The Harrowing Journey Home For Families Leaving Immigration Detention

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

https://www.edhat.com/national/news/the-harrowing-journey-home-for-families-leaving-immigration-detention/

Kheilin Valero Marcano, Stiven Arrieta Prieto and their 1-year-old daughter, Amalia, felt overjoyed when, in early February, they were allowed to leave the Dilley Immigration Processing Center.


But after spending about two months locked in the prison-like detention facility for immigrant children and their parents in South Texas brush country, the family quickly faced new, unexpected challenges. They were driven more than an hour away to Laredo, on the north bank of the Rio Grande, and dumped at a shelter, with little more than the clothes on their backs. They were 600 miles away from where they had been arrested in El Paso. And even further from California, where they hoped to settle as their immigration case moved forward.

Last year, the Trump administration detained thousands of children like Amalia. Many were held in the detention center in Dilley, often for weeks or months at a time. Most of the people sent to the 2,400-bed facility were eventually deported to other countries. But 45% of them were released to await the outcomes of their cases in immigration courts, according to data obtained by the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by The Marshall Project. After leaving Dilley, families face the medical, psychological and financial repercussions of detention. And while they are relieved to leave the harsh conditions of detention, families say the release itself can also be harrowing.

___

That’s what he said had happened to an Angolan woman and her 6-year-old daughter who arrived from Dilley in mid-February. She’d been arrested while taking the girl to school, even though the woman had an active immigration case still unfolding in the courts. Smith said they had to try to figure out how to fly or take a bus home to Maine, more than 2,200 miles away.

Smith said when families arrived at the shelter, they were often bewildered by how and why they’d been arrested. Some questioned their faith. Many needed psychological care, but there was no time or resources to “open those kinds of mental wounds.” He said the immigrants want to get home quickly, to see if they still have jobs and if their children can go back to school.