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Editor鈥檚 note: Rogelio Boluf茅 Izquierdo is an immigrant from Cuba who has been detained for more than eight months on immigration charges. After being featured in a Journal news story and letters to the editor last month, he described facing retaliation at the Torrance County Detention Facility. He began a hunger strike that lasted a week before he was taken to the hospital.

April 21 will be known as a day of profound indignation and pain. On this date, officials with the private prison company CoreCivic tore open and confiscated legal documents that belonged to me, including civil motions and lawsuits against Otero County and CoreCivic.

Among the confiscated documents, they found confidential legal strategies protected by the most basic right of due process. 

They didn鈥檛 stop there. 

They also illegally snatched personal belongings of profound sentimental and spiritual value including prayer rugs and religious items. Another detainee at the Torrance County Detention Facility, Reineir Fernandez Garit, suffered the same violation. They took his prayer rug, a book on Islam and essential documents in his asylum case. 

What happened is not just an administrative abuse. It is an open wound to the heart of the Constitution of the United States. 

When the state 鈥� or those who act in its name 鈥� confiscate legal documents that are precisely about exercising the right to justice, it directly attacks the First Amendment: the right to free expression and to petition the government. When facility officials stole necessary legal defense documents, they violated the Fifth Amendment: the right to due process. When they deprived a person of his religious belongings, they endanger freedom of religion, one of the most sacred pillars of this nation.

We鈥檙e not just talking about papers. 

We鈥檙e not just talking about objects.

We are talking about rights. 

We are talking about dignity. 

We are talking about the very soul of a nation that was founded on the promise of liberty and justice for all. Today, we not only decry these actions for ourselves. We decry it because the deepest meaning is at stake. 

Because when the rights of some are trampled in silence, the rights of all are in danger. 

From the community detained in Torrance County, we raise our voices with tenacity, with pain but also with conviction: This is not justice, this is a dangerous deviation from the principles that made this country. 

We emphatically reject these acts. We demand immediate respect be restored to constitutional rights, to due process and to freedom of religion and access to justice. 

Today is a sad day.

But today is also a day to remember that the Constitution is not a symbolic document: It鈥檚 a living promise to be fulfilled. 

And this promise, today, is being put to the test. 

*This letter was translated from Spanish by Journal Staff Writer Gillian Barkhurst.