Previously on White Lives.

Cuban inmates took over part of a federal prison in Talladega, Alabama today.

You know, he just said it was our only option.

We had to do something and this was the only thing we could think of.

Undisarrables who came here in the big Cuban boat left four years ago will be sent back.

Had the whole list been deported, there wouldn't have been any more reason for my job.

So essentially we are looking for a needle in a hazelstack.

Linda Calhoun slept poorly the night before it all happened.

Her husband had brought home a puppy he'd found, abandoned outside their house, and lend

on her kids it's been all night trying to calm the puppy down, trying to get it to sleep.

They took turns feeding it with a doll bottle, but it cried throughout the night and the

next morning she was a wreck.

So I didn't get that much sleep that night, maybe I should have stayed home that day.

But Linda would work anyway at her job as an INS deportation docket clerk at the Talladega

federal correctional institution in rural Alabama.

In that morning shortly after she arrived, she and ten others were taken hostage by a group

of men being held in the prison.

Men who were not serving as sentence for a crime.

Men who had come from Cuba in a mass exodus a decade before and had found themselves detained

for years by the immigration service.

Okay, in immigration we have regular A files and we have temporary files.

But with the Cubans we also had blowback files and they were copies of the original files.

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