WASHINGTON—Maksim Borisov says he can’t hide who he is. “I’m super obviously gay,” he tells me, over a crackling detention center phone line, the kind of static that sounds like it’s hissing in protest. “It’s completely obvious—that’s who I am.”
Maksim is twenty two, he was born on the far edge of Russia, on Sakhalin Island, where the Sea of Japan laps cold against gray shores. Fast-spoken and fierce, Maskim is a survivor.
He’s been locked up in Arizona’s Eloy Detention Center for three months now. The place is a private immigration jail run by CoreCivic, a billion-dollar prison conglomerate whose record on human rights reads like a rap sheet. Eloy is where the system sends people it wants to disappear. And Maksim is terrified that it will expel him.