Protesting a concentration camp in Nebraska
Estamos aquí por ustedes
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Tynan Stewart previously reported for Hell World on the Stop Cop City movement in Dallas.
Luke O’Neil
Estamos aquí por ustedes
by Tynan Stewart
Drive north from the city of McCook in southwest Nebraska and you'll soon see the signs. There are five along the roadside, all painted in black and white and most with text large enough to be visible from passing cars.
"How much is enough?" asks one. "Shame on Pillen" reads another in a callout of our state's conservative governor. And then a message in Spanish.
"Somos amigos de los inmigrantes."
Another sign has a long list of names including Leo Cruz Silva, Victor Manuel Diaz, Renee Nicole Good, Alex Pretti, and many others. All were people killed — directly or indirectly — by ICE or the Border Patrol.
The final sign, added later than the others, reads "We have not forgotten." It's a message intended not just for motorists, but also for the people being held in the immigration detention center just up the road.
"There's so much suffering going on inside," Deborah Walters told me.
She and her husband John are longtime residents of McCook, and they own the field in which the signs are planted. I was one of hundreds who arrived by the literal busload on Saturday for a rally and vigil on their land.
For me it was a grueling journey — a seven hour round trip in a friend's truck with no AC in the middle of August — but I was determined to be there. The detention center, which opened late last year and housed immigrants kidnapped from Minnesota during Operation Metro Surge, is an ugly blight on the state's conscience. I wanted to see how Nebraskans would respond to that moral injury. More than anything I was curious what local residents thought about this concentration camp that had been foisted on them by the federal government and Governor Jim Pillen, a man who worked closely with the Trump administration to bring it to the Cornhusker State.
"We just felt so helpless," Deborah told me. "How can we help these people? We don't know who they are. We see on the news that families are being separated. They're taking the husband and father and locking them up somewhere, and families don't even know where they went. And we thought, well, maybe we should protest. And since my husband owned this land, he said, ‘We can protest out here.’”
Saturday's rally was the third such event organized on their property, though the Walters said this was the biggest by far. Previous protests were mostly attended by locals. But this time folks came from Omaha and Lincoln, North Platte and Kearney. There were pastors and poets, musicians and lawyers and farmers and even a group of women who dress themselves as Margaret Atwood-esque Handmaids.
From where we stood you could just make out the layers of razor wire that have sprung up on the detention center's fences like some noxious silver weed. But less than a year ago the nearby prison was a markedly different place. The so-called Work Ethic Camp was a state-run rehabilitation facility for nonviolent offenders. There was a garden tended by inmates who, according to locals I spoke with, often served the community by working at the food bank, putting up Christmas lights, and cleaning the fairgrounds.
Now the garden has been bulldozed and replaced by an encircling road constantly patrolled by white pickup trucks. The new immigrant detainees are never seen in town.
The transformation is fitting because the new detention center — like all the other manifestations of Stephen Miller's mass deportation agenda — has cruelty baked into its DNA. I haven't even mentioned its unholy, alliterative nickname yet because typing it out makes me feel a bit sick. But it's an important part of the story and I can't avoid it. The (ugh) "Cornhusker Clink," much like "Alligator Alcatraz" and "Speedway Slammer," doesn't just represent the physical infrastructure of fascism, it's also a piece of agit-slop, a weapon of propaganda designed to help the dehumanization and state-sponsored suffering go down more easily. The names are simultaneously a grotesque little gift for too-online members of the MAGA faithful and a “haha fuck you” to kind of person who cares about human dignity.
As I wrote last August, when news of the prison first broke, “If you're the type of person who wants to defend the systematic mass deportation of immigrants — but would rather not have to think about the unpleasant details of what it looks like in practice — having a cute little nickname you can use to trigger the libs is a useful shield against reality.”
But rather than rallying the base in any meaningful sense, the naked barbarism of the Trump administration has galvanized even people here in the rural heart of the Midwest. The so-called “Real America.” Saturday's protest wasn't just a gathering of leftists. Sure, the Lincoln chapter of the DSA had a table, but I saw many faces (and costumes) I recognized from previous No Kings protests. The Pissed Off Grandmas, a group whose political advocacy includes singing anthems like "This Little Vote Of Mine" and wearing silly hats, were included in the rally’s lineup of speakers. The gathering felt like the textbook definition of a big tent opposition party.
As someone who’s attended protest after protest in Lincoln, where I live, the turnout was invigorating. The last time Lincoln activists tried to agitate against the McCook detention center, nearly a year ago, the showing was depressingly meagre and disorganized — and that rally happened down the street, not three-and-a-half hours away. Yet despite suffering under a political system meant to wear us down, the last year of incessant horrors, including the imprisonment of one of our immigrant neighbors, has seemingly had the opposite effect.
But as I've said, it was the folks from McCook — the people living in a county that voted 83% for Trump three times in a row — who most interested me. People living in this part of the country are told, often, that whatever terrible consequences are inflicted on their communities are what they deserve. After all, they keep electing Republicans. But what about the people loudly and visibly resisting, not to mention the people they are rallying for? What do they deserve?
At the rally, I talked to Mary Haller, a retired physician assistant who used to work part-time in the detention center's clinic. Her employment predated its transformation and she, like others I spoke to, praised the Work Ethic Camp and the incarcerated people who used to work in the community. But the changes implemented by the Trump administration, including the drastic tightening of security, made it harder and harder for her to care for her patients.
"I finally just had to walk away. I didn't feel like a good person," she said.
I don't want to mislead you. It's not as though all of McCook is unhappy about the detention center. Every reporter who visits the city does their obligatory visit to a local cafe (or if you're the New York Times, an Arby's for some reason) and finds that one guy willing to defend the indefensible.
“We finally have a governor with a backbone,” one such man told a Nebraska News Service reporter earlier this year.
Diane Lyons, a McCook resident, told the crowd on Saturday that locals opposed to the center have staged other events, including a local No Kings protest. And every time they do, people online start blaming outside agitators from Colorado or Kansas, as though local resistance couldn’t possibly be organic.
"It's always on Facebook that buses and buses and buses are coming in with people from outside the community," she said. "So you guys have ruined it today because you brought the damn bus."
It's easy to mouth off to a reporter or post shit on the Internet. It's much harder to actively support a symbol of injustice. And despite weeks of advance organizing and prior warning from the groups behind the rally, there were no counter-protesters on Saturday. I heard a single chud yell "I love ICE!" from his truck window, but many more passing drivers honked and waved in apparent support.
Whether the rally's message of solidarity reached the immigrants being held in the McCook detention center I do not know. But it's possible that future victims of Trump's crackdown, as they arrive at the prison via the highway, will see the three new signs protesters left behind. "We are fighting for you," they read. "Estamos aquí por ustedes."
Tynan Stewart is a writer and journalist based in Lincoln, NE. He writes This Week In Lincoln, a newsletter about local politics, music and culture, and also blogs about many other things on his website.