Within days of George Floyd’s killing, the state of New Mexico stepped into full repression mode against Black Lives Matter and decarceration activists, arresting myself and a leading Movement for Black Lives/Cop Watch activist Clifton White. I was booked into a private prison with confirmed Covid-19 cases for over 24 hours as a punishment for protesting prison conditions; he languished behind bars for five months because of the draconian parole system. While the state intentionally exposed me to Covid as a punishment for protesting (note: I’m white), what happened to Clifton (who is Black) shows the structural injustices of the criminal injustice system. But over the past few months, thousands of New Mexicans have been drawn into a conversation about prison abolition, as well as what decolonization would look like. At the same time, Trump was sending federal law enforcement agents to Albuquerque under Operation Legend.
New Mexico’s deadly carceral state is built on stolen land, with over ten sprawling prisons located in rural areas taken from Indigensous peoples – within the lifetimes of the grandparents of some of the elders who continue to live and tell stories there. Some of these mega-cages are located right next to reservations. This is especially dangerous with Covid-19 running rampant because as of the summer of 2020 57% of people infected with Covid in this state were native. https://www.abqjournal.com/1461218/huge-disparity-in-covid19-death-rates-for-native-americans-in-nm.html
About half of inmates in New Mexico are incarcerated in private, for-profit prisons– CoreCivic, GeoGroup, and Management Training Corporation (MTC). In Otero County, by the summer 80% of the thousand prisoners in a private prison run by MTC, which houses county, federal, and ICE prisoners, are infected with Covid-19. https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/coronavirus/nearly-80-of-state-inmates-at-otero-county-prison-facility-infected/article_ea83d514-b632-11ea-a1f3-d33423be2e8a.html. Now nearly all of them have it.
As the pandemic hit like a tsunami, the “progressive” Democratic governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, took otherwise rational measures to protect the state. She shut down schools, for example, after one case was identified in the state. But she did nothing to decrease the prison population. The ACLU filed a lawsuit for the release of non-violent offenders, but lost the case in the New Mexico Supreme Court. https://www.aclu-nm.org/en/press-releases/aclu-disappointed-new-mexico-supreme-courts-decision-deny-petition-urgent-release
As of August 2020, only 83 prisoners had been released early. https://www.koat.com/article/prisons-protesters-step-up-as-inmate-cases-rise/33281077
In March, led by Millions for Prisoners and Fight for Our Lives, we stepped up actions and initiated #FreeThemAllFridays, driving to many state prisons and doing honk-a-thon protests and roadblocks to demand that the (supposedly progressive) Governor release prisoners to stop the spread of Covid-19. These protests continued for nine weeks before George Floyd’s killing, and fell on deaf ears. At the same time, leading academics from University of New Mexico and prominent doctors and public health submitted editorials to The Santa Fe New Mexican and The Albuquerque Journal warning that the high rate of viral transmission at the state’s jails and dozens of detention centers was a severe threat to the rural communities where they are located. None of the editorials were ever published. The voices of reason and humanitarian concern for both prisoners and rural New Mexican communities were silenced.
On May 25th, the world watched the murder of George Floyd. On Thursday May 28th Millions for Prisoners New Mexico called for a Covid-safe car protest for Black Lives Matter, and hundreds showed up, their cars festooned with social justice messages. Young people poured out of their cars in unplanned rage and marched through Albuquerque’s International District. APD did their best to repress the protest, using tear gas and riot gear. Just before midnight, leading activists Selinda Guerrero and her husband Clifton White and others witnessed and documented police torture of three Black and Chicano teenagers. The young men were cuffed and detained by police for hours, had semi-automatic rifles pointed at them, had their cellphones broken. They were denied access to their parents, and one young Black man was beaten so brutally while in custody of the Albuquerque Police Department that the fire department called medical aid and his parents. The other youth were dropped off in neighborhoods far from home all over the city. When the police left the boys’ car and keys sitting in the middle of the street as they detained them, they accused Selinda and Clifton of stealing it.
The next day, Friday May 29th, our coalition hosted our regularly-scheduled #FreeThemAllFridays protest at the Cibola Detention Center run by CoreCivic. The prison is located in rural Grants New Mexico, on the border of Navajo Nation, one of the most densely affected areas of Covid infection anywhere in the country. Millions for Prisoners took the lead on publicizing the protest. It was our tenth such protest. When we were at the facility a month earlier, we had noticed that if we honked our horns in the parking lot behind the prison, the people behind bars (a mixture of migrants detained by ICE, asylum seekers, county prisoners, and people in federal custody of the US Marshals) could hear and see us calling for their release. They waved clothing items in the windows as we drove our cars in circles, honking and chanting to let them know that someone on the outside understood what was happening to them. It brought tears to our eyes to see them waving to us, and we heard reports from the inside that it lifted their spirits. Because nothing is as bad as being locked away and believing that you have no lifeline to the outside; that no one knows what is really happening or cares. The migrant detainees, in particular, have no reason to believe that anyone in the United States knows that they are here or can sympathize with their plight. Those here seeking asylum are not even charged with committing any crime. They are following the letter of international law in the Americas by showing up in the United States to ask for asylum. And yet many of them end up behind bars for up to a year.
At the protest the prior month, we left when the police got on their loudspeakers and asked us to. But on this day, on May 29th, I had signs taped to one side of my car that read “Free Them All,” with butterflies painted on them by my artist friend back in Albuquerque. These signs are ubiquitous at the car protests against immigrant detention that affiliates of Detention Watch Network have been organizing all over the country. On the other side of my car, I taped a sign that read “George Floyd, presente!” We had less cars than usual because everyone was exhausted from the Black Lives Matter protest the night before. In the parking lot, I gave our usual “safety speech” about how no one would be arrested that day. “We are prison abolitionists,” I said, “so we don’t want anyone in jail. We leave when the cops give the order.” We drove around the parking lot for about a half an hour, honking our horns and playing drums. We could see prisoners waving to us.
Then we pulled up in front of the prison exactly as we had a month earlier. My car, the first in line, was immediately boxed in on the road by New Mexico State Police. Several police officers ran up from behind our cars and started beating on them with night sticks, which scared everyone very much. Through my closed window, I asked if we could leave, and the cars that were not boxed in began to do so. Many activists were live-streaming or taking videos, and one video captures police saying to the woman in the car next to me, “Roll down your window right now, or you are going right in there to that prison behind you.” Within less than three minutes of us pulling up in front of the jail, the officers had broken my window, pulled me out of the car, laid me down on broken glass, and I was cuffed and sitting in the back of a police cruiser. They called a tow truck for my car. Everyone else was able to drive away.
I was taken to the police station, where I repeatedly asked officers to wear their masks. They charged me with four misdemeanors, including resisting an officer. I repeatedly asked if I was going to be released on bond or on my own recognisance, and they would not answer to me. To my surprise, I was driven to the very CoreCivic prison whose deplorable conditions we had come to protest. Upon arrival I was strip-searched and given a bag of prison clothes and blankets. When I asked the prison guard if I was being released on bond or my own reconnaissance, he squirmed. The woman who strip-searched me told me (out of mercy I now believe because I had no idea what was happening to me), “No baby, you’re not going home. You’re going to be in here for the weekend, until you can see a judge.”
At that moment, for the first time, terror struck me. If I contracted coronavirus in prison, it was possible that I was being given a death sentence for attending a peaceful protest. I know that this is the message that the state was trying to send to all protesters. At that time, I also knew that the prison had two confirmed cases, but that they were not testing the general prison population, so we had no idea what the real numbers were. I was put into a freezing concrete cell that a prisoner without a mask was cleaning and left there. I stared at the air conditioning vents for hours and wondered if there were particles of Covid coming in through them. At 10pm I was allowed out of my cell, and was relieved to hear that my lawyer and friend Jeff Haas had been leaving messages and his phone number for me. I wouldn’t have had the first inkling to memorize his number because we had no intention of getting arrested that day. In fact a friend in my Covid bubble was keeping dinner hot for me back in Albuquerque.
After the call with Jeff, where I told him that I thought that I was ok but that he needed to think of a way to get me out so I didn’t get Covid, I was put back into the freezing cell and told that I had to wait for the nurse. I laid down on a foam mat and stared at the vent, wondering if the virus was coming in through it. The woman who was booked right after me and put into the cell next to me was coughing all night. Around 2am I was asked to pee in a cup for a pregnancy test. Around 4am I was brought into the nurse’s office. She wore a black mask that said in gold embroidered letters “God” and below it “Covid 19.” The mask was only covering her mouth, not her nose. Prisoners being booked in do not receive Covid-19 tests. I asked if I could be isolated for the weekend, and she said “Oh you don’t have to worry about it where you are going. All prisoners are quarantined for 14 days.” Does that mean I’m alone? She told me that it meant that I was on the quarantine pod. I told her about my food allergy, and she wrote it down.
I was put back into the ice-box cell and left until about 8am the next day. While I was there reflecting, I realized that to put a human being in a cage is the worst thing that a society can do to her. Even for a person on good emotional and mental footing, it tries one’s sanity. In a way, I am grateful that I was locked up during the pandemic, because without that experience I would have never tasted the sheer terror that most prisoners feel when they are booked into a prison. I thought about friends who have been tortured in Israeli jails, and about another friend who served 30 years on a wrongful conviction in Alabama. I thought about women detained in Central America for whom rape is a constant threat. That threat applies here in the United States as well. I’ve often housed transgender asylum-seekers as they have been released from this very same prison, and I know what they went through. Being afraid of contracting the virus gave me a tiny taste of their terror, and ensured that I will be a prison abolitionist for the rest of my life.
Covid quarantine is solitary confinement. Prisoners are not allowed to leave their cells for any reason. Once I got into the permanent housing pod where I thought I would spend the next days, I was next to a woman who had already served 13 days in isolation on an accusation of assault with a knife. Thinking that I would be there awhile, I asked her if there was any chance that I would be able to play basketball. She laughed. “This is SOLITARY,” she said. Three TVs blared different stations, one of which was an never-ending infomercial. I started to cry, maybe audibly. A nurse came in to see the coughing woman. He took her temperature, and told her that she didn’t have a fever, he wouldn’t test her.
I asked the guard for a book, and she made me take my mask off to talk to her. There was a shelf of books, but she picked mine for me, which was a Christian book about life-after-death experiences. I asked for a different one, but she either didn’t hear me or pretended not to. So I read it to stop my thoughts from spinning out of control. When lunch came, I could only eat the apple sauce and peas because I can’t eat wheat. I didn’t have any silverware to eat. “Silverware is supposed to be in your check-in bag,” the guard said, but there wasn’t any. At least I did have access to soap (one tiny bar) to wash my hands, so I decided to eat with my fingers. Showers and a phone call are on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Friday, and this being Saturday, I prepared to hunker down.
Unbeknownst to me, my lawyer had gotten a magistrate to sign a release order before noon that day. But I had to stay until after “call” (prisoner count) so that I counted on the private prison’s roll for that day. If I was counted in their numbers for the day, they would receive extra money from the state. I was released at 4:45 pm. As the guard, who was from the reservation, walked me out, her demeanor changed. “We work 16 hour shifts,” she said, “So we spend more time with you than we do with our families.”
“How many 16 hour shifts do you work in a week?” I asked, expecting that it would be three or so. “Five, sometimes six if we’re shorthanded,” she said. No wonder her temper was short. I shudder to think how a person’s immune system can stand up to that, especially if they live in a place, like Navajo Nation, where the virus is rampant.
When I was released, I’ve never been so joyful in my life. Since my cell phone was out of battery, I ran all three miles down the rural highway to where my car was impounded. It started to rain and I was wearing some Italian leather sandals that my friend had given me. According to the tattered paperwork I had on the tow place, I had only 38 minutes to make it there before it closed, so I had to run, not walk. I started to worry about shin splints. I saw someone hitchhiking and considered it, but decided against it because of the pandemic. I got lost. Beginning to panic, I saw an older gentleman behind the locked gate of his welding shop, and called him over. I asked to use his cell phone, which was flip phone, and with shaking hands held it as far away from my face as I could to avoid contaminating it with jail germs. On the third try, the tow company, which was really just someone’s backyard, picked up. I was only a quarter of a mile away. I thanked the generous man, aware that I had taken risks with his health by using his cell phone because of my own desperation.
My car was full of glass shards and had to be jumped because the battery was dead. But I didn’t care. I sped the hour and a half home under a stormy New Mexico sunset, cutting myself on glass dust on the seat and gear shift, and made it just before dark fell and the rain got heavy.
The joy was short-lived. Two days later, Clifton White, the organizer for Millions for Prisoners who had witnessed and documented police abuse in Albuquerque the previous Thursday, was picked up on a parole violation. He was on his 7th parole from the same 2001 case. He was accused of violating a curfew, but he had a waiver for the curfew order from his parole officer. He was denied a wellness check and not allowed to call his lawyer at the ACLU for civil counsel due to “risk of the spread of coronavirus on the phone receivers.” Parole detention is legalized kidnapping; it is administrative as opposed to a criminal, meaning that a prisoner does not have the right to legal counsel or a trial. The state can hold you administratively for the entire length of your parole without proving that you committed any crime. So while I had good legal help and was released, Clifton languished in prison.
We knew that since there are no means for legal redress, only political pressure would work to free Clifton. The week after I was in jail, after a negative Covid-19 test, I attended a massive Black Lives Matter protest that featured Clifton White. Hundreds or thousands of New Mexicans were educated about Clifton and signed a petition for his release. We laid on the ground for eight minutes and forty-six seconds to think about what happened to George Floyd. Coordinated by organizations like Standing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) and Free Them All New Mexico, almost-weekly phone zaps targeted Michelle Lujan Grisham and asked for Clifton’s release. We made “Free Clifton White” masks. More car protests were organized at the Governor’s mansion. Clifton was finally freed on October 30th, five months after he was incarcerated. The picture below shows him at a rally at the Governor’s mansion a month after his release demanding justice for Rodney Applewhite, a Black man from out of state who was killed by New Mexico state police on a rural road south of Albuquerque on his way home to Arizona for Thanksgiving.
Photograph credit Don Usner, my good friend.
Riding the wave of confidence of the Black Lives Matter movement dismantling confederate monuments, Indigenous activists began to demand the removal of statues of genocidal Spanish conquistadors like Juan de Oñate. In Albuquerque, as protesters pulled down a statue of Oñate, right-wing militia member Steven Baca shot and almost killed the antiracist activist Scott Williams. Before the protest, Albuquerque police were caught on camera meeting with militia groups to ask for their help in controlling the crowd. Weeks after the shooting, the State of New Mexico charged Baca with felony assault, but he is out of jail on his own reconnaissance. At the same time, Trump chose to send federal law enforcement agencies to cooperate with police in Albuquerque, along with Kansas City and Chicago, under Operation Legend. Activists have little doubt that this will mean that the full force of the US surveillance state will come down on activists here. This more than anything else makes clear that the state of New Mexico continues to support the system of white supremacy. Here in the Land of Enchantment cages of mass incarceration continue to scar and haunt the stolen land that they’re built on.