‘They Were Laughing at Us’: Immigrants Tell of Cruelty, Illness, and Filth in US Detention
After harrowing journeys to the US, new arrivals are held in overcrowded and unhygienic conditions, dozens of interviews reveal
By Andrew Gumbel
All day and night they listened to the wailing of hungry children.
Here, in a freezing immigration detention facility somewhere in the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas, adults and children alike were fainting from dehydration and lack of food.
Sleep was almost impossible; the lights were left on, they had just a thin metallic sheet to protect against the cold and there was nothing to sleep on but the hard floor.
This is the account of Rafael and Kimberly Martinez, who, with their three-year-old daughter, had made the dangerous trek from their home on the Caribbean coast of Honduras to the US border to ask for political asylum.
“The conditions were horrible, everything was filthy and there was no air circulating,” Kimberly Martinez told the Guardian of the five days the family spent cooped up in one facility they — like tens of thousands before them — referred to as “la hielera”: the icebox. Her husband added: “It’s as though they wanted to…
