“It was terrible,” Olivier Habimana* remembered about his first night at a small county jail in Indiana after being arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Born in Rwanda and educated in Belgium, he came to the United States to work as an operations manager for a French company based in Indianapolis that supplies parts for the big three auto companies. He was a middle-class professional, and he had never been in jail before. So, when he was arrested by ICE, it was a “huge shock,” he told Truthout.

Agents put him in the back of a van that made him feel like “an animal in a cage.” When he got to the small jail in Clay County, in rural Indiana, he was surprised. At the time, in 2022, it held about 50 people. “I was expecting the jail was going to be something much bigger,” Ha

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