Seeking asylum, Part II: THE REALITY

BY  KAYLEE TORNAY OF THE MAIL TRIBUNE August 13, 2018

Editor's note: This article is the second of a three-day series on the Gonzalez family's experience pursuing asylum in the United States. Read Part One here. To find out more about how we reported this series, click here.

It was 3 a.m. on a December night when Estéban Gonzalez was awakened, removed from a cell that had housed him for four days and bundled into one of a line of white cars.

He caught sight of his 11-year-old sister, Lizet, for the first time since they’d arrived at the Santa Cruz County Detention Center not quite three miles north of the Arizona border town of Nogales.

Estéban felt the worry that had filled his mind during all the days they had been separated ease slightly. The moment they reunited was “very happy,” he says.

There were five other children in their car on the ride to the nearby international airport, but none of them knew where they were going. The name of the location they were traveling to, the Cayuga Centers, meant nothing to them. All the children could think of was the cold and painful fact that they were leaving the detention center without their parents, their futures now held in limbo by the U.S. immigration system.

Estéban says he had trusted both his stepfather, Jonathan, who was to receive them in Southern Oregon, and his mother, Gabriela, who had fled El Salvador with her children from gang members who threatened to kill them, that things would turn out all right.

“I didn’t know all of this was going to happen,” he says.

Read the full story at the Mail Tribune here.