Burke was not given over directly to the custody of ICE, which held ultimate determination over her fate, but to the GEO Group, a for-profit private prison contractor [my emphasis] operating 50 facilities across the United States, including the Northwest ICE Processing Center where she was sent.1 In her more than two weeks in that facility, Burke was kept in a single, large dormitory alongside 103 other detained women, given limited access to food, hygiene, and clean clothes, and unaware throughout the period when or whether she would be allowed to return home. She had been allowed early on to contact her parents (with whom she remained sporadically in touch during her detainment), and they in turn were able to reach British authorities. But while diplomatic efforts bore little fruit, Burke’s case did, in the meantime, make its way into news both in the U.K. and (to a more limited extent) in the U.S., having drawn the attention of the BBC, the Guardian, Newsweek, and, within the field of comics, Rich Johnston at Bleedingcool.com.
What a bloody catch 22. It’s Kafkaesque how someone with intentions of following the law can get sucked into that people crunching machine.
That’s the true danger of policies like that. They are supposed to be soul destroying but that kind of ruthless treatment is never confined to the people it’s meant for.
That’s why due process is important if you make a class of people illegal, you end up with false positives galore. And these organisations will not back down, rather double down.
