The Pen
(John Bazemore/AP)
On May 18, 1980, a man named Genaro Soroa-Gonzalez arrived in Key West from the port of Mariel. With no family waiting to sponsor him, he was sent by plane to a resettlement camp at an army base. There he was interviewed by the INS and, a few days later, he boarded another plane, this one bound for the federal prison in Atlanta. But wait - he'd committed no crime, so why was the US government detaining him? And how long could they hold him? In Episode 5, the story of Genaro Soroa-Gonzalez and the beginning of the indefinite detention of Mariel Cubans.
Additional context:
- Read Detention Empire: Reagan's War on Immigrants and the Seeds of Resistance, by Kristina Shull
- Read Forever Prisoners: How the United States Made the World's Largest Immigrant Detention System, by Elliott Young
- Read American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons, by Mark Dow
- Read Migrating to Prison: America's Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants, by César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández
- Read Read Caging Borders and Carceral States: Incarcerations, Immigration Detentions, and Resistance, by Robert T. Chase
- Read From Chinese Exclusion to Guantánamo Bay: Plenary Power and the Prerogative State, by Natsu Taylor Saito
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