ICE, An Agency Often Vilified

A Student Journalist Tries to Find Out What Goes on in Immigration Detention Centers.

I have heard many things about ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. From friends and social media feeds, I have heard that they were people that took away people from their families, people that don’t have a “soul,” and that the ICE agency had an area within the Reno area.

I wanted to know everything for myself. I took to looking up ICE’s information within the Reno community. I decided to go straight to the ICE media page and emailed them on Sept. 26 at 2pm, explaining to them how I was a journalism student at the university and I wanted to do a face-to-face interview on and off record, and get a tour of the system. I received an automatic reply, thanking me for the message and how the box is reserved for news media requests and that they would respond as soon as possible, and so I waited.

First email sent out to ICE media

Within two hours I got an email back from the Acting Press Secretary for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The only thing that the secretary had asked me was “Are you writing for a publication at your school, or is this for a class assignment?” signed with regards.

I emailed right away, feeling excited that I had made it through the first process of contacting someone. I messaged back that it would possibly be published. Signed with “thank you,” I sent it out and waited again.

It took weeks, from something that was quick and easy, turning into a long battle of debating to walk down there and speak with the press secretary in person. I emailed again on Oct. 31 and finally received an email back from the Press Secretary. “We referred your query to our colleagues in our stakeholder engagement office. They should be in touch.” I sent back an email thanking the secretary and with more regards signed, I waited again.

Email before the wait

I waited a week before emailing again, it had felt like another decade when I had decided to email them again on Nov. 7. I asked how long it may take for the colleagues to get back to me and when I could be expecting to hear from them. With another signed email with thank you. I waited for another hopeful response from the agency and didn't receive anything. It continued like this for three weeks, I continued to email them and ask when I would hear from the colleagues. I started to become slightly annoyed and emailed that I would even be fine with a phone interview if I couldn’t get it face-to-face.

When that didn’t work, I then tried to call both of the numbers that they have on their website. As soon as I explained what was occurring, I would be put on hold and left on hold or was told that the line I was on was not meant for what I wanted. The longest time I waited was an hour, until I had to give up and go to class.

The agency was taking too long to respond and so I decided to try and go around them, and go to a hire up. I went to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services site and found their media email. They had it where you could set up an appointment, but because the holidays were coming up, there was no availability, the next available time is Dec. 26.

On Nov. 15, I received an email back from Rosa Mengesha, a community relations officer who is in charge of Northern CA, Reno, NV, Hawaii, Saipan, and Guam. She explained that she cannot do a camera interview and she didn’t necessarily understand what I had meant by doing a tour of the facility with videos and photos. She did though try to redirect me into going onto the www.ice.gov website for their archived information and that if I needed to I could call her about the topic.

I further explained my intentions and was excited to have someone that was willing to be on at least a phone interview. I waited for her to respond.

I was waiting on two people now, I emailed the secretary again on Nov. 21, saying that I would interview the secretary and tour the jail once again. I got an email back immediately, from a different secretary that was saying that they were out of the office and wouldn’t be able to get back to me. I was livid that they tried to push me onto another person.

The email I received from the new person, the name at the top has been cut off to maintain the person's identity.

I sent the automated email another email saying that I wanted to speak to the secretary that took on my case. A few hours later they emailed saying that they are not able to support my request, but they wish me the best luck on my project. I sat there fuming, but didn’t want to seem aggressive. I emailed her back, thanking her for her help and wished her a happy holidays.

The reject email.

I was stuck, I didn’t know what else to do, to my excitement though, Mengesha emailed back on the same day. We scheduled a phone interview for Nov. 27, since we were coming up on Thanksgiving weekend. I got my questions ready and waited for the day.

I called Mengesha at 1 on the 27th,she didn’t answer the first time and left a voicemail. I was sitting there thinking that she might have been told to not answer the phone. She called back half an hour later. I wasn’t expecting the voice that I heard. I was expecting very fluent English, but instead received very broken English. You could tell that it wasn’t her first language. As soon as the interview started, I wanted to ask her where she was from,but I wasn’t sure if that would be considered inappropriate.

Outside of the ICE Building in San Francisco from Google

I asked her the basic questions, about what made her get into the field that she was in and what she does at her position. She talked so incredibly fast, that I could barely type every word she said. I asked if she would feel comfortable about having our conversation being recorded, but she denied the attempt.

I asked about how she felt about DACA, and said that she had nothing to say about the subject. When I asked about the jail system and how the detainees were handled, she said that she would send me information about all of the different fliers that ICE has put together.

She had rushed me off the phone before I was able to ask anymore questions, but a few minutes later she had sent all of the packet information and said to call or email again if I had anymore questions.

The information that she gave was very helpful, but I still wanted the ability to do a video of the jail system.

I decide to go around ICE altogether and messaged the Reno Sheriff Department on Nov. 28 to tour their facility. Sergeant Janit Bailey responded to my email the next day. She said that they were more than happy to give me a tour of the jail system and stated that I could record the premise as I walk through. We set the date for Dec. 7, at 11 am, needing an I.D. and sign the waiver that was attached to the email.

Waiver to tour the Washoe County Sheriff Office

The waiver had basically stated that I understand that there would be about two miles of walking. Also that, “I fully realize the risks involved in participating in a jail tour, including, but not limited to exposure of nudity, profane language, injury which could occur due to proximity to violent inmates, injury which could occur due to my proximity of staff members carrying out their duties … airborne diseases, riots and any other risk attended with being inside a secure jail.”

On Dec. 5 I arrived, with my waiver, I.D, video camera, camera, and recorder with me, I went into the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office with a friend, Andrew Choudhry. As soon as we walked in, it looked more like a museum than a jail system. There was an antique model-T in the middle of the entry with a rope around it, the poles made out of old rifles. We were expecting to be greeted by Janit Bailey, but when we walked in there was no one in the halls. A woman came up to us asking if we needed help and directed us into the lobby.

There were pictures of fallen officers, the sergeants, and lockers on the side of the wall. As soon as we walked into the lobby, there were four rows of monitors with phones connected to them. A small section of a box where there were two employees for checking in visitors, and rows of chairs in front of it. In a corner off to the side was a play area for younger kids.

Photo by: Jolie Ross; Front of the Washoe County Sheriff's Office

A short African American woman came up to us asking if we had been helped, we told her that we were waiting for Sgt. Bailey for the tour, and she had said that she was giving us the tour. Her name is Deputy Christal Grovatt. She took us straight to the lockers that I had noticed from when we walked in, and we placed our phones inside.

I was wearing a backpack and was told that I couldn’t have it with me. I was perfectly fine with it as long as I could have my equipment with me. There was another deputy with us, Deputy Vander Heyden. She was short as well with blonde hair and glasses. Both of them wore their hair in a bun so that someone couldn't pull on their hair.

Apparently Sgt. Bailey didn’t tell them about the camera recorder or that I was bringing equipment on the tour. Deputy Heyden went and asked Sgt. Bailey again if it was okay for me to bring it with us, and when she came back she had said no.

No video camera, no audio recorder, and no camera. I never got any inside pictures of the jail system, they had told me that I better take really good notes.

I would have tried to have snuck in at least the audio recorder, but while waiting on Deputy Heyden we had to go through a metal detector, and I was worried that there would be more on the tour.

They handed us green visitor pass that I had asked if I could take a picture of for my article, but because of certain people possibly getting their hands on the design, I was unable to get a picture of it. The passes had to be clipped to the upper part of our bodies and couldn’t be clipped on our pants, or else some of the officers might think that you belong in the drunk tank.

We walked down one flight of stairs and were stopped in a room with two sets of lock boxes, an elevator, and the stairs with a sliding glass door.

Deputy Heyden had to stop at the lock box and put her gun inside. According to Deputy Grovatt, they are not allowed any guns when inside the jail. They are allowed tasers and pepper spray, but that is it when it comes to that sort of equipment.

We sat there and had to wait for the door to open, the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office is a celi-port jail, meaning that you have to wait for one door to close before the other can open. As soon as the jail opened it smelled like a hospital.

They warned us before the tour had started to not lean up against any of the walls so as to maintain the cleanliness of the walls and because certain things have gone onto those walls, but we’ll come back to that.

The first location that we went into was a cold long cemented hallway that was the area that the officers bring in the detainees. There were two people sitting at the end, EMTs.

“That is the first stop for people that come in here. We have to make sure that they are healthy before we are able to put them through booking,” Deputy Grovatt said.

It is also connected to the booking process. The booking room has a bright blue door and as soon as you enter there are five metal cell doors, one patted and four with a bench and toilet.

As we walked out, there was an ICE agent bringing in a man that looked to be in his mid to late 20s. His hands were cuffed behind his back, jeans pulled up with a belt, a rock band shirt and an oversized puffy sleeved jacket. His hair was ruffled and his face slightly unkempt with a five o’clock shadow and patches of scruff. He kept his head high as he walked past us, not looking in our direction with a straight lined face and shoulders pushed back.

The next room we walked into was the room where the detainees strip down and they check their pockets and other areas to make sure that they have nothing to harm them. The entire room was padded with two chairs looking away from each other. After being stripped down, they have to put back on their clothes and moved into the next room.

You could see through the glass walls into the other room where there were more officers in there than any other room that we had seen throughout the tour. There were multiple video screens watching all of the cellmates that were close to the room. Within that room also, there was the mugshot section.

There is a lobby where everyone that is waiting to go through the next section sits and waits staring at a blank wall. Within there is the prisoner intake, where they place all of the items that they came in with into a bag and make sure that everything is placed correctly. All of this occurs with the same arresting officer.

Once booking is over than they can see their lawyer, and while waiting go into holding if there is plausible cause for them being kept in the system.

They are stripped again and have to take a shower, if they aren't willing to be civil than they are detained to the shower. If they act that way while they are walking, then they have a handcuff belt sort of contraption where it is a chain wrapped around the torso and the cuffs placed close to their sides.

Before each process, the inmates have to go through a metal detector, almost like one that is at the airport, but they stand on a conveyor belt that pulls them through both ways and they don’t put their hands up. The detector is called Secure Pass with low radiation.

From securepass.com : Secure Pass machine that was inside the jail

system.

After the shower, they are given their clothes that they will be wearing for the rest of the time that they are an inmate. The female inmates all wear blue tops and grey pants.

While for the male inmates it is a little bit different, depending on what they are in the system for is what level their colors mean. At the lowest, there is brown tops and grey bottoms for just arriving inmates that are still waiting to be put back into housing. For those that have already gone through the process, there are the basic cartoon attire of black and white tops and pants that means that the person conducted a misdemeanor charge. Next, is an outfit of orange top and grey bottoms which they indicate as “lower level felonies.” There are two colors for the highest of inmates, there is an all grey attire which means the inmate is violent or a high level felon, and there is an all red attire meaning that this inmate either has mental health issues or is very violent.

They are also given orange socks, so that people wouldn’t walk out of the jail system with them once they are able to leave. On top of that they are given foam shoes so that they don’t hurt the officers and it is more patting if they try to harm themselves. If they are not at risk to themselves than they are given a grey bin with a blanket, pillow, toothbrush, cup and soap. If they are going to harm themselves, then they get the same things except the toothbrush and cup in a soft bag.

The deputies then take us into a location called area control. Within the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office, they have blocks that are roam free areas. The inmates are allowed to be outside of their cells four to six hours a day. While we were there, we went into the women’s section and there were about four walking around outside of their cell. It was an open room with cells on the top and bottom. A small television was in the corner and there were multiple tables, some of them had games painted on them like chess and checkers.

There was one girl sitting there with purple hair, she was skinny with olive skin and looked to be about late 20s, early 30s. She wouldn’t stop staring at us, a lot of the inmates looked at us. The girl with the purple hair tried to come towards us, she got at least 10 feet away when Deputy Heyden put her hand on her taser and was ready to stop her.

“Back up inmate,” Deputy Heyden screamed.

The girl with the purple hair just continued to repeat that she wanted to talk to us. We had stopped talking with Deputy Grovatt, who placed herself in-between the girl with the purple hair and us.

“Hands on doors ladies,” the woman who was in charge of door system yelled out and everyone else scattered.

The girl with the purple hair changed her sentence to that she wanted to talk to the deputy and so the deputy asked for her to sit back on the table and wait for her. The girl walked back to table, crossed her arms and waited.

We continued the tour and saw the inside of a cell. Each cell has two beds, a toilet and a sink with a thin aluminum mirror. The beds were placed very close to each other. One was a wooden plank board that you saw as soon as you walked in, with a blue thin mat on top of it. The other one was on the wall next to it, over lapping where the inmate’s feet would go and was made out of metal with another blue mat on top of it.

It was lunch time during our tour, so as we were leaving the woman’s cell block there were two inmates getting the drinks and pushing the food cart prepping for everyone’s meals.

As we walked out there was a woman in a glass perch with monitors and buttons that had opened the doors for when we walked in and out. She was join plain clothes and in a spinning black chair. Choudhry had asked the deputies why they have civilians in watching the monitors, the answer it costs less.

We continue to walk and there are small sections of basketball courts cut out like a hexagon shape. The hallways start to get a little bit colder as we keep walking. We enter one of the cell blocks and it is the isolation sector, or also known as the shoe. all of the inmates have metal doors and are only allowed out of their cell for one hour and fifteen minutes every other day and they aren’t allowed to go outside. It was incredibly dark in there, the only sign of light was from the shower stalls, where they only had two and the light from the window. All of the inmates got up and stared at us from their windows. All you could see from every door was a face.

As we’re leaving that room, both Deputy Grovatt and Heyden get called from their captain that we ran into on the top floor. They were using code and looking for another officer. For some reason, Sgt. Bailey had thought that I wanted to talk with a social worker, so during the call Deputy Grovatt left us to deal with the issue at hand while Deputy Heyden took us to visit with the social worker.

We walked down the same corridor and wait at a door with a small window. A short curly topped woman in her 50s answers. We step inside and this is the first place that I see any sort of Christmas decorations in the entire prison. There were colorful lights strung through and snowflakes hanging from the opening of a “cage” door. There weren’t any windows in the room, but there was a mural of the brick showing the brick coming apart and an island in the middle of the ocean shining through with bright colors.

All of the woman in there seemed to be very jolly. The woman that we were there to meet was Amy Camp, she has blonde hair and glasses. She greeted us with a handshake and took us to the back of the “cage” where her desk was. Her desk was in an “L” shape, with no pictures on the desk, but she had two pictures, of what I assumed were her daughters, taped to the brick wall behind her.

Almost everyday the inmates have mental health evaluations, unless they are on suicide watch or a watch of any kind they get one everyday.

Camp had worked at a hospital for ten years before coming to the jail to work.

“It was hard at first to get into this new atmosphere. At a hospital you can help someone right away, but here you have to wait for the deputies that are on duty to tell you when you’re allowed to help,” Camp said.

Once we were done meeting with Camp, Deputy Grovatt was back in the room saying that there had been an issue in the cell block that we had just been in with the women. That was all that was said about it, and we kept walking.

We walked along another long hallway that they called the “happy hall” where the inmates walk when they are being released. Within the same hall though is the arraignment rooms.

We walked into the green immunity room. There was a cage filled with handcuffs that stretched down to the floor. And soccer pennies that are used for inmates that need to be watched more. It is a large room the farther you go into it, there is a podium at the from there the inmate stands and talks to the judge on a monitor. There were four rows of wooden benches on both sides and then making an isle way. In the corner was an old chair that was used to detect metal on an inmate before meeting with the judge, but it hadn’t been used in years.

On the wall near the podium is a white board with different time slots and names filling the sections. Each inmate that is able, goes into the arraignment rooms twice a day. There are two rooms, there is a pink justice room where five judges switch around throughout the month, and then an immunity room that is green where there is one judge a month.

“Once an inmate goes to court and is either sentenced or let go, deemed by the Judge, if there is no hold, they are released,” Deputy Grovatt said.

When the inmate is let go, it takes four hours for them to be released. Unless, it is on a busier day; such as, a Reno crawl day or Hot August Nights than it takes about eight hours.

Our time was cut short when two officers brought an inmate in to speak with a judge. Her hands were cuffed in front of her with a paper in her hand. Her hair a dark brown and frayed, her face looked tired as she had no emotion.

We walked out of the room as the inmate walked in. As we continued down the hall and through the door, I see another area with Christmas decorations. There were more colorful lights strung up around an open window, like as if at a concession stand. A decorated mini tree sat in the corner of the front with a white tree skirt and more decorations the farther back you looked in the room.

That section is where you would pick up all of your belongings before heading out of the jail.

“Whatever money the inmate comes in with we hand them a five dollar bill, for if they need to get on a bus or something, and then we give the rest to them as a check,” Deputy Heyden said.

Once we go through the processing area, we had made a full circle around the jail system. We take an elevator back up to the top floor and enter into the lobby. Deputy Grovatt and Heyden shake our hands as we take our stuff out of the lockers and give back the visitors passes. We thank them for the tour and leave the same way we came in.

As we walk to the car all I can think of is how much better this story would be if I was allowed my camera.

While writing this piece, I have realized how hard it is to try and comply with government officials. When talking with people that have to be very secretive it's hard to get them to talk about what it is that goes on behind the scenes.