WASHINGTON D.C. — Maryora Nicole Urbina is an effusive 15-year-old in her freshman year at a Chicago, Illinois- area high school. She enjoys her science classes and dreams about becoming a pediatrician one day. But there’s something that sets Maryora apart from her classmates: She spent two months last year traveling to the United States from Honduras after a gang member tried to kill her.
Last October, 27 women reportedly launched a hunger strike to protest the conditions at an immigration detention center in Texas. This is the story of Maribel Zelaya and the secretive world of America’s privatized detention centers.
Over the past month, hundreds of immigrant detainees have stopped eating.
This act of civil disobedience began in Texas, when 54 South Asian detainees seeking asylum began a hunger strike calling to be released from the El Paso Processing Center. In solidarity, 14 South Asian detainees at the LaSalle Detention Facility in Louisiana and 27 immigrant women at the T Don Hutto Residential Center in Texas launched their own hunger strikes. And in the latest wave, hundreds of immigrant men are refusing meals at the Adelanto Detention Facility in California.
Yanira, a 41-year-old Guatemalan national, left her home country with her three children because their lives were in danger from gang violence. She and her family arrived in Texas in February — but they were soon put in an immigration detention center for two months. Yanira now lives in San Antonio, Texas as she awaits her court date for her asylum case. But she said that her experience in a family detention center left her scarred.
An undocumented immigrant interrupted Democratic presidential candidate Hilary Clinton at an award presentation to Chef Jose Andres at the annual Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute gala in Washington, D.C. on Thursday night.
Apolinar Sanchez Cornejo is a 67-year-old undocumented grandfather from Mexico who has lived in California since 1992 and works in an auto repair shop. Last week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents took him into custody in an early morning raid at his house. By noon, Sanchez Cornejo was put into deportation proceedings.