Personal Stories from the Post-9/11 Era Excerpt 2

Monami Maulik, Executive Director, Desis Rising Up & Moving (DRUM):

“I remember tears coming to my eyes as I stood in the small, dimly lit, and dingy visitation room with one broken phone as more than two dozen men on the other side of the glass scrambled to tell me their story and how they had been disappeared in the days following September 11. They were old and young, Muslim and Sikh, and they were all undocumented workers—gas station workers, drivers, and restaurant workers. They told stories of being arrested for no reason, cursed at, assaulted, and abused in prison. They mostly had no family or support here and did not speak English well. And as the weeks passed, they were more and more desperate to simply be deported rather than endure the abuse they faced in these makeshift September 11 ‘Muslim’ prison units’.”