Limited jail visits eroded an incarcerated father’s religious community and morale

Evidence

The trip took forever, but it gave him time with his father. That arrangement lasted through his first semester of college, but then the authorities closed the Passaic County Jail. The family hoped this would mean that his father would again be released on immigration parole. Instead Abu Rami was moved to a jail in Bergen County, where visiting was limited to half an hour. Now the whole family piled into the car on Sundays. They would drive an hour each way for a half-hour visit and take turns talking through the telephone to the man stuck behind the plastic partition. There was no longer any time for those long, warm, continuous conversations Rami and his father had had before. … When Abu Rami told his son that the Muslim community in Bergen was much smaller than the one in Passaic, Rami felt that his father’s deen was dropping. “Be more of a masjid-goer,” Rami advised his father, using the Arabic word for mosque. “And you should have better friends.” His father nodded. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 853

Categorization

• XREF: The closing of one jail and transfer to another, shortening visits, is a concrete instance of how administrative decisions shape family life that echoes deportation-detention scholarship.