This week, ProPublica published an article I wrote based in part on interviews with parents and children held at the nation’s only operational immigrant family detention center in Dilley, Texas. I asked some parents if their children would write to me about their experiences. More than 30 people did so.
One of the letters was from 9-year-old Maria Antonia Guerra Montoya from Colombia. Her letter was written in a notebook. She decorated it with rainbows and hearts. She then drew portraits of herself and her mother in detention uniforms and government-issued ID badges.
I first met Maria a few weeks ago when I managed to get into the Dille Immigration Center. It’s just south of San Antonio. Since the Trump administration reopened the road early last year, more than 3,500 people, including Maria Antonia, her mother, and half of them minors, have cycled through it. I visited the facility in mid-January, before its public appearance, when Liam Conejo Ramos, a 5-year-old boy wearing a blue bunny hat who was being held in Minneapolis with his father, was sent there. The aim was to hear from the children themselves about the conditions in which they were detained.
After signing in, I passed through a metal detector and a series of locked doors to reach the visiting room. A girl around Maria Antonia’s age was quietly playing with her hands when her mother, María Alejandra Montoya, called her over to introduce me.
Maria Antonia did not hold back as she tied her long brown hair into a ponytail. She made her way to the front edge of the chair, pushed her thick white-framed glasses up her nose, and jumped into the chair.
I asked her how she and her mother got there.
Well, she said, we were supposed to go to “Disneylandia,” but we ended up going to “Dillylandia.”
Then she told me the story. She lived in Colombia with her grandmother and traveled back and forth regularly to see her mother, who had been in the United States since 2018. (María Alejandra had overstayed her visa, then married an American and applied for a green card.) In August, the whole family vacationed at Disney World. Maria Antonia said she had so much fun that she begged her mother to come back for the park’s annual Halloween celebration.
They booked her a ticket for a 10-day vacation during the school holidays. She told me about how she planned her “101 Dalmatians” costumes. She was going to be Cruella de Vil and her mom and stepdad’s spotted dog. The whole costume was so bulky that it filled her entire suitcase.
But as soon as she arrived at Miami International Airport on October 2nd, everything started going wrong. She was supposed to be dropped off with her mother by an accompanying flight attendant. However, she said she was intercepted by immigration officials and taken to a room for questioning, while her mother was questioned in another room. I remember her telling me that they asked me all kinds of questions that I had no idea how to answer (notebooks and voice recorders were not allowed in the detention center). “I can tell you my name and my birthday and my mom’s name and birthday and that I’m from Colombia. That’s it,” I kept saying over and over again. I didn’t know what else to say.
After the two were interrogated for hours, they were forced into a cold room together. Maria Alejandra’s cell phone was confiscated. There was no way to contact my stepfather, who was waiting at the airport. Maria Antonia said she didn’t know why her mother was being held since she had applied for a green card and had a valid tourist visa.
Maria Antonia was studying English at a private school in Medellin. She overheard one immigration judge telling another that if she had been 10 years old, they would have separated her from her mother. According to her, that’s when the real horror began.
Then I had to wait in the airport waiting room for 42 hours. They were eventually loaded onto a plane, then into a minivan and taken to a facility in Texas. Maria Antonia said she didn’t really understand where they were going until she saw the center outside her window.
A page from Maria Antonia’s letter to reporter Mika Rosenberg: “They don’t feed me. I’m a vegetarian and I don’t eat well. I don’t have a good education. And I miss my best friend Julieta, my grandmother and school. I already want to go home. Me in Delay.” [Dilley] I’m not happy, so please take me from here to Colombia. ” Retrieved from ProPublica
They had been in detention for nearly four months when I met them. I asked Maria Antonia what it’s like to be stuck in Dilly. She told me that she had passed out twice since she got there. She said she is a vegetarian and eats mostly beans. She felt like she had nothing to do all day and missed school. This was a concern echoed by many other children I spoke to during my interviews. She said she made some new friends in Dilly, but it was tough. She and her mother were detained for so long that new acquaintances often left when they were released or deported.
Her mother, María Alejandra, told me in a long and graphic email of deeper concerns about the deterioration of her and her daughter’s mental and physical health during their prolonged detention. Maria Antonia said she woke up in the middle of the night crying because she feared she would never leave the detention center again or be separated from her mother.
I asked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is run by the Department of Homeland Security and DHS, about Maria Alejandra and Maria Antonia’s story. They said in an email that Maria Alejandra had overstayed her tourist visa and had previously been arrested on suspicion of theft, but the charges were dismissed, according to court documents. While in custody, Maria Antonia has been seen by a medical professional twice and has been seen once a week by a mental health professional, and has “described that she is calm and well-nourished,” DHS said. DHS said everyone in the facility “will be provided with three meals a day, clean water, clothing, bedding, showers, soap, and toiletries,” and that “their diet will be evaluated by a certified dietitian.” DHS also said that “children will have access to teachers, classrooms, and curriculum booklets for math, reading, and spelling,” and that no child will be denied medical care. CoreCivic, which operates the facility, said the facility is subject to multiple layers of monitoring and health and safety is its top priority.
Soon we all said goodbye. However, I continued to communicate with her mother, stepfather, and lawyer after the incident. They shared documents about what happened to them and a legal petition seeking their release.
They learned that immigration officials granted them “voluntary departure” on January 6, allowing Maria Alejandra to pay her own expenses to return to Colombia, avoid having a formal deportation order on her record, and continue applying for a green card from abroad. However, it was not until February 6th that they were finally repatriated to Colombia.
A few days after they returned, her mother told me that the first thing Maria Antonia wanted to do was throw away the government-issued sweatsuit she had been wearing for months. Then the video arrived.
It showed Maria Antonia, wearing pink leggings and a T-shirt with a teddy bear, running outside the school to hug teachers one by one. One of the teachers takes her by the hand and leads her into the classroom. “Look who I brought!” says the teacher. Another young girl, Maria Antonia’s best friend, jumps up from her desk and throws her arms around her. Another friend quickly joined in the hug. She finally returned home.
