A wide network of institutions that detain immigrants spans every major city in the United States. And although in those urban centers the work of the undocumented often drives restaurants and builds skyscrapers, the detention centers and county jails where they were held for months – and even years – are invisible to others.
In his multimedia project “Seclusion Spaces” , the photographer and anthropologist Cinthya Santos-Briones combines drawings, poems and oral accounts of former inmates with collages made by her to shed light on life in four New Jersey facilities: the Elizabeth Detention Center and the prisons in Bergen, Essex and Hudson counties.
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Under contracts with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), prisons currently hold 117 undocumented, according to the most recent count by ICE officials. The number is much lower than in years past. The Elizabeth Detention Center, a for-profit facility run by CoreCivic , currently has 138 immigrants.
The four prisons have faced years of demands , protests and a wave of hunger strikes unprecedented in denouncing inadequate medical care, lack of due legal process for detainees and inability to protect them against COVID – 19. Essex County ended his commitments to ICE in May claiming that it was more lucrative to confine inmates at the jail in neighboring Union County, which is in closing process.
In late June, the New Jersey State Legislature approved a bill to prevent county jails from having agreements with ICE and the state from entering into contracts with private immigration detention facilities. If Gov. Phil Murphy passes the bill, New Jersey will become the fifth state in the nation to bar counties from signing new contracts with federal immigration authorities.
Briones began selecting materials for “Seclusion Spaces” during the Trump era. As the former president’s anti-immigrant speech and policies fueled news coverage of the US-Mexico border, Briones, who is Mexican, grew weary of the barrage of traumatic images of border crossings. 
“The point came when I no longer wanted to see more photos of parents separated from their children, or of cells full of immigrants who were cold and hungry,” says Briones, who lives in the city of New York and identifies as an “immigrant artist of color, with indigenous and mestizo roots.”
“There is a lucrative market for photos that show the pain of the ‘other’. I was very tired of seeing those kinds of images while almost nothing changed. ”
Instead of focusing on what Trump characterized as a“ crisis border ”, Briones wanted to create a space where immigrants could tell their own stories. To collect the material, he met with small groups of former inmates at the Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd in Brooklyn, which serves as a gathering place for undocumented immigrants. Briones and her husband, the pastor Juan Carlos Ruiz , are volunteers of the Good Shepherd. The artist also conducted individual workshops in the homes of some participants.
Briones invited the audience to draw the spaces where they were detained and to relate the details of their confinement. As a result, he obtained images of brick walls, prison plans, security cameras, metal fences, and tray after tray of processed foods. The overall theme is the overwhelming monotony of life behind bars.
The collages by Briones combine images from the media with their own photographs to represent the countries of origin of those people, its multinational routes to the US and the political and economic displacement that migration frequently causes. Initially, I planned to work with the workshop attendees to create the collages , but COVID – 19 made it risky to share materials.
So far, some 17 people have participated in the project. Most of the participants in the workshops come from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Venezuela and Mexico. Many of them are indigenous to the Quiché, Mam and Mixtec communities of Guatemala and Mexico. One participant hails from Zimbabwe.
Isaac Garay Ponce, a Salvadoran immigrant who works cleaning offices in Jersey City, participated in a workshop last year. He lives five minutes from the Hudson County Jail, where he was held for three years before winning his asylum case at .
“I’m going through there all the time and I remember those moments with mixed feelings ”, affirms the man from years that crossed into the US. USA in 2019 after receiving death threats from gangs in El Salvador. “Nobody can explain what happens in there like us. No one is going to tell you that food is bad. That you have to cry for someone to give you a roll of toilet paper. That the showers are so hot they burn the skin. That the cops are racists. So it is better that those who have been inside give others an idea of what it is like to be there. ”
Ponce, like many participants in the workshops, highlighted that county jails use different uniforms and spaces to distinguish between the detained immigrants of the imprisoned citizens.
“They call you ‘detained’ or ‘prisoner’, but for me there is no difference,” he says . “We bathe at the same time, we have recess at the same time, we eat at the same time. What you really come to understand is that you are no longer Isaac, Juan or Ernesto. You are a number. ”
Briones hopes that with the creation of community spaces to tell stories, the project can go beyond the trauma of the participants. Ponce had to imagine a future outside of prison in order to survive. Inside he learned English speaking with other detainees and used his skills to read about the US legal system and litigate his own asylum case.
“Now I can visualize my life in ten years,” he says. “If I managed to survive three years of eating bad food, fighting loneliness and dealing with the character of others and the mistreatment of the authorities, I don’t think there is something I cannot do. You would be surprised to know what we could do in such a small space. ”
“ Seclusion spaces ” it is an ongoing project. It can be found in the website by Cinthya Santos-Briones, and currently appears in the exhibition We, Women of the festival Photoville in New York City. The exhibition will be open to the public until September at Empire Fulton Lawn.
Ariel Goodman collaborates with The Marshall Project c As a Tow Foundation Fellow for Audience Participation. She is bilingual, works in multimedia, and focuses her work on community media, collaborative journalism and participation to raise the voices and stories of those most affected by injustice.