Immigrant resistance movement forged in California prisons persists decades later

I keep thinking about José René Flores, a Los Angeles resident incarcerated at a Southern California migrant detention facility in the 1980s. The El Centro Immigration Detention Facility, where immigration agents sent Flores, has a long and deep history of brutality. 

But Flores’ story is not just one of violence and violation. It is also a story of protest and solidarity — reflective of a larger lineage of resistance from inside detention, including the people the Trump administration is currently working to silence and disappear. They’ve risked their “rightless” lives with the hope that the world might learn about the inhumane conditions behind detention walls, and that they might be free. 

Flores migrated to the United States from El Salvador in 1980, after being attacked by members of his homeland’s National Guard, a paramilitary organization known for committing atrocities during the Salvadoran Civil War. As a teenager, he was targeted for his involvement in a factory trade union and for participating in the revolutionary organization Frente de Acción Popular Unificada.

“There was terrible repression in El Salvador,” Flores told me when I interviewed him several years ago. “I was criminalized for having long hair and black glasses. Just looking different and being young meant you were a criminal, marijuanero, guerillero and a drug addict.” 

When Flores arrived in Los Angeles, he was apprehended by Immigration and Naturalization Service officials, who transported him to El Centro, because he chose to apply for political asylum. The detention center, located in California’s Imperial Valley, was built to incarcerate unauthorized Mexican men and those convicted of deportable crimes in 1945. By the time Flores got there, it had evolved from a small camp into a large-scale facility with a deep history of labor exploitation, physical abuse and surveillance. 

INS officials forced Flores and his fellow detained migrants to work as low-paid and sometimes unpaid laborers, limited their access to low-nutrient food and medical care, and oversaw a climate of physical and psychological intimidation. 

Flores and a few other Salvadoran migrants decided to fight back. All of us felt the same, said Flores: “Offended. Mistreated. We wanted to tell each other not to be sad. That we were all in this together.” 

In 1981, they began a 15-day hunger strike. Their refusal to eat and the use of their bodies to protest called out the violence of the state, making the public aware of the punitive nature of detention.

Due to the protest and the efforts of the immigrant aid group Concilio Manzo, the INS released Flores from the facility that same year. 

Soon after, in 1985, a much larger hunger strike at El Centro made international news. Fifteen migrants from around the world organized an eight-day hunger strike. Between 175 and 300 incarcerated men participated, demanding that their grievances be heard. 

While official INS accounts asserted that the detention center functioned simply as an administrative holding site where people waited for their deportation hearings, the stories the strikers shared with lawyers and the media framed the detention center as a site of punishment. 

The protestors also publicized an important factor missing from the INS narrative: why many Central Americans had migrated to the U.S. in the first place. A number of the protestors came because they had been persecuted in their home countries for fighting back against repressive Latin American regimes funded by U.S. tax dollars.

The 1985 strike resulted in further repression from INS officers. But it also helped shift the narrative around detention in the public eye, even as the U.S. continued to incarcerate immigrants and asylum seekers at sites such as the Krome Service Processing Center in Florida, the Port Isabel Detention Center in Texas, and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba under both Democratic and Republican administrations. 

Acts of protest from people behind detention walls have never stopped. In the coming decades, migrants have demanded that lawyers and immigrant rights organizations hear and document their stories, filed class action lawsuits, and staged acts of defiance, like refusing to eat or work to challenge the cruelty of the state. 

Dissent continues under “Trump’s Reign of Terror.” At the end of September, for instance, 19 incarcerated migrants commenced a hunger strike inside Louisiana’s Angola prison, Camp J, calling for basic standards of care, such as prescription medication, toilet paper and clean water. 

Such acts of resistance and refusal from the inside show that, despite carceral efforts to control, isolate, and strip migrants of their humanity, people will continue to find ways to fight back.

This commentary was adapted from an essay produced for Zócalo Public Square.