Let’s dispel once and for all with this fiction from Donald Trump that it’s “bad hombres” running amok across the U.S. The reality is, the immigrants here are like Veronica Zepeda, a woman who endured so much physical abuse in both her native El Salvador and Mexico, where she was nearly trafficked into sex work, that she made the conscious decision to leave her children with their abusive father in Mexico in order to seek refuge in the U.S. But instead of finding the help she’s desperately needed here, she’s remained locked up in an ICE facility in Bakersfield, California, since late January.
Even if she is not deported to face gang violence in El Salvador or to suffer domestic abuse in Mexico, she may be relegated to a second-class status of asylum by the federal government that will prohibit her from reuniting here with her children:
For now, she remains inside Mesa Verde. The 400-bed detention center is run by the for-profit prison company GEO Group, the nation’s largest private detention center operator, which earns at least $94.95 for every day she’s detained. Inside the facility, Zepeda cleans showers and toilets five days a week for $1 a day. “It’s $5 to call my kids,” she explains in an interview. “I call them once a week to know how they are doing, so that they know how I’m doing.”
Zepeda insists that when she was first taken into custody in 2013, she was not given a “credible fear” interview, which could have led to full asylum. Instead, she was processed with others who had recently crossed the border and deported to El Salvador, where her life had been in danger after witnessing a gang murder. From there she made her way back to Mexico to her children and abusive husband, where she managed to endure two more years until she sought refuge in the U.S. yet again. She’s been in detention since then fighting her case.
According to Mother Jones, there’s no exact number of how many of the 44,000 Central Americans who sought asylum in the U.S. in 2014 have been women fleeing gender-based violence, but what is known is that “women in the Northern Triangle of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, as well as parts of Mexico, experience pervasive violence.”
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), women were murdered at a higher rate in El Salvador in 2015 than in any other country; an estimated 77 percent of killers of Salvadoran women in 2013 never faced punishment. In Mexico, meanwhile, nearly 63 percent of women can expect at some point in their lives to experience domestic violence. Like Zepeda, many of these women stay silent. According to a 2015 UNHCR report based on interviews with 160 women from the Northern Triangle and Mexico who sought sanctuary in the United States, 40 percent of them never reported the violence or threats they experienced to the police, believing that the authorities wouldn’t or couldn’t respond sufficiently because of the local control of gangs.
As the American Immigration Council notes, the Obama administration implemented an “aggressive deterrence strategy” in response to the surge of Central American women and children fleeing to our southern border, including “dramatically [increasing] the detention of women and children awaiting their asylum hearings, rather than release on bond.” But the research has shown that this knowledge didn’t deter others from making the journey north anyway—desperate people in desperate situations are left with no other choice. Making the situation even more tragic has been the incoming Trump administration, which is trying to turbo-boost an already-corrupt Border Patrol:
In a class-action lawsuit filed against Customs and Border Protection earlier this month, immigrants who had been denied access to the asylum process allege that potential asylees have been rebuffed at the border and told, falsely, that “Donald Trump just signed new laws saying there is no asylum for anyone.” In 2014, the American Civil Liberties Union examined 89 border cases in which individuals were deported without a hearing—and found that more than half were never asked in a language they understood whether they feared persecution before they were deported, while 1 in 9 had expressed fear to agents but were never referred for an interview.
What sucks up the air are sensational, fake news headlines from Donald Trump pinning all immigrants, no matter their legal status, as criminals and “rapists.” What gets lost too often are names and faces of the actual human beings stuck in limbo in our system—human beings like Veronica Zepeda.