Rhetoric doesn’t match asylum realities
Recently, I returned from Dilley in South Texas, where I volunteered with a group of faculty and students from the University of Houston assisting detained women and children seeking asylum in the United States. Over a weekend in early July, our team of five bilingual social work students, five law students, two members of the UH Law School Clinical Faculty, one interpreter and I served 73 asylum-seeking women and children. Our primary mission was to prepare our clients for their credible-fear interviews, the first step in the asylum process, and historically, a necessary step toward obtaining release from detention.
Tears flowed freely as our clients, still reeling from the traumas experienced in their home countries and on the journey to the U.S., found sympathetic and supportive listeners in our team of students. Again and again, we heard the words “I didn’t want to leave my country but I didn’t have a choice.” We heard of families selling everything virtually overnight to flee violence specifically targeting a child. We heard about small-business owners and ordinary citizens being targeted for extortion, relatives and neighbors were killed for not paying the “renta.” We heard about teenage boys being killed and carved into so many pieces that there was no body left for a mother to bury, dead because they refused to join a gang. We heard about gangs targeting mothers as sex slaves; women with children were easier to threaten and manipulate into compliance. We heard about women relocating several times to escape these threats, only to have the gangs or a violent partner track them down in new cities or towns. We heard about kindergartners being threatened with rape and murder because a parent had witnessed a gang-related murder. We watched toddlers wipe the tears from their mothers’ faces, saying, “No llore, mami” (“Don’t cry, Mommy.”)
In much of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, the gangs are the law unto themselves. The police either are on the payroll or just as terrified as the citizenry they are supposed to protect. Many women filed police reports, only to find the threats escalated in retaliation. With no hope of assistance from local authorities, these mothers have left families, friends, homes and jobs, risking their lives on a perilous journey, seeking a safe haven and the opportunity for a better life.
Texas is home to two “family detention facilities,” where the U.S. government detains asylum-seeking women and children in facilities that are run by private, for-profit prison companies. Although these women and children entered the United States without documentation, they are not here “illegally” because it is not against the law to enter seeking asylum. Nonetheless, they are detained in prison-like conditions far from any major cities. The South Texas Family Detention Center in Dilley houses 1,100 women and children, most from Central America, but the facility also houses women and children from as far away as Romania and Russia. Teams of lawyers and law students travel from across the country to spend days or weeks in dusty small towns in the middle of nowhere, working to help traumatized women and their children seek the asylum protections to which they are entitled under both U.S. and international law.
Rather than building walls and banning whole classes of vulnerable refugees, we should focus our resources on addressing the conditions that drive these families to our borders, and on treating those who make it here with dignity and respect. In this season of political insanity, the quiet strength of these resilient women offers a striking counterpoint to harsh rhetoric and mean-spirited falsehoods. Their presence in the United States is not a threat to our way of life, but instead adds depth and richness to the fabric of our collective culture.
Webb is an attorney, a social worker, doctoral student and an adjunct professor in the Graduate College of Social Work at the University of Houston.