THEY SOUGHT ASYLUM - OBAMA CAGED THEM - JPP DEMOCRATS WERE SILENT
THEY SOUGHT ASYLUM - OBAMA CAGED THEM - THIS IS THEIR STORY
The immigration debate intensified a couple of years ago during the Obama Administration when a flood of women and children came across the U.S.-Mexico border.
Obama didn't know how to handle the influx, so he detained these women and children in three family centers: two in Texas; one in Pennsylvania. There were more than a thousand people in these centers, waiting to know if they'd be allowed to stay in the country.
Maria Rosa Lopez and her son were some of thousands of people who fled from Central America to the U.S. in 2014 to escape domestic abuse — which is considered a credible fear that can warrant an asylum claim.
From Guatemala City, she and her son crossed another border into Mexico and then took a bus north to Monterrey, close to the northern Mexico-U.S. border. "I paid someone to take us across on a boat. It was night time and we slept in the desert on the U.S. side. There were other moms and their kids there too. A Brazilian woman asked me if she could sleep next to us," Lopez says.
The next morning, immigration officers woke them and took them to the Karnes detention center outside of San Antonio, Texas.
Lopez wanted asylum so she and her son could start their lives over in the U.S. She didn't know what to expect when she got on American soil, but she didn't expect to be housed in this facility with no word on when she'd be released.
"I was desperate when we got there. It was hard to see my child crying and he was asking a lot of questions," she recalls. "He knew it was a detention center and he wanted to know how long we were going to be there."
But she didn't know either. "No one was answering questions. I talked with people who had been there for six, eight months, and it was very depressing." she says. "Often my son couldn't fall asleep, we had bunk beds. He was on top of me but he would crawl down and wanted to be with me."
Denise Gilman, one of Maria's former lawyers, says the Karnes detention facility "feels very much like a prison" with "cinderblock walls, clanging doors, X-ray machines all over the place, buzzers that you have to use to get in and out to go see your 9-year-old client and his mom."
Gilman, director of the immigration clinic at the University of Texas Law School, says these women and children are seeking asylum, but they're treated like criminals.
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