frontier. He made it across. He got caught. A good Samaritan bailed him out. He never saw the letter that told him where his next hearing would take place. He missed the meeting, and that’s his crime.
And David, a black Honduran who served in his country’s army for four years, before being targeted by gangs. He nearly died of thirst in the Sonoran desert. He’s out on bail in Tucson. Why does he have to pay $420 a month for his ankle bracelet, his shackle? How can he work to earn the money to pay for that?
The millions of Trump supporters who don’t want these dark-skinned visitors to make it here, take up jobs, register legally, go to school, raise families, pay taxes: Would these voters really rather pay the $30,000 to $50,000 a year it costs to keep each prisoner incarcerated?
Vermont officially abolished slavery ahead of the other states. The truth of that claim is complicated. Some forms of slavery existed here for nearly half a century after that abolition. But now it’s as if it never quite went away. Agents of ICE freely range our northern border, threatening our frightened farm workers with detention at any moment. They can swoop in at any time and take away a valuable member of our community.
We’re living in a new era of bondage, and our brave little state has a choice: Do we support it, or do we rally in opposition?
I suggest we make the strongest statement: that we do all that we can to embrace the Latino migrant workers in our midst, the ones keeping Vermont a viable dairy state. We must fight for their legal status. We have to challenge racial profiling, and fear of the other, every time we see it. Our Vermont values of welcome and tolerance are at stake.
We should support the volunteer work of folks who work for Migrant Justice, and Borderlinks, and Vermonters for Criminal Justice Reform.
We must pull every inmate we have exiled to an out-of-state for-profit prison, and bring them back to Vermont. We’ll make a genuine effort to reduce our incarcerated population, especially women with children, especially prisoners waiting for trial or bail hearings. And we must refuse to do business with CCA, formerly Corrections Corporation of America, now called Core Civic.
We must permanently take off the table the notion of hiring CCA to build a huge new prison complex in our state. Let’s tell our leaders in Montpelier what a terrible road that would be, to go down.
