Because Keldy had been one of the first mothers to be separated under the Trump Administration, she wasn’t just a victim of the policy but also a witness to its accumulating horrors. On May 20th, in one of the facility’s white cinder-block visiting rooms, Keldy gave her list to Mary Kay Mahowald, a staffer at a small nonprofit in El Paso called Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center. Mahowald was a Franciscan sister from Minnesota in her early seventies, but behind her benign, grandmotherly façade was an activist’s razor-sharp mind. Each time the guards waved her in for client visits, she lingered in the warren of meeting rooms and cells, maximizing her time with the detainees and gathering as much information as she could. As a precaution, Keldy had also mailed a copy of her list to the office at Las Americas. On the top-left corner of the envelope, for her return address, Keldy put her full name and alien number. There were ten names on the list, including her own.

The day after the handoff, Keldy had her first and only asylum hearing, in one of the large halls of the detention center that were used for court appearances. The room was virtually empty, with heaps of chairs scattered toward the back. Near the front, two plastic tables were angled before a slightly raised podium, where the judge, William Abbott, sat in a black robe. He rejected nearly ninety per cent of the claims he heard—not the highest rejection rate in the district, but close.

The outcome of a case often depended on the mood of an immigration judge. On May 21, 2018, Abbott struck Keldy as aloof and impatient, and the proceedings moved quickly. Keldy didn’t have a lawyer to represent her, so she sat alone at her table, waiting for her turn to speak. To one side was the ice attorney arguing for her deportation; behind the two of them, a lone guard stood facing the door. The only other person in the room was a translator. The whole proceeding was over in less than an hour. Her asylum claim was denied.

For the next week, Keldy was too stunned to plot her next steps. The judge had kept returning to details that struck her as irrelevant. He seemed fixated on the fact that her brothers had been killed by different people, for different reasons, as though this proved some inconsistency in her own account. There was a gulf she couldn’t understand between the reality of her life and the tight, legible plotlines the judge seemed to be expecting.

On June 6th, she went to the library to write a final plea to an official inside the Montana Avenue facility who was managing the timing and paperwork of her eventual deportation. “Good morning and blessings to you, señor deportador,” she began. “The judge denied my asylum claim because he says I don’t have evidence and that I’m lying.” In the next two paragraphs, she begged the deportation officer for his help. There was no one to go home to in Honduras. The sicarios who’d tried to kill her once would be waiting. At the same time, she went on, “I’ve spent almost nine months here, and I can’t stand it anymore not to be able to see my children.” The letter was forceful but formal, and she left a line for her own signature at the bottom. After printing it out, she took her pen and went back over one line, drawing a circle around it for emphasis: “What is it that you all need for someone to get asylum? Do I have to come here injured or dead?”

Eight months later, the government deported her. She would have to begin her journey again. As long as her children were in the United States, that was where she would be going.

[Bolding added]

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20240130133138/https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/do-i-have-to-come-here-injured-or-dead