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In August, Jemmy Jimenez Rosa and her husband, Marcel, took their three young daughters on a vacation to Cancún, Mexico. On their return to Boston Logan airport, a Customs and Border Protection officer took Ms. Rosa aside and led her to a back room where she was told she should say goodbye to her girls. “I keep thinking this is a nightmare. Is this a nightmare? Like, is this really happening?” Ms. Rosa recalled.
Ms. Rosa was placed in a detention cell at Logan. Officers gave her virtually no information and dismissed her husband’s requests that he be allowed to bring her diabetes and anxiety medication. Ms. Rosa was born in Peru and has been a lawful permanent resident of the United States since she was 9 years old; she is now 43. Just weeks before the trip to Cancún, she had renewed her green card without incident. Her husband and her daughters are American citizens.
Over the past several months, alongside a team from Opinion Video, I’ve spoken to a half-dozen people and their families who have been taken into Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention. Each was re-entering, or was already in the country legally. No one was smuggled across the border.
None of the people we spoke to had a recent criminal record. (Three had minor nonviolent brushes with the law, all in the distant past; one received a pardon.) All were treated like suspected violent criminals, forced into tiny cells, dressed in prison uniforms, manacled for transfer. Those we spoke to were held for anywhere from 10 days to over 70 days. The experience shattered their equilibrium.
Immigration and Border Patrol officers have long held extremely broad discretionary powers to welcome or reject noncitizens arriving in the United States. And this is far from the first wave of xenophobia to hit America. But something different is happening now in the breadth and ferocity of efforts to change the makeup of this country.
The videos circulating on social media are brutal and terrifying — the often violent arrests, people pulled screaming from their cars, out of day care centers, away from their children and their spouses. What should give Americans equal pause is the inhumanity happening beyond the cameras, away from the view of judges and lawyers, and the media. Due process is not a constitutional right afforded only to citizens; legal restrictions on unlawful detention apply to all people on U.S. soil.
The stories we were told call into question both the constitutionality and the morality of how the Trump administration is directing immigration policy. That immorality, once unleashed, may ultimately be aimed at others in this country, regardless of immigration status. If a woman returning from vacation with her young children can be suddenly removed from her family and her life, how can we believe that any of us will remain safe?
There was a disquieting sameness to the horror that was described to us. Those we interviewed despaired at how the detention centers were kept purposefully, horrendously cold, forcing some of them to huddle up against strangers. They spoke of lights left on 24 hours a day and of interstate transfers that came without notice. They described food that was inadequately distributed and made them unwell. Of being forced to urinate and defecate in front of fellow detainees and guards. Of being humiliated and mocked by officers. All referred to a destabilizing lack of information, the dreadful understanding that they could be held for weeks or months without anyone informing them why they were being held at all.
We heard how they begged for recourse — asked to speak with the outside world, for bond hearings, to protest their detention. They referenced, with anxiety and sorrow, others they encountered, some presumably still languishing in those cells, without counsel or relief.
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Luis Manuel Diaz for The New York Times
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