in front of a judge for Professor Asgari,” SKETCHBOOK BY BARRYBLITT
Newman lamented to me. “We can’t do
anything for him. For two years, we were
able to help him—and now we can’t.”
A
t the end of March, Asgari was
transferred to the Winn Correc-
tional Center, a sprawling, privately
operated complex near the Louisiana-
Texas border. His first glimpse of the
place was a gut punch. The pod was a
concrete box, the air so humid that it
soaked his bedsheets, the forty or so
beds rusted. The few windows were
covered in semi-opaque Plexiglas. It
was the most depressing place he’d ever
been. “Whenever I think I’ve seen the
worst treatment by ice, they surprise
me again,” he told me.
For all that, he was relieved to have left
Alexandria. An inmate in his pod there
had tested positive for covid-19, and so
the entire pod had been sent to Winn,
where its members would be isolated for
fourteen days, their temperatures taken
regularly. “A couple of us cried,” he said,
of the group’s arrival. “They said, ‘Where
the hell is this place?’ I told them, ‘Here,
you are safer.’” Privately, Asgari told me
that the facility was inhumane: “Nobody
is talking to anybody. It is absolutely hu-
miliating and disgusting to keep people
here.” But within his quarantine pod a
kind of fellowship emerged, even though
the others mainly spoke Spanish, which
Asgari did not.
As far as Asgari could tell, ice did
not seem to take the quarantine very se-
riously. Within a few days, several Co-
lombians in the pod had been deported,
despite the pod’s known exposure to the
coronavirus. Some detainees from El Sal-
vador were also repatriated before the
end of the quarantine. Asgari joined a
habeas-corpus suit of Louisiana ice de-
tainees at high risk of developing com-
plications from covid-19.
On April 10th, he told me that three
men elsewhere in the facility had tested
positive. His blood pressure hit a hun-
dred and fifty over a hundred. By this
time, his pod had been isolated for more
than fourteen days without anyone hav-
ing fallen ill. But while we were speak-
ing he saw a new detainee being brought
into the pod—an exposure risk for those
inside. “I’m going to fight this!” he said.
Asgari hung up, then called back a few
minutes later to tell me that if I didn’t