Back to His Roots: Biden Ponders Return to Family Detention
When this photograph of families detained at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas from 2019 appeared in the New York Times last week (on March 6, 2023), my heart sank. I was immediately taken back to 2018 and 2019, to the previous times, when I volunteered on the ground and remotely at Dilley as an interpreter and legal advocate. Every element of this photograph is familiar to me: the brightly colored t-shirts and sweatshirts that were ordered in mass quantities for the detainees, the jeans, the cheap sneakers. I was struck by the little boy’s hand on his mom’s back. That sort of clinginess was common among the traumatized children who had traveled thousands of miles only to end up at Dilley, where they were retraumatized. I also remembered how shocked many volunteers were to discover that it was not Trump–whose horrific family separation policies and blatant racism had motivated many of us to take action–that built the “baby jail” at Dilley. It was the Obama and Biden administrations.
And now, as Title 42 comes to an end, Biden is considering a return to his roots.
It is hard to know where to start when it comes to talking about family detention.
Do I talk about how all of the kids were sick at Dilley? How their mothers routinely told us that there were no medications available to them? Do I talk about the children who died? The two year-old who fell asleep sitting up in a plastic chair because his fever spiked but his mom had to keep talking with the person preparing her for her credible fear interview, recounting hours of difficult testimony about the abuse she had suffered?
Is it really necessary to explain that there are no circumstances under which detaining children is acceptable? How can I make it clear that it is impossible to make it okay, even when the guards outfit the trailer with Halloween decorations and dress up as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and hand out candy?
As a member of Respond Crisis Translation, I think about language justice a lot. I pay attention to the ways that people are marginalized, disempowered, and victimized through language injustice. I have tried to learn from my fellow advocates how to recognize those processes and address them.
There was, of course, language injustice at Dilley just as there is throughout the US immigration system. The family detention system was designed to deny families services in lots of ways, most of which ripple through other facilities, regardless of the populations involved.
I saw Indigenous women who were completely isolated (aside from their children) from the rest of the families because no one else spoke their language. I saw the distinctly more aggressive way that Black families were treated, especially Haitian women and their children. I saw women wait for hours to meet with an attorney or other team member because no interpreters were available to facilitate a meeting. I watched a judge rule against a client who had filed an appeal. She didn’t know that she and her baby were going to be deported until after the hearing had ended and team members could get her into the hallway to explain the outcome. She had thanked him as the video conference ended. The judge had an interpreter, but only used her to allow him to understand others. No translation was provided for detainees. They were completely lost in the process.
We won’t have hard data on the long-term impacts of policies like family separation and family detention for some time. We may never hear some of these stories. After all, many families are deported and face the very real dangers that led them to flee in the first place. But there is no question that family detention is wrong. Even Joe Biden knows that—at least he does when it is politically expedient for him.
