In May of 2019 I embarked on a journey starting in southern Mexico which involved travelling from Mexico City to the state of Washington, in the United States, and eventually completing the trip from the west coast of Canada up to Halifax, in the far east of that country.
My brief was to travel on top of the various freight trains (collectively known as “The Beast”) that migrants regularly use to reach the U.S., and to document the landscape, part of a body of work I commenced almost three years ago entitled ‘The Landscape of the Beast’.
After several weeks travelling up the U.S. west coast I arrived at the Canadian border in Bellingham, a small coastal town in Washington State, and presented my travel documentation to a CBP officer. Following a routine check-up, I was unexpectedly denied access into Canada due to concerns about my intention for going there.
Consequently, I was escorted to a U.S. immigration office. I was questioned for several hours and later handcuffed and locked in a holding cell without any clear reason or explanation about my status. I felt powerless, intimidated and utterly confused.
Approximately four hours later, two officers woke me up and reinforced my hand cuffs while shackling my legs. To make matters worse, adding to my state of confusion, the officers still refused to help me understand why I was being treated in such an inhumane way.
I was placed inside a Homeland Security van and driven to a detention centre approximately four hours away. I didn’t know where I was until I asked an officer about my whereabouts.
I was asked to remove my civilian clothes and wear a blue prison uniform, my personal data was taken from me and put on to the prison database system. I was officially in an ICE detention centre, a prison, and did not know when I would be released.
During my incarceration at The Northwest Detention Centre in Tacoma, Washington, I tried to make sense of the situation by occupying my mind with creative activities. I befriended Mexicans, Salvadorians, Hondurans, Guatemalans, and people of other nationalities.
I listened to their stories and showed empathy, whilst documenting the reality experienced by inmates suffering ICE detentions.
Since my photography focuses primarily on themes of migration, I quickly realised I had to take advantage of this unfortunate situation. Although I had no access to my cameras, I was able to find pencils and paper to draw and write about my everyday life in U.S. confinement, just as I had done several years earlier while incarcerated in the UK.
These portraits are part of a series of pieces I documented during nearly a month of living behind bars.
My aim was to portray and write down people’s experiences in an attempt to include them in my three-year-long documentation of the journey thousands of migrants undertake to find a better life away from home. Fate allowed me to tell the story from within.
