——–South Texas Family Residential Center, Dilley, Texas
From June 2025 to April 2026, the author was held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, along with her mother and four younger siblings, after her father was charged with a fatal attack on protestors in Boulder, Colorado. This essay is based on notes she kept during her time in the Dilley detention center, which began when she was seventeen years old.
ICAN’T IMAGINE WHAT I WOULD do if I couldn’t go outside to look at the sky from time to time. I love it when it is full of clouds, but I hate it when it is empty and blank. I love how each cloud takes a shape of its own and how they interact with each other and with the light. Then the officers come and stare at me awkwardly, and I go back to my room.
Only when it is rainy or windy do I truly feel like myself, like a human. The sound of rain brings back memories of home, when I would go out into the street, where the sky was so dark. I would stand alone under the rain and be at peace. When it is windy, I remember skating free in the park with the wind blowing right in my face.
My family and I have been moved to a new room, but beyond the metal fence all I see are dead trees between our place and the road. The longer we stay here, the more we become like dead trees. One woman told me that she forgot the things she liked to do. She said, I really don’t know who I am anymore. Spring comes, and most of the trees show signs of life, but others remain dead.
Some of the officers never change, no matter how nicely or respectfully we treat them. They are trained to be mean, not to care. One of the nice officers told us she hates this place and wants to work elsewhere. Some officers won’t help us but at least they aren’t mean. Others are mean only with words. The worst ones deliberately try to make our lives miserable.
For seven months, we weren’t allowed any visitors or mail. During the second month, a teacher sent me a card. The mail lady showed it to me and said, “This card was sent to you, but you’re not allowed to read it. I will have to send it back. Only legal documents are allowed in the mail.”
The center has a small book collection, mostly in Spanish. I looked for books related to medicine, my area of interest, but never found any. During the tenth month, our teachers came to visit, and now I finally have books I’m interested in and can read.
I finished The Tempest and am currently halfway through Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande. When I read, I feel like I’m in the room with the surgeon, closely watching the surgery and sometimes even participating. Whenever the author goes to a new place, like a patient’s house or a doctor’s office, he describes his surroundings. He gives just enough detail to help me picture it all.
I decided to try to do that, and it’s hard. I don’t know what specific things or colors are called. I try to describe them in my own way. For example, the walls in the visitation area are covered with wallpaper. When I asked people what color it was, some said gray and others said brown. I thought about how I would make this color if I were in art class. I would add brown, gray, red, and a lot of white.
In the dining room, I take a blue plastic tray and sit. After the first bite of horribly cooked chicken, I notice a strand of something in the food. At first, I think it is parsley or some sort of seasoning, but as I examine it, I realize it is a long, gray-black hair. I hold it up for other residents to see before taking the whole tray back to the server. At first, they don’t have extra food, so I have to wait thirty minutes for more. It is so hard, even after fasting twelve hours, to eat food like this. This is the second time I’ve found something in my food. The food is already terrible enough, always frozen, precooked, low quality. It doesn’t need anything added to make it disgusting.
Throughout Ramadan, I feel like they are punishing us. They know we can’t eat during lunchtime, not until dinner, after sunset, around eight. They make lunch way better than dinner, with different sauces and more choices, though none of the Muslims are eating. Then, at dinner, we have almost the exact same thing every day. During Ramadan, we eat terrible fried fish more than fifteen times. I wish they would cook food that they themselves would eat.
To get halal food, your name has to be on a list. One night, when an Ethiopian Muslim lady goes to dinner, the server can’t find her name. She explains that she has talked to the chaplain and he put her name on the list, that she received breakfast this morning with no problem, that she has been fasting for fourteen hours. The server refuses to give her anything. She has to wait until the next morning for breakfast, but they don’t give her that either. By now she has been fasting for twenty-four hours. Then she faints.
Later, she files a grievance, and the grievance coordinator agrees that the server should have given her the food. But the next day the woman learns that the grievance coordinator has reported that the grievance was unfounded. That is her response to every grievance, whatever evidence you present. She says one thing to your face and puts another on the official paper. The facility simply can’t have anything reported that could be used against them.
But still, we file: grievances for their neglect of my brother’s appendicitis, my mother’s chest pain and the frightening lump under her ribs, my sister’s cavities. The head of medical makes false promises and is never held accountable. She promises to order my glasses, but I find out almost three weeks later that she never did. The grievance coordinator’s sole job is to cover up any mistakes.
One of the people who visits us says, “Everything you are experiencing is under-standable, because you are in survival mode.”
In movies, you see characters forced to do things that are against their beliefs just to survive. Is survival mode simply the willingness to do whatever it takes to stay alive? Some might say that this hardship has shown how strong and how resilient I am, that it’s brought out the best in me, but I don’t entirely agree.
I keep pushing through because I don’t have another choice. Giving up isn’t an option. I haven’t been forced to do anything against my beliefs, but many of my views have changed. My view of human nature. Of the value of a piece of gum. Of an open window. Of right and wrong. Of community. My view of life has changed.
In survival mode, people will do anything to stay alive—but what if you can’t do anything? All I can do is wait. Does waiting count as something?
I talk to a woman from Russia who has been detained for over two years, transferred from one jail to another. She says the worst part is that there is no way out, nothing she can do. When I prepare for court or write a statement, I feel a slight sense of control. At other times, I feel others have taken over my life and will dictate my future. Everything has been taken away from me, including my family.
I have always been taught that hard work can get me through a problem. Now I realize that even the ability to work hard is a privilege. I’m trapped, and working hard isn’t the solution anymore. Trust is. I have to trust in God, in the people who care about me. I have to trust that my lawyers will do everything they can to help me, that even in darkness there is goodness, that someone else will look at this injustice and decide to do something about it.
My brother and I have chosen to stop thinking about time. A lot of people here have found it is better if they don’t keep track of the days. It’s better to not even know what day it is. We call weekends “dead weekends” or “sad weekends.” Most people are depressed and cry then because they know no work is being done on their cases. That another week has passed and we are still trapped here. Throughout the week, the days start with the hope—that we will receive a judge’s decision, and it will be our last day.
At night, I go to sleep with the sound of the clock ticking in my mind.
In our room are two rows of lights, one directly above the bunk bed and another a little further away. We are allowed to turn off the lights above the beds at night, but the others are to remain on at all times, so the room is still very bright. It is important to sleep in darkness, especially for kids. Our brains are being fried. It is a form of torture.
For my mom, wearing a tight, low-quality eye mask gives her a headache. I person-ally just bury myself under the blanket. I wish they would give us five minutes of darkness. It turns out even darkness is a blessing not everyone can have.
The mattresses are thin and uncomfortable. My scoliosis pain grows every day, and all they do is give me Tylenol. Tylenol or ibuprofen are what they give for everything—ear infection, tummyache, scoliosis. They deny me a second mattress, and I have to beg and fight for multiple days just to get an extra pillow.
Sleeping has been my way of escaping reality. Most of the time I don’t have any dreams, but when I do, they feel so real. One time I dream we are being released and finally going home. After I wake up, I am disappointed and depressed for the whole day.
This place is not getting enough attention, and what we are doing on the inside to fight is not working. I decide to speak out, in a long letter and then by phone, with a reporter. The very next day, my mother and I are called early in the morning. “Only you and your oldest daughter need to come down,” my mother is told. “We’ll have some officers stay with the kids.” The shift captain tells us, “We got an order from higher up that you have to be separated.” He says to me, “Since you’re eighteen, you can’t stay with your family anymore.” It is January. I turned eighteen back in June. Mom begs and cries. I ask to say goodbye to my siblings and get my stuff. No, they say.
After the separation, I can’t sleep. My mind is always on high alert. Everything here has a specific time—food, library, visitation, and prayer—and if I miss one, there are no second chances. Without my mother and siblings, my mind is afraid of oversleeping, so I can’t rest. I wake up in the middle of the night, frightened it is too late. If I have a nice officer, she might wake me up, but most of them don’t. Some people adapt easily and can schedule their bodies to wake up at specific times, but I can’t.
In the beginning, I kept having flashbacks: Me standing outside our house, surrounded by lights and sirens as the FBI goes in. Being trapped in a van in the middle of nowhere with complete strangers. A garage door slowly closing behind us. Our first sight of the detention center, emerging from the darkness at two in the morning. My brain keeps reliving every second leading up to the disaster and every second after that, up to our arrival here.
Before this happened, I’d never heard about family detention. And even though we’ve now been detained for almost a year, a big part of me still can’t believe what is happening to us.
To go to my visitation with my family, I have to pass through multiple chained gates, a constant physical reminder that we’re trapped, helpless. I pass the main gate and a big, mostly empty space where cars and buses empty their loads of humans or products. This is the only way in or out. It is the same gate we entered at two in the morning on June 4, 2025. Every time I pass by, I recall that night and how terrified we all were.
Sometimes I also pass through intake, the first place you go when you arrive here. There they take your clothes and property, and you have to shower in an open shower area, which is humiliating. Then you wear weird clothes. You sit for hours waiting to be processed. They take your picture, which turns out to be horrible, and then they show you your room.
Intake is also the last place we will go before leaving, to reclaim our property. I sometimes try to imagine the day we will be called to intake, and this exact gate will open, and we will leave. Sometimes when we pass by, I see people who have just arrived. The tears on the mothers’ faces and the terrified looks of the children say more than words.
On visitation days, I walk with other girls my age going to visit their families. On our way back, one girl and I always used to say, “Another day.” Eventually, her family got released, but she was kept behind. ICE said she would be released after them, but she never was. She is still here. I know three other girls in the same situation. Their families were released while the oldest daughter stays trapped. When a whole family has the same legal case, why let some go and make others stay? They like to keep one girl behind, like a hostage.
This possibility terrifies my mother and me. I’ve been separated once; I can’t be separated again. At first, my mother begged for my return, until she was told, “If you keep asking, your daughter will be taken to an entirely different facility.”
There is no pattern to how they rule on our cases, nothing you can make sense of. Several months will go by when every case is denied. Then, during other months, bonds are accepted and people are released. Appeals are thrown out for translation problems, or for absurd reasons, like the case of a woman who needed her passport to prove to the court that she was a Turkish citizen, but ICE had taken it. ICE picks on people. They are often vindictive. A woman near to giving birth was separated from her husband after she spoke up too often about the way we’re treated. I know one woman who won’t talk about her case, who won’t even ask for socks. She hopes that maybe if she says nothing, she can get free.
Habiba Soliman, a first-year, bilingual college student, is majoring in biology and hopes to become a doctor. She is the oldest of five. Outside school and family life, she loves to ice- and roller-skate.
Image: G. Edward Johnson, CC BY 4.0
