California women inmates join Roy’s cause at Yuba County Jail.
AB Wire
An Indian American mother, Rajeshree Roy, who is detained at the Yuba County Jail and facing deportation to Fiji, has got support from women inmates in California who have gone on a hunger strike to protest against the deportation move and to collect funds to get her released from jail.
A group of women began a hunger strike on December 14 for Roy, joining hundreds of other detainees taking part in hunger strikes at facilities across the country, reported San Francisco BayView.
The hunger strikes are taking place at several other facilities across the country: in the Hutto Immigrant Detention Center in Texas; in an immigrant detention center in the high desert city of Adelanto, California; in the Krome Service Processing Center in Florida; and in Alabama, in El Paso, Texas and in Lasalle, Louisiana.
The strikes are known as the #FreedomGiving Strikes and they were launched on Thanksgiving by hundreds of South Asian and African detainees at three separate facilities, BayView reported.
The Yuba County Jail rents space to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to detain people. For the first time, women in criminal custody are fasting with detainees in immigration custody as an act of solidarity.
Roy faces deportation back to Fiji, where she has not lived since she was eight years old. As a child, she suffered sexual abuse and upon relocation to the United States never received counseling or help, according to the report, which has also appeared in Prison Photography. By the time she was in her teens she was both attempting suicide and robbing and beating people.
Sentenced as an adult at age 16, Roy spent 17 years at Central California Women’s Facility. Nine years later, struggling to survive and feed her children while in an abusive relationship, she stole a garden hosepipe from a store, a misdemeanor petty theft.
The district attorney set bail at $1 million and offered a 25-to-life sentence. In 2011, Roy accepted a plea bargain of seven years. In November 2014, she qualified for release under Prop 47. When Roy stepped foot out of the facility, she was picked up by ICE and slated for deportation back to Fiji, away from her children.
After years of silence due to shame and stigma as an abuse survivor and “criminal,” Roy has gained confidence through peer and advocacy support and decided to be public with her story and fight for herself and others, the Bay View reported.
“We are locked up together and refuse to be divided into immigrants and citizens. None of us belong in this cage separated from our families. We join the brave immigrant hunger strikers across the country in fasting to force recognition of our humanity,” says the statement of Roy and her fellow hunger strikers at Yuba County Jail.
Roy needs a bond of $10,000 to get out of the facility and fight the deportation order, said the report.