The story is there – or rather the lived experience is – but it has yet to take narrative form. My task as a volunteer “legal assistant” is to talk it through. To listen and to help the client shape her story so that it will be the right sort of story – to find the salient facts that will allow her to leave this place, to plead her case, to be offered asylum. 

Sometimes the women also want to tell me about what happened to them in Mexico or Brazil, or other places they passed through between here and there: rapes, extortion, hunger — information that is not relevant to their petition for asylum. “Have you been persecuted because of your religion? Your language? Your membership in a particular social group?” Can you remember the exact date when the men came and threatened to kill your child?” 

 I am not a psychotherapist or a social worker. I’m not even a real lawyer. I tell them I don’t work for the government or for the authorities in this detention center. I try to give comfort. Try to give good advice. Say the right things and nothing harmful or discouraging. The stakes are always very high.

 

YOLANDA

 

Yolanda told me that one day, on the way home from work, she got into a taxi al punto, which is a collective taxi that goes to a specific neighborhood. Two men jumped in when they were stopped at a light. One sat in front with the driver and the other got into the back with her.

 

First the cab diverted from the usual route – she noticed this – then the man next to her pushed the point of a gun into her side. He ordered her to look away, not to look at their faces. She could tell he was from a gang even though he wore long sleeves. Of course he was. He went through her purse and took out her wallet, her keys, and a snapshot of her daughter. How old? Eight, she said, though the girl was 10. The mother lied automatically because she was afraid of the question and what it implied. The man grabbed her breast and began to touch her all over, the gun still pushed against her side, just below her ribs. He touched all her “private parts” but stopped because she told him that she was wearing a soiled napkin. It was her period. He stopped and took out his phone and took a picture of her face. What he said was: if I can’t do it to you I will have to find your daughter and have her. He asked where the girl went to school and her mother lied again – she said that her daughter went to the neighborhood school in the next colonia over – not the truth but close enough to stop them suspecting right away. But they knew where she was heading in that taxi and they had the pictures of them both and it was only a matter of time.

 

When they left her, penniless, bruised and stunned, on an unfamiliar street all Yolanda could think of was escape. She would find her way home. (A man gave her 20 lempiras and took her to a bus stop.) Then she would save her daughter. She could handle anything but the child could not. She had to take her far away from those men even if it meant leaving her other daughter, just 2 years old, behind.

 

(Yolanda tells me that now, when she calls home and they put her younger daughter on the phone, she still cannot not bear to listen.)

 

***

 

In 2016 the TV mounted to the wall in the Visitation Room was set permanently on Fox News. In 2017, it seemed like it was always playing Sponge Bob. When I asked one of the guards about this she told me they are not allowed to watch anything inappropriate for children. On days when there are a lot of volunteer lawyers we sometimes interview clients at the tables right under the television set. It’s difficult to maintain confidentiality while speaking loudly enough to be heard over the sound of the cartoons.

 

***

 

A “Release Charla” is a presentation that one of the lawyers or legal assistants makes to a group of detainees who have already had their Credible Fear Interviews and are waiting for the results. Some of them will receive a “negativo” and be deported, but others will be released to continue their asylum cases on the outside. We give them information so they will have at least some idea of what to do.

 

An older woman, maybe in her 40’s, asked whether her sons, her adult children, would be permitted to visit her if she received asylum. I translated the response of the visiting attorney from Oklahoma, that the answer was no. Others asked whether she could visit them? Maybe was the answer, but if she returned to the place from which she had fled and received asylum she would risk having her asylum (even her green card once she became a resident) revoked, since it would be admitting that she was no longer in danger. The lawyer explained that it is very hard for family members to get permission to visit someone with asylum because the assumption is that they will overstay.

 

As I translated, the older woman’s face began to crumple with the realization that a wall now existed between her and her children – “Are they just supposed to never see me again?” she asks. “I could die here.” Her heart breaks as she looks into an abyss of interminable separation.

 

***

 

A “Group Intake” can involve anywhere from two to a dozen women at a time – to check the status of their cases and assist them in filling out forms asking for basic biographical information. 

 

The group filled three tables, pushed together in the main visitation room. There was a small brown-haired woman to my right. She was furtive and slow to fill in the forms, her face red and pockmarked. She spoke very softly and didn’t look me right in the eye.

 

At the end of our meeting I explained that each of them would have the opportunity to meet privately with me, or one of the other attorneys or volunteers, to discuss their case and prepare for their Credible Fear Interview with an asylum officer. Three of the women turned out to have interviews scheduled for Saturday so they would need to be prepped today (it was Thursday). They would come back after picking their children up from school at four o’clock. She was not one of the three. The other two who didn’t have appointments yet had questions and all three of them stayed. I wasn’t really supposed to be spending time talking with them about their cases. It wasn’t their turn. I got the first two squared away and they left and finally there was only the small, red-faced woman sitting there.

 

Feeling impatient, I looked at her and asked what her question was. Instead a story began to spill out. Tears fell from her eyes as she told me that her father had raped her over and over when she was a child and that she had finally run away because he told her that he would do the same to her little girl – a child of about 4 who was playing on the rug. She said that her sister had run away too and that another sister now had her own man to protect her but that she had left her little brother there – in danger. Maybe one day she could go and get him. She could not stop crying.

 

It was past four o’clock and the guard came over and spoke harshly to her for not bringing the little girl’s ID badge with her to visitation. Because she didn’t have the ID, she would have to go right away to check-in. It was urgent. But the woman ignored the guard. She was inconsolable and continued to cry. We were in the middle of the public area. I put a hand on her arm in an ineffectual attempt at comfort. Three times the guard came. I had others waiting. Finally the woman stood up. I promised she would have another chance to talk to someone before her CFI. I gave her a card, which seemed to reassure her a bit and she left with the phone number.

 

MARICA

 

One day there was a woman from Guatemala called “Marica,” who spoke only Mam. She had received a Rare Language Notice to Appear (RLNTA) and was going to be released from detention. I did her “Release Charla.” She became very tearful at the end and I realized how little she had understood and how overwhelmed she was at the thought of travelling, finding a lawyer, etc. I tried to reassure her, but she could not understand me – She knew only a few words of Spanish really. I doubt that she had any idea that her name, Marica, could be slang for “lesbian” even in Spanish. The guard did not titter when he called out her name, but I could tell from his expression that he was thinking about it.

 

***

 

Trucks may not be driven (even in the imagination) off the edge of the rug.

 

Toys may not be brought into the interview rooms. You have to leave the toy on the rug in the toy area. You have to leave it if you want to sit in your mother’s lap while she talks to me. Crying will distract your mother and her lawyer but the guard will make no exceptions. 

 

***

 

“CFI Preps,” in which lawyers and volunteers prepare detainees for their Credible Fear Interviews are held one-on-one, usually in the small private rooms in the visitation area. I say one-on-one, but it is usually me on one side of the small table and the woman and her child on the other. Sometimes it is an infant that quietly nurses while we talk. Other times it is an older child who can be asked to wait outside the small room, perhaps watching the TV or playing with the trucks or dolls or make-believe kitchen items. But most of the children older than 6 months and younger than 7 or 8 come in with their mothers. They fuss; they cry; they interrupt. They color on the linoleum table with the crayons that I have snuck in for them to use. They refuse to be still. There is no option but to carry on with them there, watching and listening as their mothers talk to me.

 

DIANA

 

Diana came for her CFI Prep with her son Ronald, who was about 6, into the small interview room where I was working that morning. She explained that they left Honduras because she and her mother and Ronald had been repeatedly threatened, robbed, and harassed by her older brother Daniel, who is drug addicted and belongs to a gang. She does not know which one. This has gone on for years. The police don’t do anything because they are afraid of the gangs if they aren’t actually working with them, which they often are.

 

They moved to another neighborhood about 8 months ago, but Daniel found them and continued to harass and threaten them. He hangs out in front of her house with other drug users. He has held a knife to her throat demanding money. He has threatened to kidnap Ronald for money. He pushed their mother down onto the ground and broke her arm.  He has threatened to kill them to get the property that the mother bought with some money left by their father. He stole his nephew’s bicycle.

 

Diana tells me that her brother has also started to bring another gang member called Walter to the house. Walter wants her to sleep with her. The two men talk loudly outside the house. She is afraid that Walter will rape and then kill her, which is typical in Honduras when a gang member wants you to be his girlfriend and you refuse. She and her mother decided it was not safe to stay in the house any longer. Her mother went to stay with a friend in another town and Diana and Ronald left to go to the United States.

 

GLORIA

 

Gloria’s teenaged niece and nephew disappeared in October of 2013. She went to look for the bodies at an abandoned coffee plantation that is well known as a clandestine graveyard.  She and her husband used sticks to locate areas of loose soil. They went three times over the next 3 days and found bloody clothing and beer cans but not the bodies.

 

She went to police but they would not open an investigation without a formal report, but to make one would be a death sentence for her.  They also said they couldn’t do anything unless the bodies were found.

 

Then she went to the City Hall, where she had been working. The Mayor lent her some of his workers to help in the search. He also arranged for two officers to protect the group. They divided up and she and her husband were the first to find an area of disturbed earth. They dug 1.5 meters and found her niece under a bunch of debris.  The girl was bound and wearing only underwear. The medical examiner came to investigate. Liliana gave taped testimony to police that is was the body of her niece.

 

When she returned home she received another threatening call, warning her against going back to the coffee plantation. But Gloria was determined and went back anyway several days later with a few family members (not the Mayor’s search party). They found another grave, and the body of a teenage boy, so they called the police and medical examiner. While they were waiting for the police the group of gang members appeared on the hillside. One of them looked at Gloria and made a gesture like slitting his throat, which she knew was a death threat. When the police arrived the gang members disappeared into their “caves.” The face of the body was mutilated and you couldn’t tell for sure who it was, but she thought it was her nephew, but a week later they were told that it wasn’t.

 

Later, when she returned home, the phone rang. The man on the other end of the line threatened to cut her into little pieces small enough to make soup out of. Soon other people, possibly they were girlfriends of the gang members, came her house and asked questions about what she was going to do. The same gang members that Gloria had seen on the hillside came to her niece’s wake and played cards and drank her liquor until all the other guests had left. They also attended the burial the next day. She did not talk to them at all but tried to appear calm. After this the threatening calls were more frequent.  She often hung up on them. They knew what she was doing, what clothing she had on, where her son was. She took her son out of school and they hid in the house while her husband was at work. They only went outside to go out to the bathroom, which was shared with neighbors.

 

She still had not denounced anyone for the murders.

 

Things calmed down for a while, then the calls started up again in February and March of 2016.  The men who called knew her whereabouts and that she had moved her son to another school. “Gloria, I know where you are,” they said, calling her by name. They said that because her son’s school was in the territory of another gang she has sentenced herself and her son to death. They threaten to dismember her and her son. She took her son out of school again.

 

Gloria went to the prosecutors at the courthouse. She was told that the case of her niece had been investigated and the men responsible were in prison. The people there warned her that she might not make it home alive after having come there and that she would be lucky to find her son when she got home. Because now everyone would think she had made a denunciation, and it wouldn’t matter that she never did.

 

After that Gloria took her son and fled the country to ask for asylum in the United States.

 

There is a restroom in Visitation. The toilet paper goes in a little cubby in the wall rather than on the usual little roller because this is a prison and someone might fashion a weapon from one of them, or kill themselves with it. For the same reason, the mirror isn’t really a mirror, more like the back of a cookie sheet that you can see your face in. The bathroom door doesn’t lock, even though in this place all of the others do.

 

MARISELA

 

Nine years ago, when Marisela was 15 years old, she and a friend were grabbed off the street by three men, local gang members, narcotraficantes. Marisela was forced to watch while they raped and then decapitated her girlfriend. Then they took Marisela to another house and raped her. Then they cut her throat, stabbed her several times (she lifts her shirt and shows me the scars to prove to me that she is telling the truth) then they shot her in the back and left her for dead.

 

But Marisela managed to get up. Although she was bleeding a lot, she walked out of the house and down the street and collapsed in front of a gas station. People there saw her and called an ambulance that took her to the hospital where she went immediately to surgery. The doctors saved her life. She had to stay in the hospital for about a month.

 

The gang offered to give Marisela’s family money not to report the crime to the police, but her mother did it anyway. The family of her dead friend must have taken the money, because they remained silent the rape and murder of their daughter. The police didn’t arrest anyone for the crimes. Marisela says that this is because the police also accepted money from the criminals. A friend of hers who lives near some of the men in the same gang told her that this is what happens.

 

When she got out of the hospital, Marisela and her family went to live with her aunt in a small town at some distance from the city. But shortly after they got there two men came to the house asking about her. They went away after the aunt lied and said she hadn’t seen her, but after that Marisela had to move out to protect her family.

 

For the next two years she lived with her boyfriend. He was a gang member and he used drugs. They had a child together, but he abused her verbally and beat her (even when she was pregnant). She had to run away and hide from him. She stayed with a girlfriend, but he kept threatening to take their son. Since then she has been moving from one place to another.  She tried to escape and come to the US, but in Mexico a man stole her money tried to rape her. Luckily someone else came along and she escaped, but she decided to turn around since she had no money left for the trip. She has moved at least a half a dozen times in the past 9 years because nowhere feels safe. She was in school before she was raped, but never went back after that. Her son has barely been to school and she has not been able to work because she is always hiding.

 

Marisela put her son in school in 2016, but not long after he started the teacher called her in and told her that two dangerous looking men had come in asking about a boy named “Diego,” and whether he was enrolled there. The teacher did not tell the men anything, but told Marisela that her son couldn’t go to that school anymore.

 

Five months before our interview, in early 2016, two of the men who had raped her 9 years earlier approached Marisela in a car.  She managed to escape by slipping into a store while they were turning the corner, but soon after that she received a telephone message threatening her son. The man said that she needed to turn herself in to them and that her son would suffer for all of the years that she had been avoiding them.

 

Marisela fled her country again, this time with her son (now 8 years old). They turned themselves in to U.S. authorities in Laredo. She had with her the police report, her medical records, and a letter from a juvenile court attorney saying that she is a “protected witness” and cannot safely stay in the country. The ICE officers took these documents in Laredo. She has filled out forms asking for them back several times but she hasn’t heard anything.

 

I offer to help her fill out another Papelito (“little paper”) to request the return of the documents. This is a half-sized sheet of paper with lines on which to write a person’s name, Alien Number, and their question. I fold it in half and write “ICE” on the outside. Detainees have to mail Papelitos themselves. To do so they have to put them in the grey box marked ICE above the washer dryer in the Recreation Room. I have never seen this box or this room, but I have described it numerous times to women seeking answers:

 

I would like to find out where my husband is. We were separated in El Paso.

 

They took my 18-year-old niece away in a van when we left the hielera. Could you please tell me where she is? She has been like my daughter since her mother moved to Arizona ten years ago.

 

I cannot understand or speak Spanish. I would like to request that my Credible Fear interview be conducted in Mam, my native language.

 

My children and I have been here for three weeks and I still have not received a date for my interview. Could you please tell me when that will be?

 

I have a fever and a pain in my abdomen. At the clinic they only give me Tylenol. I would like to be seen by a doctor.

 

At the end of the day I push the button and somebody I can’t see buzzes me out. I pass the scanner and collect my driver’s license from the woman at the reception desk. The lobby is decorated for the holidays. The artificial flowers change color according to the season. This place is surrounded by fracking wells and fields of grazing cattle. If the doors were all open, where would they go? They have already turned themselves in. Women with young children would not set out across these fields. Haven’t they already reached the promised land?