#TornApart / #Separados
A Discussion on the US Immigration Crisis

Sylvia Fernández / @sferna109

Ph.D. Candidate

Hispanic Studies, University of Houston

slides.com/sferna109/tornapartseparados

Digital Ninjas in Action

Team Houston / BAC

"The Border Crisis"

From "Border Crisis" to Torn Apart / Separados

"The name is meant to evoke not only the families who have been separated, but the way in which this sundering rips the social fabric of our country."

                                                                                   Emily Dreyfuss

“It shows that ICE is everywhere, we ourselves were shocked even though we study this. A lot of America thinks this phenomenon is happening in this limited geographical space along the border. This map is telling a different story: The border is everywhere.”

                                                    Alexander Gil - "'Ice is Everywhere': Using Library                                                                                 Sciences to Map to the Child Separation Crisis"
 

Volume 1

 Intervened in United States’ immigration debates with data narratives illuminating the effects of the government’s policy of separating families, which began at the Mexico-U.S. border but, as TA/S revealed, is, in fact, a national landscape of immigrant detention.

                          Norma Martinez - "Fronteras: Digitally Mapping                                       Trump Administration's 'Zero Tolerance' Policy"

3D: Dismantling the Mafia, Destabilizing Mechanisms, and Documenting the Historical Memory

How this project dismantles the U.S.-“border crisis” and its “zero tolerance policy” by integrating postcolonial practices, interdisciplinary research, and mobilized humanities. TA/S confronts negative national rhetoric towards immigrants of color and the Southwest border and emphasizes the humanity of immigrant communities.

The border is a trap. Begun in 2005, Operation Streamline has criminalized border crossing. Authorized ports of entry, tiny holes shown here as 15-miles wide, turn back asylum seekers, pushing them into the 100-mile-wide border zone, where they are exposed to harsh conditions from both the environment and law enforcement.                                                                                    Narrative- Volume 1

                                                                                                  Textures - Volume 1

 A shadowy network of government facilities, subcontractors from the prison-industrial complex, 'non-profit' administrators paid over half a million dollars a year, and religious organizations across the country, that, together, prop up the immigrant detention machine.

                                                                                                                               Narrative - Volume 2

Volume 2

Launched two months later, datamined and visualized U.S.-government contracts awarded by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, following the money behind the vast infrastructure subtending immigration enforcement.

Title Text

"The profitability of deterrence is not limited to U.S. territory. The U.S. has been pouring money and resources into the Mérida Initiative and Programa Frontera Sur(Southern Border Plan), which assist Mexico in fighting drug trafficking and enforcing its southern border to prevent Central American migration. These programs ultimately escalate Mexican cartel and gang power, which are then able to target Central American migrants with impunity, and target migrants with the same tactics as in the U.S."               

                                                          Meghana V. Nayak - "The Violence of Immigration Deterrence"

"While visualizations of the extensive financial network backing ICE operations should cause grave concern, the team also provides evidence of participation of people of color in ICE contracts in “Gain.” In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire warns about the danger among the marginalized who, instead of fighting for liberation for all, find liberation in becoming oppressors of their own people. One does not need to look beyond the racial make-up of the immigration enforcement agencies as an example of oppression led by people of color. One in three CBP employees are of Latino origin and in Southern California alone, 40% of ICE agents are Latino. One detained migrant with whom I recently spoke informed me that every time a Latino guard opens her cell, the female guard usually yells at her in Spanish “nobody wants you here, you are a criminal.” Imagine the traumatic implications of being reminded by a co-ethnic female who speaks your same language that you are sub-human and it is your fault that you are experiencing abuse. Therefore, the new visualizations of Torn Apart/Separados provide data that should make readers question not only the financial links that maintain ICE operations alive, but also the role of people of color whose communities are directly affected by human rights violations and arbitrary conditions at detention centers."

Estefanía Peréz Castañeda - "The Fight for Dignity"

"On the other hand, in 'Banned,' we rely on cartographic distortion to overstate a case. This visualization draws a map of contiguous United States whose combined population is close to but less than the approximate number people banned from entry into the United States at the moment, blocked by the upheld “Muslim Ban.” Yet as sparsely populated mountain or plains state after state is added to the growing black shape, it soon seems like nearly all of America would be banned. We trick the eye, then, into thinking that American population is evenly distributed across the United States. But it isn’t."

                                                        Moacir P. de Sá. Pereira "Representation Matters"

"'Lines,' for example, shows how pervasive the American removal engine is. Yet the number of deportations at a specific port of entry can be single digits or it can be over 1,000. Furthermore, simply drawing lines devalues the fact that each individual removal is its own story that’s the most important in the world to the deportee and their family and loved ones. But somehow the difference between one and 1,000 also needs to be indicated. The solution to me was to use a logarithmic scale. Now, 1,000 is a line that’s four times longer than the line for a single removal, and every soul gets a wedge cutting across the face of the United States as it continues to expel. In this way, 'Lines' has it both ways. It shows the extent of the problem of removals across the world as a whole (after all, the US has no problem removing souls from points of entry like Ireland), but also makes clear that even one removal is a scar on the national image."                                                Moacir P. de Sá. Pereira "Representation Matters"

"Las redes sociales y el Internet han logrado que nos percatemos de lo que juntos se puede lograr. Torn Apart/Separados, en su sección de 'Aliados' permite que visualicemos, conozcamos y podamos informarnos acerca de todos los esfuerzos que miles de personas están haciendo para contrarrestar las políticas en contra de la movilidad humana. No seamos más testigos, seamos aliados"

                                                                                                                                                                    Rubria Rocha de Luna - "Seamos aliados"

 "What is listed/visualized in both the U.S. and Mexico are allies, groups that are working on the frontlines of supporting migrants’ rights. And perhaps that is a lesson; some of us are very good at critiquing how power operates. We need to get better at seeing the possibilities of solidarity around us for resisting and reworking that power."

                                                                                                                                  Meghana V. Nayal - "The Violence of  Immigration Detterrence"

DATA / MEDIA

1. Be careful                    2. Unscramble                 3. Double-check sources

"The visualizations and data produced by this project, we hope, will let people see the cartographies of fear. Some will know the maps, and some will, for the first time, see: that is all we are hoping to do."                

                                                                                                                                                                          Manan Ahmed - "Lawlessness & Exile"

"It is more than information. It is a living resource, one the team hopes migrants will use to find their families and that researchers will build upon. Much of the project's power is in its archival potential." Few digital projects are documenting what is happening in everyday life of migrants.This is a digital historical record.

                                        Sylvia Fernández and Emily Dreyfuss - "'ICE is Everywhere: Using Library Science to Map the Separation Crisis"      ▬"What statement do you think that the Torn Apart / Separados project is trying to make other than just providing data for people to interpret, is there a broader social message you  want to get across?

▬Absolutely, we are at a moment where the value of the humanities is been call into question by, whether, politicians or state legislators, the public, even the United States government and then this environment. The work of Torn Apart demonstrates a committed and engaged team of researchers that can intervene in the most pressing social justice issues of our day."

                           Roopika Risam and Norma Martinez - "Fronteras" Digitally Mapping Trump's Administration's 'Zero Tolerance' Policy"  

We are happy to PASS ON OUR DATA and LESSONS learned to the ams that take on these challenges. Just drop us a line at tornapartseparados@gmail.com if you have any questions.

Next Stage: Volume 3

GitHub: Torn Apart Public Data

The Nimble Tents Toolkit

Worst Scenario

"Trump is not Hitler, at least not yet, but when Trump uses the term 'plague' to describe immigrants it is impossible not to hear echoes of the past, of the Hitler propaganda that saw the 'wandering Jews' and the gypsies without roots as "harmful pests." When the Trump administration broadcasts press releases with photographs showing air-conditioned camps where the children of migrants are being served, and when US officials declare that these people had never been better, it is difficult not to Think of the propaganda films of the Theresienstadt concentration camp, which showed Jewish children playing happily with dolls and balls in what the Nazis cynically labeled as a 'spa camp.' All this also causes some of us to remember the photographs of children imprisoned behind barbed wire in El Paso [, Texas] a century ago. "

                                                         David Dorado Romo - "Breve historia de los campos de concentración en Estados Unidos"   

Picture by Vice News

"The 'Torn Apart/Separados' Digital Humanities project creates an even greater urgency for our conversations and political action. Visualizing the detention regime puts into sharp relief the ways in which irreparable harm and trauma have been wrought on children and families."     Nicole M Guidotti-Hernández -"The Damage is Done: Visualizing Immigrant Child Social Death