Enacting and Sustaining Trauma and Violence Through Policy Enforcement

Femicide and the Northern Triangle of Latin America

Most of these women and children held in family detention centers came to the United States to escape violence in their home countries of the northern triangle of Latin America (Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala) and were seeking asylum for themselves and their children. The northern triangle of Latin America has some of the highest rates of femicide in the world (Carey & Torres, 2010; Velasco, 2008). Femicide refers to the killing and sexual violence experienced by women postwar (Geneva Declaration Secretariat, 2011). Femicide does not necessarily occur as a result of one incident of violence but often is a consequence of a pattern of violence against women that ends with their killing (Geneva Declaration Secretariat, 2011). The acts of violence and resulting death of the women frequently happen in front of other family members, who then find themselves in danger of violence by the killer, as they are witnesses to the killing. Often these family members are the children of the murdered women. Ultimately, femicide is killing of a person who is target of violence based on her unique identification of being a woman.

Latin American Mothers as Asylum Seekers: A New Crimmigration Target

The immigration debate has plagued U.S. politicians. Most of these debates are devoid of discussions about asylum seekers. As immigration policies have become more punitive and the attitude of crimmigration more prevalent (Ortega & Lasch, 2014), asylum has remained as one of the only available options for immigrants fleeing violence in their home countries who are apprehended upon entry to the United States. Current practices regarding Latin American women with children seeking asylum are tainted by crimmigration, which is the conflation of the criminal justice system with the civil immigration law system. U.S. immigration authorities attempt to hide the true nature of our immigration policy toward Latin American women by obfuscating the reality of immigrant family detention or, perhaps more accurately, family jail, by using kinder names for detention centers. For instance, Dilley, TX, is the location for the South Texas Family Residential Center. Karnes, TX, houses the Karnes Country Residential Center.

The names of the facilities give no indication that there are jails created to incarcerate women whose crimes are that they are female with children and have experienced acts of violence and are without protection from the law in their Latin American home countries. In addition, these family jails represent a prime example of interest convergence in which brown women and their children’s bodies are the vehicles for profit for the private prison industry such as The GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America. Strategically, these facilities are built in areas of economic crisis whose locations could be considered remote. Politicians and communities who are in need of economic relief find themselves in support of or complacent in the building and expansion of family jails. In these facilities, jailed asylum-seeking women and children find themselves without access to legal services.

Credible Fear and Bond: The Asylum Process

Women with children seeking asylum must engage in a series of processes that gain them a full hearing before an immigration judge who will determine whether they have a legal right to remain in the country. The process includes a credible fear interview. Women are interviewed by an asylum officer to determine whether they have been persecuted or have a credible fear of persecution upon return to their country. The asylum seeker must prove that the fear is based on her race, religion, nationality, and membership in a particular social group or because of a particular political opinion (U.S. Department of Homeland Security, ND). Mothers held in immigration jails often meet the credible fear threshold based on interpersonal violence, ethnic/racial minority group status (in the case of indigenous women), and/or sexual orientation. The interview process requires women to provide concise, detailed, and specific information about the incidents and types of sexual, emotional, and physical violence that they experienced through a question and answer process. These interviews often occur in the presence of minor children. Children may be required to provide information to the asylum officer if they were victims of or witnesses to violence.

Once credible fear is established, the case may be referred to an immigration judge for a bond hearing. The families remain incarcerated during this time. For families held in Dilley, the courts hearing the cases are located in a different state than the immigration detention jail—first Denver, CO, and now Miami, FL. The cases are adjudicated via closed-circuit television. The judge, a translator, and the lawyer representing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) appear in a courtroom, while the woman seeking asylum is led to a room in the detention center with a monitor in which to view the courtroom in a federal building many states away. Eligibility for bond and the amount of bond required are determined based on a number of factors including the on the likelihood that the immigrant is a flight risk or a threat to public safety or national security. In 2014, at the family immigration jail in Artesia, NM, immigration authorities requested that women, who passed credible fear screenings, not have access to bonds or have bonds that were excessive (AILA, 2014). Women with children being held in immigration jail have traveled across at least two countries and in many cases made the dangerous crossing through the desert. They have risked their lives in order to protect their children from the violence they have witnessed or experienced. In the face of this evidence, the DHS continues to set bonds at unreasonable and unobtainable amounts, and too often U.S. immigration judges sanction these bonds.

To succeed on a petition to bond out of detention, the incarcerated asylum seeker should provide documentation (such as identification, birth certificates, and, if she is fortunate enough to have a sponsor in the United States willing to support her and her children, proof of the sponsor’s identity, legal status, and income) to the court. Obtaining the necessary documentation while incarcerated is a complicated process that is influenced by the following factors: limited or nonexistent financial resources, inability to contact relatives in their countries of origin related to lack of funds to pay for calls outside of the facility as well as the cost of international calls, the requirement that all documents must be provided in English, and the reliance on the private prison corporation to fax and/or mail documentation to the court. At the end of this process, the immigration judge may set a bond if one has not been set by the DHS, raise or reduce a bond if one was set by the DHS, or deny the request for bond entirely. Women who are ineligible for bond, who are denied bond, or who cannot pay their bonds must proceed to the merit hearings of their asylum cases while stilled detained.

A few months ago, I attended my first bond hearing for a woman and her 1-year-old son who were being held in immigration detention. I was in the federal immigration court in Denver, CO, and she was at the detention center in Dilley, TX, where I was about to take social work and law students from the University of Denver. She was a 19-year-old Guatemalan woman without any criminal history. She had been sexually assaulted. She reported her assault to the police and they refused to take a police report. To seek asylum, you must be physically present in the United States, so she had to cross the border, essentially breaking the law, to seek the protection of the U.S. legal system. She crossed the border and asked for asylum. Her bond was set at $14,000 USD. The attorney representing the DHS was asked by the judge why the bond was so excessive. The attorney responded that there was no rational in her records for the amount of the bond and that despite that she was requesting the $14,000 bond.

During the spring break of 2015, a group of 18 social work and law students spent 5 days in a trailer in Dilley, TX. They volunteered to work with women and children seeking asylum at the South Texas Family Residential Center. Their days started at 6 a.m. and ended at midnight. The law and social work students partnered together to provide legal and social support for the women and children. They educated women about the asylum-seeking process (timelines and documentation required). They called family members in the women’s home countries to aid in gathering legal documents or information about the assaults they experienced. They filed motions and briefs. They, for 5 days, worked to provide moments of humanity and justice in a system designed to dehumanize and to deny access to legal representation. Legal representation is the key factor in positive outcomes for these asylum-seeking families. Currently, less than 30% of these families have access to legal representation (TRAC, 2015). Without representation, these women almost never gain asylum even when they have demonstrated that they have a credible fear of persecution (TRAC, 2015).

The deep learning that can occur through interdisciplinary projects focused on humanitarian issues like immigration cannot be underestimated. Social work students, who are used to working with traumatized families that have experienced violence, were upset and appalled by the barriers that are intentionally created to keep Latin American women with children from accessing the legal system. The barriers were created by the very same legal system from which they were seeking help. The barriers and dehumanization that occurred in the legal system did not surprise all of the law students; however, they struggled with the degree of violence that the women and children experienced. In many cases, the violence was repetitive by the same perpetrator or included sexual assault by groups of rapists and included law enforcement officials who at best turned a blind eye to crimes against women and at the worst cases engaged in the assaults.

By the end, social work students gained experience negotiating the requirement that traumatized women and children retell their trauma multiple times in great detail in exchange for the chance at asylum and a safer life in the United States. The detention experience, for the students, gave them a deeper understanding of the experience of trauma associated with the detention experience and its role in the family’s overall trauma experience.

The law students learned a different method of interviewing traumatized women. In addition to accessing information accurately and quickly, they learned to become witnesses to women’s stories of violence and worked with women to gain a sense of some power in a system that had previously been unfathomable to them.

Surprises and Lessons Learned

Ultimately, we were all surprised about things we had not considered, two of which I will highlight. The first was the isolation of indigenous women that occurs in facilities when they do not have Spanish or English as a second language. In addition, legal representation and access to court become severely compromised for monolingual Mam, K’iche and Canjobal speakers, as interpreters are rarely available and even when they are, the women’s stories of violence must then be told through multiple translators. Second, and one that we discuss at length, was the choice a mother may have to make when her minor child is determined to have a credible fear of persecution but she is not, either because she is not eligible for asylum due to a prior entry to the United States or because the asylum officer does not find her credible. The mother is then faced with the decision to return to her country without her child, who may or may not be safe in the United States without her protection, or to return with her child to a country in which the child has been or is likely to be persecuted. In the end, for the students involved in the project, there is no question that family detention for asylum-seeking women is inhumane and unjust. They were firsthand witnesses to the consequences of being a Latin American female in two different countries: Guatemala, El Salvador or Honduras, where the women experienced violence without protection from authorities, and the United States, where they fled seeking safety only to find themselves incarcerated.

From my perspective, the biggest surprise was that the depth of corruption of the legal system could still surprise me. In this case, the corruption was about creating barriers for an identified group of people, Latin American women with children, to access a legal process for which they are not only entitled to but is designed to protect them. I still, despite Japanese Internment Camps; Guantanamo Bay, racial profiling; police violence and brutality; and a privatized prison industry, believed that women seeking asylum based on physical and sexual violence would be granted a “fair” day in court. Instead, what I found was that every step of the process for seeking asylum for Latin American women was fraught with gender- and racial-based injustice and a kind of subtle violence.

In May, I found myself on a fan bus returning from a soccer match between the Portland Timbers and the Colorado Rapids. I was sitting next to a young woman in her late 20s named Iris, who emigrated from Mexico as a child, before the Patriot Act. During our short conversation, she revealed that she and her brother served in the U.S. military. She also disclosed that she had citizenship status as a result of being granted asylum because her father was “a bad man” who did “horrible things” in her country and to her mother. She told me that the America was “the greatest country in the world.” My response was to be grateful that her family sought asylum prior to the privatization of prison and crimmigration.

In the end, I find myself feeling responsible. My experience of family immigration jail, the inhumane process, and the trauma experienced by families at the hands of my own government makes me an accomplice in this dehumanization. Despite our best efforts and the lawsuits that have attacked the humanitarian problems with jailing asylum seekers, these women and children remain invisible and silenced. Salazar (2013) uses Paolo Friere’s work to make the case that the process of dehumanization affects not only the target of dehumanization but the enactor. As a citizen of “the greatest country of the world,” I know that we as a nation are lesser as a result of our continued dehumanization of brown-skinned women and children seeking refuge from violence.

Ultimately, immigration family jail affects citizens and noncitizens alike. Social worker’s come in contact with immigrants and asylum seekers in all areas of social work practice, from policy to direct service provision. Women and children, when they are released from these facilities, traverse the United States to family and sponsors who pledged to provide support for these families. However, there continues to be a dearth of curriculum that consistently exposes social work students to the truth about immigration policies and the resulting consequences to immigrant and mixed citizenship status families. We as social workers, as feminist, and as educators can resist the dehumanization of these women and children by simply incorporating materials into our courses that address the plight of these families. The education of our students about the realities of immigration policy enforcement provides an opportunity to engage in acts of resistance against the inhumane treatment of noncitizens.