At 6am on 30 March 2011, four armed officers knocked on the door of the house that my wife, Hope, and I owned in Waco, Texas. At first I thought there was some sort of emergency – but then they told me I was under arrest, handcuffed me and put me in a car.

My crime? I had legally immigrated to the United States in 1993 – and in 2005, I was arrested for drug possession, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to probation and a rehabilitation program.

I had not understood that pleading guilty to a non-violent crime meant that I would have an "aggravated felony" on my record, or that doing so would lead toward deportation. I certainly didn't know that offenses that were neither aggravated nor felonies are defined as "aggravated felonies" under immigration law, or that they required my mandatory detention and deportation.



Like millions of people living in the US, I was born elsewhere – in my case, in Singapore – and, when I was 13, my family moved to Valley View, Texas. My story is typical in other ways, as well: I drank alcohol at a young age (as over 25% of people between 12 and 20 do every month) and, like an estimated 24m Americans per month, I experimented with drugs. Unlike most drug users, though, I was one of the approximately 1.5m people arrested for drug possession in 2005.



I accepted a guilty plea, went to rehabilitation and served out my probation – I never spent a day in jail. My green card was renewed without incident, so I moved on with my life: I took a job at Mission Waco's homeless shelter, My Brother's Keeper, and sponsored others who were looking for help with their addiction. I met and eventually married Hope, a US citizen, completed college and bought a house.



We were ready to start a family when everything fell apart.



That night in 2011, the officers – who I learned were with Immigration and Customs Enforcement – drove me away from my home but gave me little information about what I could expect. One of them told me that my case had fallen through the cracks in the four years since my guilty plea, but that, after an administrative hearing, I'd likely be able to post bail and go back to my family. He was wrong.



The officers first drove me to a holding tank in Waco, and then took me and four others to Austin to board a corrections bus headed south. By the end of the first day after my arrest, we were 250 miles from Waco at the South Texas Detention Center in the dusty town of Pearsall (roughly midway between San Antonio and the Mexican border).



I was incarcerated there for 313 days before I was released – I was never able to post bail and it was only through my wife's determination that I was ever able to go home. She found a law firm to (successfully) file an appeal to reopen my drug case in the hopes of reducing the original charges against me, which would then remove my "aggravated felony" designation. After the case was re-opened, the district attorney asked the sheriff's office to produce the drugs they had taken from me on the day of my arrest – but the evidence had been lost, and so the case was dismissed.



The media caught wind of our story and organizers rallied in support of my release: the pressure on ICE was unrelenting and eventually my deportation order was dropped.



In February 2012, I walked out of the detention center and headed home to Waco with Hope. Today, I work two jobs, we have a brand new baby boy, and Hope is pursuing a master's degree in social work at Baylor University.



But the education I got at the hands of the government was more eye-opening than most of what we learned in school.



Due to draconian mandatory detention laws, most of the people detained alongside me were also unable, like me, to get a bail or bond hearing – and 70% of people in detention nationwide are there because of mandatory detention policies.



Where I was detained, all of us were put to work under supervision of security guards doing menial labor on the grounds of the center. Most of my fellow detainees did not even speak English, but the questions we all had – would we be deported? Would we ever see our families again? – seemed to fall on deaf ears anyway. No one was provided legal counsel, and immigration judges' backlog of cases made it impossible for them to spend more than just a few minutes with each of us.



More shocking is that the detention center at which I was held is actually a private prison owned and operated (profitably) by the GEO Group. It is just one part of the current immigration detention system, which is designed to keep a minimum of 34,000 people locked up on any given day – there's even a Congressional mandate to that effect. I realized that I was simply a number to help the agency reach their goal of 34,000 detainees – and at a yearly cost of $50,000 per person – with no regard for the circumstances of my case or the family I had left behind.



Though the arbitrary and costly detention bed quota is a Congressional mandate, President Obama has it within his power to stop this country's mass detention and deportation machine – but instead he announced on Wednesday that he was going to put off any action until after the elections in November.



Although America is proud of its system of impartial justice, there was no room for justice inside those prison walls, and no real opportunity for a fair hearing. Now, I want to help fight for a better America for my own son, so he can live in a country in which everyone has access to justice and no one is locked up for the sake of an arbitrary quota.

