At 25, Diana has an 11-year-old son and a 6-year-old daughter. She fled Peru and her daughter’s father — an abusive soldier who, she says, beat her and the children — and arrived in the U.S. in 2021. She wanted to become a U.S. citizen and thought she was following the rules.
But last month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained her and the children after an appointment at the agency’s downtown San Francisco office. Even though the kids had the flu, ICE officials forced them all to stay the night, and they slept on the floor, Diana said.
They never returned to their Antioch home.
It was the beginning of a two-week journey from San Francisco to a notorious detention center in south Texas, via Los Angeles. Throughout the process, ICE agents assured Diana that they were just reviewing her case, that it was all standard procedure. But in reality, the family was being deported.
Agents didn’t tell Diana the truth until they were loading her and the kids onto a plane to Peru.
Diana was heartbroken. She had achieved stability in the Bay Area. Now, the family is in Peru, hiding from the man they thought they’d escaped.
The Standard has changed the names of Diana and her relatives to protect their privacy.
The 25-year-old missed some key steps in navigating the U.S.’s byzantine immigration system, making her more vulnerable to deportation. With President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, experiences like hers are increasingly common — ICE has deported at least 30 people from SF since late May. But what happens to deportees is largely invisible to their neighbors, friends, colleagues, and classmates.
Diana’s story provides a window into the experience of people who are removed by ICE, and the frequently opaque operations of the federal government.
When Diana left Peru, she traveled to Antioch with her uncle and her kids, then 7 and 2. Nobody knew they were leaving.
There, Diana met her sister Maria, who had arrived six months earlier, and their father, who has been in the U.S. for 10 years. Maria had a job at a restaurant; Diana started cleaning houses. She enrolled her son at a public elementary school and began attending services at the Most Holy Rosary Church. Slowly, the panic faded.
Her son made friends, joined a soccer team, and had his first communion. Her daughter learned English and started school.
“He’s so studious,” Diana said of her son. “He was so proud of his graduation.”
But he never got to attend the June 7 ceremony for graduating fifth graders. While his classmates celebrated with their families, he was in an ICE detention facility 2,000 miles away.
The South Texas Family Residential Center reopened in March after ICE closed it last year. The official reason for the closure was cost — it was ICE’s most expensive jail to operate — but the facility was also marred by scandal.
In 2017, STFRC came under scrutiny for detaining pregnant women for weeks at a time, in violation of ICE’s policy. That policy — which allows for the detention of pregnant women only under “extraordinary circumstances” — remains in place, although it reads more like a best practice than a binding law.
The following year, an 18-month-old girl contracted an infection at STFRC that ultimately killed her after her release. Lawyers representing the child’s mother said the death could have been prevented, attributing it to unsanitary conditions and negligence at the facility.
Conditions have not improved since STFRC reopened, according to migrants who were detained there this year. Their testimony in a recent lawsuit describes families forced to live in metal trailers, unbearable heat, inadequate medical care, and contaminated tap water that made people sick.
In June, ICE announced that it would be closing the facility once again. The stated reason was the same: Too expensive to operate.
Desperate for help
Diana never expected to end up in jail in Dilley, Texas. In the fall of 2022, she found an attorney to help her file an asylum claim, trying to comply with the law and submit it before the first anniversary of her arrival in the U.S. But due to a clerical error, the attorney failed to file the claim on time.
“It was a time when lots of stuff was going on,” said the attorney, Hedi Framm-Anton. “She came in at the last minute.”
Framm-Anton decided the best strategy was to withdraw the claim, which had been filed late, and for Diana to find another attorney, who could cite Framm-Anton’s mistake as an explanation for his client had missed the one-year deadline. (Other immigration lawyers who spoke with The Standard confirmed that this strategy has worked for asylum seekers who have missed that deadline.)
But Diana had a hard time finding representation.
“I looked all over, walking, because I knew I needed a lawyer, but I was alone, without money,” she said.
In the meantime, she was attending hearings without an attorney. She had four preliminary hearings between fall 2022 and fall 2023, according to an attorney who provided her with short-term services after the fact and asked to remain anonymous because she is not authorized to talk to the press. But when a San Francisco immigration judge called Diana’s name for a hearing on Oct. 10, 2023, she was on BART. Her babysitter had been delayed, she explained.
She arrived for the hearing about 30 minutes late. The judge, who was still on the bench, issued a removal order, citing her failure to appear. Diana’s next step was to seek short-term legal aid.
Her new lawyer filed a motion to reopen Diana’s case, which the judge denied, and filed a notice of appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals, seeking to overturn the removal order.
The lawyer once again impressed upon Diana how important it was that she find sustained representation and provided her with an information packet with contact information for legal nonprofits. Diana said she called many of them, but they said they couldn’t help her.
“There wasn’t too much we could do at that point,” the lawyer said, explaining that a judge was unlikely to accept Diana’s reason for her tardiness. Throughout the process, it seemed Diana had trouble understanding her responsibilities, according to two lawyers who worked with her.
“She’s an uneducated young girl, her primary language is Quechua, she’s from a rural area, she’s been abused her whole life,” Framm-Anton said. “All the odds were against her.”
Juanita Darling, director of the Latin American Studies program at San Francisco State University, said domestic violence and teen pregnancy are common in the mountainous interior of Peru, where Diana is from. The rate of domestic violence in Peru is twice the global average, a recent study shows, and women who speak Indigenous languages are even more likely to suffer abuse.
A year passed. When she was called into the ICE office on Sansome Street in June, Diana thought she would have another chance to plead her case. Instead, she and her children were detained.
“They lied to her,” Framm-Anton said.
“They told me I had to present myself in the office on the third or the fourth [of June] to review my case,” Diana said. “I went on the third, alone, and they told me I had to come back the next day with the kids to see how the kids were, if they were studying, if they were well.”
An official told her it was “a normal check” and said ICE would review her case and those of the children together. She came back the morning of June 4 with her kids. The sixth floor of the ICE building was already crowded with other migrant women and their children. An hour passed. Then four more.
Finally, an official came to talk to Diana. He asked if the children were in good health. She said no — they all had the flu and were taking medicine. He left, and another hour passed.
“My son started to cry, and then all the children who were there started to cry. They wanted to leave. They were hungry,” Diana said. “They told us we couldn’t leave.”
They spent the entire day in that office. ICE agents confiscated their phones. Eventually, they were provided with burritos, apples, and water, but Diana’s kids had stomachaches and didn’t want to eat.
At 11 p.m., ICE agents brought in thin bed sheets and exercise mats. The kids shivered in the air conditioning. The agents watched while they slept.
“I said, ‘Please, tell us the truth,’” Diana recalled. “Our kids are sleeping on the floor, and they’re saying, ‘We’re reviewing your cases. Calm down.’”
Diana didn’t sleep. The next morning, agents let her call her sister. Then they loaded her, her kids, and the other families into a bus and drove them from San Francisco to an airport near L.A., where they led them onto a plane. Throughout the journey, Diana said, agents assured her that this was temporary, that she’d be able to return, that she’d have a chance to plead her case.
After they landed in Texas, agents herded the migrant families onto another bus and drove them three hours to Dilley. They arrived at 1 a.m., exhausted, and were forced to sit in chairs until daybreak. Guards scolded those who tried to lie on the floor, Diana said.
The next day, guards took photos and fingerprints of each new inmate. They bathed and were given tracksuits and “bedrooms,” which were barren, with two beds in each. Diana and her kids stayed together. The lights remained on all night. Bathrooms were communal.
Meals were the same every day: oatmeal, two eggs, and potatoes for breakfast; two spoonfuls of rice, salad, and bread or a pastry for lunch and dinner.
“My kids didn’t eat, because they aren’t used to that kind of food,” Diana said. “The dining room was full of flies. You have to move your hand while you eat so the flies don’t land on your food.”
The kids weren’t doing well. Both had fevers, and her son had developed a painful rash all over his body. They waited all day for the doctor, Diana said, before receiving medicine. Eventually, the kids started eating.
A few times, guards woke them in the night, brought them out of their room, and made them sit in a hallway. Each time, the guards would return them to their room, saying they had gotten the wrong family.
The facility housed 300 prisoners as of early June, according to reporting by the L.A. Times, but it seemed to Diana that there were thousands. Every day, two full buses of new inmates arrived.
On June 17, a guard woke Diana and her kids at 5:30 a.m. They gave them two duffel bags and told them to put their clothes inside of them (she and the kids had two outfits each: the clothes they had worn to their ICE appointment and the tracksuits the facility provided). That evening, they and other families were loaded onto buses once more and informed that they would travel all night. Each migrant got a frozen hamburger encased in ice crystals, an apple, and a bottle of water.
Hours later, they arrived at an airport. It was still dark. Diana saw chained men being led from the tarmac onto planes. At 8 a.m., there was another round of frozen hamburgers. It was only then that the ICE agents told them the truth: They were being deported.
Diana recalled that one migrant had a green card.
“I have my permit, I have Social Security, I do my taxes, I do everything, I was doing well. Why are you doing this to me?” the woman said in Spanish.
An ICE agent responded in Spanish, “Ma’am, you have permission to work, but you do not have permission to stay in the United States.”
On the plane, there was a third round of burgers — no longer frozen, but thawed to cold mush. The migrants had gotten nothing else to eat since lunch the previous day. They landed in Lima that evening, and Diana, defeated, called her mom.
“I didn’t want anyone to know we were here,” she said, mentioning her abusive ex. “Now we’re in my mom’s house, hiding. We can’t go out; we can’t do anything. I’m afraid. He threatened my daughter; he said he would kill her. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
An ICE spokesperson said the agency could not comment on the experiences of individual detainees and did not answer general questions about deportation practices or conditions in the STFRC.
Trump’s budget bill, which he signed July 4, provides $45 billion in funding for detention of immigrants, including families. This will allow ICE to hold even more families in facilities like the one in Dilley.
Diana’s kids, traumatized by the journey and their experience at STFRC, haven’t quite accepted the change to their circumstances.
“They want to return,” Diana said, sobbing. “They say, ‘Mom, let’s go back.’ That’s where we’d made a life.”