Everlee Has Disappeared
The Kiwi in ICE custody was transferred, then dropped off the map.
Hi,
As I write this newsletter at 7.42pm in New York, New Zealander Everlee Wihongi has disappeared. Still in ICE custody, her family and lawyer have no fucking idea where she is.
Let me explain.
Yesterday, Everlee Wihongi was meant to meet with her lawyer at the ICE detainment centre Webworm visited last month. Meeting with her lawyer was a key step in getting free from all of this. Then things changed.
At 1.28pm, I got a message from her mother, Betty: "They have pulled a fast one. They are transferring Evs to Arizona. It's happening now."
ICE is known to do this – moving detainees suddenly, from place to place. As The American Prospect reported last year, ICE is essentially hiding clients from their lawyers:
"ICE uses bureaucracy and location transfers to isolate their detainees from both their families and their lawyers, limiting their ability to get out of their predicaments and increasing misery and hopelessness."
Then things got worse.
According to ICE's own Online Detainee Locator System, Everlee had been moved to ICE's notorious "Camp East Montana" at Fort Bliss, Texas.
In short, this is the United States' largest and worst ICE detainment centre – somehow an insanely worse situation to where Everlee was previously locked up. It is the largest immigrant detention centre in the US – an industrial tent city of 3000 detainees. There are 2000 beds.
It also has the most detainees who have died inside. According to NPR:
Out of 25 people who died in ICE detention since October, three of them were at Camp East Montana.
ICE inspectors in February found 49 violations to detention standards at the facility, including inadequate medical care and failure from staff to "accurately document required checks to prevent significant self-harm and suicide."
In December last year, human rights groups sent a letter outlining other behaviour at the facility:
"Detainee reports reveal shocking conditions of confinement at Ft. Bliss
including multiple incidents of use of force by officers against detainees that involve abusive sexual contact, several of which have required hospitalization.
Detained immigrants further report lack of adequate food and the provision of spoiled food, leading to hunger and significant weight loss; inadequate medical care; failure to provide basic hygiene supplies, including soap; squalid conditions, including sewage entering meal areas, and lack of cleaning supplies; prolonged detention in hold rooms; lack of outdoor recreation; and unreasonable barriers to access to counsel."
There have also been outbreaks of tuberculosis and measles. It's so bad, its existence is being reevaluated (and yet it still exists).
So yes – that is where Everlee (left out to dry by New Zealand's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Winston Peters) was moved yesterday.
Then it got – somehow – worse.
Everlee has disappeared. As I write this, she is no longer listed on ICE's online detainee locator system.
Webworm has spoken to Everlee's mother Betty, who currently has no idea where her daughter is:
"They want to mentally and emotionally break people. If it looks like you have support, they are going to move you and keep you scared and anxious."
According to a lawyer who knows Everlee's case intimately:
"They are probably moving her to a different facility. This is what they have been doing. It is a way to “forum shop” and make it hard for attorneys to represent them. This never happened in the past."
This level of movement – and the disappearing – is new.
Betty (who is an American citizen; Everlee has a Green Card) went on:
"Winston Peters has washed his hands of anything to do with New Zealanders in custody. So if you are a New Zealander in custody here, you are screwed. MFAT is too busy kissing up to the US to actually do his job.
The NZ Consulate are good people, [but] with no teeth. They can't step in unless something is so out of place that it is obvious. Everlee's situation doesn't even raise an eyebrow for them.
And finally, ICE is an agency that has congressional backing to act against our constitution with impunity.
And boy, do they ever."
Finally, Webworm spoke to Everlee's sister:
"I am urging Winston Peters to look into my sister Everlee’s case himself. Reach out to the family. Reach out to our lawyer. 31 days. No charge.
We are fighting a system that is deliberately disrupting her legal access, dragging this out hoping she breaks. Everlee has always been proud of her Māori roots and loves being from New Zealand. Mr. Peters, we don’t even know where she is right now. It’s time to step in. Inquire. Advocate. She deserves that much."
I am deeply aware that Webworm is not an ICE newsletter. It is not an Everlee Wihongi newsletter.
But Everlee's situation speaks to so much that aligns with Webworm's values: A sense of justice, and the utter madness exhibited not just by the United States – but by the New Zealand government as well, who have washed their hands of this brown body that they, of course, give zero shits about.
David.
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Webworm's Everlee Series So Far:
David Farrier
David Farrier
David Farrier
David Farrier
