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Melissa Harris-Perry: It's The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. Since the start of the pandemic in-person visitations from family, friends, and advocates have been halted at ICE detention centers. This week, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced they'll be phasing back in these visitations. Now the move is a promising development for ICE detainees and their loved ones but the fact that it took so long to resume visitations still raises some questions because, unlike ICE, the federal prison system allowed visitations to resume starting back in October of 2020.

For more on this, let's talk with Luis Romero, Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies at Texas Christian University, where he focuses on immigration enforcement. Luis, thanks for coming on The Takeaway.

Luis Romero: Thank you, Melissa.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. This change in ICE policy is taking place more than a year after federal prisons restarted visitations. Why do you think it took so much longer for detention facilities?

Luis Romero: I think just like many other issues evolving migrants, migrants are often an afterthought when it comes to different policies and things that could benefit migrants themselves. When it comes to things like visitation, these aren't necessarily guaranteed even in pre-COVID times, so having things like medical justifications for not reinstating visitation was something that took a lot longer in the detention context. We can see this in other migration policies, such as Title 42 in which public health justifications are used to sort of use COVID to justify having things like visitation for migrants.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The very language that we use, for example, detention centers, and we just had a conversation around federal prisons. We call ICE-run facilities detention centers. How does this potentially obscure who's being held and the circumstances of that detention?

Luis Romero: Detention is civil in nature. It's not punitive as we think of incarceration or prisons. Migrants are detained because they're awaiting the processing of their immigration case, which, again, it's civil in nature. I think that that really obscures the fact that many migrants who are detained are seeking asylum or have not committed any crimes or been indicted or charged with anything really.

Thinking of migrants in detention as being in these spaces that I think are very much akin to prison, it's very easy for people to think of them as criminals or as people who are being punished but that's not really the purpose of detention.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What are the conditions like, though? Are the conditions prison-like or are they more like the kinds of conditions we might expect if you use the language of people who are seeking asylum, who are simply awaiting their cases being heard?

Luis Romero: In many cases, conditions are prison-like. Part of this has to do with the fact that private prison companies are incharge and operate and own many of the facilities where migrants are being detained. In many cases, literal former prisons that were once used to hold incarcerated populations were then converted into detention facilities. The spaces itself might look slightly different than what they did during their prison days but in terms of some of the conditions inside where that's people all wearing similar uniforms, their lives being very routinized, being watched and surveilled, not having, saying what times they get to eat or just the fact that they can't leave itself I think underscores how many similarities there are between these detention sites and prisons.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Explain why these visitations are important especially given how you've been walking us through the realities that migrants are facing.

Luis Romero: Yes. There's several reasons why these visitations and visitation groups as well are important. Visitors provide emotional support for migrants in detention that are really living under a cloud of uncertainty. Visitation also provides migrants with connections to resources, being informed on different advocacy groups in the area or being told about resources like pro bono lawyers.

Migrants in detention don't have the rights to an attorney, so being able to have access to any type of advocates becomes very critical. Visitation and visitation groups also provide a form of accountability because being able to know what's going on, whether that is abuses or whether it's any traumas that might be occurring inside of these facilities, having advocates to tell your story or to connect you with the proper groups or resources to help migrants navigate that is also an important piece of all of this.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You make this point about the ways that many of us experience some sense of isolation in the context of the pandemic and the stay-at-home orders and quarantine, and, obviously, the use of video calls and technology was a big part of mitigating some of that. Have people in ICE detention had access to that kind of technology and video calls during the pandemic?

Luis Romero: Yes, they have had access to video calls although I know that it does vary from facility to facility, but as we know, that's not a best substitute for the in-person visitations and contact and communication with other people. Besides that, the other issue that oftentimes comes up with this is people just feeling like they're being surveilled. As we know with our technologies, all of that is subject to having someone listen in on it, not to say that in-person visitations are also not privy to that but having sort of the technological eye watch and hear what you're saying is also something that I know migrants have reported as being self-conscious about and really concerned about.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Obviously, these two years of limitations on visitation means that it was certainly happening during the Trump administration, but then also largely during the Biden administration. How would you compare the situation in ICE facilities under President Biden and President Trump as a kind of general matter?

Luis Romero: Obviously, the difference between Trump and Biden is that Biden is not using the same inflammatory, xenophobic, racist language around migrants and having a love of his administration work towards punishing and deterring migrants from entering the US. At the same time, that is a low bar and one that I don't think we should necessarily use to compare Biden and his sort of work around detention and migrants in general.

On the one hand, there have been some improvements compared to Trump. Biden has increased the number of people who are able to undertake or be part of alternatives to detention, where those are GPS monitoring or other types of check-ins. He's, obviously, tried to undo Title 42 in some ways, even though that's still pending, but the fact that visitation has taken so long to being reinstated and other measures such as ending the detention of asylum seekers, for example, hasn't happened. I think those are things that many advocates and loved ones of migrants have been disappointed regarding Biden and his work around migrants.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Luis Romero, Assistant Professor at Texas Christian University. Professor Romero, thank you so much for joining us.

Luis Romero: Thank you, Melissa.

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