This week, ProPublica published a story I wrote based in part on interviews with parents and children detained at the nation’s only detention center for immigrant families in Dilley, Texas. I asked some parents to see if their children would be willing to write to me about their experiences inside. More than three dozen have done so.
One of those letters was from Maria Antonia Guerra Montoya, 9, from Colombia. His letter was written on a piece of notebook paper. She decorated it with rainbows and hearts. And she drew a portrait of herself and her mother wearing their detention uniforms and government-issued ID badges.
I had first met Maria a few weeks earlier, when I had managed to get into the Dilley Immigration Processing Center. It’s just south of San Antonio. Maria Antonia, her mother and more than 3,500 people, half of whom were minors, had been cycling there since the Trump administration reopened it early last year. I went there in mid-January, before the facility burst into public view when Liam Conejo Ramos — the 5-year-old in the blue bunny hat detained with his father in Minneapolis — was sent there, with the goal of hearing from the children themselves about the conditions under which the children were being held.
After logging in, I walked through a metal detector and a series of locked doors to the visiting room. Maria Antonia and another girl her age were quietly playing quick hand games when her mother, Maria Alejandra Montoya, called her to introduce me.
Maria Antonia, wearing her long brown hair in a ponytail, did not hesitate. She walked to the front edge of her chair, pushed her thick, white-rimmed glasses up her nose, and dove straight into them.
I asked her how she and her mother ended up there.
Well, she said, we had planned to go to “Disneylandia,” but we ended up at “Dilleylandia.”
Then she told me the story. She lived in Colombia with her grandmother and regularly traveled back and forth to the U.S. to visit her mother, who had been in the U.S. since 2018. (Maria Alejandra had overstayed her visa, but has since married a U.S. citizen and was applying for a green card.) In August, the whole family vacationed together at Disney World. It was so much fun, Maria Antonia said, that she begged her mother to come back for the annual Halloween celebration at the park.
They booked tickets for a 10-day vacation during his school holidays. She lit up as she told me how she had planned a “101 Dalmatians” costume – she would be Cruella de Vil and her mother and stepfather the spotted dogs. The entire outfit was so bulky that it practically filled her entire suitcase.
But everything started to go wrong as soon as he arrived at Miami International Airport on October 2. She was supposed to be dropped off with her mother by the flight attendant who accompanied her. But she said she was intercepted by immigration officials who took her to one room for questioning while her mother was taken for questioning in a separate room. They asked me all kinds of questions that I had no idea how to answer.I remember her telling me (I wasn’t allowed notebooks or voice recorders inside the detention center). I kept saying, “I can tell you my name and date of birth, and my mother’s name and date of birth, and that I’m from Colombia. That’s it.” I didn’t know what else to tell them.
After what they both described as hours of interrogation, they were placed together in cold storage. Maria Alejandra’s phone was confiscated. They had no way of contacting her father-in-law, who was waiting for them at the airport. Maria Antonia said they had no idea why they were being detained if her mother was applying for a green card and had a valid tourist visa.
Maria Antonia had learned English at her private school in Medellin. She heard one immigration officer tell another that if she had been 10, they could have kept her separated from her mother. That’s when, she says, the real fear set in.
Then it was 42 hours of waiting in airport waiting rooms. Eventually, they were put on a plane – then in a minivan – to the facility in Texas. Maria Antonia said she didn’t really understand where they were going until they saw the center through the window.
When I met them, they had been detained for almost four months. I asked Maria Antonia what it was like to be stuck in Dilley. She told me she had fainted twice since arriving; she is a vegetarian and says she ate mostly beans. She felt like she had nothing to do all day and missed her school, echoing the concerns of many other children I spoke with during my reporting. She said she made new friends in Dilley, but it was difficult. She and her mother had been detained for so long that new people she met often left when they were released or deported.
Her mother, Maria Alejandra, had expressed to me in long, heated emails some of her most serious concerns about her and her daughter’s deteriorating mental and physical health during their prolonged detention. She said Maria Antonia would wake up in the middle of the night crying, fearing she would never leave her detention or be separated from her mother.
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I asked the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, overseen by DHS, what Maria Alejandra and Maria Antonia told me. In an email, they said Maria Alejandra had overstayed her tourist visa and had previously been arrested for theft, a charge that court documents show was dismissed. DHS said that while in detention, Maria Antonia was seen by medical professionals twice and also had weekly check-ins with mental health professionals, “where she reported that she was calm and well nourished.” DHS said all people detained at the facility receive “3 meals per day, clean water, clothing, bedding, showers, soap and toiletries” and that “certified dietitians evaluate meals.” DHS also said that “children have access to teachers, classrooms, and textbooks for math, reading, and spelling” and that no one is denied medical care. CoreCivic, which operates the facility, said it was subject to multiple levels of oversight and that health and safety were top priorities.
Soon we all said goodbye. But I stayed in touch with his mother, stepfather and lawyers after the case. They shared documents about what happened to them and their legal requests to be released.
I learned that an immigration judge granted them “voluntary departure” on January 6, allowing Maria Alejandra to pay for her own return to Colombia, avoid having a formal deportation order on file, and pursue her green card application from abroad. But it was not until February 6 that they were finally sent back to Colombia.
A few days after their return, her mother told me that the first thing Maria Antonia wanted to do was throw away the government-issued sweatsuit she had been wearing for months. Then I received a video.
It showed Maria Antonia, dressed in pink leggings and a teddy bear T-shirt, running to hug her teachers one by one in front of her school. One of the teachers leads her by the hand into her class: “Look who I brought you!” » said the professor. Another young girl, Maria Antonia’s best friend, jumps from her desk to put her arms around her. Another friend rushes to join the hug. She was finally home.