Starting Sunday, local activists will walk the 70 miles from Pilgrim’s First Landing Park in Provincetown to the Plymouth County Correctional Facility.
According to organizer and Brewster resident Chris Tansey, the goal of the walk is to raise awareness about poor conditions for immigrants held at the Plymouth jail—the only facility in the state that detains immigrants for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
CAI's Gilda Geist talked to Chris ahead of the walk to learn more.
Gilda Geist Walk me through what you have planned for this walk coming up.
Chris Tansey Basically what we're doing is we're walking from Pilgrims' First Landing Park in Provincetown. We're leaving there on Sunday, July 19 and we're walking 70 miles in five days from Provincetown to right outside the property of Plymouth County Correctional Facility. Plymouth County Correctional Facility is the only prison in Massachusetts that contracts with ICE, that's where they go. The pilgrims first landed in Provincetown before they settled in Plymouth. A lot of the identity of this area is founded in immigrants coming over 400 years ago, and that's connected to being an American. But it's kind of ironic that the immigrants that come here now are not allowed to settle. And in fact, they're imprisoned and often not treated how you would expect to be treated as just a human being. We've done a lot of research on it. We looked at a lot of the reports, including this Boston University report describing 25 years of mistreatment, and so that kind of inspired us to do something about it.
GG Can you tell me about what you learned from that study that made you concerned about this issue?
CT So, first off, the report was a coalition between BIJAN—which is Boston Immigration Justice Accompaniment Network—and the BU Law School. And what they did was they actually went in and they interviewed 60 inmates in 2024, two different times. And in it they had different issues, including treatment by Plymouth staff and employees; food concerns, in terms of like, the food was actually making inmates sick; environmental conditions like temperature in the winter, they were not provided blankets or proper wear; sometimes the AC was on in the middle of the winter; overcrowding; sanitation; not receiving medical care in any sort of reasonable time for pretty serious issues; phone access; language access, so things like [having] an interpreter for someone who doesn't even speak the language. One of the ones that really stuck out to me was solitary confinement. There were detainees that were put into solitary confinement not for punishment, but administrative purposes. These are just some of the things that have popped up. Now, that was in 2024. It was two years ago. But Senator [Ed] Markey went and visited the PCCF about two months ago and reported that he'd seen a lot of deeply concerning things happening inside as well, so that's more recent.
GG What do you hope people take away from this?
CT There's a couple of things. Number one, a lot of people just don't even know this is happening. I have friends who are in Plymouth and they had no idea that PCCF even subcontracted with ICE. So, they had no idea there were 400 undocumented immigrants detained in this facility that was in their backyard. So, I think the first thing would be to bring awareness to this whole community because I think the inhumane treatment continues because people don't know about it, and that's where it thrives. And so, I think if there's more attention paid to it, there's more pressure to address it and fix that problem. With that being said, I would like to say our group, Plymouth Justice Pilgrimage, is not political. We invite Republicans, conservatives, liberals. We don't see this as a political issue. We see this as a human rights issue. And that's a huge part of our actual walk is to focus on the things that all unite us. And one of those things is we all deserve to have human rights. Regardless of our documentation, regardless of what we look like, our religion, we deserve to be treated as human beings.
GG Is there anything else you want people to know?
CT So, we actually created a 16-page pilgrim's guide. Within it are pages for each day of the walk, including start points, end points, miles walked for that day and how many hours it's going to take. So, what we're looking to do is if people want to join us, they can obviously join us anywhere along [any] day's route. We're starting at our start point every day at 8 a.m., and people can walk with us for as long as they want. We're going to have flyers to hand out. We're happy to talk to people as we walk about what we're doing and why we're doing it. We are also raising money for BIJAN, Boston Immigration Justice Accompaniment Network, and they do a lot of work with the detainees at Plymouth Correctional Facility. So, we have a goal of raising $4,500. That's another part of this walk, is just raising money for their organization so they can continue to do good work.
