The woman on the far left of this photo is named Nadia Tahir Ibrahim. At the time this picture was taken, Nadia was 40 years old, the mother of seven, and stuck in a Lithuanian detention center, "unable to go forward or backward, not knowing whether her husband is dead, with no news of her children" (Salgado). Nadia's husband, an officer in the Iraqi army, was going to be arrested by Sadam Hussein's secret service when they fled Kurdistan. Later, she was separated from both her husband and her children, attempted to enter Turkey without a visa, and was put into the detention center.
Salgado said that Nadia was crying every day that he went into to photograph the center. Can you imagine being in a foreign country without anyone you know, where everyone around you is speaking a language you don't understand, and without any assurance of ever seeing your family again? Living with such uncertainty must be extremely hard and stressful. One person who in 1998 had been in Pabrade Detention center, the same center where Nadia was detained in 1997, said, "People have no human rights there, they treated them like dogs. Life in detention center is miserable. Immigrants have no good foods no good cloths. Soldiers beat them badly. Those days are horrible."
Surprisingly, the detention center in Pabrade is still around. Now it's called Foreigners' Registration Center (FRC). Just a few years ago, in March of 2010, there was a report of guards beating detainees, even breaking the ribs of one man. The chief of the FRC at the time, Roberto Patraitis, said of the incident They resisted, they got what they deserved. Using violence is understandable" ("Violence").
While I don't support illegal immigration, I definitely do not support violence without due process. I think it's valuable to recognize that while doing something illegal like crossing a border illegally should never be condoned, we can at least understand that most of those who commit such crimes were driven to them by circumstances that to us would seem unimaginable. And whether that immigrant is a Kurd who ended up in Lithuania like Nadia or a Mexican crossing the American border, they at least deserve our compassion.
Salgado, Sebastião. Migrations. New York: Aperture. 108. Print.
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