What Life Is Like Caught in Crimmigration’s Web
How a Black trans asylum-seeker is fighting for her freedom
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“The only thing getting me through this is my will to survive. My head is just above water. I’m trying to get through the best that I can, but it is agonizing. Any way you cut it — mentally, physically, emotionally — this is painful,” Sza Sza quickly says into the phone, trying to tell as much of her story as she can before the detention center cuts the call after the allotted 30 minutes.
Sza Sza, who is not using her full name for safety reasons, is a transgender asylum-seeker from Jamaica in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody. Several weeks ago, ICE transferred her from the “LGBTQ pod” at the Cibola County Correctional Center in New Mexico to Texas’ El Paso Processing Center, where she is being detained in the men’s section of the facility.
Sza Sza says she doesn’t know why she and several other trans women were transferred out of Cibola and sent to El Paso, where they spend their days “locked up in cages.” Technically considered isolation, Sza Sza and the other trans women in El Paso spend 22 hours of their day confined to their cages, with just two hours granted for physical activity.
They are trailed by a guard wherever they go for their “safety,” including when they eat. For Sza Sza, all of this has meant that she can’t even partake in the activities that keep her sane while detained, like going to the library and reading law books that help her develop a better understanding of the perpetual loop of “crimmigration” she has been stuck in for almost a decade. The term was coined by legal scholar Juliet Stumpf in 2006 to describe the intersection of criminal law and immigration law. These two systems are now so intertwined they’re impossible to untangle.
Sza Sza has spent seven years of her life in the United States behind bars — incarcerated in the criminal justice system and detained in federal immigration custody. She is perhaps the longest-ever detained trans woman.
Sza Sza is caught in crimmigration’s web, and as a Jamaican LGBTQ asylum-seeker…
