A day in the life of a 19-year-old in ICE detention: ‘I feel that this nightmare is not going to end’ | ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement)

Each day spent in custody feels like 48 hours for Olivia.

The 19-year-old asylum seeker from the Democratic Republic of Congo has been at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas for more than four months.

“Another day passes, another night comes,” he said. “And sometimes I feel like this nightmare will never end.”

He is about one 5,600 immigrantsMore than half are children and have been detained at the sprawling Texas facility since it reopened last year. In recent months, human rights advocates, pediatricians and lawmakers have called on the Trump administration to close the facility and stop incarcerating children.

Olivia was arrested along with her mother and two younger siblings in November. They later separated, reunited at Dilley, and separated again after ICE agreed to release them, but not him. Since then, Olivia has become more apathetic as the days pass.

Speaking to the Guardian via video call, the woman described her daily life.

12.00: sleepless nights

Olivia said nights are the hardest times.

He was screaming in his sleep in the first weeks after his arrest, but now has trouble sleeping. “At night, when no one is paying attention, everyone is asleep, and that’s when I can cry,” he said. So he walks and cries until he’s too tired to keep his eyes open.

Usually this time is around 3 in the morning.

Soon the nightmares begin. He sometimes thinks about his brother Manuel, who drowned when he was eight years old during the family’s journey from South America to the United States. He, his mother, and his younger siblings, Manuel, Estefania, and Joel, fled political persecution in the Democratic Republic of Congo, stayed in South America, and completed their long journey to the United States in December 2022.

He is saddened that he and his family have been through so much, continuing to fight to survive, continuing even after losing Manuel, and eventually arriving in Dilley.

Sometimes he wakes up thinking about everything that has happened since his family’s arrest.

Five months ago he was living with his mother in Maine; Joel, now 17; and Estefania, 14, awaiting the final decision on her family’s asylum case. Olivia had recently graduated from high school and completed her certification to become a nursing assistant.

After the family’s asylum case was denied, their lawyers appealed the decision, but in the meantime the family decided to leave the United States and seek asylum in Canada. They were detained almost immediately at the northern border.

Olivia’s mother and siblings were sent directly to Dilley, a former medium-security prison 70 miles (113 km) south of San Antonio. But because Olivia was 19 and a legal adult, authorities separated her from her family and transferred her from one detention center to another. He was dressed in an orange jumpsuit, just like the crime procedurals he watched on TV.

Immigration officials did not respond to questions about his whereabouts or the whereabouts of his family. Now in nightmares, his mind goes back to the time he spent in those detention centers and the shackles he had to wear for long periods of time. During her interview with the Guardian, she stood up to show off the scars left on her wrists and ankles.

And he thinks about the cold. He calls the third facility where he is being held, somewhere in New York, “the refrigerator.” Authorities had confiscated his jacket, so he was wearing only one layer. “I’ve never felt as cold as I do in this place,” he said. Now in Dilley, he sleeps with a coat even on warm nights because he still can’t shake the feeling that he’s going to freeze.

He eventually found himself in Dilley; however, she and 225 other single adult women were kept separate from her family. A mental health expert who evaluated him there as part of his immigration case said he showed signs of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and major depressive disorder.

6am: ‘Another day passes’

Most of Olivia’s mornings at Dilley start the same way: She wakes up around 6 a.m. to make breakfast. It usually includes pancakes or bread, boiled eggs, milk and some coffee. It’s not great, but it’s better than what he had for lunch or dinner, so he tries to eat at least some of it.

He then continues to sleep for a few more hours until 11 a.m. or noon. He usually has a headache when he wakes up. He needs contact lenses, but his prescription expired about a month ago and he hasn’t been able to see an eye doctor, so he’s constantly struggling to see. The harsh lights in the detention center make the situation worse.

Some days he spends all day in bed; He has little energy or motivation to get up.

There are a few days when she manages to wander around the facility or chat with some of the other young women at the facility. It was such a day that during it During his second week in Dilley, he discovered that his mother and siblings were being held in a different section of the same detention center.

Another girl had invited him to walk to the library with her. That’s when he heard A voice calls out from afar: “Olivia! Olivia!” He couldn’t see well without his contact lenses, but he recognized the voice: “I told my friend I heard my sister’s voice, and she said it couldn’t be possible.”

But Olivia couldn’t let that happen. So her friend helped her find a family counselor, who confirmed it: her mother and siblings were indeed in Dilley. He had the opportunity to visit them the next day.

“We hugged, my mother cried, and we talked about what happened to us,” he said. “We cried a lot, but in the end we laughed because we were together.”

Olivia learned that every day since arriving at Dilley, Estefania had been going out and screaming her sister’s name – just in case. It was a stroke of luck that Olivia heard him.

After that, officials at Dilley offered them an hour on weekdays and three or four hours on Saturdays. The rest of the time, Olivia was alone.

He often cried after seeing them. He was worried about Estefania, a cheerful and active teenager who loved making art and had lost interest in drawing since coming to Dilley. She was angry that Joel, a promising football player who planned to enroll in college in the fall, had suddenly transformed into someone who looked almost too grown-up for his age.

When lawyers secured the release of her mother and siblings in mid-March, Olivia said it was “the happiest day of my life.” But the day after that was the saddest. He didn’t know when he would see them again.

The Department of Homeland Security said it was policy to chain Olivia. The agency also denied the separation of the families, despite being informed that Olivia had separated from them.

14:00: ‘I feel a big emptiness inside me’

Now that his family is gone, afternoons last longer.

There is a small television in the room she shares with another woman. Sometimes they watch movies or news. Olivia prefers to watch crime procedurals or hospital dramas (her favorite is The Good Doctor) but since her roommate only speaks Spanish, they usually settle on telenovelas.

Initially, he made a few friends who would invite him to play volleyball or football in the yard, but he stopped because he was afraid of injuring himself and having to deal with the medical system at the facility. Moreover, most of the young people he knew were released. “As time went on, people were leaving and I started to lose my mind,” he said. “I basically stopped doing things.”

Olivia said immigration officials came to her several times, told her there was a deportation order, and asked her to sign documents consenting to her deportation. None of this made sense, because Olivia has a “deportation period” that means she “cannot be deported” while her asylum case is being appealed.

In a statement to the Guardian, DHS said: “Detention is a choice. We encourage all illegal aliens to control their departure.” He urged immigrants to use the agency’s app to deport themselves.

Olivia’s appeal process could take a year, and she doesn’t know how much longer she can endure being held in Dilley.

“I feel a huge emptiness inside,” he said. He has difficulty eating; He has no appetite and the food doesn’t taste very good. He has lost nearly 20 lb (9 kg) since coming to Dilley.

One report In a release last week, nonprofit legal services Raíces and the advocacy group Human Rights First documented the “widespread due process violations, inhumane conditions, and lasting physical and psychological harm inflicted on families” incarcerated at Dilley. Nearly 4,000 medical professionals sent a letter to Donald Trump calling for the release of all children held at the facility, writing that the detention caused “foreseeable, serious, and permanent harm” to their health.

In a statement sent to the Guardian, DHS denied the poor conditions at Dilley detailed in the report. Those detained said they found hair, worms, insects and dead flies in their food.

But Olivia feels a twinge in her stomach every day around 2 p.m. While in Maine, he was working in the hospital cafeteria when he returned from his shift. “I would take a shower and my mother would cook my favorite meal; An African dish consisting of grilled pork chops and vegetables. “I used to drink mango juice, too,” he said. These were his favorite afternoons.

The best days now are the days when he makes video calls with his family. Joel shares Bible verses with him. Her sister cries a lot, but also dreams of the things they will do when Olivia is released. And he can tell that his mother is feeling bad.

“My mother is a typical African mother and she has a lot of restrictions. You can’t do this, you can’t do that,” she said, laughing. But these days, he tells Olivia that she can do whatever she wants with her life. Olivia thinks she feels guilty about everything her children have had to endure.

To save her mother, Olivia mostly avoided talking about how bad she felt. He did not tell his mother that he was one of very few Black people in his side of the facility and that other detainees often made racist comments about his hair. Olivia didn’t share that one time, when her roommate got really sick, some of the other inmates told her she better hope the girl didn’t die — “because she was in the same room with a black person and they were going to blame me if she died,” Olivia said.

19:00: Thinking about Maine

Some evenings he reads messages from friends in Maine. He had a large social circle and a WhatsApp group chat with around 30 people. Now several of them are in regular contact, sending him letters with updates and Bible verses. “Frankly, it’s not a good feeling to talk to my friends, because I see that everyone is moving on with their own lives, and my life is being disrupted,” he said. “A friend of mine is pregnant. And there will be a baby shower that I won’t be able to attend.”

If she were in Maine right now, she might be starting a new job as a nursing assistant. She eventually wants to become a nurse and work with children. He and his friends had also made plans to travel, visiting one US state a year until they had traveled the entire country.

Now he’s wondering instead when he’ll escape Dilley’s vast beige landscape of flat dorm buildings and trailers.

As soon as he returns to Maine, he will head to the east coast, to his favorite island off the coast. “When I was sad, I would go there and eat ice cream,” she said. “I want to see it again and be in nature.”