Mother, child fled violence, only for US to return them to it

The first time I went to the South Texas Family Detention Center, called “Baby Jail” by many of us, I saved a woman’s life. That experience inspired me to go back time and again. As an immigration attorney for Legal Services of Southern Piedmont in Charlotte, I found heading to the dusty town of Dilley, Texas, a haul, but I felt I needed to keep helping these mothers and children incarcerated by our government. I was making a difference.

But, on my seventh trip, I lost a 4-year-old boy.

This boy had been hanging out with the pro bono attorneys the day before, still in-center at 6:30 p.m., giving fist bumps and basking in the positive male attention, which until that point in his life he had never known.

His story is difficult to think about. His father began to brutally beat him with a belt when he was only 2 years old. His father also regularly raped and beat his mother. Finally, she had enough and, knowing that the authorities in her country would not help her, she made the hard choice to travel a dangerous road and seek refuge in the United States – that beacon of hope on the hill.

But instead of welcoming them to safety, we did the opposite. We jailed the child and his mother. Then, without truly giving them an adequate opportunity to explain why they might qualify for asylum, we deemed their story insufficient and sent them back.

Now imagine that you are a young woman who has been raped and beaten by your male partner for the past 12 years. When your son was 2 years old, your partner began brutally beating him with a belt. The authorities are no help because they view domestic violence as a family’s internal issue. So you and your son flee to the U.S. Here, the system expects you to tell your trauma first to an asylum officer and then maybe a judge – both randomly assigned. Chance gives you a male officer and then a male judge. Could you tell those men about what you’d suffered, reporting detail after detail about the rapes and beatings? Or would you tell them instead about your family members who’d been murdered by hit men, also true, thinking that would be enough?

I know which I would likely do. And that is what this mother did. Unfortunately, the system decided she and the child did not have a “credible fear” of being harmed upon returning to their home country and ordered that they be forcibly returned.

A request denied

Before this order was carried out, and understanding that she had to tell everything that had happened to complete strangers, this mother was finally able to share the details of the assaults and trauma to volunteer attorneys. But despite a 12-page legal brief and more than 100 pages of supporting evidence, the asylum office denied her request for a second interview.

That’s where I came in. We thought that, though the asylum office had denied this mother’s request for a new interview, there was no way it could deny a 4-year-old boy who had been brutally beaten by his father for half his life. And so I started writing the brief for why the child needed an interview.

I spent a day and a night writing and researching and went into the center before 8 the next morning ready to finish, bring the child and his mom in, sign it and send it off. Before I could, though, one of the other volunteers told me, “Stop. They’ve been deported.” I was dumbfounded. I asked the managing attorney if it were true. He confirmed it, and I slumped down in a chair, defeated. Then I returned to my “office” (a visitation room) and cried.

This 4-year-old child and his mom were returned to a country that did not protect them, to a man who may well kill them for trying to escape. Our system is so flawed that, instead of helping them, or truly giving them a meaningful opportunity to explain how and why they might qualify for asylum, we jailed them, denied them a chance to tell the child’s story and deported them.

We should be heartbroken. We should be ashamed. I know I am.

This story was originally published September 15, 2016 at 5:55 PM with the headline "Mother, child fled violence, only for US to return them to it."