The Women and Children of Dilley

In October 2018, when children were being ripped out of their parents' arms at the border, I volunteered to interpret for a week with the Dilley Pro Bono Project (DPBP)—a partner of the Immigration Justice Campaign—at the South Texas Detention Center in Dilley, Texas, the largest immigration detention center (at the time) in the United States. Every week for many weeks before I went and for every week since, a group of volunteer lawyers, interpreters, law students, and assorted other professionals from around the country do likewise. The conditions and legal realities these women were facing at the detention center in October 2018 had not changed much since the center opened in 2014, this despite the fact that the current administration is tweaking every regulation they can in order to limit the grounds for asylum, most relevantly for the population in Dilley: mostly victims of domestic and gang violence. Building a case became harder, but not impossible. The staff and the volunteers continued, and continue still, to help these refugees according to the regulations that exist today, then tomorrow, then the next day. As one lawyer I work with in Oakland reminds her staff and volunteers: This is a marathon, not a sprint.

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The largest immigrant detention center in the United States houses women and children, women with children, children with their mothers.

I want to put that in bold and italics and cover it with exclamation points because the words themselves seem insufficient.

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Before going to Dilley, volunteers had to request authorization to use a laptop computer within the facility. By signing it, I acknowledged and certified that: "I will not use the device to record, broadcast, Skype, or transmit any video images or audio sounds." As far as I know, I signed nothing that prevented me from using my senses and my memory and my limited ability to translate the ensuing thoughts, feelings, and perceptions into the written word.

Since then, some things have changed on the southern border. There have also been changes in how the United States government and its people justify and understand what is going on. What follows is an immediate account of my week in Dilley.

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One occupational hazard of being a translator and an interpreter is that we consider what words connote as much as what they denote. We also consider their associative sway, the heft they bring with them from all the other contexts in which they have been deployed. So, for instance, these women and children are imprisoned, as well as detained. The word imprisoned is harder to look away from, hence more accurate.

Another note on nomenclature: Most of the detained women of Dilley, Texas, the women in Dilley, Texas, these particular women, are from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, a region sometimes referred to as the Northern Triangle. These countries are located in Central America, which is one of three, or two—depending on how you divide up the hemisphere—American continents. Together these continents make up The Americas, and they comprise most of the land in the Western Hemisphere.

These imprisoned women are Americans, as much as any and all of us are Americans, in many cases arguably more so, for many of their ancestors were here, in the Americas, thousands of years before Europeans even knew these lands existed.

If we continue to claim the name "America" for this piece of the Western Hemisphere on what could be called the continent of North America, and "Americans" for those with citizenship in the United States, then we are also denying the connections among us. The intimate connections of cause and effect, colonialism and imperialism, economic and military power, cultural destruction and intrusion. Haves and have-nots. The massive, continuous, and devastating interference by the United States (not America) in the political and economic and military development of The Americas. A book could be written. Many have been. But in the meantime, in casual conversation or lazy mimicry of the powers that be, we call ourselves Americans and thereby deny the inhabitants of the rest of the...