El Paso - intake and more tears

In the shelter, the Spanish-speaking volunteers (like me!) do intake with each of the refugee families to allow us to organize travel for them. One of the first questions we ask is if they have any family members still in detention and the very first woman I speak to is sobbing because her mother wasn't released. We record these names but its very difficult to do anything with them.

Each person that comes over the border has the name and contact number of a friend or family member living in the US who will serve as their sponsor. Most of the refugees have carried this information with them for months, often physically written down. I speak to one woman who is petrified that she will be sent back to Guatemala because she has lost the contact information for her sponsor. (Which I get from her family over Skype.)

Some families (or family members, usually the women) don't even speak Spanish because they are from indigenous communities. One of these women has come across the border with a newborn. We search among the refugees to find people willing to interpret Quiche or Mam or Ixil.

Each refugee is given paperwork from the US government to replace their ids or drivers license from their home countries. The papers each say that the contents within have been explained in Spanish to the refugee in question. But family after family asks me what they say. The documents give details of their immigration court date: the location, time, and date. They say that families can't travel more than 75 miles from these homes of record or move without notifying the government. They say that the reason they have been released is "lack of space."

After intake we call the sponsors to tell them that their families have arrived and that they'll have to organize transportation. Anyone who didn't cry during our welcome speech usually loses it here.

This is also where I start to feel the pressure of doing my job right as I explain to the families that they will need to purchase a flight or bus ticket and correctly convey the names and birth dates of each family member -- names that might have been spelled wrong or spelled weirdly by ICE but  that are now their official names. I explain which bus lines travel to El Paso and give them phone numbers for airlines. I ask that families kindly book flights for reasonable hours. And then we ask the families to call us back with a confirmation number.

The job of the daytime Spanish speaking volunteers is to answer the shelter phones and record (correctly) the travel details for each family. And there are stories of this going wrong: tickets home booked from the wrong city, tickets booked only for the adults, writing down the wrong bus line.

In exchange for a ride back to the hotel, I go with another volunteer to the bus station to drop a family off. As I stand in the waiting area explaining the timetable to the woman and her teenaged son, I see a few Latino faces watching us and tearing up. One man comes up to me and asks me to explain his ticket as well. He is travelling from Texas to North Carolina - a trip of two days with three transfers. I barely understand the schedule myself and I leave the station with an overwhelming sense of anxiety-- obviously just a fraction of the worry and pain that these families have faced.

This process repeats itself on day two but with some notable exceptions: one of the refugees to come through has a US citizen daughter with her. The daughter, a teen, had opted to stay with her mother when she was detained by ICE as they came across the border. She is rightfully furious at how they were treated. Most of the rest of the refugees are from Brazil. In general, the Brazilian have more resources and after we do intake they opt to leave on their own and stay at a hotel.

That night I went back to the hotel to find that I had a roommate, an exchange student from Japan. I didn't want to sit in the same tiny room staring at each other so I grabbed my book and, despite wanting to be alone, perversely invited her to the bar. I learn that she's a student from the University of Alabama and this is her first time in a bar! On a Monday night we were the only ones there besides a politically apathetic, thrice-divorced bartender. (And despite the rainbow flags and the name (Tool Box) I did not connect the dots that it was a gay bar until I googled it later.)