Adriana had long looked forward to her 16th birthday — but when the date finally arrived, she celebrated not at home with her family and friends, but in a Texas center for immigrants that felt more like a prison.
“That day I didn’t do anything. I just sat there and I cried and cried all day,” Adriana recalls to Teen Vogue. Weeks earlier, she had fled El Salvador with her mother and sister, Allison, then 13, crossing the Rio Grande in order to escape violence. When they entered the United States, they didn’t have any authorization, and when they were picked up by border patrol officials, they said they were seeking asylum.
The three have found themselves stuck in a system of family detention, where other women and children like themselves are kept under lock and key.
Until 2014, under the Obama administration, children and children traveling with families seeking asylum in the U.S., like Adriana (now 17) and Allison (now 15), were required to be held in the least restrictive setting appropriate for their age while they awaited their court dates. In 2014, however, following a summer of Central American violence that saw tens of thousands of families and children (more than 68,000 families and 68,000 unaccompanied children were apprehended by agents between fall 2013 and 2014) stopped by border patrol, those hoping for asylum began increasingly finding themselves sent to detention centers, often privately run, for stays that extended indefinitely. Then Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson explained at the time that detaining asylum seekers was seen as a method of deterring others from crossing the border. The new policy has led to a dramatically different experience for families seeking to immigrate. As of August 2016, more than 2,000 women and children were being held at facilities in Texas and Pennsylvania maintained by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE).
The facilities, two in Texas and a smaller one in Pennsylvania, are restrictive, dorm-like settings, often compared to cozier-looking prisons, where mothers and children as young as two weeks old are policed by guards. Meals, school, and recreation all take place within the center, and families share rooms with strangers. Some of the centers have features like playgrounds and salons. However, the inability to leave and the monotony of life take a toll on the mental health of some residents, with reports of depression, anxiety, and suicide attempts amongst residents.
Adriana, Allison, and their mother were picked up by border patrol after entering Texas in August 2015. Shortly thereafter, they were sent to the South Texas Family Residential Center, a 2,400-bed center in the city of Dilley, a community that’s become an immigrant detention capital. The girls expected to be released after a short stay to join their father, who had left El Salvador several years prior and was living and working in Dallas. But while Johnson has said that the average detainee is held for only 20 days, their family is one of a number whose stays have stretched past the one-year mark.
After more than a month at Dilley, a center staff member told Allison to begin packing their things to prepare to leave. “We got very excited. We thought that that was where we were going, that we were going to go home. But then when we got all our stuff ready and they took us to our room, we saw a bunch of other women that were leaving as well,” Adriana tells Teen Vogue. Aware that her mother had not signed any release documents, she began to fear they were about to be deported. After several hours in that room, the group was taken to an airport and put on a plane to Pennsylvania.
“When we got on the plane, it was several of us families, including kids as young as five years old. On the plane we saw a lot of men, a lot of people in shackles and cuffs, and we were wondering how they could allow a kid as young as five to see this?” says Adriana.
ICE officials tell Teen Vogue that protocols have shifted and families are now, for the most part, transported on commercial flights. But when Adriana’s family traveled, it was on ICE Air, one of the routine flights mainly comprised of people facing deportation, including those being returned to their home countries, some of whom had been convicted of crimes. Arriving at yet another facility, the much smaller Berks County Residential Center, a public center in the borough of Leesport, she worked to maintain hope while spending each day in a sparse room shared with another family, eating cafeteria food and spending a lot of time indoors.
“When we got there, we were all trying to stay very positive, thinking, 'OK, now we’re going to leave this place really soon,'” Adriana recalls. “Why would it be so difficult for them to just get us a ticket home and let us go back to our family [in Dallas]?” Administrators offered them no timeline for when they might be able to leave.
Adriana was not the only Berks resident feeling in limbo and receiving little information about her case. U.S. family detention is a system that doesn’t seem to operate under any easily understandable rhyme or reason, with women and their children given little information about the progress of their cases, when they might expect to be released, or who is making that decision. This was acknowledged even by a Department of Homeland Security Advisory Committee, which said in a report that “At the individual immigration officer level, it remains unclear what factors are used for custody determinations, and how they are applied.” This summer and fall, a group of mothers in the facility even joined together for hunger strikes meant to protest and draw attention to their prolonged detainment. Adriana said she and her sister, Allison, were eager to take part but said the strikers had been told that any minors involved could potentially be transferred and separated from their mothers.
As the weeks at Berks stretched on, the sisters grew tired of the restrictions and monotony. “Everything was the same,” says Allison. “We would have breakfast in the morning, and we would have school, and then we would go to the computers or take a nap, or later at night we would watch some TV, and we were so tired of it all.” Even school offered little in the way of stimulation. She says that children between the ages of 12 and 18 were in the same class with no distinctions made between grade levels. As an 11th grader, Adriana felt hopelessly unchallenged, learning alongside 7th- and 8th-graders.
ICE officials tell Teen Vogue that children are given an educational assessment within three days of arriving, and an individual educational plan is developed for each child.
After nearly a year at Berks, in the fall of 2016, Adriana and Allison's mother, Carmen, who had frequently been ill, began to feel dizzy. Adriana went to get her something to drink and returned to see her condition rapidly worsening. “Her hands started getting really cold. She said that everything was going numb. Her face was really pale. Mom started to say that she was feeling so bad that she thought that she was dying. I kept saying to her, ‘Mom, please don’t say that,’” says Adriana.
Carmen was eventually taken to the hospital, where she had her gall bladder removed. One day after her operation, she was discharged and returned to Berks. Her daughters were appalled at what they saw as a total lack of regard for her needs during her recuperation. No provisions were made for her to have food appropriate for her recovery, they say, and they received no assistance from staff in helping her to the bathroom or visits with outside family members. ICE officials said they could not comment on residents’ individual health records due to strict HIPAA provisions.
While the surgery may have been the lowest point in a grueling 13-month period, it presented a ray of hope. Adriana says Carmen’s attorneys filed paperwork contesting her having to return to the facility after undergoing such a serious surgery. Shortly thereafter, the family was notified that they were being released to go live with their father in Dallas. “We just cried and we screamed and laughed, and we couldn’t believe it. We hugged each other. It was just unbelievable. That day was October 5. It was the day before my birthday, so I couldn’t believe it,” Adriana recalls.
Today, Adriana and Allison are in the 11th and 9th grades and living in Texas with their mom and dad. “We are at home; we go to school; we are learning things we are supposed to be learning. We meet a bunch of different people. We’re going to a bunch of different places like normal teenagers. We have phones,” Adriana explains. “Most importantly, we are with our family. We are with our dad after 11 years of not seeing each other.”
But their fears remain. Their case is still not settled, and while it was the Obama administration under which they were held, they know that President Donald Trump’s policies on immigration may threaten them and millions of others. A judicial order currently keeps them from being deported; they are required to report to ICE for regular appointments. “We are very scared for all the promises that he [Trump] has made of deporting so many people because we’re very scared to go back to our country. Things in our country are not OK,” Adriana says.
Thoughts of the families remaining in custody weigh heavily on the girls’ minds as well. “There are people that we arrived with at Berks when we first arrived there who are still detained there, and we always wonder, How is it possible?” Adriana says. For many, it seems, fear in their own nation has been replaced by fear in a new one.
Related: I'm 14 Years Old, and My Mom Was Deported
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