Caught Crossing and Detained

AUSTIN, Texas — Karla seemed out of place in her bedroom at the shelter. She wore skinny jeans and high heels, and she had carefully done her hair and makeup, making her natural beauty all the more striking. She did not look like a refugee or a person who’d spent time in detention. Her eyes were the only part of her that showed sadness or strain. She lived at the shelter with other immigrant women from around the world. Karla’s story began in Honduras and continued here at Casa Marianella.

The shelter, known as Casa, sits in the middle of a quiet Austin neighborhood. It is made up of three converted residential homes and serves immigrants from around the world, including political asylum seekers and those who have recently been released from nearby immigration detention centers. They stay for weeks – sometimes months – until they get on their feet, or while their immigration cases are still in progress.

Jennifer Long, executive director of Casa Marianella, has seen many immigrants come and go in her 12 years at the shelter. She introduced Karla, who had recently spent seven months behind bars in the T. Don Hutto Residential Center, a jail run by a private company with a federal contract. Hutto houses illegal immigrant women in what the Immigration and Customs Enforcement service calls the “least restrictive environment” possible.

Karla fled Honduras in August 2009 in search of refuge from her life at home.

She said she did not get along with the father of her children. On top of that she said she’d had problems with a business partner. They’d been involved in a business that sold furniture and domestic items and gave loans to people. She said the customers refused the pay back the loans and her partner held her responsible.

So Karla struck a deal to get across not one or two but three borders. A friend of hers said she’d help Karla if she agreed to bring the woman’s two children. Karla said yes, and her friend got them a coyote.

Karla’s first attempt to reach the U.S. left her in a detention center in Mexico, where she was held for a month, then deported back to Honduras. The children she was responsible for getting across the border were also detained and sent back to Honduras.

On her second attempt, again with the children in tow, she made it much farther.

There was one coyote responsible for her long journey from Honduras to northern Mexico. After her arrival in northern Mexico, she transferred to four guides and a new coyote for the trip into the United States. Karla said the guides took drugs and carried a figurine, Santa Muerte, the death saint, which they worshiped and prayed to.

“We walked a lot – like a hundred miles,” Karla said. “And the man that brought us, the guide, he was yelling at a heavy woman because she could not run. And he left her – a long distance [away] – they left her, yes, they left her – thrown away.”

According to Karla, a 15-year-old boy who was with the group went back to help the woman who couldn’t run. The boy brought her back to the main group, but she still struggled to keep up.

The group of 16 people, including four children and seven women, crossed the Rio Grande near Reynosa, Mexico. They were now in Texas.

“Crossing the river was tremendous, because it was quite cold and the men who [were] passing us from one to another were taking off the clothes of each one – one by one – and I crossed with the children, nude,” Karla said. “The children crossed with nothing. They put us in a car tire [to float across the river].”

“The children cried and yelled because they were cold and they were frozen, very frozen,” Karla said.

Soon after crossing the border, Karla said the guides became extremely nervous about being caught by the U.S. Border Patrol.

They had good reason to worry. The number of Border Patrol agents has increased from 6,000 in 1996 to 20,119 today and the prices coyotes charge to smuggle people have increased proportionately.

Coyotes have also developed a vast system of lookouts and guides to get people across the border. Many of the deals the smugglers make involve one payment up front and another when the immigrant arrives at a drop house or other specified location in the United States. If the smugglers get caught, then they don’t get paid. But they would rather leave their human cargo behind than get caught themselves and face potential criminal prosecution.

Just inside the United States, one of the guides with Karla’s group told them to sit down and wait. Pretty soon the group saw lights in the distance. It was the Border Patrol. The agents took the whole group into custody.

“[The coyote] said he was coming back, but it was a lie. They are the ones that always leave – they never catch them,” Karla said.

Already cold from crossing the river, Karla said she was held three to five days in detention — in a cold room. This was the worst part of her entire detention experience, she said. She described it as, “super, super cold.”

“You don’t know if it is day or night. You don’t know anything. They don’t give you anything to eat,” she said. “Of all the ugly things [that happen to you] this is the ugliest. These rooms. If you ask anyone, the first thing they will tell you is about those rooms.”

Karla said she was interviewed by various immigration officials but mostly she was just left alone with the children in the cold.

Karla said she hugged the children to try to keep them warm. She said the children shivered and cried from the cold. They all slept on the floor. After what Karla thought was three days the children were taken away. She estimated that she spent another two days in the “cold room.” By the end she said she felt “sick in the head.” She said she was hearing voices and talking to herself.

From the Border Patrol station, Karla was transferred to the Willacy Detention Center in Raymondville, Texas.

Willacy is an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center run by GEO Group, Inc., a private detention company based in Boca Raton, Fla.

There are approximately 442,000 people held in detention centers every year, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

A spokesman for ICE said there are more than 2,700 women in federal immigration detention centers on any given day.

According to Eduardo Preciado, assistant field office director for ICE in Arizona, people can stay in detention anywhere between two days and a few years. Their length of stay depends on their immigration case – some choose to stay in detention longer in order to appeal their cases.

Karla was only at Willacy for a few days, but she said the conditions were bad. She talked of food tasting like iodine and having to look at the wall whenever she walked anywhere. The guards would not look her in the face when she asked them a question, she said.

She complained of having to wear a uniform, and not having a private place to bathe.

After her two days in Willacy, she was sent to Hutto – the only all-female detention center in the United States – 40 miles northeast of Austin.

The transfer to Hutto was a welcome change for Karla.

“Hutto was very different,” she said.

From its opening in 2006 until September 2009, Hutto was a family detention center – housing immigrant families, including children, seeking asylum or visas, or facing deportation. The ACLU and the immigration clinic of the University of Texas filed a lawsuit in March of 2007, contending that family detention at Hutto was inhumane.

Because of mounting pressure and public attention that the lawsuit brought to Hutto, ICE moved all of the families out of the facility, transferring them to centers in to Berks County, Pa.

Then the agency set about reforming Hutto. Now, the center houses only women who are apprehended without children. The barbed wire was taken down from the fences; the women are allowed to wear their own clothes and have full-contact visitation seven days per week.

The lawsuit and following reforms have turned Hutto into what ICE calls its “model facility” – and one that made Karla much happier.

Happier, but still in detention.

“Seven months. Seven months I was there. I was sick,” Karla said.

“I was able to put up with being there that long because in truth there are a lot of things there,” Karla said. “There were ball courts — you can go outside! There is no need to have a guard with you, unlike Willacy, where a guard stays with you… there you can walk alone.”

Karla was applied for political asylum, claiming she couldn’t return to her home in Honduras for fear of retribution from her enemies. When she arrived at Hutto, she said, officials asked her if she was afraid to return to her home country then gave her asylum papers to fill out.

She fought for asylum on her own. “I went in front of the judge, the prosecutor, in front of the court by myself.”

After seven months of arguing her case, Karla was granted political asylum. Her excitement didn’t last long, however. According to Karla, her case has been appealed by the government and she is now in immigration limbo.

She has since been released from Hutto, continuing her case while she stays at Casa Marianella. She remains hopeful she’ll win her case. Winning the case or not – she can still never see her three children in Honduras again.

She had to sell her house to get out of debt left over from the business arrangement that went sour. She said the family of her husband bought the house and took her kids away from her.

Karla said the only way she talks to her children is by a friend of her daughter’s going into the house without their father knowing it. She takes pictures for Karla too.

“They wouldn’t let the children come up [to the U.S.], and if I tried they would take them to a place where I couldn’t find them.”

Meanwhile she awaits her fate at Casa Marianella.

While she waited, scandal broke out at Hutto, ICE’s “model facility.”

In early May of 2010 a contract correctional officer working for CCA allegedly groped several women while transporting them to the airport, according to the Williamson County, Texas, Sheriff’s Office.

The correctional officer, Donald Dunn, was fired from his job with CCA, along with his supervisor. After a three-month investigation by the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office, Dunn was arrested and charged with two counts of official oppression and three counts of unlawful restraint.