— EPISODE 1
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Due to the pandemic, a Tunisian man living in Italy, Nadhimi Touir, lost his job and residence permit. Arrested last November, he was sent to the detention center for migrants located in Gradisca d’Isonzo, northern Italy. His cell had no mattresses or blankets, and the winter wind came in through a broken window. The Gradisca Permanence Center for Repatriation (Cpr) was reopened in January 2020 after being closed for three years due to a riot. Since then, two detainees have died. Touir is still waiting to be deported or released. “This place makes you crazy. We are not human anymore.” (Versione italiana)
On Nov. 8, 2021, Nadhimi Touir, 21, left the apartment where he lived with his two roommates in Piacenza. He walked to the closest supermarket and bought milk, cookies and some pasta. On his way home, police stopped him and asked for his documents. That’s when Touir realized he was in trouble.
His residence permit had expired one year before; to renew it, he would have needed the job he had lost. In a country where youth unemployment under normal circumstances borders on 30%, the extensive lockdown to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic made his job search almost impossible.
“I knew my visa had expired, but I had nowhere else to go. There’s nothing but bad things for me in Tunisia,” he said.
Touir grew up in Zeramdine, a town with 16,000 inhabitants in Tunisian Sahel. He was 15 when he arrived in Italy after illegally crossing the Mediterranean Sea. The journey had cost him about 3,000 euros, which he earned while working at a gas station in Tripoli, Libya. He then lived in a center for unaccompanied minors in Reggio Emilia until he turned 18, and over time he got used to Italian food and culture.
Last August Touir had already received – and ignored – a first expulsion order. At that time, Italy was getting closer to its second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, and authorities were urging citizens to stay home and limit their movements. Instead, he was given 15 days to leave the country.
After his second stop with no valid residence permit, authorities opted to send Touir to Gradisca d’Isonzo, a town in Northern Italy, to one of the seven detention centers for undocumented migrants currently operating in Italy. (These are known as CPRs, or “Centri di permanenza per il rimpatrio”).
“They didn’t give me the time to take any clothes with me. Why such a hurry?”
Riots, self-harm, aggression—and deaths
Once inside Gradisca’s detention center, Touir had to quarantine for 20 days in an area known as the blue zone. His room had no furniture or blankets, and a broken window let in the freezing wind. Winter temperatures in Gradisca can easily dip below zero, and the heating system in the center was often out of order, as reported by Mauro Palma, the national guarantor for the rights of persons detained or deprived of liberty.
“They are leaving us to freeze to death,” Touir said. He also complained about the lack of clean clothes. “I stink. Everything stinks in here.”
Touir – an outspoken young man with taper-fade hair and a taste for trap music – was one of about 80 migrants who spent the winter in the Gradisca’s CPR, just a few miles from the Slovenian border.
Last May, the United Nations pressured the international community to suspend forced returns to protect the health of migrants and local communities during the pandemic. Even so, Italian authorities kept detaining undocumented migrants inside prison-like centers, made to hold people while they wait to be deported.
Isolated from society and held in precarious physical conditions that can take a toll on mental health, undocumented migrants under administrative detention are deprived of the legal protection given to detainees of the penitentiary system. Riots, self-harm and aggression are frequent, accountability is scarce. In most cases, those confinements are useless. Procedural errors, lack of international agreements or approval of asylum requests mean that most immigrants eventually are not expelled but released back into Italian society.
For those less fortunate, the outcome can be much more tragic than deportation. Between June 2019 and July 2020, five people died while under administrative detention. Two of these deaths took place inside the CPR of Gradisca, where Touir is confined.
While detrimental living conditions inside Italian CPRs have made headlines for nearly a decade, new problems arose in the year of the pandemic. Deportations might take longer, detainees can’t leave their cells, and the few occasions for socialization – such as lunch in common rooms – are now suspended.
The managers in charge of these privately-run centers claim they are honoring their contracts under the hardest circumstances by doing intensive COVID-19 testing, employing extra personnel, and facilitating remote communications between migrants and their families.
The CPR Management
One of the biggest operators in this business was the nonprofit Edeco Cooperativa. (In 2021, it got rebranded as Ekene Cooperativa.)
Edeco has managed Gradisca’s center since it reopened in January 2020 after winning an open contract bid with the Ministry of the Interior. According to the bid documents, the government pays the nonprofit organization about €26 per migrant per day, plus up to €41,000 every year for supply kits that include sheets and pillow.
When Edeco was awarded the contract, the detention center was supposed to have a maximum capacity of 150 inmates, generating a potential revenue of about €1.5 million a year. But that was before the pandemic. Now, the center’s revenue expectation has fallen by about 50%, because authorities imposed a maximum limit of 60 inmates – only recently increased to 80.
(Curiously, the contract also includes a section on “pocket money” of €2.50 per day per detainee – up to a maximum of €135,000 every year. Edeco said the money is used to cover inmates’ extra needs – such as cigarettes – and that what remains is handed to migrants after their release. It’s unclear, though, whether they get this money if they’re deported.) “From the economic point of view, this has been a very deceptive year,” said Simone Borile, Edeco’s executive.
Borile – a man in his forties with a heavy Venetian accent, who refers to detainees as “our guests” – says he is sure that this drop in revenue didn’t impact the services that his organization provides, including legal orientation, medical and psychological attention, as well as translation and social assistance.
“There are no problems. We have a correct approach towards our guests,” he said.
With respect to the harshliving conditions inside the center that Touir and two othermigrants described, Borile denied responsibility. He claimed that the local branch of the Ministry of Interior is in charge of maintenance and provision of furniture, that damaged fixtures are replaced promptly, and that Edeco’s staff tries to “accommodate the guests’ needs”. He also claimed that migrants purposely give a misleading image of life inside the center.
“Those people taking videos of some broken windows, they are the ones who broke them in the first place,” Borile said.
Currently, Borile is under indictment for fraud related to the possible mismanagement of a shelter for asylum seekers that Edeco ran in the province of Venice. As reported by the local newspaper Il Mattino di Padova, the center was overcrowded and severely understaffed, and Borile’s organization bought inadequate, poor-quality materials. The poor conditions of the shelter were allegedly hidden with the help of three local authorities who are also under indictment.
Italy’s Long Tradition of Detention Centers for Migrants
Italy introduced the detention centers for migrants in 1998 as a part of a broader reform of migration laws known as Turco-Napolitano. At that time, the maximum length of stay in those facilities was 30 days. The ensuing governments increased it to 18 months, then lowered it to 90 days, and finally increased it to 180 days. Eventually, in October 2020 a new measure lowered again the term to 90 days, after which the immigrant has to be deported or set free.
Over time, as administrative detention became longer CPRs started acting as a surrogate for the penal system, making it possible to isolate certain individuals from society without involving the penal system.
In 2019, less than half of the roughly 6,000 undocumented migrants held in custody in those centers were deported, as stated in the 2020 report of the detainees’ rights guarantor. This percentage has remained stable for at least the past ten years, and it’s expected to be lower during the span of the pandemic, which imposed heavy limitations on air travel.
“CPRs today are empty and deaf places: empty of everything, of furniture, of any kinds of activity. Deaf because isolated from the civil society,” wrote Palma in his report. Unlike prisons, the centers are not designed to host people for extended periods of time. There are no areas that can be used for personal or spiritual care, and no educational or recreational activities. According to the Ministry of Interior, migrants are to be blamed for this situation because of their “lack of interest in taking part in any activity whatsoever.”
“I’d rather go back to jail”
“I’d rather go back to jail ten times instead of spending a single day in a CPR,” said Mohamed Daoudi, 35, an immigrant from Morocco. He spent about two months in Gradisca’s center for undocumented migrants after serving time at the San Vittore correctional facility in Milan, under charges he asked not to disclose. At San Vittore, Daoudi worked as a janitor for 300 euros per month, although the State withheld one-third. In prison, he developed a herniated disc and was therefore allowed to leave the CPR for medical reasons. Soon a hearing will decide whether his conditions are enough to allow him a residence permit for medical treatment. At least until then, his migration status won’t get him arrested.
This system of arbitrary, extended detentions with unpredictable outcomes in alienating contexts often causes migrants to break down. In the case of Touir, during his second month of detention, he started experiencing signs of mental disorder. His conversation became more confused, his thoughts darker.
“This place makes you lose your mind. Some people are cutting themselves with glass out of boredom. Others sleep outside, in the yard,” he said. “I am losing my mind.”
Doctors prescribed him a medication to help him with his sleep—twenty drops every night at 8 p.m. But it doesn’t do much against the noise, he says. Sometimes, people yell to get the attention of social workers. In other cases, people yell at each other, arguing in animated discussions that sometimes end in violence.
In January 2020, Vakhtar Enukidze, 38, from Georgia, got involved in a fight with a cellmate. Police intervened, violently breaking up the confrontation. While investigations are still taking place, the guarantor reported that the day before his death Enukidze complained of strong pain and requested medical assistance—which didn’t show up.
“People there don’t have anything to lose. They are like animals in a cage”
Giovanna Corbatto, guarantor monitoring THE living conditions inside the center
Two months after Enukidze’s death, Gradisca’s mayor appointed a local guarantor, Giovanna Corbatto, to monitor living conditions inside the center. Today, she is one of the few people – apart from police and Edeco’s employees – who can access the unit.
“Those places are much worse than prisons,” Corbatto said. Prisoners’ rights don’t apply to people in administrative detention, and privatization makes it harder for human rights organizations of the civil society to monitor. Rules are not always clear, and they can even change from one center to another. For example, of the seven CPRs currently operating in Italy, only the one in Gradisca allows inmates to use cell phones.
To protest against what they perceive as unjust prolonged incarceration and a violation of human dignity, some detainees take incendiary action. In 2016 a huge riot severely damaged Gradisca’s center, forcing it to close for four years. In August 2020, a new protest led to fires and escape attempts.
“People there don’t have anything to lose. They are like animals in a cage,” Corbatto said. In that context, healthcare can be problematic.
On July 14, Orgest Turia, a migrant from Albania, died while he was in custody at the Gradisca’s CPR. According to local newspapers, he died because of an overdose of methadone, a medication used to treat narcotic addiction. While an investigation is still ongoing, the local guarantor hypothesizes that high turnover among doctors created the conditions for Turia’s death to occur.
“The health management inside the CPR is a tricky subject,” Corbatto said. Doctors inside the center are all independent contractors, and they change every two weeks or so. “They can’t have much control on which medications patients receive, in what quantity and how often,” she said.
If we exclude the deaths of internees, it’s impossible to know how many accidents take place inside Italian CPRs. Those centers are not required to have a registry of critical events and when they do have it, they are not updated. But it’s still fair to think that if the detention period were shorter, in better conditions and limited to deportations effectively taking place, incidents would be more rare.
Although today the maximum length of the administrative detention of a migrant is 90 days, if the person comes from a country with an existing deportation agreement with Italy it can be extended for additional 30 days. “But if the migrant files an asylum request, administrative detention can last up to one year,” Caterina Bove, Touir’s lawyer, told me.
Touir had left Tunisia as a teenager after both his parents died in a car accident and his uncle kicked him out. He then moved to Libya, shortly after the start of a civil war. When he arrived in Italy, nobody told him he could have asked for asylum. When he did, it was too late. After five months of detention, his request was denied.
“When you’ve been in Italy so long and you’ve never made an asylum request, it’s difficult that they take you seriously,” Bove said. “If someone told him about this possibility when he arrived, his life would probably have been different.”
Since his request was denied, the detention period for Touir started again. From zero. Touir will be confined inside the CPR for a maximum of four additional months until he will be deported or set free. But he hasn’t given up yet.
“They won’t send me to Tunisia,” he told me on the phone. “They will have to kill me first.”
Hidden is a series co-funded by its readers at Frontiere.
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Author Profile
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is a freelance journalist. He is currently in New York City, where he recently graduated from Columbia Journalism School.
Before turning to journalism, he volunteered and worked in international aid. His interests include migrations, human rights and social movements. He holds titles in intercultural studies, international relations, and translation and interpreting. He speaks five languages, enjoys scuba-diving, and orders his mojito with a few drops of angostura on top.
