Taking Testimony
College Students’ Emotional Firsthand Accounts from Asylum Seekers at the US/Mexico Border
Dilley, Texas. Population 3674.
Not a place you would think would provide a life-changing experience for two college students.
But it did.
We journeyed to the flat, dusty border town recently to assist lawyers and law students in gathering background information on families applying for asylum in the United States.
Dilley is home to a prison, and also the South Texas Family Residential Center, the largest immigrant detention center in the country, and not much else. Located about 100 miles north of the Rio Grande, the center doesn’t offer much more freedom than the prison. Most who live in Dilley work at one of the two facilities, which are both operated by the same for-profit agency.
We are Siena College students who went as part of a delegation from Fordham University School of Law and the Dilley-based CARA Family Detention Pro Bono Representation and Advocacy Project. Siena’s Summer Legal Fellowship program pairs students interested in careers in law with attorneys and law school students for research and legal work. In Dilley, our job was to take down testimony from the asylum seekers and log it into databases so they could officially apply to enter the U.S. Asylum seekers come without documentation because they were fleeing from danger and persecution.
We knew we would hear some harrowing stories about Mexican and Central American women and their children trying to flee from danger and hardship in their home countries and make it safely across the border, but nothing prepared us for the onslaught of moving and emotionally wrenching testimony they heard from family after family.
Every story was so awful. And that fact that they all involved mothers and young children made it even worse.
So awful, in fact, that coordinators of the work encouraged us to partake in podcast counseling to cope with what is called “second-hand post-traumatic stress,” which often impacts aid workers of asylees.
Some women tried to make it from their homelands to the U.S. on their own devices, while others paid “coyotes,” or smugglers, to get them across for sometimes exorbitant fees, some of which was paid through sexual assault.
There was always the danger of being captured by police or border patrols, getting separated from family, or not having enough food or water or money for the trip. One woman said she started taking birth control before she left home because she knew from other women’s experiences she was going to be raped at some point on the journey.
Once the women and children made it across the border, for many their struggle and hardship only continued. The only water available to the detainees for drinking and bathing was of such poor quality due to chemicals released from area hydrofracking that some nursing mothers found that their breast milk dried up and they couldn’t feed their babies. Many feared being sent back to their home countries, which they had fled in terror to get away from gangs, extortion, and violence, much of it drug-related. Many spend weeks and months in the center while being processed, dealing with horrifying memories only partly tempered by the relief of having made it out of their countries alive.
One woman had recently escaped from Honduras. A gang with government connections ordered her son and a neighbor’s son to join their gang. They both refused. The neighbor’s son declined first, so to convince the other family their order was meant to be accepted, the gang killed the neighbor’s son, decapitated him, and hung his head from a street lamp outside their house. The family fled that night.
Another mother ran a shop in El Salvador. She was approached by gang members who extorted $100 per month from her for “protection” from other gangs — a considerable sum given her modest means. She made the payments for almost a year but one month she just couldn’t pay up. The gang members came at night in a car with tinted windows. They stepped out brandishing semi-automatic weapons, and demanded back payments. To enforce their demands, they punched her teeth out. When the woman reported the incident to a police officer, the man pushed up the sleeve of his uniform to reveal a tattoo indicating he was a member of the same gang.
The stories were a major wake-up call. We couldn’t’ believe that this is what so many people are dealing with on a daily basis. We had never seen human beings so destroyed by their experiences.
We met and interviewed a young woman who had two children with her. She was 20 years old, the same age as us. Her two children, which she risked her life to bring to America, were both the result of gang rapes.
There has been talk that all these asylum seekers are rapists and drug dealers. No. That’s exactly what these mothers and their children were trying to get away from. These women simply don’t have that option to come to America legally. They are running for their lives.
Neither of us had much knowledge about the asylee/refugee experience before taking on this project as Summer Legal Fellows, but it has changed our lives forever. We take so much for granted living the way we do. To hear the stories directly from those who lived the experience was very moving.
We kept track of the testimony in journals and through blog entries during our time in Dilley. The entries have been shared with the American Civil Liberties Union and other organizations dedicated to protecting the rights of those seeking asylum.
We want to make sure their voices are heard.
Camilla Leonard and Samantha Tighe each came away with a changed view of the world and a resolve to dedicate their lives to doing something about it.
Tighe, from Ossining and Queens, N.Y., graduated from Siena in May with a bachelor’s degree in social work and is currently applying to law schools.
Leonard, from Schenectady, N.Y., graduated from Siena in May with a bachelor’s degree in sociology and certificate in pre-law. She is planning to start law school in 2018, a long-term goal that was reinforced by her experience in Texas.
