Gang violence is intense and horrible; they threaten you to flee Honduras, or else your family will suffer the consequences. You leave all you know to go to Mexico. You arrive at Villahermosa and are detained for 16 days. There’s no place to sleep, just the ground. One night, one of the other detainees sets fire to a cot. You try to others, but there’s nothing else to do; just to feel the fear and how the smoke invades your asthmatic lungs. You’re transferred to Tenozique, by the Guatemalan border. This is even worse: the walls are too short and the (torrents) of wind are so strong that the rain floods the place. You have to sleep on the floor anyways. A small child from Angola gets terribly sick in the middle of the night, and together everyone tries to help the child, but there’s only paper, so you use your feminine pads as a compress to calm his fever and help avoid any further convulsions. Others get sick too. You talk to the medic that comes twice a week, asking for help for all the sick people ‘’they survived the night? Then it’s not that serious.” You cry. You get out of there. Find on the street the same gang members that made you flee Honduras, they try to kidnap you. A friend and her partner help you. You escape again. You try to get further North in a wooden truck. You suffocate inside the beast, but nobody cares. You all get caught and sent to Tenozique, again. You get terribly sick. You heal, god only knows how. You get out, again. You cry thinking about your family, alone and without anything to eat. [SOME INFORMATION HAS BEEN OMITTED]
Let‘s set the scene:
You get to the border. Climb to the top, but get kicked to the void on the other side. You don’t feel your right leg. They leave you behind, face down, in the mud. The cold is unbearable. You pray to God and repent. Someone finds you. They take you to the hospital and into surgery.
This is just part of Sandra’s story, but according to her ‘everything I went through to cross the border does not compare to what happens to you in a detention center” she recounts.“One loses all hope that things will get better. You’re so tired and beaten up already, that you’re ready to go back to your home country and continue to navigate the streets dominated by gangs.” Sandra had given up by the time she faced the harshness of detention, she had no will to keep going. But a friend of hers shared how The Queer Detainee Empowerment Project had helped provide her with release resources, and might help Sandra too. Sandra’s partner, Lourdes, was on board with the idea.
The process wasn’t easy, especially with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, but by the end of April, and with lots of support from the community, Sandra was released to her loved ones.
‘When you’re in there, you NEED people like you. Ana [one of QDEP’s star volunteers] has been a blessing,” Sandra expressed, almost with tears in her eyes. “Having a person who worries about you, listens to you, and wants to know how you are doing has no price, truly. Everything that I lived and all the things I went through were more than worthwhile because I got to meet someone like Ana. She’s a little angel God blessed me with!’
The importance behind staying in touch with those within the detention system is almost as crucial as reaching their release. Lack of hygiene, shadow prisons, family detention, solitary confinement, medical neglect, malnutrition, sexual harassment, rape, and constant abuse are all well-known issues within this faulty system; we are well aware of these factors. However, some seem to forget the emotional toll behind it all: the isolation or even mandatory confinement, lack or limited contact with your support system, whose reach gets shattered by the system. The round-the-clock fear of not having access to information in your mother tongue produces the feeling of being tangled within a system that is created to stop you. The weight and overwhelming sense of oblivion detainees experience can be eased with the most simple, yet powerful tool; a letter.
A message of encouragement, a drawing with inspiring or happy feelings, a prayer, a supportive word… they can all help to find a sense of grounding and can make a huge difference in people’s psyche and resilience, lifting the heavy fog that depression and anxiety might have over you. Having hope is the best medicine against giving up. Writing to people living in detention centers means that you are showing an ICE guard that a person has a community that cares on the outside, that the person receiving letters in detention is being thought about, and that there are people on the outside watching out for them and anxiously waiting for their safe release. Staying connected to people inside detention centers is just part of how we stand in solidarity with our immigrant community who is waiting to start their lives in a different, hopefully safer home.
Volunteers are always moved when operating QDEP’s hotline as well: ‘I had the chance to talk once with one of our trans women in El Paso, and she was so afraid and confused by the new challenges she was facing,” says volunteer Jade Jones. “As we talked in Spanish and prayed together she cried, because she had forgotten what it was like, but by the time we hung up, I could hear she was feeling stronger and calmer. As someone who finds so much joy in helping others, this is the reason why I know my efforts are never in vain, it reminds me why it is all so important.’
There’s a lot we cannot do about how this country criminalizes individuals and exploits vulnerabilities, but there’s a lot we can do for the community that is within bars. A community sticks together and supports those who need it the most. There’s nothing better than to know that family awaits from you, when all hell is over. It gives you a reason to keep fighting.
Jade Jones is an Afrolatina queer bean, language geek, and eternally curious soul. She loves to write, connect the world through words, talk, and eat chocolate.
