As she waited at the Los Angeles International Airport in November, 2016, Glenda Gutiérrez knew her life was about to be upended. In moments, she would see her two sons, Erick and Jefferson, for the first time in seven years.
Gutiérrez had fled Guatemala in 2009 after two of her brothers were killed by gang members. She crossed the border without documentation in Arizona, and eventually settled in Los Angeles, where she got married and found work in a textile factory. In 2016, as large numbers of young people fled Guatemala, she arranged to have Erick, now 15, and Jefferson, 12, brought to Mexico’s northern border. There, they became two of the more than 400,000 unaccompanied children who have crossed into the U.S. and requested asylum in the last decade.
For years, her interactions with family back in Guatemala were limited to phone calls. When her sons arrived, Gutierrez said, the cost of spending so much time apart came rushing up to confront her. “To think in that moment that they might not recognize you is very difficult,” she said. “To see my little boy, my youngest, as this big kid of almost 10 years is tough.”
Later that year, Gutiérrez left California and moved to Bothell, Washington, a suburb north of Seattle, to live with family members. Her new life revolved around the boys’ school and extracurricular schedules.
Erick and Jefferson had never been given a date to appear before an immigration judge, so on September 13, 2018, Gutiérrez took the boys to an appointment at a suburban U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office to schedule a court date, at which time the boys planned to claim asylum. But at the ICE office, Gutiérrez was given a notice saying that she faced deportation. Ever since, she’s been living under that shadow.
“You’re in anguish because you don’t know if tomorrow someone will knock on your door,” Gutiérrez said. “ICE knows where I live, they practically know everywhere I go. They know where the kids go to school, and they could show up where I work. ICE has a thousand ways to find someone.”
Gutiérrez and her children, fearing a return to the violence that took her brothers’ lives, will now file a joint asylum claim, and they’re doing so at a precarious time. Donald Trump was elected President days after Gutiérrez’s sons crossed the border. Trump’s administration has taken unprecedented measures to limit access to asylum for Central Americans. Disturbing images of immigrant families crowded behind chain-link fences, heartbreaking audio of children calling for their parents, and the deaths of at least five minors while in, or recently released from, immigration officials’ custody over the last 12 months may be the most visible legacy of these policies. But on top of the dangerous journey through Mexico and navigating a complex asylum process in a country they know little about, families are finding an increasingly isolating and hostile immigration system even after they’re reunited and released from detention.
“I’m in limbo. Because no one has told me anything. No one’s given me a summons to court or anything,” Carlos Arias, an asylum-seeker from El Salvador, said when I met him in July. “The truth is, I feel like I’m forgotten. Like a person without a name. How can I explain it? Without identity. Like I’m hidden in the shadows. I can’t go to work — that’s the most basic — because I don’t even have an ID. I’d like to take English classes, but I imagine I’d need an ID to register. I can’t go get one, because I don’t know how.”
Administration officials have justified the harsh tactics, saying most immigrants aren’t eligible for asylum and parents are putting their children at risk by making the long, dangerous journey here. The overcrowding of border facilities and lack of services for recent immigrants, they say, is the result of overwhelmed staff and the changing demographics of who’s apprehended crossing the border. Unaccompanied minors seeking asylum, like Jefferson and Erick, and families, like Arias and his children, now make up the majority of those crossing the border without documentation, and those numbers have increased despite Trump’s policies. Of the 760,370 people apprehended at the southern border between October and July, 66 percent were children or family members traveling with them.
Critics of the Trump administration’s immigration policies say these tactics are nothing more than a way to make asylum-seekers as miserable as possible in an attempt to deter migration to the U.S.
“The government’s policies right now are predicated on the idea that these families are full of shit and they’re not legitimate asylum-seekers,” said Allegra Love, an immigration lawyer and executive director of the Santa Fe Dreamers Project in New Mexico. “The government is ramping up how dangerous its policies are to deter them from coming — whether it’s returning them to Mexico, whether it’s separating them from their parents, whether it’s massive ICE detention.”
Or, as Arias and Gutiérrez have found, whether it’s making life in the U.S. lonely, frightening, and difficult while the government determines whether they are deserving of asylum.
Arias, his lawyers say, is a perfect example of how difficult it is to claim asylum under the Trump administration. Since his release from detention in May, he has settled in a family friend’s spare room in a sprawling network of apartments in Kent, a suburb between Seattle and Tacoma. Arias spends most days waiting for the weekend, when he can see his son, 7, and his daughter, 11.
They hail from San Salvador, in a zone of the capital city known for gang violence. In 2014, fed up with the danger, the children’s mother left and urged him to join her in Washington state, Arias said. But he had a home, a car, a motorbike, and a good job selling art supplies that he didn’t want to abandon, so he and the children stayed.
In October 2018, Arias began receiving extortion threats, first via Facebook, then from a pair of teenagers, pistols stuffed in the waistbands of their pants, who were waiting at the end of his rural street when he came home from work one night. The next morning, he pretended to take his children to school, a ruse to throw off the gang lookouts at the entrances to his neighborhood. The three instead went to an uncle’s house for safekeeping.
The gangsters called Arias’ place of business looking for him, so he decided to go to the police. Local officers suggested he negotiate; federal prosecutors couldn’t offer any protection. Meanwhile, the Facebook messages continued. He showed me pages of them, filled with expletives and threats, some of which mentioned his brother and girlfriend by name. One threatened to show him a photo of his dismembered children. “I know where you go. Where you live. Everything,” it read.
On October 23, he agreed to pay a smuggler $7,500 to take him and his two children through Guatemala and Mexico to the U.S. They made it to the Mexican border city of Reynosa without incident, and on November 2 crossed the Rio Grande into south Texas on an inflatable raft. Once on the U.S. side of the river, they surrendered to Border Patrol agents and were taken to the massive processing center in McAllen, Texas, that’s often featured in news reports. Arias and his son were put in one of the cold, crowded cells immigrants call las hieleras — the iceboxes. His daughter was moved to another holding area for a day and a half — she wasn’t allowed to be in the room for men and boys — until the family was reunited briefly to to be fingerprinted and have their photos taken together.
When he saw her, Arias could tell from her red eyes she’d been crying. “I spoke with her, I said, ‘Calm down. They only need to get my information and we’ll be together again.’ That consoled her a little,” he said.
His consolation proved untrue. Later that day, Arias and his son were moved to a much larger holding area, what Arias described as an “iron cage” and others there called la pollera, the chicken coop. Before moving him, the Border Patrol agents said something that worried Arias: They’d sent his fingerprints to authorities in El Salvador, and had received word he had gang connections.
Arias said that, when he arrived at la pollera, he was confronted by a Border Patrol agent. “‘We have to take away your kids,’ he told me. It was the first time I was told they were going to take my kids,” Arias said. The agent demanded Arias’ gang affiliation. “He said that in front of my son, and my son started to cry, and I said, ‘How many times do I need to tell you I’m not a gang member?’”
A few hours later, a bus arrived to take him to federal court. Arias was one of more than 70 immigrants to be taken before Magistrate Judge Juan F. Alanis that day. They pleaded guilty to illegal entry en masse, and Arias was sentenced to time served. When he got back to the Border Patrol facility, his children were gone.
Arias and his family crossed the Rio Grande on the busiest stretch of border in the country. West of the town of Hidalgo, Texas, the river looks slow and benign as it loops through cane fields and brushland. But it has dangerous undercurrents, and immigrants have died in the dense, subtropical vegetation. The border fence sits atop nearby flood control levees, at its farthest two miles from the riverbank. So many families cross there and surrender to Border Patrol agents that officials put up signs in Spanish with arrows directing them to a staging area that’s more easily reached by buses.
The increase of children and families isn’t the only demographic change the Border Patrol has seen in recent years. In 2006, the last time Border Patrol apprehended more than a million immigrants, 90 percent were from Mexico. But last year, 56 percent of those apprehended at the southern border were from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, collectively known as the Northern Triangle.
For the Border Patrol, this meant a major change in daily operations. The U.S. has an agreement with Mexico allowing it to quickly deport unaccompanied children from there, but that’s not the case for Central Americans. Adults need to be transferred to an ICE detention center to wait for a deportation flight, while children must be handed over to the Health and Human Services Department.
While the Trump administration is not the first to try to deter asylum-seekers, it has implemented far harsher measures than its predecessors. One key difference is the administration’s focus on determining whether an asylum-seeker has “credible fear” of returning to their home country. Most families are released with an immigration court date upon passing what’s called a credible fear interview with an asylum officer from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Administration officials say the bar for passing the credible fear interview is too low, and that releasing families encourages more to come here. In a June tweet, Trump called on legislators to “get together and work out a solution to the Asylum and Loophole problems at the Southern Border.” A month later, ICE Director Matthew Albence went before Congress to ask for laws that make it easier to deport Central American children, allow ICE to detain families for longer periods of time, and make it harder for immigrants to pass the credible fear interview. And in August, the administration announced new regulations officials say will bypass the landmark Flores Settlement Agreement that prohibits holding families more than 20 days. The plan is to detain undocumented children and their families indefinitely while their immigration cases play out.
In the meantime, the administration has made getting a credible fear interview more difficult. Immigrants who request asylum at international crossings are now often forced to wait in Mexican border cities for weeks before they’re granted an interview. Even when credible fear is established, some must then return to Mexico to await their hearings, a process that can take months. Trump has tried to ban anyone who crosses the border illegally or passes through a third country — which every Northern Triangle migrant must — from requesting asylum, although those efforts have been delayed by challenges in court. Earlier this year, USCIS instructed asylum officers to be more circumspect about granting credible fear findings.
Immigration lawyers say tightening the standards for credible fear interviews could screen out some immigrants who have legitimate asylum claims. Gathering evidence and testimony takes time, and someone who has fled violence in their home country and experienced the trauma of migration through Mexico and detention in the U.S. is often too distraught to effectively present their case.
That’s what Arias learned in Texas. After pleading guilty, he spent three more days in McAllen, asking agents where his children were and never getting an answer. “What I compare that pain to is having a knife in the chest,” he said. Then he was taken to an ICE detention center in Laredo, Texas, another border town 100 miles northwest of McAllen. There, he failed his credible fear interview with a USCIS asylum officer. When I asked what happened, Arias told me he’d hardly been sleeping or eating for the two weeks he’d been in detention. When he went to the asylum interview, he was confused and distraught.
“I was torn apart,” he said. “It sounds like a joke, and I don’t know if anyone would believe me, but I would use a blanket to cover my eyes, because the lights are always left on in the detention center, and it would be covered in tears in the morning.”
He asked a judge to review his asylum case, and again lost. He was told he’d be deported in a matter of days.
Perhaps the Trump administration’s best-known effort at deterring asylum-seekers is its “Zero Tolerance” policy, which led to the separation of numerous families in detention facilities. The goal, according to the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department, was to bring misdemeanor criminal charges against anyone caught crossing the border. That thousands of children were put in foster care and group homes when their parents went to court, officials said, was an unintended consequence.
In reality, many activists and lawyers believe, the goal was not deterrence not by prosecution, but by separation.
“They just want to make life as miserable as possible for as many brown immigrants as they can,” said Efrén Olivares, the racial & economic justice program director for the Texas Civil Rights Project. “There’s no doubt in my mind about that. Look at the conditions they keep them in. It’s a deliberate attempt at the highest levels of DHS to make life for asylum seekers as miserable as possible to come here. But it’s not going to work, because the conditions they’re fleeing are much worse.”
Trump signed an executive order in June 2018 that pledged to curtail the separation of migrant families and children. Days later, a federal judge in California said the government can only separate families if they believe there’s a threat to the child’s safety. Nonetheless, at least 900 family separations have taken place at the border since Trump’s executive order, according to a July court filing by the American Civil Liberties Union.
Olivares and other lawyers have conducted interviews with immigrants taken to federal courthouses on illegal entry charges. He said he’s seen families separated because parents had once been arrested for minor crimes, like drunk driving or driving without a license. “The government is trying to ram hundreds of separations at the national level through what was intended to be a very narrow exception,” he said.
Texas Civil Rights Project lawyers knew of Arias’ case, so in January the group filed a lawsuit in Washington, D.C., alleging his rights had been violated. Rather than explain why they believed he was a gang member — U.S. officials told one of his lawyers they had “pictures and statements” tying him to gang activity, the Houston Chronicle reported — the government agreed to give him a new credible fear interview. This time, Arias spent hours preparing with an attorney. He’d been given a prescription for a sedative and an antidepressant, and was eating and sleeping. He passed the credible fear interview and, after a couple more weeks, the government agreed to give him a bond. A Texas nonprofit paid the $7,500 bond, and bought him a plane ticket to Seattle.
Administration officials are correct that many families will lose their bids for asylum. While the vast majority of asylum-seekers pass the credible fear interview, only about 14 percent are successful in court, according to the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the branch of the Justice Department that oversees immigration courts.
The asylum process is long and difficult. Within a few weeks of being released, families must fill out the 12-page asylum application in English. There’s no court-appointed counsel in immigration court, and applicants must convince a judge they’re fleeing government persecution based on their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group, or that the government is unable or unwilling to protect them. To prove this, they need to bring documents like police reports and medical records. Family members must provide testimony. Those who can afford it hire expert witnesses to testify about country conditions. The rigorous standards for asylum mean, at times, individuals who are indeed in danger don’t receive protection.
“One scary thing that happens to you in court when you lose an asylum case for a Central American is everyone in the room — including the judge and opposing counsel — will agree this person is going to get killed if they return to [their country],” said Love, the Santa Fe attorney. “You could call that justice in the sense they get put through the process, or you could look at that and say instead, We’re going to [create] some kind of protection that actually helps people.”
Once a family like Arias’ gets a credible fear finding, most are free to enter the U.S. If their case drags on for six months, which it almost certainly will in the backlogged immigration court system, they’ll be eligible for a work permit, although lawyers say it can take a year or more to arrive. Trump administration officials’ claims that most families who pass their credible fear interview disappear into the interior of the country, never to be heard from again, are false. An analysis by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse found that, from September 2018 until May, most families requesting asylum showed up to court. The appearance rate was even higher for those with legal representation; however, only about 20 percent of the 46,743 families they tracked had lawyers.
Arias, who has been in the U.S. for 10 months, still does not have a work permit. While he was in detention in Texas, his kids were released to their mother. The person he’s staying with lives near her, and he sees his children at least three days most weeks, but Arias doesn’t have much to do when they’re not around. He doesn’t have a car, so he spends his free time wandering the neighborhood, cleaning the apartment, and reading the news on his phone.
“I feel bad because I’d like to help in some way, help my kids financially more than anything. Take them somewhere to play, or something like that. All I can do is visit them,” he told me in July. “But the lawyer told me not to work without a permit. This is another problem I have. My case continues, and I went to consult with other attorneys, and it’s very expensive. A lawyer told me to complete a case costs about $20,000. Where am I going to get $20,000?”
He’s since found representation through a pro-bono legal group, but that’s a rare bright spot. Arias is concerned his son, who now gets upset any time he sees a police car or person in a uniform, needs counseling the family can’t afford.
Unlike refugees, who apply for entry to the U.S. before arriving and are paired with a resettlement agency that eases their transition into the country, immigrants who request asylum at the border must find their own way. Asylum-seekers for the most part aren’t eligible for federal assistance such as food stamps, but some states, including Washington, give them access to certain state-funded benefits.
“That initial year is so hard for people,” said Leta Sanchez, an immigration lawyer who works in Mount Vernon, Washington. Last year, she started the nonprofit Immigrant Resources and Immediate Support, which provides some bare necessities to asylum seekers. Sometimes that means helping clients find housing. In other cases, it’s just providing an air mattress so a family isn’t sleeping on the floor.
“It’s very difficult to not only navigate the [legal] system, which is very complex … but to survive,” Sanchez said. “They struggle to just get the basics.”
This is, in part, by design. In his first year in office, Trump shut down a case management system that paired asylum-seeking families with service providers who insured their appearance in court. In July, Attorney General William Barr instructed immigration judges that the families of people facing persecution no longer qualify for asylum. In 2018, Barr’s predecessor, Jeff Sessions, similarly instructed judges to reject asylum claims based on domestic violence or gang violence, although a federal district court later struck down that ruling.
In July, ICE carried out what it calls a targeted enforcement operation to deport families. And while officers arrested fewer than 20 of their intended targets, widespread coverage of the ICE “raids” terrified families seeking asylum. Arias and his children aren’t in danger of deportation while their case is pending, but his son didn’t want to go out in public after hearing about the raids on the radio.
In April 2018, DHS and the Department of Health and Human Services, which cares for unaccompanied children who cross the border, signed a memorandum of understanding to share information about children’s sponsors and others in their households. Ostensibly this was done over concerns about the safety of children once they’re released, but during his July testimony, ICE director Albence said that, from the memo’s implementation to February, when Congress included wording in a spending bill that prevents ICE from using the shared information to deport sponsors, “around 330” sponsors were arrested. The prohibition against using that information will end in October.
As a longtime resident of the U.S. without a criminal record, Gutiérrez almost certainly would not have faced deportation under the previous administration. It’s not clear whether the Congressional prohibition would matter for someone in Gutiérrez’s situation. Because her sons didn’t have a court date, she took it upon herself to notify immigration officials when she moved from California to Washington.
Tanya Roman, a spokeswoman for ICE in Seattle, told me in an email the agency “prioritizes its enforcement resources on individuals who pose the greatest threat to national security, public safety and border security.” When asked why Gutiérrez was put in deportation proceedings, Roman wrote: “ICE will no longer exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement. All of those in violation of the immigration laws may be subject to immigration arrest, detention and — if found removable by final order — removal from the United States.”
In Gutiérrez’s case, it means her children, unwilling to be separated from her again, are joining their asylum case to hers. Unaccompanied minors have avenues to legal status not available to their parents, though the Trump administration has taken steps to limit access to those for children who are reunited with their parents. In effect, immigration officials are discouraging parents from getting their children out of government custody. As such, undocumented parents like Gutiérrez could start ignoring court summonses, resulting in their children being ordered deported, said Andrew Lorenzen-Strait, who until this spring was ICE’s deputy assistant director for custody programs.
“You can’t have a 12- or 14-year-old boy or girl come through the border and their sponsor won’t come forward because they’re afraid they’ll get arrested,” said Lorenzen-Strait, now director of children and family services at the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. “It’s all about denying family unity, which is detrimental to kids.”
When she left home 10 years ago, Gutiérrez thought her sons would join her some day. Her undocumented status forced her to stay in the shadows, but she settled into a life in the U.S. that was far more comfortable than what she’d known in her neighborhood on the outskirts of Guatemala City. There, the boys lived with a grandmother for a while, but she began to have health problems; Gutiérrez’s brother started receiving extortion threats. Meanwhile, gangsters there have gotten younger, and Gutiérrez feared for her sons’ safety.
The three are still settling into their lives in Washington. Jefferson, the youngest, is long and lanky, speaks English easily, and talks about plans to dissect a frog in biology class. The language doesn’t come as easy to his older brother, Erick, who’s shorter and has a shy smile like his mom’s.
Being a single parent is difficult for Gutiérrez. For eight years, her maternal duties were limited to wiring money to Guatemala and making occasional phone calls. Now, she has to worry about registering the boys for school, taking them to basketball games, and making sure they’re supervised — all on top of working long hours cleaning houses and handling their pending case for asylum. “Right now, they’re that age when they’re rebellious,” she said. “But things are fine. I tell them take it little by little because it’s a drastic change for everyone.”
Despite their family being victim to violence in their home country, Gutiérrez and her children could have a tough time proving an asylum case because none of them was threatened directly. Gutiérrez said her hopes rest on convincing the Los Angeles Police Department to sign off on a visa for victims of crime who cooperate with police. In 2014, Gutiérrez’s husband stole her car and set it on fire. At the time, she filed a police report and took out a restraining order. Her request for a visa has already been rejected once. An LAPD spokesman didn’t respond to a request for comment about her petition.
I asked Gutiérrez if she regretted bringing her sons to the U.S. now that the whole family faces deportation, and she thought for a moment. “They’re here now,” she said. “We’re three. If we have to leave, we’ll go together. Do I regret bringing us together? No. Do I regret leaving them so long? Yes.”
This story has been updated to correct details about President Donald Trump’s 2018 executive order related to its family-separation policy.
