An hour ago – 10pm on a Sunday – my husband Zahid called from inside the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma. His voice was tense. The pod was on lockdown.
They had taken twenty men overnight — nearly a fifth of his unit — without warning or explanation. The tablets used to call family had been confiscated. Guards were hovering, pressuring him to hang up the phone. In two months of detention, that has never happened before.
He didn’t know where the men were being taken. ICE doesn’t tell them. But everyone inside knows what it means when they disappear without notice: deportations, or transfers. Often across the country. Sometimes to facilities far worse — hotter, more isolated, stripped of family contact and medical care…