New multimedia game exposes the realities of immigrant lives in U.S. detention

LatinaLista — There’s a lot of truth in the saying that you don’t know how someone else’s life is until you walk a mile in their shoes.
It is certainly true of the 300,000 immigrants who are being detained across the country by the Department of Homeland Security. In detention centers, and under conditions that have resulted in the deaths of 87 immigrants while in detention, immigrants, both legal and undocumented are being subjected to a dehumanizing policy that strives to deprive basic human rights to people who, many of them, have not even been charged with a crime.
What’s worse is that in an effort to justify the detention, so-called “crimes” are exaggerated or distorted.

A new multimedia campaign from the human rights group breakthrough called Homeland Guatanamos attempts to let everyday Americans walk in these immigrants’ shoes who are detained in federal detention facilities.
Through role playing, visitors pretend to be a journalist who is sent inside a detention facility by their editor to uncover the real story of the immigrants. What makes this project so unique is that breakthrough has been able to mix gaming elements with real life. Videos of actual immigrants in detention telling their stories are featured on the site. There’s even a “Memorial Wall” with the names of all 87 immigrants who have died in detention and in a unique way, to show that we’re not all so removed from this tragedy as we’d like to think, there’s a feature that allows the insertion of a zip code to see which detention centers are nearby.
Of course, with all breakthrough campaigns, there’s a feature that tells visitors how to get in touch with their Congressional representatives to demand action against such facilities.
It’s one thing to enforce the law but it’s another to criminalize innocent people.