The cramped room was filled with women, some lying on the cold floor, others looking scared or simply sad, all in desperate need of food and water. The bathrooms were just curtained stalls. The room itself was frustratingly bright, with hard, uncomfortable benches that added to the tension of the situation. Later in the night, we were finally given some dinner. My request for halal or vegetarian food was rejected.
Still, despite these awful circumstances, I clung to my belief in humanity. I took a moment to collect my thoughts. I then began engaging in conversations with the women around me. Over the 14 hours I spent in processing, I connected with many of them. Through a sometimes-challenging language barrier, we talked—about how we’d gotten there, where we’d been, and what was waiting for us on the inside. I discovered that another woman there also had asthma, as she carried her inhaler. I learned that several women were separated from their children.
I soon learned the color coding used in the detention center. Orange indicated “low crime,” meaning those individuals were asylum seekers, their “crime” being the act of legally seeking asylum or crossing the border without authorization. Women kept asking me, “Did you cross the border?” I answered: “I hadn’t.’’ “I had a ticket.’’ “I had F-1 visa one day before.’’ “I am a doctoral student.’’ The red uniforms denoted more serious offenses. I came to understand that this facility serves as an immigration detention center where asylum seekers, refugees, and immigrants—people escaping conflict, war, oppression, and violence—are taken and find themselves stuck for months or years. I was given orange. I wondered which border I had crossed without my knowledge.
COOKIES, CONVERSATION, AND CONFUSION
Around 6 a.m. on Thursday, March 27, having gone two nights without sleep and little food, I was finally processed in the for-profit ICE prison. My request for a space for my morning prayer was rejected by an intake officer. Instead, I was directed to the medical center for my first evaluation, which primarily consisted of me listing my health issues to the nurse and trying to remember the names of the medications I was taking. I spent hours waiting there under extremely loud TV sounds. Later, when I was directed to where I was to stay in the afternoon, I was bewildered to find 23 other women crowded into a small cell. They greeted me with warmth and smiles, which only added to my confusion. The questions I initially had about who they were and why they were there continued to fade. I opened the plastic bag of “essentials” that the officers had given us, which contained two to three changes of clothes, flip-flops, a small bottle of shampoo, a comb, one thin blanket and sheet, toothpaste, a cheap toothbrush, and a handbook.
Always the student, I wanted to dive into the handbook, but it was written in Spanish. I asked a few of the other women if they had an English version; they did, and they were eager to help me understand everything. I read the handbook and instructions multiple times, but some parts were confusing.They walked me through the setup of the phone, which felt outdated and challenging to operate. They showed me how to use the old tablets in the room, explained how to set up my account, and guided me through the commissary process—the weekly food ordering system that often failed to deliver—along with a few other limited features. After that, utterly miserable and drained, I turned my attention to the blue metal bunk bed.
My cellmates noticed how tired I looked and came over to help: “You can store your clothes under the bed,” they said, “and you can push it to create a small shelf for some of your belongings.” We managed to do that together. I received a small black box for my clothes that contained pasta, oil, and some bugs—not the best surprise. We started cleaning up together. They taught me how to do laundry, making sure the bag is tight so the clothes don’t get lost, which would mean a lot of difficulty requesting more. One woman offered me cookies, while the other offered tea, and they both sat down to chat with me. “This place is the worst,” they said, telling me about the times when they did not have access to female hygiene products or toilet paper, times when their questions were not answered, how they were constantly counted and lined up, how some officers raised their voices or, somehow even worse, did not even respond. How in the kitchen, they were forced to sit at another table without reason. They shared how cold they were in the wintertime, with no extra blankets, jackets, or proper shoes being provided. They shared stories of witnessing violence.
The next chapter of my experience in prison began in that moment. Over the next six and a half weeks, I found myself immersed daily in the love, beauty, resilience, and compassion of these women. We each found ourselves trapped in our own individual nightmares, but we found comfort and relief in one another, and we shared the burden and pain by listening to each other.
In one small room, a world of possibilities unfolded: It transformed into a therapy space, a beauty salon, a hairstyling center, a Pilates studio, a medical center, a massage room, an interfaith temple, and an art studio all at once—without any tools or resources. We tackled long-standing disputes that have plagued our nations for years, between Armenia and Turkey, Russia and Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. We bonded over our shared experiences, which spanned geographies from Colombia to Iran and Afghanistan to Honduras. These warm interactions extended to all other women I interacted with outside of my room in the ICE prison.
Each conversation turned into a group therapy session where we would gather to open up about the grief we felt regarding the harsh realities and dehumanization occurring in a godforsaken for-profit ICE prison in America, a place we had all come to pursue our dreams. During limited times outside in the yard, I walked with many women, listening to their stories. Among us was a singer with almost a million followers, a talented violinist, a Pilates instructor, a visual arts teacher, a devoted mom, a loving grandmother, and a woman with a passion for arranging flowers. Someone’s best friend. Someone’s fiancée. Someone’s wife. Someone’s daughter. An aunt. A human rights activist. A human, like all of us, with a heart. And me, a very confused international doctoral student.
