Artist and University of Arizona professor David Taylor has been observing the U.S.-Mexico border for more than 20 years.
He sums up the future of the border infrastructure in one word: proliferation.
Taylor describes the border system that has emerged since 9/11 as “a 1,900-mile-long service economy,” built and maintained largely by private contractors.
“It’s an arms race,” he says, likening the ballooning industry to a Cold War economy.
For a recent project called “Complex,” Taylor focused specifically on Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers, the sprawling, non-descript, warehouse-like structures where migrants are sent for grueling, indefinite stays.
These structures stand in stark contrast to the vast expanse of mountains and desert that often surround them, and Taylor’s work combines aerial drone footage, landscape photography, and audio recordings featuring the testimony of people who’ve spent time in these facilities — including Arizona’s infamous Eloy Detention Center, where detainees have alleged a wide range of mistreatment from ICE agents.
Taylor joined The Show to about the project.
Full conversation
DAVID TAYLOR: It looks like an industrial park, more or less. But an industrial park, ringed by double-perimeter fence, surveillance cameras, out in the desert adjacent to agricultural fields. You wouldn't notice it, unless you knew what you were looking for as you drove by.
Once you recognize the sort of typology of these facilities, they become easier to pick out, but they're fairly nondescript. They're ultimately nestled in alongside Amazon warehouses and logistics facilities of that sort.
SAM DINGMAN: Yeah. I think it's interesting that you brought up Amazon warehouses as the example there because one of the things that I know is interesting to you about this project is talking about what the architectural design elements of these facilities say about the values behind them, right?
TAYLOR: Yeah. They are, really, in many ways a sort of apex expression of the neoliberal mindset, right? That sort of privatization and commodification of everything. And so, these are ultimately warehouses for people. And the individuals who occupy the bed space are the raw material of the industry.
DINGMAN: Talk a little bit more, if you could, about, you know, you used the word “industry” and one of the other elements of this project that I know is interesting to you is the involvement of private industry in generating these facilities.
TAYLOR: Yeah. These are all for-profit facilities. Of course there are still state- and federal-run jails, prisons. But in the moment of mandatory minimum sentencing, there was a sort of move toward having private prisons through all sorts of different legislation and policy changes, right? So effectively incarcerating people became an industry.
The way that I come to it is around immigrant detention. The project that I've been pursuing really intersects with immigrant detention, but it belies the larger system insofar as these are contract facilities for hire. And so, an entity decides that they need to satisfy the imperative of incarcerating whatever group it might be. And they contract with these companies to the tunes of hundreds of millions of dollars.
And it might be inmates from Hawaii. It might be women in immigrant detention. The populations are sort of always turning over. And the contracts move with whatever the contracting agency, you know, has deemed a priority.
DINGMAN: Yeah. Can I ask you a little bit about the experience of interacting with the work? Because, there's still images, but then you also have kind of slow-moving drone videos of these facilities. And the drone cameras are moving very slowly, either high up in the air, giving us an aerial view that conveys the expanse of the buildings that you were alluding to when you were describing them earlier.
But then you also have some where the camera’s moving very slowly on the ground, through the aisles between the structures. And there is this silence to it. The grandeur and significance and the sprawl of the structures contrasted with the silence is really striking.
And then in one of these videos, you also have audio from people who were incarcerated in these facilities talking about these very horrific experiences that they had.
[Audio clip]
And the lack of ambient sound or natural sound also contrasted with the intensely personal experience conveyed in the voices of the people interviewed was jarring.
TAYLOR: It's gratifying to hear that you read it in that way. That was — that's the intent.
Those voices, and I should make a shout to the Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project and the really important work that they do in pro bono representation of people who are in asylum proceedings. They facilitated connection with all of the folks that you are hearing, and those voices are reflecting on, in particular, the experience of being in detention as the COVID pandemic broke out.
DINGMAN: Yeah.
TAYLOR: And anything other than their voices just felt like a hollow choice to me. I mean, there's a drama in hearing the emotion of people's sort of uninflected recollection of what they experienced.
I assembled them in a way that you are sort of led through the kind of quotidian experience of being in the facilities through to really the most fraught moments of the pandemic and people's palpable desperation that can be heard in their voice.
And I think people — when you read people really good journalism and scholarship around these issues, we're seeing not rapists and criminals and gang members, but people fleeing climate insecurity, people fleeing economic insecurity, people fleeing political instability.
I met two young men from Sudan near the border last year. One of the young men said — introduced them as being from Sudan — and he said, quote, “I don't know if you know, but there's a civil war in our country. Our homes are gone.”
