Asylum under Siege

The women asked:

“What time is it?”

“Are we still in August?”

Others said:

“I’ve lost track of time since my son and I got locked up in here.”

“I was separated from my children on June 9. I don’t know how many days have passed.”

As in any incarceration space, time moves at a strange pace in the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, the largest immigrant family detention center in the United States. Dilley is run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and CoreCivic, the private prison corporation contracted by the federal government to manage nearly 63 percent of the immigrant jails in the US. It’s one of 120 active immigration detention spaces in the country’s rapidly expanding, and extremely profitable, prison industrial complex.

While these testimonies from women and children at Dilley were recorded in 2018, the fear they express is current. Conditions for families in detention are the worst they’ve ever been. Twenty-four people have died in ICE custody since 2017, including six children. Migrants are often held in rooms with freezing temperatures and denied medical treatment. In an El Paso detention center, a midwife wishing to serve pregnant women was barred from entering; the facility cited “security concerns.” Such cases are the rule.

The United States has constructed the largest immigration detention infrastructure in the world. On average, forty-two thousand people were detained each day in 2018—the highest rate on record since ICE began tracking the data, in 2001. Also in 2018, US Customs and Border Protection made approximately 396,600 apprehensions, a 124 percent increase from the year prior. It’s no surprise, then, that cells are overflowing. The most overcrowded facilities are at the border. They feature cages, which migrants call perreras (dog pounds). Photographs have shown migrants sleeping there on concrete floors, and children going unfed and unwashed.

It is clear that ICE facilities do not provide adequate resources to migrants. But the more important problem, the one we must turn our attention to, is why detention is a condition imposed on migrants in order for them to begin the process of claiming asylum. While their particular circumstances and stories vary, the women and their children held in the Dilley facility have one thing in common: they are fleeing circumstances of grave violence in their home countries, have come to the United States to seek legal protection, and are detained in a federal prison complex while they hope to be granted due process. Dilley holds 2,400 women and children, most from the countries of the Northern Triangle (Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala). Despite laws requiring that a detention center that incarcerates children “shall not be equipped internally with major restraining construction or...