"It's the American horror" instead of the American dream

ICE lied to a Venezuelan mother and told her that her 2-year-old would be on her deportation flight... and instead purposely kept her child in US foster care

Yorely and Maiker have a two year old daughter. They came to the US seeking asylum and instead were arrested, separated, and then worse things happened… culminating in the US government taking their daughter away from them.

Yorely Bernal Inciarte and Maiker Espinoza Escalona were having trouble making ends meet. The financial situation in Venezuela was hard. Yorely was working at a fast food cart, Maiker was cutting hair.

They heard things might be better in Peru, so they made a run at things there, but it wasn’t much better. One of them finally floated, what if we tried the U.S.? Given the situation in Venezuela there was a real chance they could qualify as refugees. The more they thought about it, the more amazing the idea seemed. The United States is the land of the free and the home of the brave, right?

And they would have to be brave to make the journey. From Peru they’d have to go through Ecuador, then Columbia, and then through the Darién jungle. And they had a one-year-old daughter with them, too. She was a big part of the reason they wanted to find a better situation. It could all be worth it.

The journey is long and difficult, and it’s one that many asylum seekers from Latin America have to make. There were some close calls: Yorley and Maiker and their daughter were briefly held captive by smugglers in Mexico.

But last May they made it the border, crossed into the US and turned themselves over to the border authorities, announcing their desire to seek asylum in the United States. “Asylum seeker” is a legal status in the United States, and the most typical thing the US government does when receiving asylum seekers is to get them into the system and set up court dates so that the legal process of either granting asylum (and thus legal refugee status) or denying it (and then typically deporting them).

But something different happened to them.

It sounds like there was some confusion about what was happening at first, but the understanding now is that immigration authorities had some concerns about Yorely and Maiker’s tattoos. Authorities thought they could possibly be gang related. Or at least, that’s what Yorely and Maiker eventually came to believe.

So the US government arrested them, separated them, and put their daughter into foster care while the legal process for their asylum claim played out.

Some of the tattoos they have: Yorely has her parents’ birthdates, a lightning bolt, some flowers, a flame, a snake. Maiker has a cross, a crown, a compass with a plane, some Looney Tunes characters.

Held in completely different facilities, Maiker and Yorely couldn’t see each other, but there was still a chance they could be granted asylum. It was a waiting game now. Starting in October they were allowed weekly in-person visits with their daughter… the foster parents would bring her. Those continued until March.

Then, suddenly, on March 29th, Maiker was sent to Guantanamo.

The next day he was put on a plane to El Salvador, where he was admitted into the mega-prison that’s meant for gang members and terrorists but has become a holding pen for US prisoners who are *accused* of being gang members, most of them with no criminal records or court dates, no proof, and no evidence.

Maiker is one of those: he has no criminal record in the US or overseas. No evidence has been provided. And the specific allegations of him being a gang member were, as one of his lawyers said, “Sudden.” They’d had him for months, and then out of nowhere these allegations… as if the government was in a hurry to get him on a plane or something.

Yorely didn’t know where Maiker was until she saw him in one of the videos that the prison has released to the media. She and Maiker had both told the government multiple times that they aren’t involved in any gangs. They had assumed this was a misunderstanding, something that would be cleared up in the asylum process before they were released to go after the American dream.

ICE came to Yorely and explained the situation. Maiker was in prison in El Salvador now, in a place that people didn’t come back from. She could stay in the asylum process and try her luck. Maybe she’d get through the process in the next year or two. Maybe she and her daughter could try to build a life in the US just the two of them. Eventually. Maybe.

OR

Yorely could withdraw her asylum claim, which would allow the US to legally deport her. Soon she and her daughter could be on a plane headed back home.

Faced with this stark choice, Yorely chose to be reunited with her daughter and sent back to Venezuela.

She boarded a plane to Caracas on April 25th, excited to be with her little girl — now two years old. Her daughter had been in four different foster homes during the year they’d been apart, but now they’d go home, stay with Yorely’s mother.

But after Yorely had already boarded the plane, she was told that they weren’t planning to bring her daughter at all. According to the Department of Homeland Security, their little girl would be staying in the States in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, in yet another foster home.

Yorely had no choice. She was forced to fly home without her daughter.

Venezuela’s Interior Minister accused the US of “kidnapping” the child, which apparently made the US government mad enough to write a press release in which they accused not just Maiker of being a gang member, but also said that Yorely was in the gang and recruited sex workers and participated in human trafficking. Now Maiker is accused of running a “torture house” rather than being a hair stylist.

Here’s a picture of Maiker cutting hair in Venezuela. We call this “evidence” of a claim. No evidence of him running a torture house can be found anywhere. ***insert shrug emoji***

So now we get to the weird crux of the matter:

Why did the Department of Homeland Security arrest, separate, and imprison these two asylum seekers? And why did they suddenly and without evidence remove Maiker — someone with no criminal record — to the horrific prison in El Salvador?

Why did they lie to Yorely so she would withdraw her asylum claim if they had proof she was a gang member?

And why did they lie and say they would send her daughter home with her and then keep her in the US in foster care instead?

Well, DHS claims it’s because they care about children.

In a couple of recent cases, three US citizens were sent home with their deported mothers. DHS made a big deal about this, saying that they just did “what the parents wanted.” But in one case, ICE refused to release the US citizen child to a parent or other guardian who was not in custody and then said “the mother chose” to take her child rather than leave them behind in the US government’s custody. It’s strange that the US government is suddenly so hot to keep a non-citizen toddler in the US and separated from both her mother and her father.

The “we just care about children” and “we’re fighting traffickers” claims also don’t make much sense when you realize that the US government recently decided to stop paying to help unaccompanied migrant children get access to lawyers and other resources.

Then a judge said they had to keep paying, but they didn’t.

Then the government changed their mind and said they would, and the judge extended her order so that the government couldn’t change it back.

And then the Republicans in the House floated a new proposal that would give them freedom to stop paying again AND ALSO to charge migrants (and unaccompanied minors) fees like five grand for coming to the border between ports of entry, or eighty-five hundred bucks for sponsorship fees.

If that sounds bad, you should hear what the Freedom Network thinks about it. Freedom Network is a the largest coalition of anti-trafficking advocates and experts in the US. Their director, Jean Bruggeman, said this proposal would be, "a huge gift to traffickers and an increase in vulnerability for children and families in the United States that will lead to more abuse and exploitation."

So, yeah. I have a hard time believing the US government stole Yorely’s kid for her own health and safety, especially given that there hasn’t been a shred of evidence that Yorely has done anything wrong.

Which brings me to the sad theory of why I think the US is actually doing things like this.

It’s to deter people from coming to the US looking for asylum (or to study, or as tourists, or for any reason really).

The message is this:

”Come to America and legally seek asylum. We’ll separate your family. We’ll take your kid away. We’ll — without proof — decide that your tattoo of the Tasmanian Devil is a gang sign and lock you up in a third country in a horrific prison. We’ll send you home but take your kid.”

Or we’ll cancel your student visa and not tell you or your school.

We’ll deport people “accidentally” and illegally and then refuse to fix it.

We’ll arrest teenage tourists at the border and strip search them if we feel like it. Maybe because they don’t have all their hotels booked yet. Then we’ll kick them back out of the country.

The point being, don’t think of us as the land of the free and the home of the brave.

We’re the land of lawless incarceration with no due process and no evidence. We’re the home of the two-year-old who we stole from her mother through lies and deceit.

We’re doing all of this on purpose. It’s not because we’re inept or disorganized, it’s because we want the world to know that the United States is not a safe place for immigrants. We want them to know that you could be on your final interview for citizenship and we might choose to lock you up. We want them to know that when we say “freedom of speech” we mean “we will definitely arrest and deport you if you say something we don’t like.”

Meanwhile, here’s what’s happening right now:

There’s this family who came to the United States looking for the American dream. It was Maiker and Yorely and their little girl. They thought they could apply for asylum and get it.

But now Maiker is wearing a white jumpsuit in a prison in El Salvador. Yorely is back at her mother’s house in Venezuela, sobbing in her bedroom all day.

And there’s a little girl in her fourth foster home in less than a year who the US government has held against her parents’ will.

As Maiker’s sister has said, this is not the American dream. “It’s the American horror.”

SOURCES:

A detailed account at the New York Times.

“American horror”

The gross, weird DHS statement can be found here.

Three US citizen children sent home with deported mothers, and refusing to release to other caretakers.

Admin cuts legal help for migrant children traveling alone.

A judge said the government had to fund it anyway, but the admin didn’t.

Then they changed their mind and reinstated the money.

A judge said they HAD to anyway, so now there’s legal backing preventing the admin from backtracking.

Which has led the Republicans in the House to propose some legal changes that would let them stop paying but also introduce a bunch of fees to immigrants, which Freedom Network – a coalition of anti-trafficking experts – said would be “a huge gift for traffickers.”

Teenaged tourists detained and strip searched because they didn’t have their hotels scheduled for their entire stay.

P.S. Please do note that the people in this story entered the US and were detained and separated during the Biden administration, and then sent to a US funded overseas prison, lied to so they would withdraw asylum claims, and had their child kept from them in a foreign country under the Trump administration. So if you’re one of those people who only gets mad when the party other than yours does bad things to migrants, this is going to be a hard story. It’s almost as if the Department of Homeland Security and ICE do these terrible things regardless of which administration is in the White House.