I Feel Like I Am in a Desert

A story of fear, faith, loss and the fragile human connections inside immigration detention

Like many of the detained immigrants I have supported as an Abide in Love pen pal for the last year, when Tania first responded to my initial contact, she wasn't asking for much.

She wanted to know what was happening to her.

She wanted to know whether anyone knew she was detained by ICE. 

She wanted to call her husband. She wanted to speak to her mother and her daughters in Mexico. She wanted a lawyer. She wanted someone who could speak her language.

Mostly, she wanted someone outside the walls of the jail to remember that she was there.

“I am pregnant,” she wrote. “I entered the country for political asylum. ICE put me in custody in this prison since I was arrested at home in Jefferson County. I was only supposed to be there for 12 hours. I don't know anything about my state of pregnancy, I'm not comfortable, I'm deprived of my freedom, please help me.”

She had no attorney.

She had two daughters in Mexico and a husband in Missouri. Her husband only spoke Spanish, and she asked me to contact him, but he worked during the day, and communicating with him from the jail was difficult. Calling Mexico was even harder.

Inside the jail, she felt profoundly alone.

Her fellow detainees often couldn't understand her, and she couldn't understand them. Even the simple act of making a telephone call required navigating a confusing system.

I began trying to help in whatever small ways I could.

I enrolled her for free legal advice. I arranged for a volunteer attorney to speak with her before her hearing. I gave her husband instructions for using the jail's communication system. When international calls became a problem, I helped her work through the maze of numbers required to make them. Minimally 30 numbers 

None of it seemed like much.

But to Tania, it mattered.

“You and my husband are my only link to the outside world,” she wrote.

That sentence stayed with me.

Because there is a particular kind of loneliness that comes from being surrounded by people and still having no one who can understand you.

A jail sentence she never expected

When Tania entered the United States seeking asylum, she had not expected to ever find herself in a county jail.

But one evening she was arrested at her home following a domestic dispute. She later acknowledged that she had struck her husband. What the paperwork did not capture as easily was the history behind that moment.

She told me her husband had hit her before.

More than once.

She had endured it because she loved him.

That night, she said, she had simply reached the end of what she could tolerate.

Her husband called the police after she hit him.

She was arrested, but told she would likely be out in about 12 hours.

Instead, she was turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

A domestic-violence arrest had become an immigration detention.

And suddenly a woman who had expected to spend a night in jail found herself trying to understand an immigration system she barely understood, in a language she barely spoke.

She began asking questions about voluntary departure, removal, hearings, transportation to Mexico and how long she would remain incarcerated.

She listened to what other detainees told her about how quickly people from Mexico were deported.

She wondered whether she would be sent directly to Mexico City.

She worried about her husband.

She worried about her daughters.

She worried about everything.

And then there was the baby.

“I have felt truly very lonely.”

There were moments when legal questions gave way to something much more basic.

“I have felt truly very lonely,” she wrote. “Thank you so much for your attention and staying in contact with me. I need you right now.”

Tania was Catholic.

Faith became one of the few things she could reach for inside the jail.

She asked whether a priest could visit her.

She wanted a Bible.

There was a Bible available, but it was in English. The tablets offered a Spanish version, but she couldn't access it in the way she wanted.

“I would love to read the Bible,” she wrote.

She had found only one book in Spanish.

She had already read it completely.

“I am too bored,” she wrote. “I hope the agenda is not full to see the priest.”

I added her to the list for a priest visit.

I also suggested that she request a Spanish Bible from the officers.

Eventually, she received one.

“Yesterday they brought me THE Bible that I asked for,” she wrote. “Thank you very much. Yesterday I slept better.”

They were small things.

A book.

A visit from a priest.

A telephone card.

Instructions for making a call.

But inside that jail, small things became enormous.

The photograph that never came

One morning Tania wrote that she had spoken with her husband and had cried again.

She wanted a photograph.

Not a legal document.

Not money.

Not even a promise that she would be released.

She wanted to see the people she loved.

“Do you think you can ask him for a photo of him and me together and one of my girls and send it to me?” she asked. “If you can, please, it would be very good for me to see them. I already cried a lot. I really miss them. I don't want to be here anymore.”

I contacted her husband.

He never responded to that request.

There were moments when I felt helpless.

I could make calls. I could send instructions. I could ask questions. I could try to find answers.

But I couldn't put her daughters' faces in front of her eyes.

I couldn't open the jail door.

I couldn't bring her husband inside.

And I couldn't make the system move any faster.

Then I lost track of her

Eventually, Tania's court hearing approached.

Then the messages stopped.

I tried to contact her.

Nothing.

I knew her hearing had been scheduled, but I could not reach her to offer encouragement or even tell her that I was thinking about her.

I began to worry.

Then came the message that changed everything.

“Yesterday they operated on me. I had an ectopic pregnancy, and they removed my right fallopian tube.”

I was stunned.

She had lost the pregnancy.

And she had been somewhere in the medical system while I had been unable to reach her.

My fear was now replaced with anger.

When I checked the records and saw that an order for removal had been entered, I initially believed that her immigration hearing had happened without her.

I assumed she had missed it because she was in the hospital.

I assumed that, combined with the criminal charge, she had been ordered removed due to her absence.

I was outraged.

She had been so vulnerable.

I couldn't reach her.

Decisions affecting her future appeared to have been made while she was somewhere else, recovering from surgery, alone and grieving.

Later, Tania explained what had actually happened.

She had been present.

And she alone had made a decision.

“I don't want to be in prison anymore.”

The judge had given her the opportunity to appeal.

Tania declined.

“I requested my removal from the country,” she explained.

She knew that appealing could mean remaining incarcerated for months—possibly as long as nine months, in her understanding. I knew it could be much longer.

She was exhausted.

She had just lost her pregnancy.

She had undergone surgery.

She was still incarcerated.

And she wanted out.

“Honestly I no longer want to be in prison,” she wrote.

I tried to explain that accepting an order of removal could have consequences different from voluntary departure.

But Tania had reached a point where the future seemed less frightening than the present.

She wanted to leave.

She wanted to heal.

She wanted to see her daughters.

She wanted to go home.

Then came another loss

Tania told me the hospital had explained that her husband might be able to take care of the remains of the pregnancy.

She wanted him to bury her baby.

I began making calls.

The hospital transferred me from one person to another. I left messages. People called back. I was transferred again.

Eventually I learned that the hospital could not make the arrangements.

A funeral home would have to handle them.

I called the funeral home they referred me to.

They explained that Tania's husband would have to come in and make arrangements. He would need documentation proving that he was her husband and the father.

Then another complication surfaced.

They weren't legally married.

His name wasn't on the medical records.

There was nothing more I could do.

I remember struggling with the language I used for them.

I kept calling them my “clients,” because that was the easiest way to explain why I was making these calls.

But they weren't really clients in the traditional sense.

They were two people caught in circumstances far larger than either of them.

She was incarcerated.

He was outside, but now living in fear of being detained himself.

She was grieving a pregnancy.

He was trying to understand what had happened.

And I was a person on the other end of a telephone trying to find a path through a system that seemed to have no straight lines.

“I feel like I am in a desert.”

After the surgery, Tania wanted her medical records so she could continue treatment in Mexico.

She couldn't get them.

She couldn't afford another call to her husband.

She was running out of money.

She was running out of hope.

“I feel devastated,” she wrote. “I am so desperate to leave here already. I feel like I am in a desert from which I don't know when I will get out.”

I sent her another calling card.

Then she told me something that hurt more than any legal question she had ever asked.

Her relationship with her husband was deteriorating.

His words had made her reconsider everything.

And she was blaming herself.

“After what happened, he made me see many things with his words and I feel so bad because he is really right, this is my fault,” she wrote.

It was not enough that she had lost her pregnancy.

She was beginning to believe she had caused that loss.

She was beginning to believe she had caused the loss of her own freedom.

She was beginning to believe that fighting back against years of abuse had brought all of this upon herself.

I pleaded with her not to blame herself.

People get angry.

People reach their breaking point.

People sometimes lash out after carrying too much for too long.

I reminded her that she could not know that the fight had caused the ectopic pregnancy.

She could not know that the pregnancy would have otherwise survived.

She could not know that one night would lead to all of this.

And yet guilt has a way of ignoring facts.

“Migrants like me, my husband and I, this was not the first time he hit me,” she wrote. “And I never took revenge against him because I love him.”

She said she had tolerated the violence.

Until that night.

“I just got tired of his blows.”

And now she was in jail.

The man she loved viewed her actions as a betrayal.

She was questioning herself.

And the consequences seemed impossible to separate from the moment she finally fought back.

“I have just lost my son,” she wrote. “I was recently operated on. I lost part of my inside, part of my life, my freedom, my opportunity to give everything to my daughters.”

There was grief in every sentence.

But there was also a stubborn determination to survive it.

“After the storm comes the calm.”

The last message

Eventually, the transfer came.

Tania gathered her belongings and waited for the sheriff to come for her.

She had been told the transfer would likely happen at night.

She called her husband. She sent me a late-night message.

She hoped she would be allowed to communicate with him wherever she was being taken.

She gave me a personal number and promised she would contact me when she had her phone.

Then she wrote:

“God bless you every day of your life and that you know that God will reward you for all the good things you do for us.”

She prayed that more people would join the effort to help immigrants in detention.

She told me I was doing the right thing.

And then she said something that stopped me.

“When I come back to the United States soon, I will try to help your organization as much as I can.”

I did not have the heart to tell her that coming back to the United States was no longer a realistic possibility.

Not after the removal order she had accepted.

Not after everything that had happened.

She left believing that perhaps someday she would return.

I was left wondering whether I would ever hear from her again.

What remains

Tania was eventually escorted across the El Paso/Juarez border and made it safely to Mexico. After a long bus ride, her mother wrapped her in her arms.

She was able to see her daughters again.

She never received her medical records.

Her husband was never able to bury the remains of the pregnancy she had lost.

I don't know whether she’ll ever stop blaming herself.

I do know, for a period of time, a woman sitting alone inside a jail cell believed that someone outside those walls was listening.

She needed a lawyer.

She needed medical care.

She needed her family.

She needed someone who spoke her language.

She needed a priest.

She needed a Bible she could actually read.

She needed glasses after hers were broken.

She needed a telephone call.

She needed a photograph.

She needed someone to tell her that she was not forgotten.

None of those things should have been extraordinary.

But to Tania, they were lifelines.

I tried to address her needs as best I could. 

I was woefully inadequate at times.

________________________

I am happy to say that I am still in contact with Tania, and despite everything she’s been through, she is finding ways to help others facing what she faced, like she said she wanted to. She and I have worked together to assist coworkers of hers who have since experienced immigration detention and deportation. She offers to meet them at the border, bring them to her home, feed them, and help them return to the cities where their families await. Like myself, I know she feels it is not enough, but still we Abide.