Shackled, transferred, mocked: woman, 23, says she gave in to deportation after ‘humiliating’ ICE detention | ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement)
A.na María was happy living in the USA. She had an asylum case going through the U.S. immigration system and was working, being part of the community, living with her boyfriend, and grateful for the safe harbor.
But after being arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), she had such a terrifying experience that, in desperation, she agreed to be deported back to her home country of South America, thousands of miles away from danger and the life she had built.
In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, she said she was taken to at least six detention centers over three months, shackled at each transfer and packed away with other women who were subjected to the same insults despite having no criminal record in the US or her home country.
“They treated us worse than criminals, like dogs — so a dog lives better in the United States than this,” he said in Spanish phone conversations from South America.
The Guardian is guarding the woman’s true identity and agreed to refer to her as Ana María, but it also did not disclose her place of origin in South America and several other locations and dates in its story for fear of retaliation by authorities or criminal gangs.
Although life in the US was initially going well, Ana María was so frightened by the anti-immigration crackdown that emerged in the months after Donald Trump returned to the White House that she and her boyfriend decided to move from their home in the northeastern US to Canada. He had family there and said they thought they could start over, especially at a time when Trump is going after people who have documents and have pending cases, not just the undocumented.
Meanwhile, ICE and US border patrol were descending on Democrat-run cities, and the duo had watched TikToks of people being arrested, detained and deported, fearing it could happen to them at any moment.
“The situation is better in Canada, we will live more peacefully there,” she recalled her boyfriend saying.
This January, in the middle of winter, the couple boarded a bus headed for the U.S.-Canada border, surrendered to Canadian police and sought asylum.
But Ana María, 23, was horrified when Canadian authorities accused her boyfriend of being a gangster who was apparently trying to traffic her because of her tattoos. He remembered that nothing he said had convinced them otherwise. They arrested and detained him and sent him back to the US, directly to ICE, and the nightmare began.
He recalled spending a day at the nearest detention center, then being transferred the next day to another center 50 miles away for almost two weeks. One of her first shocks was being painfully handcuffed at the wrists and shackled at the ankles while being transferred; This happened every time he moved out of state or country thereafter.
“The treatment is degrading. They chain you up and tighten the chains so much that they leave marks on your arms and legs, making it impossible to walk. They grab your arm to force you to walk faster and I tell them, ‘Miss, it hurts! Please! I can’t walk.’ I beg. We couldn’t even tie our hair up because our hands were tied to our waists. “And the chains were heavy,” he said.
His first flight with ICE was from the northern state where he was arrested to Louisiana. He didn’t even know where he was after he landed and was thrown into prison with the others; He’s in another detention center somewhere in Louisiana.
“I asked why they took me, what was going on, but they didn’t tell us anything, they didn’t even tell us where we were going or what happened. To any question they said ‘we can’t give you this information’,” he said.
Many of the conditions reported by people in ICE detention are already well documented. Lights on 24 hours a day, stale and sometimes rotten food, or lack thereof. The guards often shouted, including at night, so the prisoners did not get much sleep. Ana María explained that she experienced similar conditions.
Ana María was moved from Louisiana to various parts of Arizona, then to Texas, each time in chains. These memories in particular disturb him.
“They were tightened tightly to your specific contours. I mean, if they tighten the chain while I’m standing, naturally your belly will swell a little bit when you sit down. So imagine; you can’t breathe, you can’t lie down, you can’t really move because the more you move, the tighter the chains get. Or if you make a wrong move, they suddenly get even tighter,” he said.
He vividly remembers once asking the guards at a southwestern facility to loosen his handcuffs a little because it hurt so much. He recalled teasing her in front of him “Only for one of them to laugh and the other one to start dancing”.
He said that in addition to the lousy food, sometimes there wasn’t enough food.
He recalled that at one facility, whenever he begged for something to eat, saying he was very hungry, he was told, “No, you’ll eat later.” But he later said staff brought out lunch boxes and ate “very delicious” meals in front of detainees.
“Tears were streaming down my face because my stomach hurt. I begged for water just to fill it up and they said ‘later, later’,” she said.
Ana María left her hometown in 2024, even though she was about to finish her nursing degree. She was the youngest of four sisters, two of whom had been shot to death by one of them’s gangster ex-boyfriend; This incident had become an infamous murder case in his hometown. Ana María said the family had received death threats from other gangster friends of the perpetrator, and the sisters’ mother was afraid of losing another daughter. So he decided to go to the USA to get away from drug crimes and a town where everyone knew everyone. He and a friend took a plane to Mexico City and then a 40-hour bus ride to the Mexico-California border.
“That was a nightmare, too,” he recalled, because every time the police stopped the bus, the driver would point at them and they would be checked and demanded bribes. They crossed into the US, surrendered to the border patrol, and after spending a week in the detention center, they were able to apply for asylum with the Biden administration and were released.
When Ana María established herself in the United States, she worked as a house cleaner, in restaurants, packaging products in a warehouse, and also sold sweets from her home country. He was allowed to apply for asylum and was given a date to appear in court in early 2027. He was hopeful that one day he would be able to get a visa for his mother and bring her to visit him in the United States.
He said one of the hardest parts of being in custody was not being able to contact his family. Detainees are not allowed to use their own mobile phones in the centres, but are normally allowed to make free phone calls when they arrive at a new place of detention to tell loved ones where they are, and he recalled that the length of this varied from just 30 seconds to a minute or five, depending on location. However, if you don’t know a phone number by heart, you’re out of luck, he said. And in a vicious circle, if families do not know the whereabouts of their detained relatives, they cannot contact them to send phone numbers and money for searches.
Eventually, Ana María was able to contact her mother thanks to a friend she made in one of the prisons. That friend’s daughters in Nicaragua were able to contact a friend of Ana’s through Facebook. “
Güeras Aliadas, a volunteer organization founded by two North Carolina mothers who wanted to help their immigrant neighbors amid ICE raids, has experienced how difficult locating a detainee can be for his family.
“A lot of times we know someone’s been arrested, but unless there’s still a designated center, we can’t locate them. And even when we do eventually get in touch with them, they take them to another center for some reason and we lose contact,” said Devyn Brown, one of the organization’s founders who helped Ana María while she was in custody.
The Guardian sent questions about many aspects of this story to ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). However, after contacting the Guardian to inquire about the identity of the person involved and being told that the identity would not be released for security reasons, ICE did not respond further. When asked about specific facilities and in general, DHS has frequently said there are no “high-interest” conditions in ICE detention.
Ana María continues to be shocked by the way she was taken from place to place and the conditions of her detention.
In addition to the chains and starvation, he recalls authorities carrying out frequent and invasive searches.
“When they check you out, they grab your whole body,” he said.
“I could only think: ‘Why am I here? Why are they so evil?'” She recalled asking God what she had done to deserve such treatment, a doubt that still constantly assaults her.
Ana María remembers that in the midst of the persecution, there would always be the odd good person, such as a detention center worker, who told her, “Calm down, this will pass,” and gave her the strength to continue. “I can’t complain because at least I got this,” he said.
When he finally asked ICE officials what was happening in his case, he said he was told that a judge had ordered his deportation to a third country, Ecuador or Honduras.
Apart from his exhaustion and demoralization due to the conditions in which he was kept, he became terrified at the prospect and reached a turning point; He couldn’t take it anymore and asked the voluntary organization Güeras Aliadas to help him cancel his asylum claim and accept that he could be sent back to his homeland in South America.
That’s how it happened. Now he has returned to his mother, but he is worried. “I haven’t been going out since I arrived, I don’t feel good and at peace. I think anything could happen to me at any time because of the constant threats I received before moving to the USA,” he said. He is considering whether he can go anywhere in Europe and seek asylum there.
He misses his life in the USA. “Of course I miss my friends, they were like family there because we lived together, I miss my girlfriend so much,” she said of her boyfriend — though they are no longer romantically together while he is in Canada and she returned to South America after his ordeal.
“I love the United States, I was already independent, my lifestyle was improving, I was working hard to get what I wanted, helping my family,” he said. His voice faded.
Ana María continues to watch TikToks about ICE detention conditions.
“I experienced everything you see in these videos, just as they say. We all experience the same things,” he said. Her only hope now is that telling her story might help change things.
“Please make sure everyone knows what it is like to be detained.”
