Steve Babb

Thoughts on driving past the future site of the Social Circle immigrant detention center

I drove past pod on barren pod
Of vacant warehouse space
The sites of future segregation cells
And scenes of pending crimes
Already in the planning stage

They stretched on endlessly
And made me contemplate
Our infinite capacity
For inhumanity –
All of the thought and sweat
And treasure we’ve misspent
In order to augment the sum of human misery
As if there was a deficit of it

They made me think of the stockade
A few hours away at Andersonville, where
Gaunt Rebels held emaciated Union prisoners at bay
Beneath the broiling sun and pouring rain
Without a bivouac to shelter them
Or any source of drinking water but
The creek they did their business in
While sentries trained their guns on them
And watched them waste away

What would I give to have the chance
To nip such horror in the bud
And to avert such needless suffering
On such a massive scale
Inflicted with such callous apathy

ICE says they plan to squeeze
Ten thousand human souls inside
This latest, greatest model of
A cost-effective modern charnel house
Which is explicitly designed
To maximize the cruelty
And to dehumanize the detainees

Now is our chance to intercede
So our descendants will not need
To dedicate a monument
In order to commemorate
The victims whom
We could have saved
If we had only had
The will and fortitude
And to redeem the guilt
We might have spared ourselves
And won’t be able to escape

Steve Babb is a retired public health worker who has fought for social justice for his entire adult life. He volunteers with El Refugio, a hospitality house for relatives visiting detainees at Stewart Immigrant Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia (elrefugiostewart.org). His poems address a variety of social justice struggles, including immigrant detention and solidarity with Central America and Gaza, and he has been inspired by the poetry of witness of Anna Akhmatova, Mahmoud Darwish, Refaat Alareer, Hiba Abu Nada, Mosab Abu Toha, Fadi Joudah, Roque Dalton, Carolyn Forché, Wilfred Owen, Nour Elassy, and Hanan Azaiza. His work has appeared in Wayfarer Magazine, The Rising Phoenix Review, IMMPRINT, and Mothering Magazine.

This poem appears in Uprooted: Poems of Resistance, Witness, and Survival (The Chaos Section Poetry Project, Fall 2026). We’re sharing each poem from the collection individually over the coming weeks. You can read the full book or download the free PDF here.