100 Immigrants Go on Hunger Strike in Tacoma Detention Center

By teleSUR

12 April 17

The NWDC has been a frequent target of immigrant activists since a March 2014 hunger strike involving 1200 detainees.

ver 100 immigrants at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, WA started a three-day hunger strike Monday to protest their poor living conditions, reported immigrant rights group NWDC Resistance in a statement.

The detention center is one of the largest immigration prisons in the country, with the capacity to hold up to 1,575 people who are facing civil deportation proceedings.

Since noon Monday, the immigrants refused their meals, stopped using their phones, would not abide by the late night count or lights out, in a bid to obtain better food, better hygiene and medical attention, increased recreational time, and speeded-up court proceedings, among other demands.

“Immigration and Customs Enforcement contracts with the GEO Group, a multinational private prison corporation, to run the facility, and hunger strikers aimed their demands at both the federal government and the private contractor,” said the immigrants' support group in a press release.

“It is very likely that ICE and Geo will try to retaliate by switching them (the striking detainees) to other pods or sending them to solitary,” NWDC Resistance leader Maru Mora Villalpando told the crowd Monday outside of the facility as they held a solidarity action.

In March 2014, over one thousand people detained at the NWDC decided to start a hunger strike, which lasted for 56 days and spread to other detention centers across the United States.

The NWDC has been a frequent target of immigrant activists since that hunger strike first brought international notoriety to the immigration prison.

“This year, on the third anniversary of their action, we reflect on their achievements and make an abolitionist call to stop locking people up and end all deportations,” added the activists.

The conditions have still not improved much in three years, as immigrants explain that they are paid US$1 per day for mandatory work — sometimes not even paid — despite running all the facility's basic services, and receiving a bag of chips in exchange for several nights of waxing the prison’s floors for instance.

“Detention conditions were already terrible under Obama, and from what we’re hearing, they’ve gotten even worse since Trump’s election,” deplored NWDC Resistance.