The US governments' policies administered by Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) inhumane handling of immigrants and asylum-seekers, including family separations, must be called into question and dismantled. After thousands of reported cases of inhumanity with freezing temperatures, people jammed together like factory farms, sexual assault and poor health conditions ICE is seeking to destroy their records. We will not let ICE forget, as we tell the stories of detentions and abuse, and children separated from families, and deaths in government custody. Join us each Wednesday to help display, demonstrate, and document ICE's activities since its inception; lest they forget.
Each week we will bring new stories of immigrant detention and separation of families, read the stories aloud, then archive them. All who attend are welcome to bring a story with them.
Here is one such story, the story of Kevin Euceda of Honduras, who has been in immigration detention for more than 900 days!
In February 2020, still waiting as he now passed 950 days in detention, Kevin began thinking that he might just give up and self-deport, even if it meant going back to a place he’d been followed out of by text messages saying if he ever returned he would be killed. This is a story about the ongoing efforts of the U.S. government to deport a Honduran teenager named Kevin Euceda, who had already been in detention for more than two years. The U.S. government’s anti-trafficking program took the extraordinary step of certifying Kevin as a victim of “severe human trafficking,” finding that he had been “subjected to involuntary servitude by being forced to work for a gang.” The designation gave Kevin the right to all the benefits of a legal refugee, and meant he would be a prime candidate for asylum. [In September 2019, Kevin watched his court proceedings] from a remote detention center. On one side of the judge, he could see his lawyers, ready to argue that he should be freed immediately. Across from them was a lawyer for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), there to argue that Kevin should be deported. And in front of them all, inside a thick folder, was an old report from a shelter for immigrant children that was the reason the long-running matter of Kevin Euceda existed at all: “Youth reports history of physical abuse, neglect, and gang affiliation in country of origin. Unaccompanied child self-disclosed selling drugs. Unaccompanied child reports being part of witnessing torturing and killing, including dismemberment of body parts,” the report said. The person who had signed it: A therapist at a government shelter for immigrant children who had assured Kevin that their sessions would be confidential. Instead, the words Kevin spoke had traveled from the shelter to one federal agency and then another, followed him through three detention centers, been cited in multiple ICE filings arguing for his detention and deportation, and now, in the fall of 2019, were about to be used against him once more.
Organizer: Greater Cleveland Immigrant Support Network
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