In a California detention center, former film student Mohamed X reflects on his four-year confinement. Blocked from filming inside the opaque system, he recounts organizing a labor strike against $1 daily pay and a brutalized hunger strike, revealing the unimaginable realities of immigration detention.

The architecture of detention offers an entry point, while readings by Honduran poet Claudia Torres weaves Mohamed’s story into a larger history and web of people affected by the modern U.S. border regime, stretching back decades. While recent, highly-publicized events involving ICE appear exceptionally violent, they are part of a longer history and a permanent state of exception.