So you remember that I'm in San Antonio as a YAV, right? That stands for "Young Adult Volunteer", a project of the Presbyterian Church USA. YAV has sites all over the country, but some of them are collaborations with another organization named D.O.O.R.. "Discovering Opportunities for Outreach and Reflection" belongs to the Mennonite Church, and San Antonio is one of the sites they have jurisdiction over with YAV. Essentially, this partnership allows YAVs access to cities otherwise run by D.O.O.R., hence most of our activities and opportunities are managed by the Mennonites (although our official host church in town is Presbyterian).
San Antonio itself is a blur of Mexican and German heritage. Back in the day a lot of die Deutschen immigrated to the city and built very large, very fine Victorian houses. The Mennonite Church in San Antonio owns one of these overtly gigantic homes, which D.O.O.R. uses to host mission trippers from its various programs. This is la casa (the house).
This year, though, D.O.O.R. opened up the bottom floor of the Casa (with a spacious six beds and two bathrooms) to the Interfaith Welcome Coalition for use as a temporary home for migrant families out of detention and on their way to far-off American cities. How this arrangement came about is another long story involving several different organizations and government agencies, sometimes with conflicting interests among them.
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| That bit at the top is the southernmost part of Mexico. |
Do you remember when, last summer, the US experienced a enormous influx of child migrants from Central America? They crossed the southern border in droves, and there was a great rush to find somewhere to put them, with Border Patrol holdings overflowing and army bases opening to accommodate hundreds of children. Many came (and continue to come) from what's known as "The Northern Triangle" of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador; declared by the UN to be the most violent region in the world. Honduras experiences 90.4 murders per 100,000 people yearly; El Salvador, 41.2 per 100,000; Guatemala, nearly 40 per 100,000. Comparatively, Rwanda is at 23, Mexico at 21.5, Sudan at 11, Somalia at 8, and the United States at 4.7.
That's a lot of intentional homicide for such small countries; especially El Salvador. Look at that thing. It'd be like living in a Massachusetts where 2,779 people were murdered annually. Or a Virginia, which has roughly the same geographic size and population as Honduras, seeing a murder rate of 7,527 people a year. (That's about half the yearly murder rate of the entire United States.)
Gang violence is an epidemic in this region, and their networks of control are vast. Businesses are extorted; children are recruited on pain of death. Women and girls are threatened with rape. Impunity and police corruption are high. It is not hard to see how everyday citizens may want to leave for the north, where they know life is hard for migrants but there are jobs and they pay more, too - which means money to feed families, build better houses, and living without fear of gang presence and rampant violence.
There are various ways to get across the US-Mexico border from Central America: your family hires a smuggler to make you look innocuous on a bus, you ride on the roofs of freight trains rumbling north through Mexico. If you are lucky, you are not thrown from a train by a gang member or a Mexican immigration officer; your leg or your forearm is not torn off by the grinding wheels. You are not kidnapped by a cartel and held for ransom in a warehouse, or raped by gang members and beaten to death in a graveyard. If you are traveling alone, and have not lost your mother's phone number by the time you get to the border, you are not fated to languish there until you earn enough money wiping windshields in the streets to call your aunt in Tegucigalpa. You cross the Rio Grande by night in an inner tube or on a floating raft. If you are being taken to a distant safe-house by another smuggler, you dodge the lights of the Border Patrol vehicles behind brush and wait for a signal. If you have crossed with intent to seek asylum - be it from gang violence, persecution, domestic abuse, or any number of offenses that guarantee your protection from deportation - you approach the Border Patrol and you turn yourself in.
This is how most of the women and children encountered by the IWC have been detained after crossing the southern border into Texas. They are asylum-seekers, requesting protection by the government because they fear for their lives if returned to their native country. Migrant family detention in Texas follows a more-or-less regular process:
That's the gist of it, though bail and release aren't the end. Their asylum claim has yet to be approved, and while living with relatives they are required to appear at the local immigration court for the continuation of the case. Some make it through weeks or months in detention only to have their claims denied, whereupon they are deported.
My first experience volunteering with the migrant families was indirect. In January there was a request to help answer phones at RAICES, as women contacted the office from the detention centers for legal help. When they did, I was to take down their name, A#, and enter them into a spreadsheet so we knew to send a lawyer to review their case. If there wasn't another call waiting, I was to ask where they came from, when they were detained, number and ages of children, and details on their treatment at the centers. Are you too cold? If your child is sick, are you given medicine? And so on. Of all this information, we must at least have the A#, which is the primary means of identifying someone in the detention system.
The RAICES cell phone is backlogged with messages. Some are unintelligible; static and a garbled voice. In others, women give only their name. Understanding Spanish over the telephone is difficult for me, and many times I can't puzzle through a distorted message the way I can in English. Words and names blend together, numbers are spoken too quick. I am given first names and surnames I've never heard and don't know how to spell. A Spanish-speaking colleague parses them out for me. One woman leaves a message, but her voice is almost completely lost in the static. "Please help me," she says, "I need a lawyer. Please, please help me." When there's no way to identify a caller, the only thing to do is hope they'll call again.
Weeks later, Matt invites me to the bus station with a RAICES colleague. IWC volunteers keep an eye out for mothers and children just dropped off by Karnes or Dilley, introduce themselves, help with purchasing bus tickets, and invite them to the Casa. Travel backpacks are brought to give to families leaving that night. Volunteers offer fruit and other snacks, chat with the women and explain the journey laid out on each ticket. The first night I join them, I make small talk with a young girl who is leaving with her younger sister and their mother later that night. I've never spoken with Central Americans before, let alone refugees. Sometimes it is difficult to know what to say, what questions are appropriate to ask, and my Spanish is rusty from lack of practice. Still, communication happens. She tells me her favorite movie is Toy Story. Her sister likes to watch Peppa Pig, dubbed into Spanish. At one point, I am asked if I have my own children. (This question will come up more than once in my other interactions with migrant women.) Most of the IWC members present are older Mexican-American women who are fluent speakers, and their presence is reassuring, both to myself and to the families. Some women are quiet and shy, others are very cheerful and talkative. Children munch grapes and giggle, especially younger ones, who tend to bounce back faster from the journeys they've undertaken. (Still, says Mallory, who studies medicine, trauma in young children can manifest itself later on in life.) Volunteers come and go, driving families to and back from the house.
Sometimes there are guests. A group of law students from out of town are present, having been assisting RAICES with the influx of families arriving in the spring. Another night, nuns from another city are visiting. Not everyone speaks Spanish, which is a chance to flex my interpretation skills by passing questions and answers back and forth. I learn the bus tickets along with the migrants; they're complicated enough in English to then have to understand in Spanish. Depending on distance, families may have to change buses twice, three times, four times, or more. It's a cause for nervousness, especially for one woman, who does not know how to read much. I can't be sure which stations east of Texas will have Spanish-speaking employees to help with transfers. When I'm familiar with the city they're traveling to, I try to offer advice on the weather, or if they'll be able to find an immigrant community that speaks Spanish. Transition is difficult in a foreign country. We let them know that tap water is safe to drink in the United States.
All told, I take more shifts volunteering at the house, which comes with its own rhythms and routines.
Early on, most days are fairly quiet, and my job as an evening volunteer is to prepare beds for incoming families, make sure there's food on hand, check for clean towels, and be ready to welcome whomever is dropped off from the bus station. Mallory or Tori go with me the first few weeks so that I'm not minding the house on my own. IWC members or RAICES employees come in and out, dropping off families and intake forms. I take down women's names, country of origin, destination, departure time, and their children's name and ages. Once in a while women traveling alone are brought in, en route to husbands or other family in the United States. I explain bus tickets, point out where they're going on the map, and ask if they need more blankets, because the air conditioning is finicky and warms up too slowly. Drivers and volunteers take women to a small bungalow where the travel backpacks, shoes, clothing, diapers, and hygienic items are stored, so that they might pick out what they need for the night and the journey ahead. I call people from the driver list, make sure each family has a ride to the bus station the next day, and go to bed after 11:00, when I'm sure there isn't anyone new coming to the house for the night.
Agnés is one of dozens of women who participated in a hunger strike in late spring at the Karnes facility. Held two months in detention, a short stay compared to other families, she was released to discourage outside scrutiny and lives now in the Mennonite house with her young daughter and two teenage sons. Most migrant families we see are crossing into the United States to reunite with family members or live with friends. Others with no prior connections in the US are integrated into the community with help from RAICES and other organizations. Pending a move to another part of the county for permanent residence, Agnés and her children have become the pillar of the household. I see them weekly, and sometimes more often, depending on the need for volunteers. Her daughter Paulina, whose fifth birthday party was celebrated in June with a cake, tamales, and a princess piñata, delights in running off with my phone. (Mallory, enjoying a quiet evening at home, receives a series of puzzling text messages as Paulina yells accented English words into the voice-to-text function.) Agnés' two sons are friendly teenagers who attend ESL classes during the day. They wish me a good evening when I see them and are usually around to help blow up air mattresses as the beds fill up.
It will be strange to imagine the house without Agnés, who has been guiding fellow migrant families there for three months. She cooks rice with peas and corn, fried eggs, and pots of black beans eaten with wedges of Cotija cheese. Always there is coffee, drink of choice with milk and sugar for even the young kids. Sometimes there is chicken soup with lime, or thighs and drumsticks in tomato sauce, and of course tortillas are ever-present; freshly made or store-bought and heated in the microwave or on the comal. Agnés serves food, hustles, and chats loudly with the women as they trade stories from the detention center. I take over laundry folding as the families flood in, and run back and forth with sheets and pillowcases to arrange air mattresses. On quieter days she'll do women's hair, and loves showing pictures of her family on her smartphone. I am shown siblings and cousins in a parade; Paulina is dressed as a mermaid on a gleaming float decorated with sequined sea stars and kelp. Everyone's stories are different, but I ask almost no one why they left, except for the two brothers. Marcel, the younger, shrugs. "Because of everything," he says. "The violence."
Earlier in the year, the overnight shift at the house was a relatively calm gig. ICE would bus people out until roughly two in the morning, which meant late nights, but we'd be hosting a small group of two or three families. Until recent change in policy, migrants were held until their bond was paid, even if they'd passed the initial credible fear interview which establishes strong case for asylum. In the past few weeks, however, families are released as soon as they pass the test, meaning we've seen as many as ten or twenty families arriving per night as Karnes and Dilley empty their backlog of cleared women and children. We open the church and a second house to handle overflow. Volunteer drivers, lawyers, a doctor and interpreters pile in, crowding the kitchen and the dining room. It gets impossibly noisy, and in all the confusion my Spanish becomes embarrassingly blundered. Children scamper underfoot, playing with toys and gliding about on a pink scooter. One night, a small girl wails with an earache; on another, a tiny boy cries from the strangers and over-stimulation, babbling to his mother to leave. I disperse cough medicine to adults and children alike; ibuprofen to ease headaches and other pain. Mallory says that cold air can cause asthmatic symptoms in young lungs, not to mention the germs thriving in close quarters. I listen to toddlers cough and cough.
One night, a woman asks for an outlet to charge a black device strapped around her ankle. I show her where she can plug it in, assuming it must be some kind of medical machine, perhaps for blood pressure or diabetes. I find out later that’s it a tracking bracelet, assigned to women whom ICE believes have a high risk of flight, although recent implementation seems less clear-cut. The women complain to each other of the injustice of it. When I ask if it's alright to take a photo, they tell me how journalists have been coming in and out, snapping pictures of the monitoring devices every time.
At 4 am I go to wake up a woman named Iris and her two children, only to find her sitting on the side of the bed, wide awake with the light on. She hasn’t slept all night for the pain of the tracker around her leg, and implores me for a way to have it taken off at the detention center she came from. Her bus leaves in two hours for Atlanta, where she will see an immigration judge in ten days. Even so, Matt tells me later, immigration hearings are different from ICE’s bracelet determinations.
No one from RAICES is awake to take my calls, and I am hesitant to rouse Agnés, unsure she'd be able to offer any recourse. I try to tell Iris that going back to Dilley would probably not be the best solution at this point. Her family and her new lawyer are in Georgia, and the doctor from NYU conducting interviews with the women has promised to write her a letter of support urging ICE to remove the bracelet as soon as possible.
Still, my advice feels pathetic. Iris looks desperate, afraid for her mental and physical health. "I'd rather go back and try to ask them," she tells me, "than leave having to endure this."
I check her paperwork, where we find out that she will see someone faster by continuing on to Atlanta than by returning to Dilley. Iris calls a relative on the house cell phone, and seems cheered after a long conversation. The driver arrives, and she leaves with her sleepy children as the sun begins to grace the neighborhood. I catch a friend from RAICES later to relay Iris's concerns and make sure someone with better Spanish and much more legal expertise gets in touch with her about the bracelet. Come 7:00, a housemate picks me up and we return home, where I catch a little sleep before work.
Volunteering at the Casa is one of the more genuine experiences I've had this year. Unhappy as the circumstances are, it is at least good to be working within a network of committed people with all different levels to expertise and resources to offer against the situation. What we do at the house is offset by the work of RAICES, who are raising legal challenges against the government to ensure better treatment of Central American refugees from the top down. Still others will have to work towards encouraging the government and the international community to advance economic development within these countries, so that families are able to live and work without having to flee for the United States.
If you are interested in learning more about RAICES and their work, please visit http://raicestexas.org, where you can sponsor a travel backpack or contribute to the bond fund. Below are several links and recommendations for future reading on the subject of Central American migration and detention.
On the child migrant crisis:
From A Stream To A Flood: Migrant Kids Overwhelm U.S. Border Agents (NPR)
Undocumented and Underage: The Crisis of Migrant Children (VICE) (video)
Why Kids Are Crossing The Desert Alone To Get To America (Think Progress)
Migrant Children Are Fleeing a Region Rife with Sexual Violence (New Republic)
Child Migrants Settle Uneasily In The Big Easy (NPR)
Child Migrant Crisis Stemmed By Border Security Build-Up (NPR)
On the detention centers:
‘Drink more water': Horror stories from the medical ward of a Texas immigration detention center (Fusion)
Migrant kids and parents await their fate in U.S. detention centers (Aljazeera America)
Public schools grapple with influx of migrant children (Aljazeera America)
The U.S. Is Locking Up Immigrant Children in Private Prisons Under Inhumane Conditions (In These Times)
Immigrant families in detention: A look inside one holding center (Chicago Tribune)
Exclusive: Family detention social worker speaks out (McClatchy DC)
On conditions in Central America:
The Northern Triangle: The Countries That Don't Cry for Their Dead (In Sight Crime)
CRIME AND VIOLENCE IN CENTRAL AMERICA’S NORTHERN TRIANGLE: How U.S. Policy Responses are Helping, Hurting, and Can be Improved (Wilson Center)
New U.S. policy of little help to Central American families who live in fear (LA Times)
A Murder Foretold (The New Yorker)
On journeying to the United States:
Riding 'The Beast': Alt.Latino Interviews Salvadoran Journalist Oscar Martinez (NPR)
"Enrique's Journey", Sonia Nazario
How Four Dudes Skated from El Salvador to the U.S. to Flee Gang Violence (RollingStone)
On the ICE tracking bracelets:
What It's Like to Live with an Ankle Bracelet (VICE)
U.S. government's use of ankle monitors on immigrant mothers draws criticism (Fox News Latino)
Note: The names of the migrant families have been changed in this post to protect their privacy.
Until later,
Caro
That's a lot of intentional homicide for such small countries; especially El Salvador. Look at that thing. It'd be like living in a Massachusetts where 2,779 people were murdered annually. Or a Virginia, which has roughly the same geographic size and population as Honduras, seeing a murder rate of 7,527 people a year. (That's about half the yearly murder rate of the entire United States.)
Gang violence is an epidemic in this region, and their networks of control are vast. Businesses are extorted; children are recruited on pain of death. Women and girls are threatened with rape. Impunity and police corruption are high. It is not hard to see how everyday citizens may want to leave for the north, where they know life is hard for migrants but there are jobs and they pay more, too - which means money to feed families, build better houses, and living without fear of gang presence and rampant violence.
There are various ways to get across the US-Mexico border from Central America: your family hires a smuggler to make you look innocuous on a bus, you ride on the roofs of freight trains rumbling north through Mexico. If you are lucky, you are not thrown from a train by a gang member or a Mexican immigration officer; your leg or your forearm is not torn off by the grinding wheels. You are not kidnapped by a cartel and held for ransom in a warehouse, or raped by gang members and beaten to death in a graveyard. If you are traveling alone, and have not lost your mother's phone number by the time you get to the border, you are not fated to languish there until you earn enough money wiping windshields in the streets to call your aunt in Tegucigalpa. You cross the Rio Grande by night in an inner tube or on a floating raft. If you are being taken to a distant safe-house by another smuggler, you dodge the lights of the Border Patrol vehicles behind brush and wait for a signal. If you have crossed with intent to seek asylum - be it from gang violence, persecution, domestic abuse, or any number of offenses that guarantee your protection from deportation - you approach the Border Patrol and you turn yourself in.
This is how most of the women and children encountered by the IWC have been detained after crossing the southern border into Texas. They are asylum-seekers, requesting protection by the government because they fear for their lives if returned to their native country. Migrant family detention in Texas follows a more-or-less regular process:
- Families, defined for our purposes as women crossing with their children, are voluntarily or involuntarily apprehended by the Border Patrol. During processing, they may spend days crammed into the holding facility with other detained migrants, where the temperatures are kept profoundly low for people coming from a tropical climate. They call it la hielera (the icebox).
- Depending on the discretion of the Border Patrol, families are transferred to the custody Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). At this point, they are sent to one of two family detention centers in Texas at Karnes City or Dilley. (There is a third center in Pennsylvania.) This part of the process is nicknamed la perrera (the kennel).
- Families are given packets of legal information, but it is not always provided in Spanish. Some women are illiterate, with children too young to read or write, and some do not speak Spanish at all, but indigenous languages of the regions from which they hail. (Translators or interpreters in these languages are difficult to find. Most experts in the United States are at far-off universities.) Among this legal information, provided families can read it, is a directory of free legal help, one of which is the RAICES immigration law office.
- RAICES send lawyers to the women who contact them and give their full name and A# (alien number, the means by which families are organized in the centers). Lawyers help women organize their cases for asylum before their audience with a judge.
- Women are seen by one of three immigration judges who assign bail; the minimum amount is $1,500, but some judges have been known to set it as high as $15,000 or $20,000. (One particularly notorious for harsh rulings is nicknamed el diablo, "the devil", and will sit with his back to the defendants.) If women first come into contact with RAICES after their audience, lawyers help negotiate a lower bond.
- Family members in the United States, whom migrants are usually traveling to reunite with, will pay the bond. RAICES also has a bond fund to help bail out migrant families who need assistance covering the fee. Once released, migrant families are bused to the Greyhound station with a sandwich and chips to await the bus to their relatives' city, which may not be leaving until the next morning, the next night, or even the next couple of days.
That's the gist of it, though bail and release aren't the end. Their asylum claim has yet to be approved, and while living with relatives they are required to appear at the local immigration court for the continuation of the case. Some make it through weeks or months in detention only to have their claims denied, whereupon they are deported.
My first experience volunteering with the migrant families was indirect. In January there was a request to help answer phones at RAICES, as women contacted the office from the detention centers for legal help. When they did, I was to take down their name, A#, and enter them into a spreadsheet so we knew to send a lawyer to review their case. If there wasn't another call waiting, I was to ask where they came from, when they were detained, number and ages of children, and details on their treatment at the centers. Are you too cold? If your child is sick, are you given medicine? And so on. Of all this information, we must at least have the A#, which is the primary means of identifying someone in the detention system.
The RAICES cell phone is backlogged with messages. Some are unintelligible; static and a garbled voice. In others, women give only their name. Understanding Spanish over the telephone is difficult for me, and many times I can't puzzle through a distorted message the way I can in English. Words and names blend together, numbers are spoken too quick. I am given first names and surnames I've never heard and don't know how to spell. A Spanish-speaking colleague parses them out for me. One woman leaves a message, but her voice is almost completely lost in the static. "Please help me," she says, "I need a lawyer. Please, please help me." When there's no way to identify a caller, the only thing to do is hope they'll call again.
Weeks later, Matt invites me to the bus station with a RAICES colleague. IWC volunteers keep an eye out for mothers and children just dropped off by Karnes or Dilley, introduce themselves, help with purchasing bus tickets, and invite them to the Casa. Travel backpacks are brought to give to families leaving that night. Volunteers offer fruit and other snacks, chat with the women and explain the journey laid out on each ticket. The first night I join them, I make small talk with a young girl who is leaving with her younger sister and their mother later that night. I've never spoken with Central Americans before, let alone refugees. Sometimes it is difficult to know what to say, what questions are appropriate to ask, and my Spanish is rusty from lack of practice. Still, communication happens. She tells me her favorite movie is Toy Story. Her sister likes to watch Peppa Pig, dubbed into Spanish. At one point, I am asked if I have my own children. (This question will come up more than once in my other interactions with migrant women.) Most of the IWC members present are older Mexican-American women who are fluent speakers, and their presence is reassuring, both to myself and to the families. Some women are quiet and shy, others are very cheerful and talkative. Children munch grapes and giggle, especially younger ones, who tend to bounce back faster from the journeys they've undertaken. (Still, says Mallory, who studies medicine, trauma in young children can manifest itself later on in life.) Volunteers come and go, driving families to and back from the house.
Sometimes there are guests. A group of law students from out of town are present, having been assisting RAICES with the influx of families arriving in the spring. Another night, nuns from another city are visiting. Not everyone speaks Spanish, which is a chance to flex my interpretation skills by passing questions and answers back and forth. I learn the bus tickets along with the migrants; they're complicated enough in English to then have to understand in Spanish. Depending on distance, families may have to change buses twice, three times, four times, or more. It's a cause for nervousness, especially for one woman, who does not know how to read much. I can't be sure which stations east of Texas will have Spanish-speaking employees to help with transfers. When I'm familiar with the city they're traveling to, I try to offer advice on the weather, or if they'll be able to find an immigrant community that speaks Spanish. Transition is difficult in a foreign country. We let them know that tap water is safe to drink in the United States.
All told, I take more shifts volunteering at the house, which comes with its own rhythms and routines.
Early on, most days are fairly quiet, and my job as an evening volunteer is to prepare beds for incoming families, make sure there's food on hand, check for clean towels, and be ready to welcome whomever is dropped off from the bus station. Mallory or Tori go with me the first few weeks so that I'm not minding the house on my own. IWC members or RAICES employees come in and out, dropping off families and intake forms. I take down women's names, country of origin, destination, departure time, and their children's name and ages. Once in a while women traveling alone are brought in, en route to husbands or other family in the United States. I explain bus tickets, point out where they're going on the map, and ask if they need more blankets, because the air conditioning is finicky and warms up too slowly. Drivers and volunteers take women to a small bungalow where the travel backpacks, shoes, clothing, diapers, and hygienic items are stored, so that they might pick out what they need for the night and the journey ahead. I call people from the driver list, make sure each family has a ride to the bus station the next day, and go to bed after 11:00, when I'm sure there isn't anyone new coming to the house for the night.
Agnés is one of dozens of women who participated in a hunger strike in late spring at the Karnes facility. Held two months in detention, a short stay compared to other families, she was released to discourage outside scrutiny and lives now in the Mennonite house with her young daughter and two teenage sons. Most migrant families we see are crossing into the United States to reunite with family members or live with friends. Others with no prior connections in the US are integrated into the community with help from RAICES and other organizations. Pending a move to another part of the county for permanent residence, Agnés and her children have become the pillar of the household. I see them weekly, and sometimes more often, depending on the need for volunteers. Her daughter Paulina, whose fifth birthday party was celebrated in June with a cake, tamales, and a princess piñata, delights in running off with my phone. (Mallory, enjoying a quiet evening at home, receives a series of puzzling text messages as Paulina yells accented English words into the voice-to-text function.) Agnés' two sons are friendly teenagers who attend ESL classes during the day. They wish me a good evening when I see them and are usually around to help blow up air mattresses as the beds fill up.
It will be strange to imagine the house without Agnés, who has been guiding fellow migrant families there for three months. She cooks rice with peas and corn, fried eggs, and pots of black beans eaten with wedges of Cotija cheese. Always there is coffee, drink of choice with milk and sugar for even the young kids. Sometimes there is chicken soup with lime, or thighs and drumsticks in tomato sauce, and of course tortillas are ever-present; freshly made or store-bought and heated in the microwave or on the comal. Agnés serves food, hustles, and chats loudly with the women as they trade stories from the detention center. I take over laundry folding as the families flood in, and run back and forth with sheets and pillowcases to arrange air mattresses. On quieter days she'll do women's hair, and loves showing pictures of her family on her smartphone. I am shown siblings and cousins in a parade; Paulina is dressed as a mermaid on a gleaming float decorated with sequined sea stars and kelp. Everyone's stories are different, but I ask almost no one why they left, except for the two brothers. Marcel, the younger, shrugs. "Because of everything," he says. "The violence."
Earlier in the year, the overnight shift at the house was a relatively calm gig. ICE would bus people out until roughly two in the morning, which meant late nights, but we'd be hosting a small group of two or three families. Until recent change in policy, migrants were held until their bond was paid, even if they'd passed the initial credible fear interview which establishes strong case for asylum. In the past few weeks, however, families are released as soon as they pass the test, meaning we've seen as many as ten or twenty families arriving per night as Karnes and Dilley empty their backlog of cleared women and children. We open the church and a second house to handle overflow. Volunteer drivers, lawyers, a doctor and interpreters pile in, crowding the kitchen and the dining room. It gets impossibly noisy, and in all the confusion my Spanish becomes embarrassingly blundered. Children scamper underfoot, playing with toys and gliding about on a pink scooter. One night, a small girl wails with an earache; on another, a tiny boy cries from the strangers and over-stimulation, babbling to his mother to leave. I disperse cough medicine to adults and children alike; ibuprofen to ease headaches and other pain. Mallory says that cold air can cause asthmatic symptoms in young lungs, not to mention the germs thriving in close quarters. I listen to toddlers cough and cough.
One night, a woman asks for an outlet to charge a black device strapped around her ankle. I show her where she can plug it in, assuming it must be some kind of medical machine, perhaps for blood pressure or diabetes. I find out later that’s it a tracking bracelet, assigned to women whom ICE believes have a high risk of flight, although recent implementation seems less clear-cut. The women complain to each other of the injustice of it. When I ask if it's alright to take a photo, they tell me how journalists have been coming in and out, snapping pictures of the monitoring devices every time.
At 4 am I go to wake up a woman named Iris and her two children, only to find her sitting on the side of the bed, wide awake with the light on. She hasn’t slept all night for the pain of the tracker around her leg, and implores me for a way to have it taken off at the detention center she came from. Her bus leaves in two hours for Atlanta, where she will see an immigration judge in ten days. Even so, Matt tells me later, immigration hearings are different from ICE’s bracelet determinations.
No one from RAICES is awake to take my calls, and I am hesitant to rouse Agnés, unsure she'd be able to offer any recourse. I try to tell Iris that going back to Dilley would probably not be the best solution at this point. Her family and her new lawyer are in Georgia, and the doctor from NYU conducting interviews with the women has promised to write her a letter of support urging ICE to remove the bracelet as soon as possible.
Still, my advice feels pathetic. Iris looks desperate, afraid for her mental and physical health. "I'd rather go back and try to ask them," she tells me, "than leave having to endure this."
I check her paperwork, where we find out that she will see someone faster by continuing on to Atlanta than by returning to Dilley. Iris calls a relative on the house cell phone, and seems cheered after a long conversation. The driver arrives, and she leaves with her sleepy children as the sun begins to grace the neighborhood. I catch a friend from RAICES later to relay Iris's concerns and make sure someone with better Spanish and much more legal expertise gets in touch with her about the bracelet. Come 7:00, a housemate picks me up and we return home, where I catch a little sleep before work.
Volunteering at the Casa is one of the more genuine experiences I've had this year. Unhappy as the circumstances are, it is at least good to be working within a network of committed people with all different levels to expertise and resources to offer against the situation. What we do at the house is offset by the work of RAICES, who are raising legal challenges against the government to ensure better treatment of Central American refugees from the top down. Still others will have to work towards encouraging the government and the international community to advance economic development within these countries, so that families are able to live and work without having to flee for the United States.
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| A note left in a room at the Casa. It says, "Thenk you for all the suport thatyou all gave us maygod watch over you always and bless you tuday tomorrow and always. thenk you thenk you so much you hav a beautiful and wunderfull heart" |
On the child migrant crisis:
From A Stream To A Flood: Migrant Kids Overwhelm U.S. Border Agents (NPR)
Undocumented and Underage: The Crisis of Migrant Children (VICE) (video)
Why Kids Are Crossing The Desert Alone To Get To America (Think Progress)
Migrant Children Are Fleeing a Region Rife with Sexual Violence (New Republic)
Child Migrants Settle Uneasily In The Big Easy (NPR)
Child Migrant Crisis Stemmed By Border Security Build-Up (NPR)
On the detention centers:
‘Drink more water': Horror stories from the medical ward of a Texas immigration detention center (Fusion)
Migrant kids and parents await their fate in U.S. detention centers (Aljazeera America)
Public schools grapple with influx of migrant children (Aljazeera America)
The U.S. Is Locking Up Immigrant Children in Private Prisons Under Inhumane Conditions (In These Times)
Immigrant families in detention: A look inside one holding center (Chicago Tribune)
Exclusive: Family detention social worker speaks out (McClatchy DC)
On conditions in Central America:
The Northern Triangle: The Countries That Don't Cry for Their Dead (In Sight Crime)
CRIME AND VIOLENCE IN CENTRAL AMERICA’S NORTHERN TRIANGLE: How U.S. Policy Responses are Helping, Hurting, and Can be Improved (Wilson Center)
New U.S. policy of little help to Central American families who live in fear (LA Times)
A Murder Foretold (The New Yorker)
On journeying to the United States:
Riding 'The Beast': Alt.Latino Interviews Salvadoran Journalist Oscar Martinez (NPR)
"Enrique's Journey", Sonia Nazario
How Four Dudes Skated from El Salvador to the U.S. to Flee Gang Violence (RollingStone)
On the ICE tracking bracelets:
What It's Like to Live with an Ankle Bracelet (VICE)
U.S. government's use of ankle monitors on immigrant mothers draws criticism (Fox News Latino)
Note: The names of the migrant families have been changed in this post to protect their privacy.
Until later,
Caro
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