Five years ago, Abbie Arevalo-Herrera and her young daughter Marcela waited with a group of migrants on the south bank of the Rio Grande for the right moment to cross the river and enter the United States. They had left Honduras five weeks earlier, fleeing Arevalo-Herrera’s former common-law husband, who had threatened to kill her. Waiting at the riverbank, Arevalo-Herrera struggled with the fact that it was Marcela’s seventh birthday. She had nothing to give her. A man in the group said, “I’m gonna go and see if I can bring a cake, so we can cut it together,” but he couldn’t make it to the nearby town. Later that night, she recalled, he apologized and said, “I offered you a cake, and I wasn’t able to give it to you.” He took fifty dollars from his pocket and gave it to Arevalo-Herrera for Marcela. Soon afterward, Arevalo-Herrera and her daughter crossed the river, and were apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol agents and brought to a processing station in McAllen, Texas.
Arevalo-Herrera is petite, not much more than five feet tall, with dark shining eyes and thick black hair. She recently turned thirty-one, but looks much younger. Last month, I met her in an office at the First Unitarian Universalist Church in Richmond, Virginia. She wore an orange short-sleeved T-shirt that read “Happy Halloween.” Her skinny jeans revealed a bulky ankle bracelet that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has required her to wear for the past three years. As we spoke, she periodically rubbed her left forearm—the one that her ex-husband, who is also Marcela’s father, used to grab and twist, she said. It was raining heavily, and the damp, she said, aggravates the pain. (In since-deleted Facebook posts, Abbie’s ex-husband denied abusing her and insisted he was a good father to Marcela.) When she and Marcela were first detained, they were still wet from their river crossing and were placed in a detention center that was so cold from air-conditioning that detainees called it the Icebox. “This reminds me of that place,” Arevalo-Herrera said, smiling and shivering in the church office. She went downstairs and returned wearing a gray hoodie.
Arevalo-Herrera and her family have lived in the basement of the church for the past four months. Marcela, who is now eleven, is a sixth grader at a nearby middle school. Last year, Arevalo-Herrera married Elmer Arita, a legal permanent resident whom she met when they were both working at a local restaurant. They have a two-year-old son, Gabriel, who was born in Virginia and is a U.S. citizen. (At Arevalo-Herrera’s request, pseudonyms are being used for both children in order to protect their safety.) Abbie, Elmer, and Gabriel sleep in a converted religious-education room. Marcela sleeps in an adjoining room, which used to be a storage closet.
Arevalo-Herrera came to the United States hoping to apply for asylum. The fact that she and her family currently live in the church is due, in large part, to a controversial Department of Homeland Security practice by which immigrants are given a “Notice to Appear” in court that bears no date or time. In thousands of instances, they are never told when to show up, and are tried in absentia, with few if any options to reopen their cases.
Arevalo-Herrera was processed by the Department of Homeland Security in McAllen, and was given a piece of paper ordering her to appear before an immigration judge. This Notice to Appear provided an exact address—2009 West Jefferson Avenue, Suite 300, Harlingen, Texas—but, where one would expect to see an assigned date and time, the words “to be set” were typed.
Arevalo-Herrera had relatives in Richmond, and she provided officials in McAllen with their address. D.H.S. officials informed her that information about when she had to be in court would be mailed to her there. She and Marcela took a bus to Richmond, where they lived for a time with her relatives. Arevalo-Herrera began working, enrolled Marcela in school, and waited for the notice of her court date. She insists that it never arrived. “I never got any notice,” she told me. On March 10, 2015, she was tried in absentia in an immigration court in Harlingen, and was ordered to leave the country.
For the next three years, Arevalo-Herrera appealed this decision. She continued working and living in Richmond, and Marcela continued in school. She married Arita in March of 2017. In April, after a series of motions to reopen her case, the immigration court in Harlingen denied her request, upholding the notice of removal. She was subject to deportation at any time. Her application for asylum was never considered, because she had not shown up at her initial court date.
On June 18th, with the help of an attorney, Alina Kilpatrick, Arevalo-Herrera and her family moved into the First Unitarian Universalist Church, living in a state of sanctuary. Although ICE has radically increased its pursuit and deportation of undocumented immigrants, it has observed a nonbinding agreement not to enter sensitive areas, such as churches and schools. As a result, around the country, at least forty individuals and families have moved into churches as they seek legal remedy for their immigration cases.
Marcela goes to school each day and Gabriel goes to day care, and they return to the church basement each night. Elmer, who works as a roofer, divides his time between the church and a one-bedroom apartment where the family had previously been living together. Arevalo-Herrera and her lawyer hope to find some way to reopen her case. Like tens of thousands of immigrants, the lives of Arevalo-Herrera and her family have been upended by the chaos and the fear generated by the Trump Administration’s immigration policies and the contradictory court rulings that alternately raise and ease their fears of deportation.
On June 21st, Arevalo-Herrera and Kilpatrick received promising news. The Supreme Court, in Pereira v. Sessions, ruled eight to one against Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the Department of Justice in a case involving a Notice to Appear that hewed closely to Arevalo-Herrera’s. In a blistering opinion for the majority, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “A notice that does not inform a noncitizen when and where to appear for removal proceedings is not a ‘notice to appear.’ . . . The plain text, the statutory context, and common sense all lead inescapably and unambiguously to that conclusion.”
Kilpatrick joined us at the church, and told me that she thought the ruling would have a far-reaching effect on cases in the immigration courts. “The appeals courts may invalidate orders of removal for people like Abbie, who were ordered removed in absentia,” she said. “It’s the hottest issue in immigration law right now.” But, during the past six months, the Trump Administration has created three other, potentially more significant hurdles. Sessions reversed a 2016 decision by the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals that had made domestic-abuse survivors eligible for asylum. “Generally, claims by aliens pertaining to domestic violence or gang violence perpetrated by nongovernmental actors will not qualify for asylum,” Sessions wrote. “The mere fact that a country may have problems effectively policing certain crimes—such as domestic violence or gang violence cannot itself establish an asylum claim.” He also imposed a quota for immigration judges, requiring them to close seven hundred cases a year. And he ended a requirement that asylum-seekers receive a full hearing before an immigration judge. Now judges can close any cases that they deem unlikely to succeed without hearing them.
Arevalo-Herrera was living in Honduras, in 2012, when she saw Marcela’s father threatening to hit their daughter, who was six years old. “I took her in my arms and ran into the bedroom,” Arevalo-Herrera told me. “And he cornered me against the wall. He grabbed me by the neck and just picked me up. I felt like he was killing me. I felt like I was dying at that moment.”
Her sister happened upon the scene and started yelling “Get off!” He relented. “By that time, I had already started looking for options to leave him,” Arevalo-Herrera said. She said that Marcela’s father abused drugs and alcohol and had threatened her repeatedly. She moved into her grandparents’ house, but he quickly found her. “He would come and run around the house, or around the perimeter of the house, with a machete, making noise and screaming for me to come out.”
Reporting him to the police, Arevalo-Herrera thought, was pointless. Kilpatrick said, “The police were probably the most dangerous institution in Honduras.” Arevalo-Herrera added, “And they still are today.” A 2014 United Nations mission described the scope of the danger that women face in Honduras. It found that ninety-five per cent of sexual-violence crimes went unpunished.
Arevalo-Herrera said that Marcela’s father knew this. He told her that, if she had him arrested, he would be out in a matter of days. If that happened, she was certain he would be angrier than before and more likely to kill her. So, she made a plan. She was pregnant again, so she would wait until she gave birth, leave the newborn with her mother, and flee with Marcela for the United States. In January of 2013, Arevalo-Herrera gave birth to a daughter. She nursed her until November, and then left the child with her mother. Arevalo-Herrera and Marcela went north. Arevalo-Herrera hasn’t seen her younger daughter for five years. She is still being cared for by Arevalo-Herrera’s mother, and Arevalo-Herrera’s ex-husband is still involved in her life. It had always been Arevalo-Herrera’s intention to send for her daughter as soon as she was established in the United States. Now she communicates with her child via phone and video chat.
BI Incorporated, a subsidiary of the private-prison company GEO Group, monitors Arevalo-Herrera’s movements through her ankle bracelet, under a program called the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, or ISAP. In 2014, BI Incorporated won a forty-seven-million-dollar contract to monitor more than eighty thousand immigrants currently enrolled in ISAP. The program is an alternative to keeping immigrants locked in detention centers, and it is demonstrably more humane than incarceration. But its methods are still draconian, and, it seems, lucrative: the company also manufactures the ankle bracelets.
After being fitted with her bracelet, in 2015, Arevalo-Herrera was required to check in at ISAP’s Richmond office once a week, and to be available for weekly home visits by ISAP officers. ISAP officials also called her many times a week. When Arevalo-Herrera was pregnant with Gabriel, ISAP agents allowed her to remove the bracelet for seven months, but she still had to check in once a week in person. After Gabriel was born, she had to report to the office three days after leaving the hospital. Shortly thereafter, they reinstalled the ankle bracelet, and she has had to wear it ever since.
After she moved into the church, she stopped going to the check-ins, but ISAP agents continued to call. “They have some kind of weird schedule between one and four A.M.,” she said. “That’s when they call me. Every single night they call.” She added, “I have my phone right here. I can show you the call logs.” Ostensibly, the ISAP agents are checking that she is in the church, but the bracelet has a G.P.S. locator and sounds an alarm if she removes it. The agents know precisely where she is and whether or not she is wearing the bracelet.
During the four months that Arevalo-Herrera and her family have lived in the church, she has grown increasingly uncomfortable with being on the first floor. In an effort to raise awareness about her case, her attorney helped set up a Facebook Live event in which Arevalo-Herrera could answer questions online. The next day, she got a call on her cell phone. “A man said, ‘You fucking woman! You need to pray for your life!’ ” Arevalo-Herrera said, imitating the man’s low drawl. Now she tends to stay in the basement, where there are no windows. “I don’t like coming up here,” she said, as the rain pounded on the skylight above us. Every night, a volunteer, usually a member of the church, sleeps on a mattress in the lobby, to make sure that Arevalo-Herrera and her family are not alone. Volunteers do this in many sanctuary churches across the country, serving as sentries in case anyone, from ICE agents to anti-immigrant protesters, might try to enter.
I followed Arevalo-Herrera down a cinder-block stairway to the basement. The church was built in the nineteen-seventies, and at night it has a cold and cavernous feel to it. There is a large open space in the basement, meant for meals and Sunday-school events. Around it there are a handful of small rooms used as classrooms. “We live here,” Arevalo-Herrera said, pointing to a door bearing two signs: one a computer printout that says “PRIVATE”; the other a sign that Marcela wrote in crayon, which reads, “DO NOT! Enter or open the door! Without knocking!”
Behind the door is one of the small classrooms, which church members converted to a bedroom. Arevalo-Herrera apologized for its messy state. There were toys, books, and a box of diapers on the floor. Two mattresses lay on the gray carpeting. Abbie and Elmer sleep on one, Gabriel sleeps on the other. There is a bathroom down the hall, and the family shares the kitchen with the church staff.
The basement is a busy area, especially on the weekends, and until recently the door to Arevalo-Herrera’s room didn’t lock from the inside. “I can’t lock myself in my room when I’m sleeping,” she told me, before the fix. “No one has ever come in or anything,” she added, “but I still have that fear. It’s always in my mind from my country. No matter where I am, I check the doors.”
On the night I visited, Laura Hastings, a soft-spoken woman in her fifties, had the overnight shift in the lobby. Wearing a faded green T-shirt, sweatpants, and blue sneakers, she sat near a folding table, where she had arranged her laptop and a bottle of Coke Zero. Her shift was from 8 P.M to 7 A.M. “From here, I can see both doors,” Hastings told me, pointing to the church’s two large entryways, each bookended by a pair of large glass panes.
This was her second time on the overnight shift. “The first time was remarkably uninteresting,” she said. She stayed up for a few hours, then slept on an inflatable mattress. “It’s not scary,” Hastings said. “I’m used to being here.” After the church put a Black Lives Matter banner out front a few years ago, she said, the members became accustomed to the occasional objection by passersby or people online.
Hastings is part of what the church calls a “pod”—a group of volunteers who can be called upon to perform various duties, such as sleeping in the lobby, or getting food for the family, or taking the children where they need to go. Hastings, who works in I.T., was raised as a Southern Baptist in South Carolina; her mother was a Democrat and father a Republican. In the past few years, she said, she’s been dismayed by the rise of white-supremacist rhetoric and behavior tied to the election of Donald Trump. “I think it gave it sort of an approval that it didn’t have before,” she said. “It’s gotten decidedly more,” she paused for a minute and looked toward the door, “confrontational is the word I would use. People seem to want to put immigrants in a group of ‘other’—not part of this country. It’s sad.”
As we spoke, a car’s headlights swept across the front window and soon the church door swung open. It was Lana Heath de Martinez, one of the sanctuary organizers. She had brought Marcela and Gabriel home from the library, where Marcela had been doing her homework. Marcela, a thin girl, already the same height as her mother, wearing large glasses and carrying a binder, walked quickly through the lobby and downstairs to join her mother. At a glance, she looked like an ordinary, studious, and cheerful eleven-year-old girl. But Marcela lives in a basement with her mother, who wears an ankle bracelet, and is under an order of deportation. She has a five-year-old sister who she hasn’t seen since she was a baby. If Marcela and her mother return to Honduras, as the U.S. government is ordering them to do, her mother expects to be killed by her ex-husband.
When we toured the basement earlier that night, Arevalo-Herrera showed me Marcela’s bedroom, a converted cinder-block closet. The girl had done an admirable job of giving the room, which measures about six feet by eight feet, some character and warmth. It had been painted lavender, and a pair of bunk beds stood against one wall. Around a small mirror, Marcela had hung an array of blue and red school achievement ribbons, and a dozen bookmarks—given by her previous school—that read, “I am a Super Citizen.”
“She’s like a little old lady, I always tell her,” Arevalo-Herrera said. “She keeps everything.”
On one wall, Marcela had taped a handful of her paintings and drawings. “This is my daughter’s art wall,” Arevalo-Herrera said. “She likes art, but she never actually expressed what she wants before.”
“Fly Free Fly Free,” one painting said. “Free as a Bird,” said another.
“The freedom art started when we got here,” Arevalo-Herrera said.
For Arevalo-Herrera, there are a few remaining legal routes to relief, but none of them are easy, and each is subject to the uniquely convoluted and logic-challenged world of immigration law. First, if Pereira v. Sessions is interpreted the way that Kilpatrick and other immigrant advocates hope, Arevalo-Herrera’s order of removal could be terminated—this is equivalent to a dismissal—because she was never notified of the hearing of her case. But that would only bring her back to her asylum case, which has been made far more difficult, perhaps even impossible, to win by Sessions’s announcement that victims of sexual assault no longer qualify.
There is a simpler way for Arevalo-Herrera to stay in the country. In 2016, federal regulations were changed, making someone like her, who is married to a lawful permanent resident, eligible for a green card. She would return to Honduras for a medical exam and an interview with the State Department, and, after period of time—Kilpatrick says it could be between three weeks and three months—return to the United States with a green card. But ICE’s position is that Arevalo-Herrera’s original sin—that of missing her first court appearance—supersedes all other considerations. This was, again, the court appearance for which they didn’t give her the time or date. “What’s particularly egregious about the actions of ICE in this case,” Kilpatrick said, “is that they know that Abbie’s husband has a green card, and that she’s eligible to remain in the United States while she adjusts her status. But they just don’t care.”
Earlier that evening, sitting in the church office with the rain hitting the glass above, Arevalo-Herrera asked that people consider her fate and that of other immigrants who share her situation. “I would like people to keep in mind that, if we’re coming to this country, it’s because we are truly suffering in our own countries,” she said. “I’ve seen a lot of women that were mutilated, their arms were cut off. Or they’ll cut your face. And it’s really sad to see that the abusers use our own children to hurt us. Maybe people don’t know the need that we have to be protected. And that our governments are not doing a good job, that they don’t defend the rights of women and children. But I feel hope in people, the people who have been surrounding me lately.” She rubbed her face and closed her eyes, and continued speaking with her eyes shut. “And I have hope that people will recognize that we’re people, too, with faith and hopes. And that our human dignity is being violated. And that it’s so sad to come here to seek refuge, and we can’t find it.”
Below is the “Notice to Appear” document calling for Arevalo-Herrera to appear in an immigration court. Where the assigned date and time should appear, the words “to be set” are typed. In her case and thousands of others, immigrants are never told when to show up, and are tried in absentia, with few if any options to reopen their cases.
