VivirLatino

When your cuerpo is used as fodder to feed the prison industrial complex, how do you transform that body into a weapon of protest? For immigrants caught up in detention, using their bodies to protest the horrible and inhumane conditions inside is nothing new. What is new is the context that the current administration has made it clear that prison “reform” is not a priority, much less if the prisons we are talking about “reforming” are for those labeled alien/foreign/unwanted/brown.

Now, another group of immigrants inside a detention center are on hunger strike, their fifth one, in protest of the deplorable conditions at the South Louisiana Correctional Facility in Basile. This detention center is run by the private contractor LCS Corrections Services Inc. and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

According to the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice, more than 100 detainees acted as human rights monitors inside the jail throughout July. “Over the course of a month, detainee human rights monitors recorded complaints, attempted to lodge hundreds of grievances, and communicated with advocates about jail conditions,” said NOWCRJ, which released a report of their findings and the accounts of the several detainees.

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