Fourteen years ago, Mateo* was in a Tennessee county jail waiting to be processed into the prison system when he was approached by someone who didn’t work for either. They worked for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
They took him into a separate room, took three photos with a Polaroid camera, and then took his fingerprints. They began to ask him questions about people he might know who were undocumented. He didn’t answer.
He was told that when he completed his prison sentence, ICE would be back to pick him up. He might be immediately deported, or he might be released into the United States and told when and where he’d have to surrender himself. Depending on where the laws stood. That was all the information he received for the next seven years.
In 2018, he was called to intake, where prisoners are processed in or out of the facility. Two ICE agents were waiting for him. They took his photo and gave him a paper notifying him that he was being placed under a federal detainer; he would be deported upon his release. He recalled one of them saying, Your days in America are coming to a close.
They told him to get visits with his family while he still could.
“None of us knew what to expect.”
In 2000, Mateo and his niece, both teenagers, had paid $1,500 each to get on a bus that would take them from their home country of Mexico into the US, crossing the border through a remote part of Arizona. If they made it, they would head for Texas and try to find Mateo’s older brother, who had made the crossing a few years earlier.
“The bus was packed with mothers and small kids, mostly, and some teenagers,” he told Filter. “We were all trembling and quiet. A shared dread about what may come if we were caught. None of us knew what to expect.”
Mateo had been working since he was 13 to pay for the trip. The week before leaving Mexico, he’d sold everything he owned that he couldn’t carry. There was no way to know that anyone really was waiting for them on the other side. What if they’d handed over their life savings to be abandoned somewhere in the desert?
But there was no other option. Both were determined to go to school, Mateo to study architecture and his niece to study nursing, and that wouldn’t happen if they stayed in Mexico. Access to better educational opportunities is one of the biggest reasons people attempt to cross the southern border without documentation.
Their driver had stopped at a clearing about the size of a football field, and everyone got out. Their instructions were to watch out for border agents, and on the other side to meet up with a man whose name Mateo had written on his hand in permanent market. The moment the last person was off the bus, the driver took off.
Mateo remembers seeing a man and a woman, each carrying a small child strapped to them with a blanket, huddled together making the sign of the cross. The woman was crying, and Mateo heard the man tell her everything was going to be okay. He wanted to believe everything would be okay, too. He and his niece held hands and began to walk.
A quarter-century later, Mateo’s voice shakes when he talks about crossing the border. As he reaches the end of his sentence, he’s again trying to prepare for what awaits him, without knowing what that is.
Mateo knows around 50 Central and South American men here. He estimates at least half are undocumented.
The ICE officer who met Mateo in county jail 14 years ago was the first one he’d ever encountered. Most people deported by ICE aren’t arrested by the agency itself; they’re arrested by other law enforcement, and being processed into correctional systems is what alerts ICE. This includes people who are awaiting trial and have not been convicted of anything, and people who have legal immigrant status but become subject to deportation after a conviction.
No one else in Mateo’s family who’s crossed the border has been incarcerated. He doesn’t know if he’ll be taken directly back to Mexico, or to a detention center in the US, or to another country. ICE could show up in the middle of the night, or not for months. Many others here are in a similar position.
This prison is privately operated by CoreCivic. Mateo knows around 50 Central and South American men here, and estimates that at least half are undocumented. None of them know what will happen to them either. But everyone’s talking about it, and everyone is scared.
Under President Donald Trump’s second administration, Tennessee jails are filling with people held on ICE detainers. In June, the Tennessee Department of Correction joined a growing list of state agencies working with ICE.
Law enforcement and corrections departments do not have to submit to ICE detainers, but private prison operators in particular are financially motivated to do so. Around 86 percent of people under ICE detainers are held in private facilities. Prison staff have never had any information to give them about what ICE will do. Mateo said the typical response is, Once you leave here, we don’t know.
“We get together and wonder what’s going to happen to us,” Mateo said. “Most would still have crossed, but would have made some better decisions once on the ground of opportunity.”
Mateo’s wife and daughter are US citizens. Once ICE comes for him, it’s unlikely he’ll ever see them in person again.
He hopes to reunite with his parents. When he left Mexico as a teenager, he didn’t know if they would ever meet again. His parents never attempted the journey themselves, but supported their children and others in their family who wanted to do so.
“They knew that all we could hope for in Mexico was to be laborers,” he said, “and would never have anything to call our own.”
Name has been changed*
Image (cropped) via Representative Zoe Lofgren/Immigration and Customs Enforcement
