“For many people, phone calls are their lifeline”

An immigrant advocacy group has launched a campaign to raise $2,500 for people held at the Stewart Detention facility in Lumpkin, to call their loved ones. The campaign comes just two weeks after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reportedly stopped giving them access to free phone calls.

For many people held inside the detention facility, says Amilcar Valencia, “the only connection with loved ones are phone calls.” He’s the executive director of El Refugio, the nonprofit that launched the “Call Home Campaign” on Wednesday to help pay for people to make phone calls. 

Just a few days before people inside Stewart said they were officially told that the free calls were over, Amilcar said he had been hearing from families as well as from those detained in the facility that they could no longer reach their families. “When the announcement came, [ICE] had already taken away [free phone calls]. No time frame was given. Just, this has been taken away, and that’s the end of it.”

285 South reached out to ICE, asking for a verification of whether they had ended free phone calls. A spokesperson replied in an email, saying, “we currently do not have a response available to provide.”

Since 2020, ICE has been providing people in detention facilities up to 520 free phone minutes a month. The free minutes “allow a detained noncitizen to call anyone — family, friends, attorneys — domestically and internationally,” reads the ICE website.

On June 13, the Detention Watch Network, a national immigrant advocacy organization, reported that people inside over a dozen facilities across the U.S., including the Stewart Detention Center, were saying that they no longer had free phone minutes.

Amilcar says that since then, even calls from people in the facility to El Refugio, have “just dropped.”

He’s very concerned. He recently spoke with a woman in Colombia, who finally spoke to her young family member who is held at Stewart. “She said she talked for 6 minutes. That cost her 7 dollars. It’s expensive for anyone.”

So far, El Refugio’s Call Home Campaign has raised around $1,200. The money will make it possible for the nonprofit to put money into the commissary accounts of people detained at the Stewart facility, according to the campaign website. 

“For many people, phone calls are their lifeline,” said Amilcar. “They can’t visit loved ones, they can’t drive, they don’t have connections in the United States. If they have loved ones in South America, the only way they can talk to them is through phone calls.”