(matt)
Despite the threat sanctuary cities are under, I wish I lived in one. I wish I could support public officials who, politically at least, see noncitizens (whatever their immigration status) and citizens as equally worthy of moral consideration, as equal stakeholders in the community. Wyoming is lucky enough to have a few public officials who see both documented and undocumented residents of the state as part of their community family, but the odds, unsurprisingly, are not in our favor.
Wyoming’s ruling class, its cattle and mineral and real estate interests, often exhibits a uniquely and sometimes brutally indifferent attitude towards disadvantaged people. And although Wyoming has always had a significant Latinix community, it hasn’t been easy for them.
Comes now Management and Training Corporation, an allegedly terrible Utah company, to build an ICE detention facility in Evanston, the Wyoming border town an hour from Salt Lake City. Andrew Graham of the ever-important and brilliant WyoFile, described developments as of last October:
Both Evanston’s city council and Uinta County’s commission unanimously passed resolutions in June to support the Management Training Corporation’s plan to build and manage an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center just outside Evanston city limits. The jail would have the capacity to hold 500 undocumented immigrants detained by ICE while they await court hearings in Salt Lake City.
Uinta officials are uncertain whether they need Wyoming’s five statewide elected officials to approve the project. It is possible a jail holding immigration detainees does not require the same level of approval as other forms of private prisons regulated under Wyoming law, a county official said. Either way, MTC’s efforts to jail immigration detainees from throughout the northern rockies in Uinta County have thus far gone largely without notice in the state at large.
Except they didn’t go unnoticed for long. More on that in a minute, but first more about MTC, which has come under scrutiny for a number of problems that ought to raise red flags in the minds of the public: corrupt officials, riots, prison breaks, sexual abuse by officers, alleged human rights violations, and a number of other charges ranging from concerning to embarassing to horrifying. If even some of these charges are true, that raises serious public policy concerns. MTC also deploys prison labor and I was told by people I trust in this subject matter that it was very likely ICE will utilize detainee labor –practically unpaid–at the facility it wants in Wyoming. I’ve written articles and talked about this before. Extracting surplus value from the labor of the incarcerated is an especially insidious and destructive form of bio-political control.
MTC knows it’s in trouble. Fortunately, ICE is having problems of its own (notwithstanding the Trump administration’s mandate for ICE to behave like literal stormtroopers). Evanston, Wyoming–in Uinta County–is a chance for both corporation and goon squad to do right. Finding willing jurisdictions for building detention centers has been challenging. The hope is that Wyoming, immersed in a downward trajectory of economic insecurity, and highly supportive of unhinged border nationalist Donald Trump, will be a willing partner.
But there’s fierce resistance (partly due to Wyofile‘s coverage) and it’s growing throughout the state. Thanks to groups like Juntos, the ACLU, and the Equality State Policy Center (and many other organizations, churches, groups, and individuals, an organized effort is underway to pursue numerous political, legal, and social pressure-oriented means (check out #WyoSayNo) of stopping the project. I’m helping.
I’m not just helping because immigrants are human beings, detainees are human beings, and we’re all potential aliens and detainees (that’s all true though). I’m helping because our vision of the Commons, of community, and of cooperativism will not work alongside a regime of regulating human movement based on violence. If we are to “regulate” migration, let us do so democratically and cooperatively. That’s the spirit of the Commons appropriate to the tens of thousands of years of cultures migrating, traveling cyclically, escaping bad things and journeying to better places, together. Welcoming the stranger, giving the outsider the head seat at our table, is a recognition of our universal dependence on the Commons. If we have to regulate the way and where we move, we need different criteria, and different voices, in place to exist with and honor how and why we travel across, out of, and into shared spaces.
More later on this, here at C on the C, and elsewhere.
Cowboys on the Commons 