Quest for a better life for my kids landed me in a detention center
My name is Floricel Liborio Ramos. I am 38 years old, indigenous Huichol and a Mexican citizen. I have gone through many difficult things in my life, but the most difficult has been being in this detention center, where I cannot see or hold my children.
I was arrested on March 26 by immigration agents. It was very sad and painful because they arrested me in front of my children. I was locked up with others in a detention center in Richmond and everyone who worked there treated us harshly.
At 3 a.m. on July 17, they told us that we would be moved. They left us in a cold room. At 11 a.m., they gave us a sandwich and a bottle of water. There was a woman who was more than 70 years old. and there were people with diabetes. The officials did not give them their diabetes medicine. They did not give us anything.
From Richmond, they took us to San Francisco, and then, at 4 p.m, they moved us to Gilroy. We were given nothing more than the bottle of water and the sandwich that they had given us at 11 that morning. We arrived in Gilroy at almost 8 p.m. The officials moved us from a bus to a van. It was July, and the temperature was more than 100 degrees. The van did not have air conditioning, and it was dark inside.
We were nine women. We wanted to go to the bathroom, but the officials told us no. From Gilroy, they moved us to Fresno.
As we went, we could barely breathe; we needed air. They did not give us water. Of the women with diabetes, one woman fainted. Other women were vomiting. There was a woman with claustrophobia who was terrified of confinement; she fainted. We were tied at the hands, waists and feet and could not help her.
We desperately tapped on the interior window of the van between the back where we were held and the driver’s seat. We wanted the guard driving the van to listen to us so he would stop or give us water. He was on the phone and driving at the same time, and just yelled at us to shut up.
I thought that my life would end there. I felt that I would never see my children again.
We arrived in Fresno at 10 p.m. There we were moved to a different van, and from Fresno they brought us here to Mesa Verde in Bakersfield. We are alive by a miracle. We are receiving psychological help, because this experience is something we have not yet been able to overcome. I have been in Mesa Verde detention center for almost five months.
The hardest part about being detained has been being apart from my children. I have never been separated from them. They are everything to me. They are my world. They do not have the support of their father, because he was deported in 2012, nor do they have mine, because I am detained.
I also have a daughter with special needs, and while all my children need me, my youngest daughter needs my help to resume her therapy. I want to get all my children counseling for the trauma that they have lived through during our separation.
Although we are detained, through the news we know that the outside world is very sad — our children are outside where we cannot hug them and tell them that everything will be OK. I am asking for an opportunity to leave this detention center, to embrace my children and make up for the nine months that we could not be together.
President Trump is separating innocent families. We, the people who are here in immigration detention, are in the government’s hands and they put our lives in danger.
We came to this country to give our children better lives. We are people who work in the fields, harvesting fruit and vegetables that we bring to our homes, to our tables.
I have lived in California for almost 20 years, and I have seen members of my community cleaning houses, hotel bathrooms, washing plates in restaurants, or picking grapes, tomatoes, chiles, apples. We do many of these jobs. They’re hard jobs, because we work many long hours and we are paid the very least. But we work with all our strength from sunrise to sunset to offer our children something better.
We are the people held in immigrant detention, while outside our children suffer immense grief because we are detained, while outside there is work to be done, crops waiting to be harvested.
Stop the raids, stop the deportations, and close all immigrant detention centers. There are thousands of people in detention who are deprived of their freedom. Many of us fear returning to our home countries, and fled life-threatening situations. All of our rights have been violated by immigration agents.
Put yourself in our place — the place of not being able to see your children because you asked for nothing more than an opportunity in to be in this country. We are mothers. Our children are the ones who are suffering, and many are living outside detention with neither their father nor their mother. We ask for our liberty. Let our voices be heard on the outside.