Just over an hour’s drive north of Gainesville in rural Baker County lies one of Florida’s five ICE detention centers.
For many locals, this proximity comes as a shock, said Joan Anderson, the 77-year-old program coordinator for Baker Interfaith Friends.
“I would say that probably most people in Gainesville would be surprised that we have an Immigration Detention Center just barely 60 miles north of us,” Anderson said. “We usually associate the detention centers [with] being somewhere else, but there are over 200 in the country. So we have one very near us.”
BIF’s mission is to be a compassionate voice and a listening ear for the isolated community to air its grievances and keep ICE officers accountable, said BIF volunteer Alice Gridley.
“We're not doctors, we're not lawyers,” she said. “The best we can do is listen to their stories. When I first started, we were able to bring paperback books to them, and that meant a lot because they had nothing to do all day long.”
Since 2008, BIF has conducted courtesy visits to immigrants to speak with them in friendly conversations. Twice every month, the organization’s dozen active volunteers talk with ICE detainees for 15-minute blocks over an allotted two hours.
“I hear the kinds of things where I feel that human rights are being violated, from a medical standpoint, from the food that they are given, and from the way they are treated,” Gridley said.
Gridley heard from one man who broke his arm after getting into a fight with another detainee. He was reassigned to the upper bunk of a different cell and couldn't get into it because of his arm. He had to sleep on the floor, she said.
“They do split up the families, and sometimes a family that's left behind has no way to support themselves,” Gridley said. “For example, sometimes a mother has small children, so if she can't work, she has to take care of the children.”
From what BIF coordinator Anderson hears from detainees, there is much to hold ICE accountable for. Although BIF holds an official visitation charter with ICE, detainees are treated with intense suspicion for complaints, he said.
“All the conversations are monitored,” Anderson said. “So they’re a little cautious in what they will tell you because there's rampant retaliation for anything the staff doesn't want you to know.”
Detainees aren’t allowed to discuss the quality of the food, the sleeping quarters and the quality of medical treatment, among other conditions, Anderson said.
For Anderson, the intense monitoring stems from how illegal immigrants are treated as criminals.
“Immigration detention is a civil offense,” Anderson said. “They are in detention, they're no threat to society. They're simply awaiting their hearings. At Baker County, they share a jail. On one side they have the people that are actual felons and criminals, and it's the same staff that serve them. So they treat them all alike.”
The poor treatment detainees face is ironic, Anderson said, as most detainees have lived in the United States for most of their lives. Many had moved to the U.S. as children, and by now have green cards, jobs in the community and families.
But, as one detainee learned, residence doesn’t guarantee citizenship.
“We had one man who was a tattoo artist,” Anderson said. “He made a big picture of ‘permanent doesn't mean forever.’ If he was caught with marijuana or driving without a license or broken taillight, that's cause for deportation. It’s a big surprise to them.”
One of the major miscommunications between the justice system and immigrant communities comes from language barriers. A lack of language knowledge, especially for those who learned very little English, means a limited understanding of the justice system.
Even for BIF volunteers, it can be difficult to communicate with detainees with whom they don’t share a language.
Richard MacMaster, the coordinator for Gainesville's Interfaith Alliance for Immigrant Justice, said translators were available for Spanish-speaking detainees, but there weren’t only Spanish speakers in the center.
“There was one man who didn’t speak English,” MacMaster said. “He was from Egypt. We didn’t have an Arabic translator.”
The poor treatment detainees face in the detention centers has led to active calls for the Baker County Detention Facility to be shut down. The Florida ACLU, Southern Poverty Law Center and Detention Watch Center are among the loudest voices for change.
The consequences of immigrant detention extend far beyond those individuals being detained. BIF coordinator Anderson noted this in a construction project right across the street from her home.
“It took them a couple of weeks, and I only ever saw two people working on the roof,” Anderson said. “I talked to the supervisor and he said the immigration policies that were just instituted by our governor here in Florida have scared off all his workers. Those jobs could be filled, but instead, people are sitting in detention.”
Although the stories volunteers hear from detainees are unsettling, there are a few silver linings concerning reform, Anderson said. Just last year, the institution built an outdoor recreation area for detainees to experience sunlight as a result of BIF’s visits.
For communication, Anderson said she hopes ICE’s new reforms in its visitation system will allow virtual visits, enabling the organization’s few volunteers to converse with more detainees than they would be able to in person.
Most of all, Anderson truly sees the impact their conversations had on the detainees they have spoken with. While recounting the story of a previous detainee from Somalia, she described a phone call she received from him a year after his release.
“We'd had a hurricane in Florida, and he wanted to make sure all the volunteers were okay,” Anderson said. “It was just so touching to me that he remembered after all that time that it meant so much to him that we had visited with him.”
Eluney Gonzalez contributed to this report.
Contact Laura Quintana at lquintana@alligator.org. Follow her on X @LauraCQuintana1.
Laura Quintana is a third year Journalism major. Spring 2024 is her first semester working at The Alligator. Some of the things she likes to do is read, write, and take pictures. Her biggest goal is to become a novelist and travel the world.
