The lights are never off in prison, so Catherine Engelbrecht lost her sense of time; she thinks it was the early morning hours when she stood in line at the Montgomery Processing Center, a Conroe, Texas immigration detention prison, awaiting an uncomfortable medical assessment.
Engelbrecht founded the election-monitoring organization True the Vote in 2010, and she and Gregg Phillips of True the Vote were subjects of the film “2,000 Mules,” which followed the group’s investigation of activity around drop boxes in the 2020 election. Investigating election integrity means challenging powerful people. It has not been comfortable.
Even though she was an American citizen, and had not entered the U.S. illegally, in October 2022, however, she spent nine days in solitary confinement at a federal immigration detention prison….