Ssemanda felt free, for a moment.
It was August 2020, and the young political asylum seeker from Uganda was about to walk out of the Imperial Regional Detention Facility in California, just north of the U.S.-Mexico border. Ssemanda eagerly took a shower and changed into a fresh set of clothes. He felt “joy and happiness” — a sensation that he was, at long last, “finally moving out.”
But then he saw the device: a black GPS-enabled electronic ankle monitor. Before Ssemanda was released, an employee at the detention center fastened the electronic bracelet around his leg, handed him a charger, and barked a few instructions at him about the device, a common tool used by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to monitor migrants awaiting their immigration hearings. “If anything goes wrong, you’re coming back to the detention center,” Ssemanda recalled him saying. With the bulky monitor newly wrapped around his ankle, Ssemanda felt his mood lurch back to distress.
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