MOVEMENT VICTORY!

Together, we #ShutDownIrwin 
ICE contract terminated in Irwin County after years of organizing

Today, we celebrate a massive victory. ICE has been notified by the Dept. of Homeland Security Secretary that it will have to shut down the immigrant prison in Ocilla, Georgia at the Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC). (Intercept article here)

For many years, a grassroots movement has organized to shut down ICDC. Georgia-based organizations Project South, GLAHR, Georgia Detention Watch, and South Georgia Immigrant Support Network and many others fought side by side with racial justice movements to defund police, end ICE raids, and dismantle state surveillance in our communities. We called for the closing of all cages and targeted ICDC in South Georgia, owned by private prison company LaSalle Corporation and ICE.

The campaign made international headlines in September when Project South and partners submitted a detailed complaint exposing the atrocities happening at ICDC with direct testimony from detained immigrant women and whistleblowing nurse, Dawn Wooten. Dozens of women stepped forward to testify to the medical abuse, forced sterilization, and invasive gynecological procedures happening to them without consent while incarcerated.

After many years of working with immigrants incarcerated at the ICDC, Project South celebrates the courage of dozens of immigrants who came forward despite retaliation and threats of deportation to tell their harrowing stories and fight for the shutting down of Irwin. We celebrate the power of grassroots movements to defeat white supremacy and social control. We celebrate the local leadership of organizers in South Georgia working daily to break the isolation and support the people incarcerated inside ICDC. We celebrate the movement lawyers who filed federal complaints, filed lawsuits, demanded medical records, supported immigrant cases, and connected legal strategies to organizing strategies. We celebrate the long history of movement work that reminds us that every win is an accumulation of years of rigorous work and vision. [See below for the organizing story behind the victory]

We also recognize that every win requires accountability and vigilance. We demand that all immigrants detained by ICE at Irwin be released, not transferred to other deadly detention facilities. We demand that the entire facility be shut down, not continue to be used as a county jail.

“Today’s closure marks an important step in the right direction—but this country’s disgraceful practice of profiteering from locking people up lives on. We will not stop fighting until we end the private detention racket, dismantle the cruel deportation machine, and reverse the racist criminalization of immigration in this country.” – Adelina Nichols, Executive Director of GLAHR

“We celebrate this hard-won end to immigrant detention at ICDC, and yet we lament the continued suffering of all harmed in body, mind, and spirit at this center, including employees. The incalculable damage caused by immigrant detention confirms that imprisonment is no solution to worldwide immigration challenges.” – Leeann Culbreath, Co-Chair of South Georgia Immigrant Support Network

“The closure of the Irwin County Detention Center marks a decisive victory in the long war against white supremacy in the US south and across the globe.  While they have yet to receive justice, today those who suffered at Irwin have been vindicated.  The abuses at Irwin are emblematic of our urgent need to end immigrant detention and abolish ICE.” – Kevin Caron, Steering Committee Member of Georgia Detention Watch

“This victory is monumental and would not have happened without the bravery of the immigrants and the workers who called out the abuses. While we celebrate this moment, we know that there are hundreds of immigrants still detained in 3 other ICE detention centers in Georgia and across the country with inhumane conditions. We look forward to continuing this fight.” – Priyanka Bhatt, Staff Attorney with Project South

Project South renews our commitment to fight the long haul battles for fundamental change. We have a responsibility to understand how we achieved this victory and a responsibility to continue organizing until all detention centers and prisons are closed, our people are released, and the harm is repaired.

This is a collective victory. Movement victories happen when slow, steady, strategic work manifests what we believe is possible:

  • Project South launched a campaign with Georgia-based partners to shut down immigrant detention centers in 2016 and produced “Imprisoned Injustice: Inside Two Georgia Immigrant Detention Centers,” an investigative report published by Project South and Penn State Law Center for Immigrants’ Rights Clinic in May 2017
  • Nationally recognized human rights attorney and Project South’s Legal & Advocacy Director, Azadeh Shahshahani and Staff Attorney Priyanka Bhatt led the efforts to investigate and expose the horrific conditions of detention centers in Georgia, includingsending letters to the Georgia Congressional delegation demanding an investigation and the shutting down of Irwin. Project South also submitted several requests for investigation to international and regional bodies in partnership with the Penn Law Transnational Legal Clinic.
  • As COVID hit prisons, jails, and detention centers hard in 2020, detained immigrants held a hunger strikeand released a video demanding aid. Project South and partners wrote op-eds; submitted letters to Georgia congressional delegates warning them about the conditions and urging release; held virtual press conferences; organized a caravan action to Irwin with dual demands to release the detained immigrants and to provide paid sick leave for employees who live in a devastated rural economy, linking the dangers and increasing the possibility for solidarity across frontlines.
  • Working with the testimonies of numerous detained immigrants, nurse whistleblower Dawn Wooten, and grassroots partners,Project South submitted a 27-page complaint to the Office of Inspector General on September 14, 2020 to demand a full investigation, the shutting down of all detention centers in Georgia, and release of people back to their families.
  • Within a few days, hundreds of organizers from around the country joined a call to launch the coalition’s 5 Point Planto: 1) Break the Pipeline; 2) Close the Cages; 3) Repair the Harm; 4) Free the People; and 5) Tell the Truth.
  • The coalition organized over 6,800 people to sign on to apetition demanding Irwin County commissioners break the contract with ICE and LaSalle to shut down ICDC.
  • Over 800 medical practitioners, nurses, midwives, and healers signed ahistoric statement written by prominent public health leaders, intellectuals, and organizers to condemn the forced sterilizations, call for the Shut Down of Irwin, and press for abolition of the prison and medical industrial complex.
  • Project South met with a Congressional delegationwho visited the Irwin County Detention Center in late September. Within a week of their visit, HR1153 was passed with a bipartisan support condemning the abuses at Irwin and demanding an investigation. “The Squad” led by Representative Rashida Tlabi called on the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to initiate an international investigation.
  • Through online forums with Black feminist leaders, indigenous organizations, reproductive justice groups, and prison abolition efforts, we connected the #ShutDownIrwin cross-movement campaign to reproductive justice, workers’ rights, public health and healing justice, and the movement to dismantle the prison industrial complex.
  • Project South partnered with the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington to file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)request to investigate gynecological procedures at other ICE prisons around the country. We had to file a lawsuit in order to get the information and will release what we have learned to the public soon.
  • Project South in partnership with the Penn Law Transnational Legal Clinic briefed various international and regional human rights bodies about the human rights abuses at Irwin. In December, we also filed a communication with various United Nations Special Rapporteurs.
  • On December 18, 2020,International Migrants Day, the #AllEyesOnGeorgia #AllEyesOnIrwin social media campaign connected the Senate runoff, the power of Georgia voters, and the need to keep the heat on the Department of Homeland Security to shut down Irwin.
  • Project South along with the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, Columbia Law School and several other law school clinics, and Attorney David Dryer, andfiled a lawsuit against ICE on December 22, 2020. Azadeh Shahshahani, Legal and Advocacy Director at Project South and co-counsel on the lawsuit, tells TIME  “As part of the lawsuit we’re gonna show that ICE knew as far back as 2018 that there was medical abuse taking place.”
  • Survivors of Irwin’s violence spoke out on Democracy Now,December 28th.
  • In spring 2021, Project South launched the Repair the Harm pilot programwith organizers and mental health care practitioners to train and coordinate movement-informed mental health practitioners to provide support to women survivors who experienced harm at ICDC. The project applies a healing justice approach and investigates the possibilities of repair as part of our movement organizing.
  • As a member of the Detention Watch Network’s national “Communities Not Cages” campaign,Project South and partners participated in the week of action in late March. We urge our members to continue to take action to shut down detention centers all over the South and the country.
  • In April 2021, Irwin stopped detaining immigrant women. Advocacy and demands to release the men, end the ICE contract, and shut down the facility continued. Joint statement was releasedwith partners and the Detention Watch Network as part of their campaign to pressure the Biden administration.
  • May 20, 2021 – Contract between ICE, Irwin County, and LaSalle terminated.

Project South and our partners will continue to fight to close the entire facility, release people back to their families rather than transfer them to other deadly prisons, and demand redress for harm.

The fight to abolish immigrant prisons is connected to the broader fight to eliminate all prisons and policing in this country. Fundamental to our mission to eliminate poverty and genocide, the #ShutDownIrwin Campaign is a part of our movement organizing efforts to protect our people and dismantle all forms of social control.

THANK YOU TO ALL THE PEOPLE & ORGANIZATIONS FOR TIRELESS WORK OVER MANY, MANY YEARS TO MAKE THIS HAPPEN. 

LET US RENEW OUR COMMITMENT TO MOVEMENT WORK IN THE KNOWLEDGE THAT WE CAN AND WE WILL WIN.

In a time of compounded crises in the U.S. and global colonial violence in Palestine and all over the world, we recognize that this victory is part of a larger effort to liberate our communities from all forms of oppression and build a just world.

Please share & re-post this page #ShutDownIrwin #FreeThemAll