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The American Creed: Immigration and Detention in Tacoma

Wendy Pantoja

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Interviews 24 plain 2018-05-09T22:15:55-07:00
Maru Mora Villalpando
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“I am just passing what I heard from the detention center, I am not a big genius. My job has been to listen to people detained and to make sure that what I listen is passed onto the outside, that’s all I do. Some people just don't listen”
Maru Mora Villalpando is an nationally recognized, undocumented rights activist in the Seattle-Tacoma area who leads the NWDC Resistance, a grassroots organization that advocates for undocumented immigrants detained in the Northwest Detention Center. In this interview, Maru discusses the challenges she faces as an activist as well as strategies, collalitions, and collaborations she incorporated into her successful movement. Maru also discusses her current fight against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who has been targeting immigration activists.

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Rose Pytte
“[The NWDC] is part of a long history of colonialism and forcibly removing people of color and separating them from families and homeless ”
Rose Pytte is a senior at the University of Puget Sound with a major in African American Studies and a minor in Gender and Queer Studies. She is the outgoing president of a student organization at UPS called Advocates for Detained Voices (ADV) that works in conjunction with local grassroots undocumented led organizations in the Seattle-Tacoma area to advocate and support families struggling with loved ones detained inside the NWDC. On their campus, this club organizes rallies and protests to bring awareness to issues of immigration, detention, and deportation. They also have a radio show called Locked Up and Tuned In, and a semesterly zine called Anonymous Voices, that features grienceses from people inside the NWDC to elevate the voices of those caged in the immigration prison. In this interview, Rose discusses how her identity shapes her work and the institutional barriers her and ADV have been met while doing this immigration advocacy work.

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Miguel Armenta
“It feels like I am still inside [the Northwest Detention Center] but in a beautiful place."
Born in Puebla, Mexico and immigrated to the United States at the age of 12, Miguel Armenta, shares his experience being detained at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, WA for over a year. He discusses his reasons for organizing and leading the Hunger Strike in 2014, sharing the terrible living and working conditions that he lived through. Miguel also explains how his life has changed as a result of his detention.

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Wendy Pantoja
“[GEO] está jugando un papel de lucro con nuestras comunidades, se lucra con las necesidades de las families.”

As a child, Wendy Pantoja saw her father fight for the rights of marginalized people in her community of Yucatan, Mexico. Now living in the United States, she follows her father’s similar path by advocating for undocumented people that are affected by the Northwest Detention Center. Wendy shares some of the experiences she's seen while organizing the undocumented community through the Northwest Detention Center Resistance. She closes her interview with a message to people who have the privileges of being US citizens and how they can help mitigate the impact of the Northwest Detention Center.

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Angel Padilla
“I was literally dying at that moment and I was not going to go without a fight.”
Angel Padilla was detained at the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC) on January 2016. While detained after a conviction while he was a teen, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) authorities have repeatedly denied him a life or death surgery he required to remove a cancerous tumor in his left kidney. Angel discusses his experience detained inside the NWDC including his organizing and every-day forms of resistance. He discusses how his life has change as a result of his incarceration and the role that immigrant and legal advocates played in his release.

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Many Uch
“It wasn't about fighting to be free but fighting the suffering I had to go through.”
Many Uch is a Cambodian refugee who has been fighting his order of deportation for almost 20 years. His story resembles many refugees and permanent residents that have been deported for mistakes they made in their youth. Many discusses the connection that the immigration system and the criminal justice system have in common as well as sharing his experience being detained in the Seattle INS building in the early 1990’s. Today, Many is a father and husband who has dedicated his life as a mentor and a nationally recognized advocate for men who have lived similar experience to his as a previously incarcerated Asian-Pacific Islander refugee.

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Henry Tehutli
“Hay 24,000 muertos en el desierto entre los Estados Unidos y México, yo podía ser uno de ellos.”

From LA, to Salt Lake, to Seattle, Henry Tehutli has been involved in immigration justice and immigrants rights in every city he has lived. In this interview, Henry talks about his experiences crossing the U.S.-Mexico border and almost left there to die when their coyote lost them in the middle of the desert. Henry discusses his experience being detained in a detention center in Arizona and shares some of the similarities across private detention centers and the traumas that linger in his mind since his detention.

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Silky Shah
“The immigration system is run as a police force; as an enforcement operation. It is not run as a system to support in getting status.”
Growing up and seeing her mother face racism and xenophobia in Texas, Silky Shah, the Executive Director at the national coalition Detention Watch Network talks about how the NWDC is part of a larger trend of privatized detention. Silky discusses the intersections of race and gender across groups that have been affected by private immigration detention. Silky references historical moments like 9/11, 1965 Immigration Law and others that have influenced her in her advocacy work.

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Elizabeth Padilla
“You’re not looked like as a human, your rights as a human are ignored. You are just a bed, you are a number that they are trying to fill that pays them”
Growing up as a Mexican-American in Southern California, Elizabeth Padilla never considered herself “American.” Her interest in immigration justice came when she helped her father become a US citizen but intensified when her husband was detained at the Northwest Detention Center. That is when she began to research on immigration laws, wrote to her senators and representatives, spoke in Washington DC and sharing her husband's stories. Elizabeth discusses her “rollercoaster of emotions” while her husband, Angel was detained.

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Tomas Madrigal
“You have to decide to either support the leadership or get out of the way”

Growing up, Tomas Madrigal saw his mother and father navigate racism and injustices throughout their life as migrant farmworkers in eastern Washington. Tomas discusses the direct links between private immigration detention and the plight of migrant farmworkers.

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