Nature writing for ICE Detainees
Figuring out what to say to a pen pal
I’m part of a letter writing project for ICE detainees through the Boston Immigrant Justice Accompaniment Network. Every few months, I’ll get an address for a new pen pal and will sit down to draft a letter to a complete stranger. I only ever know one, maybe two things about this person. Their name, sometimes their country of origin, and always, always, the fact that they are in immigration detention, awaiting court dates that never seem to get any closer until finally, they’re here.
My last pen pal got deported a few weeks ago—I heard from the program coordinator once that he liked hearing from me, but I never got a letter from him. Stamps are expensive, writing is harder for some people than others, any number of reasons, but I tried to write him back whenever I thought about it. Less than was probably good for him. And now he’s back in a country I can only imagine it took him a long time and effort to leave, a place he probably wasn’t ready to return to. I didn’t really know anything about him, but I at least know that, and that makes it hard and awful.
And so this week, I got another new pen pal.
There’s always something terrifically awkward about starting a letter to an absolute stranger. This is just part of the process—every time, I sit in front of a blank note pad and agonize a little bit. How do I hit the balance between talking about myself, and asking questions? What do they want to share about and what questions would fill them with dread? What would be meaningful to them—a poem or a note of solidarity or pretending like the building they’re in doesn’t exist? The answers are different for every person I write to, and ones I often suss out through trial and error, but there’s always that first letter, a blank slate.
And so I start like I always do. “Hi,” I say. “My name is Alejandra, and I live in Chicago with my dog and my husband.” I write my letters by hand because I think it makes them look more human, a step that is maybe only halfway worth it, considering that even when I’m writing to guys in detention in Massachusetts, I’m mailing their notes to a Securus P.O. box in Tampa, where it will be opened, analyzed, and scanned for delivery on a janky, shared, prison-issue iPad. There’s something desperately sad about this new mail system to me—one more step of dehumanization, of isolation, and studies show that incarcerated people feel the same. Of course, it’s theoretically a “safety measure”, but in reality, it does little to make jails safer and instead works to push people towards more expensive forms of communication like costly phone calls and iPad visits. So I hand write my letters, black ink on gridded blue-and-white paper as per regulations. This is so that, even if they won’t get to see the fun envelopes I pick for them, or get the tactile sensation of thin, crinkling notebook paper, or get to see what I might have doodled for them, the colored inks I favor in my own writing, they’ll at least get something out of my round, half-print-half-cursive handwriting, get an idea of a person behind the letter.
And then what? What does a woman who lives, free and at home, with her dog and her husband in the city of Chicago, who is writing this letter at her work desk, surrounded by her knickknacks, for whom delicious fresh food is a few steps away, who is not afraid of deportation—what do I have to say to a person who has none of those things close at hand? I am not a loved one, who knows what to say to call them back into themselves. I am not a lawyer with helpful information or data on their case. I am a stranger.
This is where my experience helps. I went to an immigration detention facility, privately owned, back at the tail end of 2019—five years ago now, somehow—on a work trip to gather information about these places. It was a good one, as these things go—clean-ish, not overcrowded, and yet, also, indisputably, a prison. High ceilings, nearly no windows, horrible incandescent lights everywhere, no privacy. We were shown the yard, a scorched-looking piece of grass and black top surrounded by chain link, the warden joke that it was hotter n’ hell out there in the summer, so the guys preferred to stay in the gym—a room nearly identical to the dorms except for the fact that it swapped out bunks and showers for a basketball hoop.
Talking to the men incarcerated there, later, they told us that they rarely got any rec time, much less outdoors, even in the more temperate winter. Maybe once or twice a week, depending on whether the guards were in a good mood. They were supposed to get it every day, according to ICE regulations. They missed the sun.
And so, when I pick up my pen to write to someone in immigration detention, I tell them about the weather. When I wrote to my new pen pal last week, we were in one of those dopamine-euphoric days known in a lot of overwintering states as “false spring,” where the sun is shining, it’s only cold if the wind is blowing, and it feels like there’s hope in the air again. And so I told him about it—I told him about the smell of mud out on the prairie, the sort of faint fuzz of green you almost want to see out of the corner of your eye when you look at tree branches, about the sun actually warming you for the first time in months. I told him that I knew it wouldn’t last, that it would be snowing again by next week, but that the sunlight on the leaves made spring feel at least possible. I asked him what he was looking forward to when he got out of detention, asked him what his plans were, told him to stay strong, but the bulk of the letter was just that—stillness and soil and the smell of things being reborn.
This, in short, is nature writing, but not for insight or for beauty, but rather to provide the most ersatz form of connection with the outside world, with the changing of the seasons, in the same way a grainy black-and-white digital copy of my nervous, handwritten note is an ersatz form of connection with me. What I really want to do is not send them a note, not describe to them what spring looks like when it comes, but rather, to let them experience it for themselves, to give them the real thing—human connection and sunlight. Our world isn’t set up for that right now, so instead I keep writing letters, and keep fighting to make them unnecessary.
If you want to send your own letters to incarcerated folks, I don’t know if BIJAN is currently accepting volunteers, but I’d recommend them, or reaching out to Letters for Liberation, which is a really supportive and well-thought-out letter writing project for folks in both immigration and regular lockup.
You can also, always and of course, help pay someone’s immigration bond. The average amount of a bond is around $3,000—an amount that can be out of reach for individuals or families, but becomes achievable when a community comes together. I’m part of the Midwest Immigration Bond Fund, but if you want to donate more locally, check out the directory at the National Bail Fund Network.
Where I’ll Be:
I’ll be at the Tucson Festival of Books on March 15-16–you can find my full schedule here!
I’m also teaching a handful of in-person classes on “Journaling For Growth” here in Chicago at Intuit Healing—much to my own surprise I am, in fact, a daily journaler, and I have a lot to say about it, so come hang out at my class and find out! If you’re interested in an online version of it, let me know! I have taught this class once before and really loved it, so let me know.
What I’ve Written:
For Commonweal, I wrote about the visibility and invisibility of ICE “enforcement actions” and of migrants in and around our cities.
My latest for Christian Century is a love letter to the prairie behind my work, and the community of artists it sustains and that sustain it.
For , I wrote about the cruelty of deporting migrants to the Darien Gap.
Reading:
Triangle: The Fire that Changed America by David von Drehle—I’m embroidering a name for Tatter Blue Library’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory memorial banner, and thought I should do more reading around this. Tatter is making a conscious effort to tie their memorialization of the people who died in that fire to present-day lack of worker protections, so I’d pair this book with
’s incredible The Life and Death of the American Worker.Much Depends on Dinner by Margaret Visser — I can’t remember if I went out and bought this book after reading about it in
’s newsletter or ’s (both are incredible both readers and writers and I follow their breadcrumbs whenever I can), and I’m so immediately charmed by Visser’s voice here—delightful!
glad you're enjoying Visser! would love to hear your thoughts later on. I also have her book The Rituals of Dinner on my shelf and have been meaning to start it