When Hundreds of Mothers and Children Were Abandoned by ICE, San Antonio Stepped up to Help

For-profit immigrant detention centers, failing to meet daycare center standards, released 500 asylum seekers at bus stations around the city. Here's how the community responded.

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The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency isn’t explaining why, in early December of 2016, they suddenly released hundreds of mothers and children asylum seekers from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras into the streets of San Antonio, Texas.

Perhaps they were expecting more immigrants to rush the border before Trump’s inauguration. Or maybe it was because, a week earlier, a judge ruled the Texas detainment centers, located in Karnes and Dilley, could not be licensed as daycare centers for children seeking U.S. asylum with their mothers. The detention centers, run by the for-profit prison companies CoreCivic and the Geo Group, do not meet state standards for childcare facilities. The Dilley facility alone can hold up to 2,400 women and children.

Whatever the reason, over 500 women and children were dropped off at bus stations around San Antonio over several days, many of them with nothing more than an open bus ticket and a rain slicker. Many of the mothers wore tight tracking monitors fastened to their ankles, to ensure they would show up for immigration court hearings.

“I first heard about the mass release from a Facebook post for the King William’s Neighborhood Association,” explained San Antonio resident Jen Morey. “The Mennonite church right around the corner in our neighborhood was working with RAICES [a San Antonio based immigrant and refugee assistance agency] to provide temporary shelter. The church had reached out to the community for help. They were beginning to take in a lot of women and children from the bus stations.”

Members of several churches in San Antonio routinely walk the bus stations, bringing backpacks filled with food, books for children, and diapers for parents who might have just crossed the border and are overwhelmed and confused about what to do. They might not know that Los Angeles is a three day bus trip from San Antonio, for example.

The church volunteers are trained in how to approach possibly undocumented women, especially women who may have already been traumatized in the sex trade before ever crossing the border. These monitors help women and children find resources and shelter, especially before predators recognize them as vulnerable.

It was these monitors who first realized ICE was up to something.

“First there were prison buses with barred windows carrying sixty to seventy people stopping at the bus stations,” explained John Garland, a pastor at the San Antonio Mennonite Church. Garland has a long history working on the border offering help to immigrants. “Immigration detainment is imprisonment,” he said. “It’s natural our church would want to help immigrants find safe harbor and shelter.”

With gang violence topping sixty murders per 100,000 in Honduras, and 100 per 100,000 in El Salvador, both Mexico and the United States saw an increase in asylum seekers in 2016. Asylum claims in Mexico increased by 156.4 percent in 2016 from the previous year, and have been on the rise for years as people continue to flee violence in Central America.

Reading about the stranded asylum seekers, Jen Morey felt compelled to go to the bus station to offer assistance. “It was late at night and I thought…I need to go there,” she said. “I don’t speak Spanish but I’ve got to do something.”

RAICES partnered with the San Antonio Mennonite Church to set up a temporary relief station for the asylum seekers, and started gathering clothing, food, and medical supplies.

Jen Morey found herself on the hunt for blow up mattresses and sheet sets. “The employees at WalMart, once they heard what we were doing, all pitched in to find anything that might work,” she said. “The church didn’t have enough heat so we were really concerned about the kids being cold.”

“I spent the second half of my night running back and forth to the pharmacy,” she added. “Two thirds of detainees had upper respiratory infections—a few even had to go to the hospital.”

One woman was rushed immediately to the hospital with a widespread infection stemming from a cactus scratch. “Her leg was swollen and purple and even her stomach had purple splotches,” said Morey. Volunteers had to care for her three-year-old son while she was in the hospital. The woman’s husband, who lived in Houston, had been contacted and was trying to make his way to San Antonio as quickly as he could.

The pastor was in the parking lot when the husband arrived three days later. “I was holding his son, who he’d never met before, and this tiny child was clinging to me after all this confusion and days of strangers and strange foods. He called me Papa and yet there was his father, waiting in the parking lot to pick him up.”

Most of the detainees have been reunited with their families, and are awaiting their asylum hearings before a judge. A few remain in San Antonio, staying at churches and retreat centers. John Garland and his Mennonite church community continue to monitor bus stations and remain vigilant to offer help to any other immigrants and asylum seekers in need.

Diana Kirk is the author of Licking Flames. Her essays and interviews can be found in Nailed, Thought Catalog, Five 2 One and The Psychology of It. She lives in the PNW with her three sons and husband.