New York Times
By Jake Naughton
March 22, 2016
What
happens to a town of 4,000 when the country’s largest detention center
for immigrants opens its doors there? That’s the question we at Black
Box traveled to Dilley, Tex., last year to
try and answer.
Black
Box — Christopher Gregory, Natalie Keyssar, Alejandro Torres Viera and
me — is a creative cooperative that seeks to find new ways of making and
presenting documentary photography. Rather
than working alone, we worked as a unit, building off one another’s
strengths and together developing the project at each step along the
way.
We
wanted to tell a story about immigration and detention in the United
States not just through the experiences of those detained at Dilley, but
also through the lives of the town’s residents.
The result is “Welcome to Dilley,” a multiplatform project that takes a
deep dive into a place at the heart of the national immigration debate.
Late
in 2014, the Department of Homeland Security opened the South Texas
Family Residential Center, the largest detention center in the country,
in Dilley. It was designed as a response to
the thousands of women and children — many of whom were seeking asylum
from the violence running rampant in their home countries — who had
crossed the border en masse the previous summer. The center was made to
hold as many as of 2,400 women and children as
they worked their way through the immigration system.
Almost
immediately, the center became a lightning rod in the nationwide debate
about immigration and the legality of family detention, putting Dilley
in the news ever since. Following the
initial outcry, stories detailed human rights abuses alleged by the
detained families. Soon after, the facility became the center of a
continuing policy battle about the legality of detaining children. And
now it’s the site where families swept up in recent
Homeland Security raids wait their turn to be deported.
But
before the center opened and the name Dilley became synonymous with the
immigration debate, the town was a speck on a map, an hour and a half
north of the Mexican border. Who were the
people who lived there, and what did they have to say?
Noel
Perez, the town’s administrator, called bringing the detention center
and its promised 600 jobs a no-brainer. But Mr. Perez remembers a time
when, as a young Mexican-American running
for local office — one of the first in the region — he lost the
election because of tacit racism.
Nowadays,
most in Dilley can trace their lineage to Mexico within a generation or
two, although that wasn’t always the case. Over the last 50 years, the
town has flipped from being a quarter
Hispanic and three-quarters white to the inverse.
To
explore bigger themes in the immigration debate in the United States,
we gathered materials that painted a rich portrait of a town, its
residents and their unwilling and unwelcome guests,
all at the center of one of the most volatile debates in America — who
belongs here, and under what circumstances?
Many
in Dilley, including its Hispanic residents, are unsure what to think
of the detention center and the families inside. The jobs didn’t flow as
promised. From the perspective of a town
where a third of the population lives below the poverty line, the women
and children inside detention seem to be treated awfully well. “Why do
they get everything, when we work so hard to get the little we have?”
wondered folks all over Dilley.
And
yet we also spent time with women and children who had been released
from the center and found their way to the Mennonite House, an hour
north in San Antonio. The house, overseen by the
immigration nonprofit Raices, is a refuge where just-released families
spend their first hours outside detention in America before heading on
to where they would wait for the outcome of their asylum cases, be it
Idaho, Arizona or Long Island.
Among
its residents was Mirza Dalila, a young mother who fled gang violence
in Honduras with her daughter, and another woman and her daughter who
had been kidnapped in Veracruz, Mexico, on
their journey to the United States. Despite these traumatic
experiences, they described detention as a worse ordeal.
“I
was desperate to get out of there, because truly, being there was a
nightmare,” Ms. Dalila said of her time in Dilley, decrying the
prisonlike conditions for women and children who went
there seeking asylum.
But
reality is never black-and-white. After months of contentious
back-and-forth, the families in the detention center are being cycled
out in weeks, instead of months, and the future of
family detention is in question. Yet women and children continue to
surge to the border in record numbers, fleeing unchecked violence in
their home countries, while the administration has doubled down on the
necessity of family detention.
As
the political campaigns rage on, these families and the towns they’re
housed in have become talking points in presidential platforms. But for
the formerly detained families, and the long-term
residents of Dilley, the issue isn’t abstract — it’s a defining facet
of their lives.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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