Posted August 14, 2025
“You belong. We belong” reads the sign posted above the secure entrance to CoreCivic’s Cibola County Correctional Center, a privately-owned immigrant detention center in Milan, New Mexico. The sign continues: “We foster a welcoming culture where everyone is treated with dignity and respect, contributions are valued, and people are equipped for success.”
These sentiments are a stark contrast to the three rows of barbed wire and electric fencing that surround the entire facility, and to the purposeful placement of windows and doors that prevent people detained inside from seeing the sun. The sign is corporate propaganda, designed to hide the immense isolation, hopelessness, fear and psychological torture taking place just beyond the gates. Cibola County Correctional Center is not a detention center. It is a prison. It is one of many private prisons around the country designed to profit off of human suffering. The immigration system in the U.S. is not about law and justice; it is about racial prejudice and abuse of power.
Working as a summer intern at New Mexico Immigrant Law Center, I had the chance to work closely on the case of a man detained at Cibola. This man told me about growing up in Venezuela without public services, medication and reliable institutions, and how that thrust him into political advocacy and opposition to oppressive government policies. He related the first time he was violently threatened by the Maduro regime when he sought a free and fair election, and how he felt as he watched armed guards steal the presidential election ballot boxes and manipulate the results to keep Nicolás Maduro in power.
Soon after, as the man stood in the street with millions of others awaiting the election results, he was struck by a tear-gas bomb from the National Guard and lost consciousness. By the time he woke up, he had been detained by the National Guard in one of their bases. They tortured him to make him unlock his phone, and then tortured him even more brutally after they found on his phone evidence of his opposition. They beat him so badly that he temporarily lost his vision. He and several others were then taken to the city landfill, where they were told to kneel with their backs facing the guards. They were then executed. He was the only survivor. The bullet from when he was shot is still lodged in his chest. Since the massacre took place in the landfill, the guards didn’t even have to move the bodies.
After fleeing Venezuela, the bullet wound still fresh, this man traveled through seven different countries on his way to the U.S. In Mexico, he was kidnapped and trafficked by a cartel, forced to work long days on a mango farm with minimal water and no food. His family had to pay thousands of dollars in ransom to free him. When he was finally freed, he was left alone in a plaza in Mexico and threatened with death and torture should he ever tell the authorities what had happened.
He fled to the U.S./Mexico border, seeking refuge. He turned himself in to the Border Patrol, believing he had come to a land of law and justice. Instead, he has spent nearly nine months imprisoned, without adequate food, medical care or any legal representation. He fears for his family. They have been threatened and cut off from government benefits, including food, but do not have the funds to leave Venezuela.
Given multiple asylum bans at the border across multiple presidential administrations, this man may very well be denied asylum protection — despite the immense harm he has suffered in his home country and all along the route to the United States.
The immigration system does not exist in a vacuum; it is not its own entity. It is a thread in a tapestry of oppression — a cog in a machine designed to oppress and to profit off of the suffering it creates, leaving thousands of separated families and broken hearts in its wake. The U.S. immigration system is primordial evil disguised behind a veil of nationalism and prejudice pandered to the public eye as valiant patriotism.
Eliza Blanning is a senior at Colorado College studying Sociology and History. This commentary is republished from Source New Mexico under a Creative Commons license.
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