Four men detained at an ICE detention center in rural Georgia used the facility’s video conferencing software to expose both the conditions inside and President Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the immigration courts. In the five-minute video, the men describe an intentionally dysfunctional legal system designed to keep them trapped in federal custody for months or years — in privately owned facilities that profit from their confinement.
The video cost the men, literally and figuratively. The Folkston ICE Processing Center has a work program for detainees in which they are paid a pittance to cook, do laundry, or clean. These wages allow them to buy supplementary food in Folkston’s commissary and stay connected to people outside. “The workers here are paid $1 a day, which is just enough for a 10-minute phone call,” said Idris Makhmudov, one of the men in the video, who says he has been detained in Folkston for 27 months and counting.
Makhmudov and the three other men, who are from several different countries, appear in drab, facility-issued uniforms. Their images are blurred by the low-resolution cameras on the detention center’s tablets. It’s unclear exactly how the men made the video, but it’s possible that they called someone on the outside who recorded their message to the outside world. Samantha Hamilton, an Atlanta-based immigration attorney with Asian Americans Advancing Justice, said she received a YouTube link to the video via a Signal chat.
