Volunteers offer a warm welcome
At a Texas bus station, they guide immigrants newly released from detention centers.
SAN ANTONIO — An immigrant mother and her small son walked into the Greyhound bus station last week, newly released from federal detention. She carried their few belongings in a clear plastic bag labeled “Homeland Security.”
Four more mothers followed, all from Central America, all stunned, exhausted and clueless in this city 240 miles north of the border. Glendy Rodas Alvarez, 22, f led gang violence in Guatemala with her 2-yearold son, Jackson, hoping to join her husband and sister in San Rafael, Calif.
Half a dozen volunteers came to the families’ aid, explaining their bus tickets, showing them their destinations on a map, offering cellphones, food, clothes, toys and shelter beds.
At a nearby shelter, a worn notebook testifies to the immigrant mothers’ numbers and reach. More than 500 have passed through since March, headed for Los Angeles, New York and Miami, but also for the Pacific Northwest, Midwest, Northeast, Deep South and the nation’s capital.
“People don’t realize this is happening,” said volunteer Melanie Chaffin, 38, a stay-at-home mother of two who came for a week from conservative Lubbock.
More than 68,000 immigrant families, many from Central America, crossed the southern border last fiscal year, sparking what President Obama called “an urgent humanitarian situation.” His administration has been quietly expanding family deportations and detention.
So far this fiscal year, 20,850 families have crossed the border, compared with 39,113 this time last year, a nearly 50% drop. The government has expanded from one family detention center in Pennsylvania to four, the two newest and largest both south of San Antonio. A facility in New Mexico closed in December.
More than 4,500 immigrants have been detained since last summer, and the centers are expanding to house 3,500 people at a time by year’s end.
Opponents say the detention centers, run by private correction companies that contract with the government, are prisons where women and children are subjected to abuse and neglect. Some frustrated immigrant mothers detained for months have staged hunger strikes and sued the government. Their leaders were allowed to bond out last week before a visit Monday by Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and, later this month, by a congressional delegation opposed to family detention.
Administration officials defend the sites, which they call “residential centers,” as providing quality food, housing, education and medical care.
Volunteers in Texas provide stopgap legal and social services. The San Antoniobased nonprofit Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, or RAICES, and a local Interfaith Coalition carpool to visit mothers at the detention centers, write to them and raise money to pay their bonds. So far, they have raised $214,000 for 78 women and children.
At the bus station last week, volunteer Edwin De La Riva, 20, a pre-med student at Sam Houston State University, interviewed one mother.
Clementa Pablo Geronimo, 28, had fled rural Guatemala with her 10-year-old son, Andy. They were traveling to join cousins in Oakland.
“Do you have a lawyer?” De La Riva asked in Spanish. Pablo nodded. “Do you know his name?” De La Riva asked. She shook her head. RAICES has been trying to compile information about where the families are from, how long they have been held, their bond amounts and destinations in the U.S. to better represent them and ensure they have pro bono attorneys where they’re going, said Jonathan Ryan, the group’s executive director.
“The government uses their failure to report to court as a reason to deport them,” he said, noting the administration has sped up immigration court hearings for families and unaccompanied children, with faster socalled rocket dockets. This fiscal year, immigration judges have ordered more than 11,000 family members removed as of April, 87% because they never appeared in court.
Ryan noted that at least seven women who had become outspoken activists at the Karnes City detention center were released before Johnson’s visit.
“These are cases that have been reviewed many times with the same facts and circumstances,” Ryan said. Before members of Congress come, he added, “They’re trying to get people out so there’s no one for them to visit.”
Gillian Christensen, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the cases were reviewed as part of an initiative announced last month after a federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled in favor of the American Civil Liberties Union in a class-action lawsuit and ordered the administration to stop using high bonds as punishment.
Delmi Cruz and her son Alexis, 11, were among those released from Karnes last week on $5,500 bond, covered by RAICES donations. They had been held for 11 months.
Afterward, at a volunteer’s house, Cruz detailed deteriorating conditions inside the detention center: A Honduran woman had been deported after attempting suicide, she said. ICE officials insist the woman merely had a wrist abrasion. A Guatemalan was deported after suffering a miscarriage, she said. ICE officials also dispute this.
Before her release, Karnes officials warned her that speaking out about family detention could hurt her immigration court case, she said.
Cruz, 36, is heading to Los Angeles, where her 6-yearold son has been in relatives’ care. She plans to fly back to Texas to meet with the congressional delegation later this month.
“We have to be brave,” she said. “There is a lot of injustice.”
At the bus station, volunteer Carlos Afanador, 55, said he tries to reassure women. “We always tell them, ‘Welcome to the United States,’ ” he said.
“We are not all like the jail people,” added his wife, Catalina, 52.
A Guatemalan mother had arrived with her 9-yearold son, headed for Los Angeles after 15 days in detention.
Rosaura Perez, 27, was rail-thin, the arms emerging from her black teddy bear Tshirt nearly as slender as her son’s. Freddy Guzman Perez’s gray jeans and striped polo shirt hung on his thin frame as he clutched a battery-operated keyboard. He welcomed the volunteers with a gap-toothed grin.
“It’s a humanitarian crisis,” Chaffin said.
“That’s why we’re all here,” said Carla DeMore, 31, a law student who came from Tucson to volunteer. “Because it’s just not right.”
The volunteers waited with the women, offering reassurance as well as backpacks of food, toiletries, and toys. Then they helped them line up with their children shortly before midnight to board buses and roll out into the darkness of an uncertain future.