A day outside an LA detention center shows profound impact of ICE raids on families

Los Angeles – In a federal immigration building in downtown Los Angeles guarded by the navies, the girls, the sons, the aunts, the nieces and other Americans, head for a underground garage and line up with a door with a buzzer at the end of a dark and dark stairwell.

It is here that families, some with lawyers, come to find their relatives after being arrested by federal immigration agents.

For immigrants without legal status which are detained in this part of southern California, their first judgment is the center of treatment of immigration and customs in the subsoil of the federal building. The agents verify their identity and obtain their biometrics before transferring them to detention establishments. Upstairs, immigrants align around the block for other services, including for green cards and asylum applications.

A recent day, dozens of people arrived with medicines, clothes and the hope of seeing their beloved, if only briefly. After hours of waiting, many were refused without new, not even confirmation that their parent was inside. Some have relayed horrible conditions of conditions inside, including prisoners who have so thirsty that they drank in the toilet. Ice did not respond to requests for comments sent by e-mail.

Barely two weeks ago, demonstrators walked around the federal complex after aggressive raids in Los Angeles who started on June 6 and did not stop. The explanations scribbled on President Donald Trump always mark the walls of the complex.

The people arrested come from various countries, including Mexico, Guatemala, India, Iran, China and Laos. About a third of the 10 million county residents were born abroad.

Many families have learned the arrests of circulating videos on social networks showing that masked officers in parking lots in home deposits, car washing and in front of tacos stands.

Around 8 am, when lawyers start, a few lawyers buzz the basement of the basement called “B-18” while families look forward to hearing any information idea.

Christina Jimenez and her cousin arrive to check if her 61-year-old stepfather is inside.

His family had prepared for the possibility that this happens to the day worker waiting to be hired outside a home depot in the suburbs of Los Angeles in Hawthorne. They started to share locations when the raids intensified. They told him that if he was detained, he had to remain silent and follow the instructions.

Jimenez had urged him to stop working, or at least avoid certain areas as raids increased. But he was stubborn and “always jostled”.

“He could be sick and always tries to go to work,” said Jimenez.

After learning her arrest, she looked for it online on the locator of the ice prisoner but could not find it. She tried to call the ice in vain.

Two days later, his phone cracked from his location in the city center.

“My mother is in shock,” said Jimenez. “She goes very angry with crying, the same with my sister.”

Jimenez says his name in the intercom – Mario Alberto del Cid Solares. After a brief wait, he is told yes, he is there.

She and her cousin are pushing a sigh of relief – but their questions remain.

His greatest fear is that instead of being sent to his homeland in Guatemala, he will be expelled in another country, which the Supreme Court has recently ruled was authorized.

In the middle of the morning, Estrella Rosas and her mother came to pick up her sister, Andrea Velez, an American citizen. One day earlier, they saw Velez detained after putting his marketing job in a shoe company in the city center.

“My mother told me to call 911 because someone had kidnapped her,” said Rosas.

Coating in a one -way street, they had to surround the block. As they returned, she says they saw VEZ handcuffed in a car without license plates.

Velez’s family believes they were targeted to look Hispanic and stand near a tamale stand.

Rosas has her sister’s passport and the American birth certificate, but learns that she is not there. They find it next to it in a federal detention center. She was accused of hampering immigration agents, which the family denies, but is released the next day.

About 20 people are now outside. Some have found cardboard on which to sit after the hours of waiting.

A family comforts a woman who is crying gently in the stairwell.

Then the door opens and a group of lawyers emerges. Families rush to wonder if lawyers could help them.

Kim Carver, a lawyer for the Trans Latino coalition, says that she planned to see her client, a transgender Honduurian woman, but she was transferred to an establishment in Texas at 6:30 am that morning.

Carver accompanied her less than a week ago for an immigration interview and the asylum officer told her that she had a credible case. Then the ice officers entered and owned it.

“Since then, it was just a prosecution trying to find it,” she said.

As more and more people arrive, the group is starting to share information. A person explains the very important “number A”, the registration number given to each detainee, who is necessary before a lawyer can help.

They exchange advice such as how to add money to an account for telephone calls. A woman says $ 20 lasted three or four calls for her.

Mayra Segura is looking for her uncle after her frozen popsicle cart was abandoned in the middle of the sidewalk of ass City.

“They couldn’t find it in the system,” she said.

Another lawyer, visibly frustrated, comes out. She wears bags of clothing, snacks, Tylenol and water that she says that she was not allowed to give to her client, even if he said that he had received only one bottle of water in the last two days.

The line extends outside the stairwell in the sun. A man leaves and returns with water for everyone.

Almost an hour after family visits should start, people are finally allowed to enter.

Always carrying scrubs at the Labor Hospital, Jasmin Camacho Picazo returns to see her husband again.

She brought a sweater because he had told him that he was cold and that her back injury was aggravated to sleep on the ground.

“He mentioned this morning (that) people were drinking in the toilet water to the toilet,” explains Picazo.

On her phone, she shows images of her car left on the side of the road after her arrest. The window was broken and the keys were still in contact.

“I can’t stop crying,” said Picazo.

His son continues to ask: “Will Papa come and pick me up from school?”

More than five hours after the arrival of Jimenez and his cousin, they see his stepfather.

“He was sad and he is afraid,” said Jimenez thereafter. “We have tried to reassure it as much as possible.”

She wrote his phone number, which he had not memorized, so that he could call her.

More people arrive as the others are allowed to enter.

Yadira Almadaz comes out crying after seeing the boyfriend of his niece for only five minutes. She says he was in the same clothes he was wearing when he was detained a week ago during an asylum appointment in the city of Tustin. He told her that he had only received cookies and fries to eat every day.

“It breaks my heart to see a young man cry because he’s hungry and thirsty,” she said.

Four minutes before the end of the time of visit, an ice officer opens the door and announces that it’s over.

A woman breaks him with frustration. The officer tells him that he would be in trouble if he helped him at 4 p.m. after 4 p.m.

Over 20 people are still waiting online. A little runoff. Others linger, fixing the door with disbelief.