ICE detainees in Georgia used the facility’s video calling software to expose the conditions inside

ReportCloseReportPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All Report

Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

TechCloseTechPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.FollowFollowSee All Tech

Asylum seekers at the Folkston ICE Processing Center decried Trump’s ‘deportation courts’ in a video taken behind bars.

Asylum seekers at the Folkston ICE Processing Center decried Trump’s ‘deportation courts’ in a video taken behind bars.

Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

If you buy something from a link, The Verge may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.

Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

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. “We’ve learned that everyone in the video that was released this weekend

ICE detention isn’t supposed to be a form of punishment; its purpose is ostensibly to ensure that people in deportation proceedings show up to their hearings. But ICE facilities are virtually indistinguishable from prisons — a point the men in the video make repeatedly. Folkston, in fact, was a prison before it became an immigrant detention center. It has many of the hallmarks of prison life, including expensive communication tools that detainees are forced to rely on to talk to people on the outside.