Interview with Maru Moro Villalpando of La Resistencia, a project that organizes against the Northwest Detention Center. In this conversation, Maru passes a kite along on behalf of immigrants housed in the facility. As they point out, facilities like this are “black boxes” where extra effort must be taken to shed light on conditions inside.

Maru discusses some of the previous actions, including multiple hunger strikes, that detainees have carried out to protest issues such as poor food quality, lack of medical care, and poor sleeping conditions. More recently, a lack of clean facilities led them to protest their conditions, as workers were unable to clean the detention center due to Covid. One of the recent demands of the hunger strike is that more measures be taken to stop GEO guards and ICE officers from bringing Covid into the facility, which already became an ongoing hotspot during the pandemic.

They also discuss the rapidly expanding digital prison system, predatory companies trapping immigrants into unintentional prison. This digital prison system now monitors not only those in ICE proceedings, but their family and household members as well.