Ana Kikabidze did everything the government told her to do. She won an immigration lottery out of 20 million applicants. She got green cards for herself and her kids. She moved to New York. She spent three years and $18,000 getting her paperwork straightened out after a family illness pulled her back to Georgia (the country, not the state). She followed every rule, crossed every t, dotted every i.
And the government’s reward? Locked her and her 11-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son in a camp in Dilley, Texas, where the lights go out at 8 p.m. and the kids wake up sobbing in the dark.
This is the part where the usual suspects tell you the system is working. The Department of Homeland Security told The Marshall Project that detained families “receive due process.” Sure they do. Due process piped in through a video screen, where an immigration judge named Saul Greenstein told Kikabidze she could appeal her deportation order but warned her it would take months. Months in a lockup where her daughter was already waking up in tears and her son was getting angry. Some choice. Fight for the legal status you earned, or give up and go home so your kids stop starving in a cage.
Héctor Berganza / PexelsHere’s what nobody in Washington wants to say out loud: this isn’t a glitch. It’s the design. A former immigration judge, Jeremiah Johnson, said it himself. “It’s a legal strategy to detain someone so they abandon or withdraw their case.” The whole point is to make it so miserable that people with valid claims just quit. The government isn’t processing cases. It’s manufacturing despair and calling it enforcement.
More than 66,000 parents and children detained and deported since Trump took office. Sixty-six thousand. And the Flores Settlement, which has been on the books for decades, says you can’t hold kids longer than 20 days during a surge. Judge Dolly Gee, who oversees that settlement, found children held for 50 days, 91 days, 323 days. In July, more than half the kids at Dilley had been there past the 20-day limit. Five straight months of averaging over the cap. The government didn’t miscount. They just ignored it, because who’s going to stop them?
Gee appointed an independent monitor to do unannounced visits at Dilley for at least a year, paid for by the government. The last time she did this was during Trump’s first term, after six children died in custody. Six kids dead before anyone in a black robe decided maybe somebody should take a look.
Now, I’m not going to pretend an “independent monitor” is some kind of fix. You know what happens when the government appoints a watchdog to watch the government?