On December 11th, Alejandra Pablos will stand in front of a federal judge in Tucson Immigration Court and could find out if she’s on track to gain asylum in the U.S., the country she’s lived in her entire life. It’s been a decade-long fight, one that could very easily result in her being deported to her birth country, Mexico.

“I've been doing a lot of brujeria,” 33-year-old Pablos told ELLE.com. “Talking to my ancestors, using indigenous ways of self care. Doing protection spells before court and protection spells against the police. I’m doing what I know is going to make me feel protected.”

Pablos, who was released from Tucson’s Eloy Detention Center in April , spent 43 days there following a routine check-in with ICE after she was arrested during a protest outside the Homeland Security building near Richmond, Virginia, in January. Advocates say Pablos was singled out by a DHS officer due to her activism. Of about 30 protesters , she was the only one arrested that day.

Alejandra Pablos

“He took me from where I was freely standing and threw me to the ground,” Pablos said of the officer, adding that her knees were bleeding, a few of her nails were broken, and “my hand was twisted touching the right side of my shoulder blades. I've been having a lot of back pain.”

Pablos was released from jail in Virginia and the charges were dropped, but her immigration officer in Tucson was contacted by ICE about her arrest. In March, at an ICE check-in, she was taken into custody and sent to Eloy. It wasn’t her first stint at the detention center known for a record number of inmate deaths : Pablos spent two years there after being arrested and convicted of several charges in 2011, including a DUI and possession of drug paraphernalia.

Pablos was born south of the Mexico border , but grew up in Santa Ana, California and has been a legal resident since she was 18, but because some of those charges were felonies under Arizona law, her green card was revoked and she was placed in deportation proceedings.

In the five years since she’d been at Eloy, Pablos blossomed into an immigrant rights and reproductive justice activist: She’s a member of Mijente , a digital grassroots hub for the Latinx and Chicanx movement, a storyteller at We Testify , a project of the National Network of Abortion Funds, and she served as a field organizer for the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health , working between Arizona and Washington, D.C. She's been working with youth since she was a teen and says fighting for justice is in her DNA.

Pablos is no stranger to the in-between of the U.S. immigration system—the aftermath of detention, when many asylum-seekers wait in limbo until their cases are decided. “More often than not, these immigration cases are taking years to be adjudicated,” said Christina Fialho, an attorney who is the co-founder and co-executive director of nonprofit Freedom for Immigrants . “Immigrants languish long after they've been released from detention.”

Fialho said that to understand life after detention, you also have to understand the conditions women experience inside. Like at the West County Detention Facility in Richmond, California, where she says women were often on 24-hour lockdown , and forced to defecate in biodegradable bags in their cells. “Women suffer after they've been released from detention from this type of isolation and abuse,” Fialho said.

To understand life after detention, you also have to understand the conditions women experience inside detention.

Those first two years at Eloy, Pablos remembers having a rapport with the guards and warden—they’d ask her how she was doing. She’d teach pláticas, or lectures, to the other women inmates about the Five Love Languages and she also taught English. She became politicized after watching the “Dream Nine” activists stage a hunger strike there in 2013 ; she was inspired and fasted with them. Her second time at Eloy, she saw the prison with a new set of eyes: She never saw or met the warden this time around, and the environment was strict—there was no touching family members at visitation. The women in her unit had no formal process for filing complaints, and had to get up at 5:00 A.M. to see a doctor or were forced to wait until the next morning. “It was very difficult for them to advocate for themselves,” Pablos said.

So she advocated for them, talking with them about issues like abortion rights and autonomy—and her story of getting out in 2013 gave them hope. The same day Pablos was detained in March, her supporters went to work: A petition demanding her release garnered over 24,000 signatures , and was shared by celebrity-activists America Ferrera , Rosario Dawson , and Alyssa Milano . At her April 19th hearing, she was granted an $8,000 bond and released. Her mom, brother, and friends waited outside for hours in a dust storm until she got out. “I see my mom and my brother waiting for me outside, their hair all wild and a few shades darker because of the sand, and I just hugged them,” she said.

“There ain’t no violent people in there,” Pablos said, reflecting on the women she’s met at Eloy. “You had women that were on their way to work and got pulled over with no driver's license. People who've been working here for 20, 30, 40 years. Grandparents. Young mommas who are survivors of domestic violence.”

Maribel Santander

Pablos is referring to women like Maribel Santander. Last July, Santander, a 31-year-old single mother of three who was born in Mexico but has lived in Atlanta since she was 10, was pulled over by a police officer who accused her of driving under the influence.

“I told him it's a lie, I'm not drunk, but they did a test and said I have alcohol in my body,” recalled Santander. Santander’s attorney says she was arrested and charged with "Driving Under the Influence of Alcohol or Drugs" and "Open Container." (The charges were later dismissed. Santander’s attorney says they learned the officer who falsely arrested her was dismissed from duty, and documents show the officer made up charges against immigrants and then lied about it in subsequent internal investigations.)

Since Santander has DACA, at the time of her arrest she was transferred over to ICE and spent a little more than a year in detention.

“It was tough because I'd never been in jail,” said Santander, who mostly stayed in her cell reading James Patterson novels and the Bible. “I read the Bible every day, and it helped me a lot. I was reminding myself, I'm a warrior, I have to fight for my kids.”

During that time, Santander’s mother and kids, who are 14, 10, and 7, and were born in the U.S., had to live with family friends because they were evicted from her apartment. Seeing their mom behind bars was hard on them—Santander said her 10-year-old son is aggressive now, and her kids were bullied at school. “We were a happy family, all the time laughing. But when I was in detention they would just cry,” she said.

“I get anxiety a lot,” Santander added. “Sometimes I just wake up and start crying. But I don't go to my mom and my kids because they have their own problems.”

After she was released in July, Santander found a job in demolition and things started looking up. But when her boss unexpectedly passed away the company closed down, and she spent a month and a half without work. A few weeks ago, she was hired as a cashier at a gas station and moved her family into a one bedroom apartment, but she’s made major sacrifices: She can’t afford a car, so four days a week she commutes a total of four hours by bus to and from the Lucky Foodmart station in Decatur—and she’s looking for a second job to afford all of her bills. On those days gets home at midnight, long after her kids are asleep, and only sees them in the mornings to get them ready for school.

Diane Cook and Len Jenshel/National Geographic Creative

“I told my kids it will be just temporary,” Santander said. “It's not easy for me and I know it's not easy for them.”

Santander has been granted a temporary stay that will keep her from being imminently deported, but her fight isn’t over: She’s waiting to hear back from the Board of Immigration Appeals on her motion to reopen her case, which could put her on the path to getting her green card.

Along with the emotional effects of detention, there are also the practical consequences: Affording bond, finding housing, accessing medical care and an attorney, and getting work authorization.

Along with the emotional effects of detention, there are also the practical consequences: Affording bond, finding housing, accessing medical care and an attorney, and getting work authorization. Freedom for Immigrants (FFI) mitigates these hardships through their Alternative Accompaniment Program , a network of more than 800 volunteers across the country who have pledged to open their homes. People who are detained are eight times more likely to win their case if they’re released, but documented immigration bonds “ranging from $1,500 to $250,000 with a median of $4,250 and an average of $14,500,” keep many imprisoned. FFI’s revolving immigration bond fund (that you can donate to here ) has already been used to bond out over a hundred people from immigration detention in 2018.

The goal, Fialho said, is to build “a network of sanctuary homes that welcome and care for all migrants. We're demonstrating that communities can respond to migration by welcoming our neighbors rather than incarcerating them.”

Pablos’ mother, brother and fellow activists are fighting alongside her. She doesn’t have a job since she no longer has a work permit, but she’s highlighting stories around the deportation crisis through her web series with Mijente, Chinga La Migra (which stands for “Fuck border patrol”).

Her criminal record makes her case complicated, and she’s also trying to get a pardon from Arizona Governor, Doug Ducey, which would increase her chances of avoiding deportation. But she’s bracing for a different future too: living in Mexico where women are jailed for getting abortions , and activists have been killed . Pablos is vocal about the several abortions she’s had through her work at We Testify .

“I'm still on the front lines because this is who I naturally am,” she said. “I have no other choice [but to] speak my mind and talk about my passion for liberation.



If a person who’s released from detention doesn’t have family in the U.S., they’re forced to rely on the generosity of strangers to survive. Charlotte Prado, 29, a transgender woman who fled Honduras on a caravan with other Central American migrants that arrived in the U.S. in early May lives with a host family in Richmond, California. Prado started transitioning when she was around 11—growing out her hair and “dressing like a girl”—and fled Honduras because she couldn’t live openly as trans. She says a group of traffickers was also trying to force her to sell drugs, and she refused. Prado had 24 hours to leave Honduras before they would kill her.

Charlotte Prado

“The traffickers approach girls like me to sell drugs because they take advantage of our vulnerability,” she told ELLE.com through a translator.

Besides her host family that she was connected with through an organization, Prado has no support, no income, and is without healthcare or medication, like the hormones she needs for her transition. She’s had little contact with her family back in Honduras, and says her brothers don’t support her transition but that her mother accepts her. She started a GoFundMe campaign to raise money and mostly stays in her host home because she doesn’t have a work permit yet. And like thousands of immigrants seeking asylum in the U.S., Prado wears a GPS tracking bracelet as part of ICE’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program so they can know where she is at all times. Every Tuesday she has to be home from 8:00 in the morning until noon in case they decide to do a check.

“I keep myself busy cleaning the house and in the garden,” she said. “That's my way of giving back to [my host family].”

Sometimes, Prado likes to go to the nearby mountains that overlook San Francisco and listen to music to distract herself. “Being in that spot makes me dream a lot.”

After fleeing Honduras to Mexico where she lived for several months, Prado got on the caravan in Puebla with other trans migrants, enduring extreme weather, harassment and attacks. While seeking refuge in Tijuana, she said a group tried to kill her and the others. “They tried to burn us alive,” she said. They asked for asylum in San Ysidro, a district of San Diego, where she was detained before being moved to another detention center in Texas, and eventually to the Cibola County Correctional Center in Milan, New Mexico. In New Mexico, Prado recalls sleeping on the floor in the freezing holding cells known as hieleras, or “ice boxes.” Prado and her friend Roxsana Hernandez Rodriguez , who Prado says was battling an advanced infection in her nose and was believed to have HIV, asked for medical attention: “They told us no, there's no medical attention in this center,” Prado recalled. BuzzFeed reported that Hernandez was later admitted to a hospital in Albuquerque where she died on May 25th.

"All I want is the opportunity to be in this country and to live with dignity."

“When we found out [Roxsana] was dead, that was very hard on us,” Prado said. “We asked for a priest so we could have a little ceremony for her soul, for her passing away. The priest came and we did a small ceremony with all the trans in the group that knew her.”

With the help of attorneys from the Santa Fe Dreamers Project , Prado was released from Cibola in late July and connected with her host family in California until she awaits her next court meeting in February. “In New Mexico I was actually waiting for my last court meeting, but then they transferred me to this new state. So now I’m starting from zero,” she said.

Even in this time of uncertainty, Prado said she feels confident that her asylum plea will be approved: “My story is very powerful. All I want is the opportunity to be in this country and to live with dignity. I'm looking forward to be able to be myself and live here as a transgender girl.”

Update 12/12/18: At Alejandra Pablos' December 11th hearing in Tucson, immigration Judge Thomas Michael O'Leary denied her request for political asylum and ordered Pablos deported from the United States. Pablos plans on appealing the decision and pursuing her last resort: a pardon from Arizona Governor Doug Ducey for her criminal record and a chance to stay in the U.S. Her community has rallied behind her and the Action Network launched a petition for support that's garnered thousands of signatures. You can keep up with updates about her case here.

Jessica Militare Jessica Militare is a journalist living in New York City and has written for Glamour, xoJane, Brooklyn Magazine, and the Miami New Times.

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