As the US looks to extend the time children can be held, former detainees discuss their harrowing experiences

The first memory Hilda Ramírez has of the United States is the sound of helicopters. Four years ago, she, her eight-year-old son, Iván, and five other migrants from Central America piled into a small raft on the southern bank of the Rio Grande, the final step in a perilous trip through Mexico that she had begun one week before.



When the group crossed the border near McAllen, Texas, they were immediately surrounded by border patrol agents, boats and a helicopter circling overhead. Ramírez and her son were sent to a detention center – Karnes county residential center in Karnes City, Texas – where they spent the next 11 months.

“We came to the US for a chance for a better life,” said Ramírez, who said she had left Guatemala fleeing domestic abuse. “I thought we would at least be treated like human beings. Instead, we ended up in a prison treated like criminals.”

Ramírez arrived at the US border in August 2014, the same year the Obama administration revived a family detention system that put children and parents in prison-like facilities.

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Last month, amid international outcry over his administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy, which led to the separation of 2,300 children from their parents, Donald Trump issued an executive order to end family separation. But the move set the stage for another expansion of the US family detention system. On 22 June, immigration authorities asked for 15,000 more beds to be ready for detained migrants in the next couple of weeks. One week later, the Trump administration announced its policy of holding families in detention for extended periods of time.

“This is substituting one kind of trauma for another kind,” says the 27-year-old Angelina Márquez, who fled El Salvador in 2014 with her six-year-old son and spent two months in the Artesia family detention center in New Mexico.

Márquez said that some of the women she met in Artesia had been there for months: “Nobody knew how long they would be there. Nobody knew to seek asylum. Nobody knew they could see a lawyer.”

The detention center has been accused of rights abuses, poor living conditions, deficient medical and mental healthcare, and lack of detainee access to legal counsel.

Márquez described how families would sleep eight to a room. The food was often “raw and inedible”, “not fit for humans”, she said. The most upsetting thing to the mothers was the cruelty the guards showed to their children. When Márquez arrived, none of the guards spoke Spanish; when the detainees, including the children, asked for water, they would be denied it if they pronounced the English words incorrectly.

These places can destroy people Hilda Ramírez

Now, whenever Márquez’s son sees news about families being detained or separated, he begins to cry. “He relives it all again,” she said, speaking from her home in Virginia. Even the ringing of the phone makes him nervous; the caller is often her immigration lawyer, whom he associates with the possibility of detention.

Then, in April, Márquez’s husband was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) and sent to detention. She said her son cried nearly every day, imagining his father in the same kind of place he and his mother had been.

Today the family is back together in Virginia. But the anxiety and fear persists.

“He wakes up at night searching for his parents to make sure we are both still here,” Márquez said, “not back in detention.”

In a phone interview from an Austin, Texas, church where she and her son have sought sanctuary from deportation, Ramírez described her time at Karnes as “the worst thing I have ever had to endure”.

Like Artesia, the Karnes facility also has a troubling past, with multiple allegations of sexual abuse since 2014. Texas lawmakers have described Karnes, and other Texas family detention centers, as “jails for children”.

Speaking through an interpreter, Ramírez described rancid food containing “bugs and small pieces of plastic” and food so bad that many of the children “grew thin and often fainted”. She and other detainees went on a hunger strike in 2015 in response to the conditions at Karnes.

Ramírez also said her son was repeatedly ill and denied proper medical care. “That hurt me the most. My son was sick and I could do nothing about it.”

At Karnes, Ramírez said, guards would often yell at the children and threaten to take them from their families.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Undocumented immigrant families are released from detention at a bus depot in McAllen, Texas, this week. Photograph: Loren Elliott/Reuters

“Things changed when the important people came,” she said. “The guards put out stuffed animals and toys. There was better food and treatment.” But when the VIPs left, all that disappeared: “They would take away the toys and stuffed animals.”

In a video statement, her son, Iván, said in Spanish: “Detention is ugly. When someone important came by they would not let us ask them for help, and if we did, they would lock us up in a cold room.”

Iván became increasingly irritable and confused, often asking his mother about when they could leave. Like many at Karnes, she didn’t have an answer. It was an uncertainty that Ramírez said led her to become increasingly anxious and depressed. A feeling of “worthlessness” began to take over, she said.

Ramírez recalled when, a few months after she arrived, a detainee attempted suicide. She said the 19-year-old woman, Lilian Yamileth, had received news that her asylum case had been denied. Devastated, she tried to kill herself in the bathroom. Ramírez watched guards break down the bathroom door and pull the unresponsive woman out, as her “screaming child watched the whole thing”, said Ramírez.

After receiving treatment, the mother was put in “a tiny room by herself”, Ramírez said.

She added: “These places can destroy people.”

Ramírez and her son spent nearly a year in detention, 41 more weeks than what was previously allowed under the Flores agreement, which is generally interpreted to limit family detentions to 20 days. The Trump administration’s new policy means more families will find themselves in the same situation.

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On 25 June 2018, the Trump justice department filed a request to amend the Flores agreement, in order to detain children for longer periods of time. On the 29th, the administration said it would “detain families together during the pendency of immigration proceedings” – proceedings that can last months, even years.

“Functionally, they are in indefinite detention,” said Don Kerwin, noting the current backlog of cases that leaves people in detention for months. “They have no idea when they are getting out or when they have a hearing.”

“That is what this whole Flores fight is about, prolonged detention,” said Laura Guerra-Cardus, deputy director of Children’s Defense Fund – Texas. “You saw the result of it, the hunger strikes, the protests around sexual abuse and poor conditions at these facilities. When people are detained for long period of time, horrible things happen.”

Ramírez said: “This government does not have any feeling … Instead of closing these centers, they are making them bigger and more.”

When asked if she thought the policy deterred families from coming to the US, Ramírez replied: “No.

“People will continue to take the risk and ask for help to find somewhere safe to go. Everyone wants happiness, everyone wants peace.”