Video: When Your Mother Is Deported

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In a Texan business park named Export Plaza, the Corrections Corporation of America operates a complex of concrete buildings where illegal immigrants are locked up until they agree to leave the country.

“When you first get there, they tell you you’re nobody,” says Sergia Santibanez, who spent 18 months inside CCA’s Houston Processing Center while she fought to remain in the United States with her children.

Watch her daughter, Luisanna, speak about her mother’s detention here:

—Stokely Baksh and Renee Feltz

For more on the business of detention, don’t miss MoJo reporter Stephanie Mencimer‘s article, Why Texas Still Holds ‘Em. For more multimedia coverage of this issue by investigative reporters Renee Feltz and Stokely Baksh, go to www.businessofdetention.com.

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The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

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