Brianna Nofil

So we're going to kind of take the focus or the heat off of this one site and we are going to, you know, decentralize.

We are going to obscure people.

We are going to hide people in this sort of network of sites that we have rather than letting this one contentious site be the focus.

Absolutely.

For sure.

And this is something that is so clear in Louisiana today, right?

Like many communities in Louisiana have said, you know, we could not afford to keep our jails open in these communities if we were not getting these deals with ICE.

This is not like a footnote to the story of mass incarceration, right?

It is a pillar of mass incarceration.

Right.

To me, it is a core question of sort of who is an American.

Immigration detention's roots are in this moment that is so blatantly racist that sort of, you know, the Chinese Exclusion Act pulls no punches about what it is doing.

It is targeted to a specific group of people.

But that is where we get the legal precedents that undergird this entire system today.

It is a system that has only really ever, to my opinion, receded.

Immigration detention has only really ever rolled back when it is seen as threatening whiteness.

And it is a system that has, you know, continually expanded and gained public support by, you know, targeting racialized people, by targeting people who Americans are encouraged to imagine as maybe kind of criminal anyway, right?

It is doing...

political work and it is doing work that I think is like really revealing about how the nation sees itself.

to pursuing this because every president every politician wants to be appearing to protect the rights of the in-group it seems to me this all comes back to power and that it seems really easy this is such an easy power but I think the question is right it's like it's like who do you blame for problems and that is the question that the federal government has been trying to answer and it is continually come to the answer that the group to blame for problems and that problem can look different right the problem can be health it can be crime it can be