AVID In the Chihuahuan Desert El Paso Service Processing Center LiteratureThe resources from both AVID and the Bracero History Archive are voluminous and provide a cross section of snapshots across time depicting a timeless human experience of travel in pursuit of a better life.
Both organizations offer firsthand accounts of the migrant, refugee, and guestworker experience during different time periods. In addition to some firsthand accounts through primary documents such as completed detainee grievance forms and notes from interviews with the grievant, AVID also allows for a better understanding of the extensive bureaucracy that shields the current US immigration system from comprehensive reform. Universally, concerns about detained migrants and refugees center around human rights; the bureaucracy that is shown through the included reports serve to demonstrate what interviewed detainees say themselves: detainees are not treated like human beings.
These works are indispensable for our project, particularly as the carceral experience of detained migrants in El Paso is laid bare by AVID, and the Bracero History Archive denotes less recent history that remains relevant for many El Pasoans. AVID documents the carceral nature of bureaucracy without extensive public oversight to provide checks and balances on a system that is centered around “power over” rather than “power to”. Ostensibly those who seek to declare asylum are “consenting” to detention under US policy, but by the very act of declaring asylum, are they not exhibiting an inability to consent?
AVID’s resources bring to light the system of crimmigration described by Carlos Cuauhtemoc Garcia Hernandez and the Panopticon described by Foucault. Brett Story’s methods of looking at what a carceral landscape is, in context with these sources, underscores that a geography like El Paso is in many ways carceral throughout. Outside of El Paso County, the surrounding geography on the US side of the border is relatively small in population, which socially makes it something of an island in a desert. This designation to a place that serves as a port of entry with such an extensive human detention program calls to question what part detention and crimmigration play in the El Paso economy even as many and perhaps most of the county’s inhabitants don’t align ideologically with the policies.
I was struck by the presence of a grievance log in the detention centers. AVID shared documents from federal agencies charged with seeking to maintain compliance protocols, including the Joint Commission which oversees all healthcare facilities in the US, and the DHS/ICE inspection reports, in which the beast is really running itself. What of these grievance logs? In democratically run organizations, grievance logs are powerful tools that can be used collectively to track organizational power. Although very different herein, it strikes me that the presence (and absence, in 2017, per DHS/ICE, as cited) of a grievance log offers an opportunity to use these public documents to show the human experience inside the walls of the detention centers.