The Wayfair Walkout: Why I Don’t Want Beds in a Concentration Camp
Today, I stood in solidarity with the Wayfair Walkout: I attended an event with hundreds of my fellow workers and community members to push back against Wayfair’s sale of $200,000 of furniture to a private contractor building a detention camp in Texas. I am proud of the organizers of this event, and happy that I could help in a small way to make it happen.
Throughout today, I have repeatedly seen the question asked: “If we’re going to detain these kids, shouldn’t they have beds?” I want to explain my personal reasoning behind joining the Wayfair workers in their action today.
Let’s start with where we are today: Mass detention of asylum-seeking refugees is a human rights atrocity being perpetrated by the US Government.
Every step towards making it more straightforward to detain more people is contributing to that atrocity. Whether it’s buying beds or cages, bunks or tents, every bit of material needed to build a concentration camp is supporting pushing further along this line of mass detention of persons who have committed no crime.
The problem with concentration camps is not how comfortable they are: It is the fact that we are building them at all.
Directly, what today’s call for action from Wayfair employees would achieve — if it were to be successful — is to marginally slow the deployment of a specific new concentration camp, as the private contractor who is being contracted to build this camp would have to buy beds from somewhere else. Indirectly, slowing down deployment of new concentration camps reduces the number of people that we can detain in those camps, and slows down the general, ongoing march towards greater mass detention in concentration camps.
This action has now raised nationwide and international attention, and because of that there is renewed pressure on identifying not just this supplier, but other suppliers of these services. As an example, Bank of America announced today that that would stop offering loans for private detention and private prison companies as a result of similar consumer pressure. If pressure like this were to continue to build, in theory you could see selling to the government and its contractors to build concentration camps become toxic in general. At some point, if it were unable to build the camps, the government would be forced to re-examine what options it had for mass detention — and it is absolutely the case that “letting people go because there is no room to keep them” is something that we have already seen over the past two years, so this is within the realm of the choices that would be made.
We should not build concentration camps. Every obstacle we can put on the road to building concentration camps is an obstacle that will raise pressure on not building concentration camps. Since we are already committing this human rights atrocity, all of our options here are bad, but any options we have should focus around what leverage we have to slow the further development of concentration camps.
I support children having beds. I believe they should have beds. But those beds should be with their family members, or sponsors, or anywhere that is not a concentration camp.
I also want to clarify something I think is a misunderstanding of what this purchase was. I don’t think it influences the statements above, but it is relevant to some folks to think about what is going on in this particular case.
There has been a lot of press about facilities used by Customs and Border Protection without beds. There has been press of detainees — including children — not having access to appropriate facilities. These might be places to sleep, or appropriate hygiene supplies like soap or toothpaste.
The existing facilities that do not have beds, or do not have soap, or do not have lights that turn off in the evening are not lacking these things because they could not be obtained by the government. Instead, these facilities lack these features because the facilities in question were not meant to be used for long term detention. If you’re only going to hold people for 30 minutes to process them, you don’t need soap, or beds, or even lights that turn off.
The government has taken an intentionally hamfisted approach towards detention. As a result of that choice, these short-term facilities are now massively overburdened: with no increase in staff or reduction in processing time, government officials have elected to apprehend and detain many more people than these facilities can meaningfully process. This is terrible. However, the government is not buying beds to fix this problem; they are not hiring people to process folks faster to fix this problem; and they are not in any way considering reversing the bad decision — to apprehend a greater number of people, flat-out — that led to this problem in the first place. These facilities are kept the way they are because, in part, the cruelty is the point: these facilities are intended to be feared, because deterrence is an intended outcome of the intentionally difficult, painful, and — as has been repeatedly demonstrated — life threatening process once asylum-seekers enter into the custody of the US Customs and Border Protection officers.
No number of beds sold to the government will fix facilities where there are no beds today. Instead, these beds are being sold to contractors building new places to store more people for longer. This sale is a part of an attempt to ramp up the ongoing long-term detention of migrants — detention choices made by the government, against asylum-seeking refugees who have committed no crime.
There is no question here of “Don’t you believe we should make the existing facilities better?” That option is not on the table. (If it were, I would probably still object, because our existing facilities are only overburdened because of their intentional and drastic misuse.) The question I am forced to answer when asked about objecting to Wayfair’s sale is: “Why do you not support building new concentration camps for long-term housing of asylum-seeking refugees?”
That’s not a question that I feel is difficult to answer. I don’t support that because I don’t think that we should be building interment camps for long-term housing of asylum seeking refugees: I think we should be releasing them. For adults, they should be released on bond; for unaccompanied children, they should be processed as quickly as possible and released to appropriate sponsors; and overall, the number of people we are housing in detention should be trending downward — not upward, as it continues to today.
