Eight-year-old Jorge Jr is withdrawn. He does not lift his head up from the table for much of the hour-long visitation at the immigrant detention center.
“He’s lost 4 pounds [1.8kg] since we got here. He’s not the same child,” said his father, Jorge. “The psychologist asked me if I wanted to give him any medication. I told them the best medicine is freedom. All we need is to be free.”
It has been a traumatic few months for Jorge and Jorge Jr. After illegally crossing the Rio Grande into south Texas, the pair were arrested and separated by the US Border Patrol. Jorge Jr was sent to a shelter for a month while his father was processed in the criminal justice system under zero tolerance for illegal entry to the US.
Illustration: Yusha
Although now reunited, the pair — and thousands of others like them — face a new horror: indefinite detention.
Reporters met three sets of reunited but incarcerated fathers and sons at the Karnes detention center, about an hour southeast of San Antonio, early last month: Hondurans Jorge and Jorge Jr and Franklin and Franklin Jr, as well as Elmer and his son Heyler from Guatemala.
They are among the 800 “residents” at the prison, where most children have been detained for far longer than the legal limit of 20 days.
“We’ve all been detained with our sons and have no idea when we’re getting out. I’ve been here with Franklin [Jr] for 53 days. I’m counting every day,” Franklin said in a subsequent telephone interview.
US Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) forbids visitors’ recording devices and notebooks from the detention center.
All three families fled their home countries in fear and applied for political asylum when they were taken into immigration detention.
While they were separated from their sons, the fathers failed the “credible fear” interview they need to pass to seek asylum, but all were appealing their cases.
“It was sell drugs or be killed, so that’s when I decided to leave Honduras,” Franklin said, referring to threats his son received from gangs near the capital, Tegucigalpa.
He rode through Mexico on the roof of a cargo train dubbed La Besti (“The Beast”) with his son strapped to him with his belt so he would not fall off.
Jorge left the Olancho region of Honduras for similar reasons.
“It used to be nice, but bad people turned up and started extorting, killing people, selling and trafficking drugs. So many of us left,” Jorge said. “I can’t mention names, because if it comes out in the news, bad things happen.”
“They want to kill me in Guatemala,” Elmer said he told immigration officers when he presented himself at the Roma, Texas, international bridge asking for asylum.
He was extorted by a gang that had already murdered his brother-in-law in his home town of El Chal in Guatemala’s Peten region.
“The officer told me there are murderers here, too. We aren’t going to give you asylum, we are going to separate you from your son,” Elmer said.
For a month, Elmer did not speak to his son or even know where he was.
“They kidnapped him, that’s what they did,” he said.
Prior to zero tolerance this year, asylum seekers were typically released from detention as they pursued their asylum claims. Today, unlawful border crossers are criminally prosecuted before moving to immigration detention, even if they tell Border Patrol they are fleeing for their lives. Getting bonded out or paroled is now much less likely.
While the fathers were being processed, their children were sent thousands of kilometers away: Heyler and Jorge to New York, but Franklin does not know where Franklin Jr was sent.
“They told me to a shelter in Texas, but he says he got on a plane, so I think they sent him to California,” Franklin says.
The children are struggling to cope with their incarceration. Franklin Jr wants to be outside playing with horses. In Honduras he used to watch his father train horses for dressage competitions.
Heyler describes the “school” within the detention center as just playing or watching television.
“We don’t learn anything,” he said.
Sleep is hard to come by. Although each family has its own room, the fathers say that guards do bed checks every 30 minutes during the night, knocking on the door and waking them up.
Jorge Jr’s weight loss has attracted the attention of Karnes staff and is making his father anxious.
“If he doesn’t eat, they accuse me of being a bad parent and threaten to take him away from me,” Jorge said.
Having thought the family separation was over, Elmer and Jorge were retraumatized on Aug. 15, when riot-clad ICE officers separated them and 14 other fathers from their sons again, taking them to a detention facility about two hours away from Karnes.
“It happened at two in the afternoon, while our sons were at school,” Jorge said. “We were put into solitary confinement and we were all crying.”
After 28 hours, the men were taken back to Karnes and reunited with their sons.
An ICE spokeswoman said the raid was a response to a “disturbance” involving about 40 men.
“ICE San Antonio deployed additional law enforcement resources to control the situation,” she said, confirming that 16 of the men were temporarily relocated. “No one was injured during this incident.”
“The children were sad because they didn’t think they were going to see us again,” Jorge said. “We were sad, too, for the same reason.”
Now if the men are found talking in groups of three or more, the guards will break them up.
“Then they start asking us questions about what we are talking about. We tell them we are telling each other jokes, sharing our experiences,” Elmer said.
After months behind bars, the fathers are losing hope. They would still prefer to remain in the US, but want to fight their cases outside detention.
The Flores Settlement is supposed to limit detention for immigrant children to 20 days, but ICE takes the position that because the fathers are appealing their cases and want to remain with their sons, they must remain in detention, said Manoj Govindaiah, the family detention legal director of Raices.
“What ICE is doing is completely arbitrary,” Govindaiah said.
Some families are released, while others are not. Since family separation happened earlier this year, Raices has six staff lawyers and six legal assistants working at Karnes.
“It’s nearly impossible to explain things to our clients, many of whom are fleeing violence with their children and all of whom have experienced even more traumatization because of family separation and zero tolerance,” Govindaiah said.
Elmer is losing hope.
“We’ve been here since the end of July,” he said. “I don’t want to be here any more. We don’t want to be here any more.”
Jorge Jr was desperate not to spend his birthday — which came and went at the end of last month — in Karnes.
“And yet we’re still being detained,” Jorge said, unsure whether he will receive asylum or be deported.”This is punishing our children. We are going to die from sadness in here.”
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