Fleeing violence, finding detention: One family's year in US lock-up

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HUNTINGTON STATION, N.Y. — Katherine started eighth grade behind schedule, on Oct. 5, partway into the fall semester and a grade level behind. She felt nervous, not so much because of the language barrier or the newness of life in small-town America, but because so much time had passed since she was last in school. The previous year and a half had been an unspeakable blank.

In July 2014, she and her mother, Ana, had left El Salvador to escape a gang they say was extorting their family and threatening Ana with violence. (For legal reasons, only first names are used in this story.) It was their second such journey; the first had ended in deportation from the U.S. This time, it took three weeks to cross into Texas, where they surrendered to U.S. Customs and Border Protection and declared themselves refugees. They’d hoped to petition for asylum and reunite with Raúl, Ana’s common-law husband and Katherine’s father, who was living on Long Island, New York. But they were soon put on a plane to New Mexico, entering the first of three federal detention centers — really, prisons, Ana said — for mothers and kids seeking asylum.

Their longest stay was in the South Texas Family Residential Center, a new detention facility run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, in the oil-camp town of Dilley. Katherine, a tall, serious girl with dark brown hair, recalls a blurry nine months of inactivity. She remembers how bored she was and how little appetite she had; how they only had an hour per day to use the Internet or read in the library. Most of the time was spent sitting in their communal bedroom, crowded with bunk beds. There was nothing resembling school. “Sometimes, I would go outside with my friends,” she said, reticent about her experience. “Outside” was the fenced-in, 50-acre expanse in which the buildings and trailers making up the detention center were arranged.

With 2,400 beds for mothers and children, Dilley is the largest civil detention center in the country and, in its desert landscape and low-lying architecture, reminiscent of the Japanese internment camps of World War II. The Obama administration says family detention is necessary to deal with last year’s surge of some 68,541 unaccompanied minors and an additional 68,445 children traveling with a parent or legal guardian, mostly from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. But the facility was designed and built in haste, through a no-bid contract with a private prison company, the $1.65 billion Corrections Corporation of America, or CCA.

Ana and her daughter were among Dilley’s first detainees and were held there longer than anyone else, according to immigration advocates on-site. They were finally released without explanation in early September, after 14 months in ICE custody. Their asylum claims had been denied, and Ana is required to wear an ankle monitor and attend regular check-ins with law enforcement. Despite the real threat of deportation, they’ve felt relieved to join Raúl in New York and get Katherine back in school. Ana said she worries, though, that her daughter was scarred by their confinement: “She doesn’t seem like a normal girl who can enjoy things.”

When President Obama took office, he vowed to curtail George W. Bush’s policy of detaining migrant children. In August 2009, following extensive litigation by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, removed all minors from the T. Don Hutto Residential Center, a facility in Taylor, Texas, run by the same private prison corporation — CCA — that now operates Dilley. (CCA declined to comment for this story). But in response to the 2014 increase in child refugees, Obama reversed course, adopting a “no-release policy” to deter further migration across the U.S. border. In 2013, ICE had just 95 beds in family detention units; that figure has now risen to some 3,000, spread across three secure facilities: the center in Dilley, the Karnes County Residential Center in Karnes City, Texas, and the Berks Family Residential Center in Leesport, Pennsylvania. (The Artesia, New Mexico, facility, where Ana and Katherine spent their first five months in the U.S., was closed at the end of last year.)

The legality of these facilities is now in question. In July, U.S. District Judge Dolly M. Gee of the Central District of California ruled [PDF] that ICE’s policy of detaining children for weeks and months, alone and with their mothers, violates a 1997 settlement in Flores v. Johnson, a class action lawsuit brought by unaccompanied minors fleeing earlier violence in Central America. That settlement holds that ICE must release immigrant children “without unnecessary delay” to a legal guardian or adult custodian and make “continuous efforts on its part toward family reunification.” By Oct. 22, ICE must prove that it has devised standards and procedures to ensure that children are only held for short periods and in “facilities that are safe and sanitary, consistent with concern for the particular vulnerability of minors,” never in “unlicensed or secure facilities” except in extraordinary circumstances. “Our position is, [ICE] could comply with the law and with Flores by releasing these mothers and kids in a week at most,” said Peter Schey, executive director at the California-based Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law and attorney for the plaintiff class in Flores.

To Ana, the processes governing Dilley, Karnes and Artesia were just as opaque. Like 80 percent of family detainees [PDF], she and Katherine passed their “credible-fear interview,” the first step in proving they should be deemed refugees. Yet their case stood still. Why did some get out on bond while others never got that opportunity? Why were some women and kids detained so much longer than others? “[The ICE officers] basically just scare you. They don’t give you enough information. They don’t tell you what’s going to happen to you,” Ana said.

A few weeks after they arrived at Dilley, Ana and Katherine had a brief hope of “early” release. In January, ICE notified Ana’s attorney that Katherine would be let go. Mérida, Katherine’s paternal grandmother in New York, flew out that night, spending hundreds of dollars on airfare: round-trip for her and one-way for her granddaughter. The next morning, Mérida arrived at Dilley and was told that Ana, too, would be discharged. Then, for hours, Mérida heard nothing and grew frantic. Around 5 p.m., she recalled, they were informed that neither Ana nor Katherine would be released. The family was permitted an hour’s visitation at which they held each other and wept, the two women said. Ana had a panic attack; Mérida flew back alone.