LOS ANGELES — The bang of a gavel.

For those facing deportation, that sound marks the moment that might determine the course of their lives.  

According to TRAC Immigration, a data gathering service operated through Syracuse University, there were more than 1.6 million active cases pending in immigration court at the end of January 2022. That same month, roughly 28,000 people were booked into detention centers run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In 2019, that number sometimes topped 50,000 a month.

“Thousands of people are being held in immigration detention every day, are still being deported,” said playwright France-Luce Benson. “Not just people on the border, but people who have been living here for many, many years, whose families are here.”

Immigration attorney Judy Rabinovitz has been working with this population for years as deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project. She had the idea to mold some of the court records and interviews into a play and approached Benson to see if she’d be interested in writing it.

“I mean, I was hooked immediately,” Benson remembered. “Between her passion and just the egregiousness of what was happening, I knew I wanted to be a part of it.”

So did director Mark Valdez. A longtime believer in the power of theater to enact social change, he read the piece and was deeply moved. More than moved, he was angry.

“It was rage that these are stories of people who are having these experiences and that it’s happening here in our country because of our laws,” he said.

The play, “Detained” which is having its world premiere at the Fountain Theatre in East Hollywood, is a docudrama and the characters are based on real people, like retired nurse Danielle Regis. She is the basis for the character, Bernadette, who traces her brother’s experience in immigration court.

“No one called me or my mother,” the character says, after her brother, who suffers from mental illness, was deported back to Haiti.

Regis flew to Los Angeles from Florida to attend the premiere.

“The play was such a success in conveying what families go through when their loved ones are deported,” she said. “It’s really cruel to be deporting people and separating them from families.”

Her brother Emmanuel’s struggle continues. He had been living in America for over 30 years, had been married and had children here, before he was deported in 2012. After returning to Haiti, where he has no close family, he suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed.

Regis’ 92-year-old mother, a naturalized citizen, has been fighting to get him back into the U.S.

“If something happens to her, what is going to happen to my brother because my mom is his only hope?” she explained. “She knows her days are numbered, and that’s her dream to have her son by her before she dies.”

“Detained” is full of these first-person accounts, but one story is especially close to Benson’s heart. Her own family immigrated to the United States when she was a baby, she says. Her father taught English at Krome Service Processing Center, an immigration detention center in Miami.

She didn’t know what he was doing at the time, but she remembers the phone was always ringing with people asking to speak with teacher Benson.

“He would help detainees with their paperwork,” she recalled. “Once they were released, he helped them find jobs, he helped them find homes.”  

He even won a humanitarian award she didn’t know about until she started working on this play. Very generous, but very humble, Benson thinks he would be proud of what she has written.

“I hope that he would be proud,” she said, adding with a smile, “I think he would say, ‘oh you didn’t need to mention me.’”

While the stories may be difficult to watch, Benson wants the audience to come away from it energized to take action, providing with them resources and strategies as they exit.

“I want the audience to leave here feeling like, ‘what can I do’ and wanting to do it right away and giving them the tools,” she said.

It’s a play that ends with a curtain call that’s also a call to action.

“Detained” is playing at the Fountain Theatre through April 10.