From Dorian Estuardo de Wind at The Moderate Voice:
These two letters are part of the Otay Mesa Detention Center Detainee Letter Collection, documenting “the hidden stories of hundreds of refugees from human rights hot spots around the world… Each of them has sought asylum in the United States and has been held at the San Diego, California Otay Mesa Detention Center…”
They are part of the work of “Detainee Allies” and of professors and staff at San Diego State University, many of these letters in response to letters written to the detainees by people with empathy and compassion.
A “project” that started last summer as “an old-fashioned correspondence that bloomed into a friendship, part of an unusual epistolary campaign initiated by San Diego State professors and others in suburban San Diego,” and which, according to the New York Times, “[l]ast week, the university library made public the digital archive of hundreds of letters from detainees, throwing open a window into the fragile lives of migrants from more than 20 countries living, some of them for years, inside a nondescript private prison.”