Her first night in the bunks, she thought about how this place might change her. Would her sons in the beds above and beside her see their father again? What would she have to do to protect them? And did she have the strength?
The rooms on this side of the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Dilley, Texas, near San Antonio, housed only women with their children. Nicolle Orozco Forero and her boys, ages 5 and 7, arrived there on an afternoon in June, awaiting a deportation she was sure would come.
When she woke up from a nightmare around 9 p.m., she turned to see if her husband was beside her. He had been separated from her when they arrived, as her boys cried. “We want to stay in papa’s room,” they said.
She cracked open a Bible and landed on a verse: “So do not fear, for I am with you.”
A day earlier, Orozco Forero and her husband, Juan Sebastian Moreno Acosta, arrived at their routine monthly meeting with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) expecting to make some progress on their case.
The family, originally from Colombia, had been living in Seattle for two years, where Orozco Forero worked as a child care provider for children with disabilities. Her eldest son, Juan David, has a serious kidney issue and was being treated at Seattle Children’s Hospital. His nephrologist had written a letter to ICE requesting he remain in the country to receive a biopsy and further treatment.
(Courtesy of Nicolle Orozco)
But the mood at the appointment that morning was different. An officer shadowed them. Their case worker looked at them anxiously. When she called them in and said, “There is nothing more we can do for you,” Orozco Forero knew.
They were soon handcuffed, stripped of their belongings and shuffled to the back of the building. Orozco Forero said she showed an ICE officer a letter from Juan David’s doctors approving a biopsy; the officer tore it apart, she said. “This no longer works,” the officer told her.
She only had minutes to tell her family in Seattle what was happening. Her family scrambled to get in touch with lawyers. An attorney in New York took the case. There may be a way to stop the deportation order, he told them.
She thought only of her sons.
“They didn’t deserve to go through this process. Perhaps an adult makes the mistake of entering the country illegally, but the kids are not at fault. One brings them to seek a better future for them,” she said. “I was afraid, thinking these people may take my children from me.”
The boys arrived at the ICE offices in Tukwila, Washington, later that night. Juan David had been crying. He had a feeling in his heart, he told her, that he’d never see his family in Seattle again, or the girl in his class that he was in love with. She told him they were going on vacation to Colombia.
“But mami,” her younger son, Daniel, protested, “they don’t speak English in Colombia.”
The family was flown from Washington to Texas, and then driven to Dilley. Through the journey, their family back in Seattle watched them move as dots on a map thanks to the location on Juan David’s Apple watch.
The 55-acre Dilley facility was built in 2014 to house families, but the Biden administration ended that practice as part of a move to stop family detention, which pediatricians say can have a detrimental impact on childhood development. Dilley held only adults until it closed in 2024.
When the Dilley facility reopened in March, it was retrofitted to again house children. Some 2,400 people can be held there at any one time, making it the largest family detention center in the country. It has a gym, a library, a game room and a large cafeteria that families are allowed to roam. “This is clearly not a concentration camp,” Matthew Albence, the former ICE acting director, said during a 2019 tour of the site.
When Orozco Forero, her husband and their boys arrived on June 19, she watched as they were sorted — the women and children to one side, the men to the other. Inside, they were known by only their alien registration numbers. In the rooms, they were addressed by their assigned bunks out of the four: C, D and F. Outside, the facility was rimmed by tall gates. ICE agents were everywhere.
A recent Senate probe of conditions in ICE custody found hundreds of reports of mistreatment since Trump was inaugurated in Janaury, including 41 credible reports of physical and sexual abuse and 18 of mistreatment of children. The Trump administration recently tried again to dissolve a decades-old legal agreement that sets standards for housing children in ICE custody, including rules around keeping them in the least restrictive facilities and releasing them as quickly as possible. A federal judge rejected the administration’s second attempt.
After that first day at Dilley, Orozco Forero was allowed to see her husband again, and the family would get some time to be together in certain areas of the compound. They had access to meals and snacks; the boys could watch cartoons on a TV in their room at certain times of the day. But over the course of the next three weeks, there would be many times the ordeal stripped her of her humanity, she said, as she was ordered this way and that by people she felt treated her like just another immigrant to process.
“The treatment from a lot of them was cruel toward everyone, even the kids,” Orozco Forero said.
She worked to keep the boys distracted and unaware. When the family congregated in the gym, their father told them they were on a large farm where the men sleep on one side and the moms and kids on the other. The kids said it was like a school because they all wore the same uniform.
One time, when the boys were being particularly rambunctious, an ICE agent screamed at them. “They need to understand they’re not in school,” the agent told them. Orozco Forero begged her not to say it.
“Please don’t say the word,” she said. Don’t say detention.
The first time they tried to deport Orozco Forero and her family, her first week at Dilley, they were eating dinner when officials approached them. They were taken inside administrative offices where another Colombian family was already waiting and told to change out of their uniforms into street clothes given to them by ICE officials. All of them were then escorted to the entrance of the facility.
But once they got there, officials directed Orozco Forero and her family to go back inside.
The family wouldn’t be deported yet, they told a bewildered Orozco Forero: “It’ll be next time.”
Back in Seattle, Orozco Forero’s family and friends had been mobilizing on her behalf. They’d helped arrange a news conference in San Antonio attended by U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat, calling for her release. And the attorney they hired in New York had already filed a motion for a bond hearing hoping they could plead their case to a judge who would allow the family to stay in the country longer.
The family came to the United States in 2023, fleeing cartels in Colombia that had tried to extort her husband, a street food vendor. They initially sought asylum but represented themselves in court and lost their case. Only about 19 percent of immigrants who represented themselves in court over the past decade actually won their asylum cases. Unfamiliar with the U.S. justice system, they failed to file an appeal and were issued a deportation order in April 2024. But ICE allowed them to stay in the country under monitoring.
Orozco Forero’s detention left her community reeling. Right before she was detained, Orozco Forero was getting ready to open her own home-based day care serving children with disabilities. Her husband, who worked in construction, was training at a child care institute in Seattle to one day help with the child care center. Both had Social Security numbers.
Since she was taken to Dilley, at least one mother who had been waiting on the day care to open had been forced to quit her job to care for her child instead. One in 5 child care workers are immigrants like Orozco Forero.
She also had no criminal record, part of a growing number of people being caught up in deportation proceedings who have not committed any crimes and are not the “worst of the worst” Trump pledged to deport. Undocumented immigrants with no criminal conviction now make up the majority of those deported. Orozco Forero’s husband does have a misdemeanor reckless driving conviction for driving under the influence of alcohol on his record and completed a court-mandated course.
They don’t know why they were flagged for deportation in June.
(SEIU)
Inside Dilley, she was also contending with Juan David’s condition, which was deteriorating. He was barely eating, often skipping at least a meal a day.
“I took him a lot to see the doctor because he was losing so much weight. You could already tell on his ribs,” Orozco Forero said. “I told the doctor that I needed them to do the tests that he needed, but what they always told me was they didn’t have the medical staff to do all of that.”
Juan David’s kidney condition turned his urine cloudy. Without the biopsy doctors in Seattle recommended he have, it was difficult to say what was causing it. So far, doctors had determined he was losing red blood cells and protein through his urine. If his levels dropped too low, his condition could become serious quickly.
An ICE official told The 19th in a statement that the agency is “committed to ensuring that all those in its custody reside in safe, secure and humane environments under appropriate conditions of confinement. Medical and mental health intake screenings occur within 12 hours of arrival at an ICE facility and a full assessment within 14 days. Detainees have access to emergency care 24/7.”
The agency declined to answer any specific questions about the family’s experience in detention.
Doctors at Dilley did perform some blood tests on the boy, but they told Orozco Forero they couldn’t do much else. They gave him ibuprofen every day instead. At least three cases have been reported of children with severe medical issues being denied adequate care while in ICE detention. In one case, where a child was vomiting blood, officials allegedly denied care and told the mother to “just give the girl a cracker.”
In Orozco Forero’s case, she was told to wait for a pediatrician who would never come.
There was another deportation false start, one evening when officials escorted Orozco Forero’s husband away.
Orozco Forero was in the room with her sons when her roommate ran in.
“Colombiana!” she shouted. “They are taking your husband!”
Orozco Forero and the boys ran to a window and saw him being taken. We are a joint case,” she yelled to an officer in the hallway. “You can’t take us out one by one!”
Orozco Forero’s boys screamed for him.
“Juan and Daniel looked at him through the window, and I felt the pain the boys felt,” she remembered.
Later that night, they were sitting down for dinner when he walked back into the cafeteria.
The boys ran the length of the room shouting: “Papi, papi is here.”
He carried them as the room burst into applause.
“God is good,” she heard people say.
No explanation was ever given to the family.
When Orozco Forero later told her family what happened, they were able to get enough time on the phone to clue her into what was being done on their behalf back home — the media attention her case garnered and the multiple letters of support they had secured from colleagues and families she worked with. A GoFundMe was racking up tens of thousands of dollars from people who didn’t even know her personally but had heard her story.
“They are mobilizing for you,” her family told her. “You were able to touch a lot of hearts.”
She felt supported, blessed, important — if for a moment. It was one of her hardest days in detention, she said, because it was the first time she felt real hope.
“For a moment,” she said, “I thought I was going to be able to get out.”
The third time they came for her, 21 days into her stay, ICE rounded them up all together.
She knew what to expect this time — it was around 11 p.m. while she was reading the boys a story from a book in the library. Her husband was already waiting for them in the administrative office. They changed clothes again and this time were ushered onto a white van with no door handles on the inside.
“I need to speak with my family and my attorney,” Orozco Forero told them, but they said she was going to an ICE court in Louisiana where she could get in touch with her family.
The van drove them nine hours east to the Alexandria Staging Facility in Louisiana, the nation’s central hub for deportation flights. More than 40,000 have been shuttled out from there this year alone.
Orozco Forero had seen this place only on TV.
“I thought, ‘God, please, let some sign reach my family that we are in this place,’” she said.
On that expansive tarmac, she watched people get marched out of the country. Most were in handcuffs and shackles. There were other families, too.
A little girl, maybe 10, had been brought alone in a van. Later, a woman got out of a bus and immediately started screaming “Julia,” looking for her daughter inside the vans until she spotted the girl.
“They hugged. It was a moment of sadness and we all watched as she hugged her daughter,” Orozco Forero recalled.
Then the mother’s screams cut through the stifling air. “Six months!” the mother spat at the officials. Six months they’d kept them apart.
Orozco Forero sat on that tarmac for hours before they finally called her family into a large white plane full of other Colombians. She’d carried some hope until the moment she set foot inside it.
This next part she remembers only as if she watched it happen very far away. She couldn’t talk; only cried. Voices sounded distorted.
Someone sang Colombia’s national anthem.
They arrived in Bogotá with nothing.
They’ve been in Colombia for a little over a month now, living with Orozco Forero’s grandmother — their only family left in the country. They’ve started to work as street vendors at night again, and they’re scouring the city for a doctor who will see Juan David. An appointment alone can cost about $1,000, if they can even secure one. The money from the GoFundMe, which in the end collected more than $34,000, will go toward his medical bills. Next school year, Orozco Forero hopes to put the boys in a bilingual school so they don’t lose their English proficiency.
But she hasn’t quite given up on returning just yet. She’s continued taking early childhood courses remotely through the Washington State Department of Children, Youth and Families, just in case a path opens up for them.
She has wondered if they were deported not in spite of being a family — but because they were one. The blistering ramp-up of deportation under the Trump administration followed a directive to arrest 3,000 people a day, a goal the administration later denied. But still, did rounding up a family make that mission easier to attain?
“In those detention centers, there are many families who are innocent,” she said. “We were innocent.”
Now, they are settling into life: Juan David needs a biopsy. The boys need to get in school. They need to rebuild — they don’t have a choice.
“First in my thoughts are Juan and Daniel and the future I want for them. I am fighting for them to be good kids,” she said. “There are days where we feel those emotional dips. But I am a believer — I believe everything is a process and everything has a purpose.
“Perhaps in a few years, we can return.”
Great Job Chabeli Carrazana & the Team @ The 19th Source link for sharing this story.
