Marie Claire: One Teen’s Family Separation Experience

Marie Claire has published an essay on one teenage girl’s experience of being separated from her mother at the border, and subsequently incarcerated with other girls, some as young as two years old.

“I was taken to a huge, huge cage inside a detention center. They had other cages for the boys, men, and women. It was prison. We could see the other cages, but we weren’t allowed to talk to anyone outside our cage. There were more than 100 girls in there, all from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Most of the girls were between the ages of 6 and 17, but there were a few very young girls too. The little kids would cry, especially when they first arrived. They were saying how much they missed their parents and how much they wanted to go home. The officers wouldn’t really pay much attention to them; they just walked away like nothing happened. The big girls would try to calm them down. We would play with them or tell them to watch the movie playing on the TV.”

This piece also provides a counternarrative to the frequently-told story that recent asylum-seekers are people with little to no ties to the United States.  The teen telling her story had already lived in the U.S., was attending high school and spoke English before the border apprehension incident that led to her separation from her mother. (“The officer’s Spanish wasn’t very good, so I said, “Why don’t you speak to me in English to make it easier?” He was shocked. The officers had been cracking jokes, fooling around, and I had understood everything. They talked about how stupid we were to cross the border and how dumb we were to think we wouldn’t be deported.) 

She told her story to Marie Claire anonymously, and bravely.

-JKoh