The tightly rolled piece of lined notebook paper had ‘important’ written on the outside in Spanish. Nilson Barahona-Marriaga, almost six feet tall with a scruffy beard and a shaved head, an immigrant from Honduras who had lived in Georgia for 20 years, unfurled it as if it were a precious scroll and began to read: “We wanted to tell you that we are going to go on a hunger strike. We ask you to join us.”
Hours earlier on April 9, a woman on her work shift in the laundry room slipped the letter into the fold of a clean piece of clothing bound for the Echo-7 unit, a men’s section of Irwin County Detention Center, in south Georgia, where Barahona and 30 other immigrants detained by ICE were held. A man discovered the note in his laundry bag, drafted by a group of detained women held on the other side of the facility. The women, it said, would refuse to show up for $1-a-day shifts in the laundry room, kitchen and commissary and would stop accepting meals from the kitchen. “We ask you to write back to us. If you all have another plan, let us know.” They were demanding that the immigrant detention center take measures to protect them from Covid-19 and that ICE release the sick, elderly and high-risk among them.
