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  With the Refugee Act in 1980, the United States finally created a policy addressing refuge and asylum that, in accordance with United Nations policy, would treat everyone facing political persecution equally. The new policy was put to the test almost immediately with the worsening Haitian refugee crisis, as well as the arrival of thousands of Cuban refugees on the shores of southern Florida after Fidel Castro eased restrictions on migrating by sea. Between April and September 1980, approximately 125,000 Cubans left the island in a mass exodus known as the Mariel Boatlift, named for the seaside town from which many of them departed. Maintaining the approach to asylum of his predecessors, President Jimmy Carter’s administration accepted Cuban migrants from the Mariel Boatlift as political refugees, while the Haitians were denied refugee status and considered to be fleeing for economic reasons.8 During those months, the deaths of Haitians who drowned before reaching Florida’s coast were largely ignored by the media.

  In September 1981, president Ronald Reagan declared that Haitian immigrants represented “a serious national problem detrimental to the interests of the United States.” Through an agreement with Duvalier’s government, the Reagan administration allowed the U.S. Coast Guard to block boats carrying Haitian immigrants from entering U.S. waters and return them to Haiti. This was the first such agreement of its kind. By the end of 1990, 23,000 Haitians had been detained at sea under the new policy. Only eight were granted asylum. In 1991, a boat carrying Haitian refugees to the United States stopped to rescue some Cubans whose boat had sunk. When the Coast Guard intercepted them, the boat filled with Haitians was returned to Haiti with everyone on board, except the Cubans, who were taken to Florida.

  In 1994 an energy crisis prompted another mass exodus from Cuba while a military coup that had brought Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power three years earlier provoked an exodus from Haiti. As thousands died at sea, a federal judge ordered U.S. president George H.W. Bush to suspend his policy of repatriating Haitians. Refugees in boats intercepted at sea were taken to the Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba. By late 1994, 50,000 refugees were being held at the base, at a cost of between $500,000 and $1 million per day. A massive repatriation process began. Three-quarters of Haitians, even minors who were traveling alone, returned to Haiti “voluntarily.” In 1995 the 20,000 Cubans who had been held at Guantanamo were brought to the United States, and the “wet foot, dry foot” policy began. (Those caught at sea were returned to Cuba, while those who made it to land qualified for expedited permanent resident status.)

  This disparity in granting asylum has been a constant in U.S. immigration politics for decades. Cubans, Venezuelans, Syrians, Chinese, and Colombians who cite a fear for their lives or safety, offer a marketable skill to benefit the economy, or are attempting to reunify their families are more likely to be admitted. Meanwhile, Hondurans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Haitians, and Mexicans have a much lower chance of being approved for asylum and few alternative avenues for legally entering the country. Shifting economic, trade, ideological, and military alliances as well as political affiliations and rivalries among nations determine who deserves protection. When it comes to matters of asylum, geography is destiny.

  The last major immigration reform legislation to be passed in the United States was signed in 1986 and established that only immigrants who had arrived in the country before January 1, 1982, and could prove it would qualify for legal status. This measure left out most Central American immigrants who had fled violence in their countries after the Sandinista victory in Nicaragua in 1979, when the rightist governments in El Salvador and Guatemala stepped up their campaigns against leftist guerrillas and their presumed sympathizers among the civilian population, including through repression of religious groups and unarmed activists. In Guatemala, hundreds of indigenous villages were destroyed in what is now openly acknowledged as an act of genocide, and millions of people were internally displaced. Between 1984 and 1990, 45,000 Salvadorans, 48,000 Nicaraguans, and 9,500 Guatemalans applied for asylum. Of the estimated 500,000 to 850,000 Salvadorans who were in the United States in 1986, only 146,000 had been in the country for at least four years.9

  The United States opposed Nicaragua’s leftist revolutionary government and supported the right-wing regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala; this meant that 26 percent of the petitions from Nicaraguans but only 2.6 percent of the Salvadorans and 1.8 percent of the Guatemalans were approved.10 This held true for immigrants from other countries that the United States considered enemies: 73 percent of Syrians and 52 percent of Chinese, for example, were admitted.11 In contrast, many Central American refugees were arrested at the border and returned to Mexico without even the opportunity to request asylum.

  This lopsided treatment, on top of the worsening situation in Central America, sparked the growth of an important support network in the United States, including the Sanctuary Movement, which offered refuge and help to thousands fleeing violence in the 1980s. Some organizations were started by refugees themselves, such as the Central American Refugee Center (CARECEN), founded in 1983 and later renamed the Central American Resource Center. These were the first organizations to question and challenge the lack of rights for undocumented immigrants in the public sphere. Increasing emphasis was placed on the fact that U.S. intervention was one of the principal causes of the violence that prompted the exodus from Central America: “We’re coming here because you were there.” Activist groups called for the withdrawal of military aid to the Contras in Nicaragua and the governments of El Salvador and Guatemala. And social activist organizations filed a lawsuit, American Baptist Churches v. Thornburgh, which resulted in the so-called ABC settlement; as a result, through a long process that would take years for some, thousands of asylum cases were reopened in 1990, giving Salvadorans and Guatemalans another chance at legal residency. Among other things, the Immigration Act of 1990, also known as IMMACT, created Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which granted work permits to immigrants from countries affected by war or natural disasters. The permits were valid for eighteen months, and then could be renewed.

  TPS for Salvadorans was extended a few times but then discontinued in 1995 after a peace treaty was signed in El Salvador, ending the civil war. At that time there were around 1 million Salvadorans living in the United States, half of whom had legal status, and 90,000 to 190,000 of whom had TPS.12 Immigration reforms in 1996 put new obstacles in place for asylum seekers, among them giving every immigration agent the authority to deny them the opportunity to present their case to a judge, or to lock them up in detention while their cases were reviewed. When the TPS program ended, many Salvadorans once again went forward with asylum petitions that had been put on hold, but were confronted with a tremendous backlog in immigration courts. This resulted in extensive bureaucratic paperwork, followed by extremely long wait times while their applications were processed and a dark threat of deportation hung over their day-to-day lives. In 2001, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) estimated that it could take as long as twenty years to process the 200,000 applications pending for Central Americans.13

  Between 1999 and 2003, the approval rating for Salvadoran and Guatemalan asylum applicants hovered between 7 and 11 percent, a figure similar to what it had been in the 1980s, which had prompted the ABC settlement. Finally, after devastating earthquakes in El Salvador in 2001 and Haiti in 2011, a new TPS went into effect to afford some relief to undocumented immigrants from those countries, though it offered them neither permanent residency nor an eventual pathway to citizenship.14 As Aviva Chomsky puts it in her book Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal, “Immigration law revisions have continued the pattern of creating new ways of punishing illegality, while concomitantly creating sometimes unexpected and apparently arbitrary new avenues for legalization.”

  6

  Giving Up Freedom to Save Your Life

  The Eloy Detention Center is surrounded by three rows of electrified fence with barbed wire at the top. A dirt road leads to a parking lot some dist
ance from the entrance. When I get out of the car, I walk over the lot covered in pebbles, feeling oddly vulnerable without the objects I usually carry with me. No one can enter the Detention Center with a handbag, cell phone, keys, cash, or dark sunglasses, nor a belt, any jewelry, an overcoat, or wearing a low-cut top. I cannot refer to the Detention Center as a jail, prison, correctional facility, or penal institution: the people held there have not been put on trial or sentenced, so, according to the law, they cannot be detained under prison-like conditions.

  The waiting room is an irregular polygon devoid of chairs, tables, any adornment, or comfort of any sort. The space can hold up to thirty people. A man hands out numbers to each visitor. Visiting hours begin at eight o’clock in the morning. It’s 8:40, and I am number fifty-two.

  The number of children in the room surprises me. They are dressed up as if they’re going to a party—checkered shirts and dress pants, flouncy dresses, hair carefully styled in neat braids and curls. The children try to have fun, in a space where there is no room for games. They talk to each other in English, but the adults who accompany them speak in Spanish.

  A man comes over to me and asks for my help filling in the form. In the space marked “Name of detainee,” he writes his brother’s name. Where it says “Name of visitor,” he writes his own. In the space marked “Name of Minor Visitor,” he writes the same name as the detainee.

  “He’s my nephew, my brother’s son. He’s four years old. He came to visit his dad. They have the same name.”

  The minutes tick by, and no new numbers are called. Since we’re all stuck there waiting in the same room, we begin to talk to each other to pass the time. Janet, who’s number fifty-nine, just got in a few hours ago from Dallas, along with her thirteen-year-old daughter. Just the day before, they had received a phone call. Janet’s mother, who had crossed the border undocumented from Tijuana, was taken into custody and transferred to Eloy. Janet does not speak English. By law she is supposed to be assigned an interpreter, but she doesn’t dare ask for one. She brought her daughter with her to translate and use a computer. Because soon, she was told, she would need to find a lawyer. Juan Carlos, who left San Diego at three in the morning to get to Eloy by eight, has come to see his niece.

  “We brought her so she could see her mother,” he says, glancing downward. I look down and see a little girl with jet-black hair wearing a white-and-blue dress, smiling up at me. She is seven years old. “She’s my niece’s daughter.”

  He tells me his niece has been in detention for five months.

  Every year the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) receives $1.7 billion in contracts for operating prisons and detention centers. Still, in Eloy, they charge you for everything. You are not allowed to enter the visiting area with any cash, but there are vending machines. At the entrance, a visitor can purchase a card that costs five dollars. That is just for the card, there is no credit on it. In order to use it for purchases, you have to pay even more. Juan Carlos asks me to help him get one. The day before, his niece had called him and asked him to bring money so he could buy her a “burrito” from one of the vending machines.

  “Can you imagine what they must be eating in here, that would make you want one of those disgusting burritos?” he asks rhetorically.

  Three hours later, after passing through a metal detector, the visitors are shown into another waiting room. There, an employee shouts out the names of the detainees, and then, through two more doors (six since the entrance to the building), you get to the visiting room.

  Looking around the shoebox-shaped room, I spot Yamil sitting toward the back. His khaki uniform makes him look even thinner; his hair cut short in a buzz close to his scalp brings out his shining eyes, like two black cherries. We have never met, but when I catch his eye we recognize each other. In this room, with children wrapped around their fathers’ necks, a young woman holding her boyfriend close, and the three young men who take turns kissing their little cousin on the cheek, people who greet each other only with their eyes are the exception. Yamil stands up and smiles at me, and we sit down and get ready to talk. A woman in a uniform delivers a stern ultimatum: fifty minutes.

  Yamil invites me to sit down at one of the tables. He warns me that we cannot sit on the same side of the table, we have to sit across from each other. Only minors under the age of eighteen are allowed to sit close to the detained. We have barely sat down when, in a rapid-fire move like something out of a movie, Yamil pulls out a small object and puts it on the table. The look in his eyes urges me to take it, fast. So I grab it just as quickly as he had put it down, and look down at it in my hand. It’s a red-and-white ring fashioned out of pieces of cookie wrappers and empty bags of chips from the vending machines. It has been sculpted into a pattern forming connecting letters that spell my name. He explains that this is the sort of thing one learns to do in a place like Eloy.

  Yamil tells me bits and pieces about his life, and at times he seems relaxed, but at some moments he seems to be trying to look strong. He has lost weight since he’s been here, but he says he is in excellent physical condition. He tells me what a normal day there is like: he gets up, plays soccer—his great passion—takes a shower, plays some chess or dominoes, sometimes he helps out in the library, sometimes he helps in the kitchen. That routine only changes if you get punished. In that case, a detainee is taken to “the hole,” a solitary confinement cell, with no windows, where they are only taken out in handcuffs for a half hour per day. Once, he tells me, another detainee tried to start a fight with him, and Yamil got blamed for it. He was in “the hole” for fifteen days.

  “But it wasn’t so bad. It’s dark and it gets really cold, but you don’t have to see anybody there.”

  I am the first visitor Yamil has had in sixteen months, since shortly after he arrived at the Immigration Detention Center in Eloy. His wife and son came to visit him a week after he was first detained here, but because they live so far away in Kansas and don’t have much money, they haven’t been able to come back. So there are no kids clinging to his neck, no hugs, no kisses on the cheek, no impatiently looking forward to Visiting Day on Saturday for Yamil. In spite of it all, this forty-four-year-old man originally from Durango, Mexico, is locked up here of his own free will.

  What would make somebody choose to spend over a year in a shared prison cell in the United States, rather than live in freedom in Mexico?

  “Hope,” he answers quickly. “So I can give a better life to my family, to my son. Or just a life. Back there, something could happen at any moment.”

  On January 26, 2012, Yamil was kidnapped by municipal police officers in Torreón, the city where he lived. He paid a ransom, lost his business, and later survived an attack from an armed assailant. His son was beaten up. A year later, Yamil and his wife Claudia came to a decision: they had to leave their country. They left behind the little they still had. Claudia went first, and a few weeks later Yamil followed, crossing the border separating Mexico and the United States and turning himself in to immigration authorities at the gate in Nogales, where he presented an application for asylum. That was in 2013.

  Five sets of locked doors and a tall fence separate Yamil from life on the outside. There are four locked doors between the visiting room and his cellblock. Even so, he says he is prepared to stay there for as long as it takes.

  “You get used to everything once you’re in here,” he says. “You learn to see things in a different way, to be more tolerant with people, to be patient.” He flashes a smile. His face changes totally when he smiles. His eyes shine even brighter; the lines that form around his eyes give him a warm, serene expression. Yamil has the peaceful look of someone who knows the wait will be worth it.

  Eloy is in the middle of nowhere. Between Phoenix and Tucson, the two biggest cities in Arizona, are 116 miles of pure desert and sky. Eloy is right in the middle. Every once in a while you pass a small mountain dappled with cacti that makes it seem as if you are actually getting somewhere as you
drive along the seemingly endless Interstate 10, the highway that runs from the Pacific coast in California all the way to the Atlantic in Florida. The most visible landmarks along the way are signs for McDonald’s, Burger King, and Love gas stations, which appear every 6 to 12 miles.

  It is the third Saturday in February, and tumbleweeds are buffeted aimlessly in the wind. That same desert wind makes the trailers on the eighteen-wheelers shimmy while their drivers listen to country music on the radio as they race down the road, or tune in to La Campesina, the station that plays corridos and ballads known as “regional Mexican” music here.

  After taking the “Casa Grande” exit, a left turn puts me on a road that is barely paved and covered in a fine sandy dust that blankets this rugged landscape where the Akimel and Pee Posh tribes once lived. Now the Indians live on the Río Gila reservation, and the only people out on these dusty roads fall into two categories: locals who live on the isolated ranches, and people on their way to the complex of cement buildings in the heart of the desert. The buildings are three correctional facilities and an immigration detention center known as Eloy. In the middle of nowhere, these four buildings contain 5,000 lives, walled in by barbed wire and electrified fences.

  Eloy is one of the six detention centers in Arizona operated by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the private company that manages most of the prisons under subcontract in the United States.1 Eloy has 1,596 beds, and is filled with men and women accused of being on this side of the border without a piece of paper. For the past thirty years, the CCA—which changed its name to CoreCivic in October 2016—has made millions in profits by holding immigrants in detention while they wait for their cases to be decided by a judge. Yamil is one of these immigrants.