Visiting Hours

A flash of orange prison scrubs, followed by a web of tight, elegant braids, were all that was visible of Lamilem Badasa as she sat down for a video-conference interview. The camera angles were off, and she’s only five feet tall, so just the top of her head appeared on screen.

On the other side of the cameras, visitors to the Ramsey County Jail sat elbow to elbow at cubicles, straining to hear the voices of family members through the phone receivers. Digital clocks mounted on the Plexiglas-encased video monitors counted down the last five minutes of each twenty-minute visit. Everyone had to shout to be heard. The cacophony of voices bore the stress of a dozen fresh arrests.

Badasa, who came to Minneapolis from Ethiopia in 2003, has been in jail since January 26, 2006, though she’s never been charged with a crime. Instead, Kristin Olmanson, a federal immigration judge in Bloomington, denied her political-asylum claim, and so U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE, formerly known as the INS) took her into custody. Now, even as she receives therapy and medication from the Center for Victims of Torture and free legal representation from Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights, ICE is moving forward with her “removal”—that is, her deportation to Ethiopia.

Badasa joined dozens of other immigrants at the Ramsey County Jail. According to Sheriff Bill Fletcher, on a typical day his 494-bed facility houses some sixty detainees facing deportation to countries as diverse as Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, China, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Bosnia. The jail contracts bed space out to ICE at a rate of eighty dollars per prisoner per day, garnering the county $1.9 million last year. Immigrant detainees are held on average for about a hundred days, but as Badasa’s case demonstrates, stays can drag on for far longer. Her total time is now fifteen months and counting.

County jails, however, aren’t designed for long-term stays. Most have no recreational programming, no religious services, and no access to the outdoors. Menus rely heavily on the hotdog-and-baloney family. Badasa, who eats no pork, has lost fifteen pounds. She hasn’t seen the sun in more than a year; for exercise, she runs up and down the stairs in her cellblock. A devout Christian, she rises at 5:00 a.m. to read her Amharic-language Bible before beginning work as the jail’s “swamper,” serving meals to other inmates, sweeping, and cleaning bathrooms. Far from complaining, Badasa is grateful for the job. She said it helps stave off anxiety and depression during her interminable wait.

As she recounted it, Badasa’s journey to Minnesota began in 1998, when her father was called to fight in the Ethiopian-Eritrean war but didn’t want to go. He was arrested and never came home. Badasa, who was twenty-one at the time, went to look for him at the jail of the provincial city where they lived. Later, soldiers came to look for her at her home. They beat her mother and arrested Badasa. She was in jail for a week. After her release, the local military chief required her to check in at the jail each week.

There were places in Badasa’s story where she could not find the words to go on—this was one. But her political-asylum claim states that she was repeatedly sexually abused, both during her stay in jail and after, for two years. She eventually fled to Addis Ababa, where she lived in hiding for another two years. In 2003, she heard that she was in danger of being arrested again. With the help of a smuggler she fled again, first to Italy, and then, on a false Italian passport, to Minneapolis, where she had one tenuous contact, a woman from her hometown.

Badasa’s case is pending before the National Board of Immigration Appeals, and if it fails there, her lawyer will appeal to the Eighth Circuit Court. It will be months, perhaps another year before she hears anything. The debilitating effects of indefinite detention are well documented. Speaking over the phone, Badasa put it this way: “When you’re pregnant you know it will be nine months. Here I know nothing. I don’t even know tomorrow.”

Badasa said she’s had no contact with her mother or siblings since she left Ethiopia. Even a letter, she believes, could put them in danger. As she said this, waves of distress mounted on her forehead. She began to cry. The five-minute-warning clock ticked down to a minute twenty-five. She was still crying when the video monitor went dead.

The dead screen seems to hit all the visitors the same way: a moment of shock, a glance around the room, perhaps looking for someplace to register a complaint. But the rules are strict. Even for those saying goodbye to a family member before she is deported, twenty minutes of cold screen time is all they get. Up at the front desk, the sheriff admonishes everyone to sign out before leaving.


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