Ms. Batiz said her interview happened the same day she arrived at the “icebox.” She recalled the two officers who questioned her gasping when she told them how she faced discrimination for having H.I.V. “I think that’s why they took me out quickly,” she said.

The next morning, Ms. Batiz and Kirad were released to go on to New York. They didn’t know what happened to Susan, only that she had been taken away hours earlier. Kirad said they asked people at the processing center but were told only that Susan was taken to a different place. “My mother started crying,” she recalled. With no additional information, they took a bus to San Antonio where they got assistance from a Catholic aid organization, which paid for them to fly to New York.

Soon after arriving at her sister’s home in Far Rockaway, Ms. Batiz got a call from Susan. She was 1,900 miles away at an adult detention center in Pearsall, Tex., run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She was examined by a doctor and given H.I.V. medications. But it took three weeks for her to get her credible fear interview.

During that waiting period, Susan said a doctor told her that the H.I.V. drugs she was given in Honduras were not working well. She said she was also under great distress, begging other detainees in her room to let her sleep on the bottom bunk because she was afraid of heights. She had never been away from her mother before and said she was scared of the women who worked at the detention center, claiming they said cruel things to her because she was black and from Honduras.

The credible fear interview took place on Aug. 8, with an asylum officer speaking English in person and a Spanish interpreter on the phone. When we spoke in January, Susan recalled telling the officer about the persecution she suffered at school. She said she described how classmates would abuse her in the bathrooms. “They would put my head in the toilet and urinate on me.”

The transcript of Susan’s credible fear interview does not include this graphic incident. Regardless, it shows that Susan clearly stated that she was threatened and discriminated against, and that students wanted to kill her. “Because I am H.I.V.-positive,” she said, “and because I am black.” She said students feared she would “contaminate” them.