About Us
Immigration Detention: Stories from Inside is a project of Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (CIVIC). CIVIC is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in the United States. We work to end the isolation and human rights abuses of people in U.S. immigration detention through volunteer visitation, detention monitoring, and advocacy.
We launched Immigration Detention: Stories from Inside through a grant from Cal Humanities in partnership with the National Endowment for the Humanities. We began by creating audio recordings and animated shorts that explored the social and cultural world inside California's immigration detention centers through the stories men and women in immigration detention share; while this project focused on California immigration detention facilities, we are now working to help other organizations and individuals replicate this at immigration detention facilities across the globe. Our hope is to create a larger audio/visual map of the global immigration detention landscape through the stories people in immigration detention desire to share.
To date, no comparable project has documented these stories in a systematic way. Family members, attorneys, visitor volunteers, and advocates routinely hear concerns about general treatment and conditions inside facilities. Rather than speaking on behalf of people in immigration detention, we want to provide them with a medium to communicate to the outside world.
Listening to stories reminds one another of our shared humanity and builds connections between people in detention and communities on the outside. Preserving the stories through this mapping project will weave into the fabric of our cultures the understanding that every life matters, no matter what country you are from or where you live today. Together, we will create an invaluable archive of stories from immigration detention to use in educating communities today and in history lessons for future generations.
