If officials in a foreign country to which you had fled forced you and hundreds of your compatriots to live in isolation in the desert, surrounded by a fence and armed guards to monitor your every move, limited the public transport available to take you elsewhere during the few hours between mandatory headcounts and gave strict orders to stay inside at night, it would be fair to say that you were in detention.

Israeli officials, however, do not want to use the word "detention" for what is taking place at their new “center” to house Eritrean and Sudanese nationals, mostly asylum seekers, in the Negev Desert. The Holot Center for Residents opened on Dec. 12 with the transfer of 480 migrants there from the Saharonim Detention Center. Officials created the facility after the High Court of Justice ruled in September that detaining asylum seekers in Saharonim was unlawful.

To protest their transfer to the Holot Center, on Dec. 15 about 150 of the African migrants walked six hours through the desert to the nearest city, Beersheba. They continued on Dec. 16 toward Jerusalem, arriving the next day and marching to the Knesset, where the police took them away. Two of the marchers collapsed along the way in the bitter cold. All of them are now detained, once again, in Saharonim.

Israeli news reports quoted a Sudanese asylum seeker saying of the Holot Center, “It’s just like a prison, only the doors are open.”