The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap Highlight

Gainesville was the first stop on a tour I took of a vast archipelago of roadblocks, convoys, and detention centers built and maintained specifically for a certain kind of alien—the poor, non-European kind. The archipelago, which has grown at breakneck speed over the last two decades, is like a giant legal purgatory in which detainees don’t have any real rights or enjoy any real due process. People disappear into it, hundreds of thousands a year, and become less like prisoners with rights than like objects or packages to be crated and shipped out like cargo. ICE even has a UPS-style tracking system that allows immigrant families to punch in a number and see where their deported relative is in his or her serpentine journey through the detention system. In the real justice system, you get habeas corpus; in the shadow system, you get a tracking number to see where your familial “package” is.