How Families Separated at the Border Could Make the Government Pay

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The police refused to investigate the killings, claiming that Olimpia’s husband had shot her and then himself. This enraged Rodríguez, and, in 2006, she booked a flight home to launch her own investigation. In Nacaome, she convinced local authorities to exhume the bodies for autopsies, which, she told me, showed that they had been killed with different guns. “The police took me as a thorn in their side, so I kept at it,” she said. Soon, she, too, faced threats.

When Rodríguez and Daniel arrived in Dilley, they found a facility that offered Zumba classes and had a hair salon , all within the confines of a barbed-wire fence. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents subjected Rodríguez to what she describes as “humiliation, threats, and intimidation,” urging her to give up her asylum claim. Guards frequently woke Rodríguez up in the middle of the night, demanding her signature on deportation forms. The stress gave her panic attacks.

Daniel refused to let go of his mother, and the agents eventually gave up and brought them back inside. But after that Rodríguez stopped her organizing efforts, fearing repercussions. She and Daniel took their meals alone. Daniel was not allowed to speak to his father, but he penned him a letter. “I miss you,” he wrote, beside a drawing of a heart with eyes, crying two large tears.

That afternoon, as the law students celebrated and prepared to fly home, Rodríguez asked them a favor: Could they represent a Honduran woman she had befriended in detention? Cruz explained that New Haven was too far from Dilley for them to be of much use. But Rodríguez pressed, noting that local lawyers were hard to come by. “Can’t you do it over the phone?” she asked.

The case was rare, in part, for its legal strategy. The federal government typically enjoys sovereign immunity from private lawsuits, which has made it hard for asylum-seeking families to sue. Big civil-rights groups tend to focus on class-action cases to combat constitutional violations, but these suits rarely deliver financial reparations to individual asylum seekers.

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