In their own words: Clients share stories from NM’s detention centers.
STORIES FROM THE INSIDE:
The following stories were shared by detainees currently or previously held in New Mexico’s three detention centers represented by NMILC’s Deportation Defense Team.
Raymond and his wife on their wedding day.
His wife supports him from afar while he is in detention.
Raymond
When the violence of the Anglophone crisis reached his community in Cameroon, Raymond’s life changed forever. Accused by the government of being a separatist fighter, he made the heartbreaking decision to flee for his life. His path to safety was anything but simple—first to Nigeria, where Cameroonian refugees were regularly sent back, then to Brazil, where seeking asylum wasn’t an option. Finally, on February 15, 2025, Raymond reached the United States.
In the US he passed his Credible Fear Interview, but instead of being released to pursue asylum, Raymond was told he needed to find another country willing to take him. One by one, Canada and many others said no. And so, he was detained and placed in ICE detention in Cibola County, where he has now spent nearly a year.
Inside detention, Raymond describes daily conditions that feel like “surviving, not living.” Medical care is often delayed or denied. When he became ill in May, his request for medication went unanswered. The same happened to many in his unit—one man waited nearly three months to be seen. In August, a rash spread rapidly through their pod of 40 men. Only after it became an epidemic were they quarantined for weeks, stripped of most clothing and left without blankets in cold temperatures.
Food is scarce, and without money for commissary, hunger is unavoidable. Raymond works as a hallway porter, but much of what he earns goes toward phone time so he can stay connected with the people he loves, including his wife, who continues to support him from afar.
Even the most basic parts of living—clean showers, functioning drains—are a daily struggle. Yet Raymond’s resilience remains unshaken. Through it all, he holds onto hope: hope for freedom, for safety, and for a life where he can build a future with his wife without fear.
His journey is a reminder of the courage it takes to seek safety and of the humanity and dignity every person deserves.
Raymond is currently detained at the Cibola County Correctional Center.
Christian*
For nearly three years, Christian*, a Venezuelan father has tried to rebuild a peaceful life in the United States—a place he once imagined as a refuge. He fled Venezuela after refusing to support the policies of a government he describes as a dictatorship. “Because I did not agree with the policies of my government, not only my life but my family’s lives were at risk,” he explains. Staying, he believed, would mean imprisonment, torture, or worse.
In the U.S., he and his children finally felt safe, but they still understood they were at risk. That sense of safety shattered when his wife was detained for five months and later deported. Only after her release did he learn what she endured. “She suffered a lot. It is unimaginable… she told me everything,” he recounts, including an injury inflicted by a guard. “It was very painful", to learn of her conditions, he said, “because I thought that she was okay the whole time she was there but when they deported her to Venezuela, she was able to describe what happened and she told me that she wasn’t able to talk about it while she was detained because they would take away her phone privileges…and suspend her ability to talk to her family to her loved ones.”
““My family needs me, my children, my mother, my wife, they all need me. But I can’t return to my country.””
The emotional toll has been heaviest on their children, especially their son with diabetes. “The school psychologist had to call to tell me that my son couldn’t stop crying,” he says. With his wife gone, he now manages work, parenting, and his son’s medical needs alone.
“My family needs me, my children, my mother, my wife, they all need me.”
Despite everything, he wants the public—and immigration authorities—to understand one thing: immigrants like his family did not choose hardship. “We had the necessity to be here… we aren’t guilty for the policies of our own government,” he says. “We are talking about the future of the world—the children.” His plea is simple: to be seen, to be understood, and to live without fear of losing his liberty or his life.
“Ever since I was a child, I’ve had a really lovely image of this country. And I still do, but what happened to my family and what is happening to others is really cruel. We are talking about the future of the world, that is the children, they are the future of the world. It would be nice if they could consider every person, we are not all criminals.”
*Christian is a pseudonym to protect this client’s identity.
Dennis*
Dennis* came to the United States in early 2025 seeking safety due to years of ongoing crisis in his home country of Cameroon. He took a risky, three-week journey from his home to the United States, hoping it would offer him safety and opportunity.
He finally arrived at the U.S. border near Nogales, Arizona late at night. When he arrived, Red Cross volunteers offered him and others a tent to sleep in and used a satellite phone to call Border Patrol the next morning.
Border Patrol took the group for medical checkups and issued A numbers before they put them on a bus, sending them to a camp in Arizona, then on to California. In California, people were getting deported to Panama or Costa Rica. After some time, Dennis was transported again to another California facility, and then finally in the middle of the night – “they always come when you’re asleep”- he was taken to Cibola County Correctional Facility in Grants, New Mexico.
Dennis described immigrant detention as “psychological torture and frustration.” Medical care was nearly nonexistent: referrals took more than a month, doctors rarely appeared, and when they did, “they would have nothing to say to you anyway.” Days often passed with no time outdoors.
Eventually, Dennis was transferred to TCDFTorrance County Detention Facility, another facility in New Mexico. His conditions deteriorated further. Staff were hostile, lockdowns were frequent, and access to recreation and the law library was inconsistent. Sewage overflowed into cells for at least six months, and nearly every medical issue — “no matter how severe” — was met with nothing more than ibuprofen or ineffective video consultations. Mail often went undelivered, cutting people off from their lawyers.
“It was all so traumatizing and demoralizing,” Dennis shared. “The people in detention have families and some of them are just so isolated, and many have a lot of health complaints. There are many suicide attempts.”
When Dennis and others tried to report the conditions they were living in, the Assistant Warden dismissed them, saying, “You’re just trying to tarnish my reputation.”
Now released, Dennis describes the experience as haunting. It feels strange, he said, “to see people living and going about their business normally,” while his own memories remain vivid. He is speaking out in hopes conditions change for those still inside.
*Dennis is a pseudonym to protect this client’s identity.
Elias
Elias grew up in Ecuador, where many people rejected the idea that “un hombre se enamora de otro hombre”. Because of his sexual orientation, he faced extortion, bullying, and severe abuse throughout his youth. He endured sexual assault as a teenager and constant judgment from religious family members and others who refused to accept him for who he is.
As he moved across the country trying to build a life, the threats only escalated. One day, he was attacked while leaving work, hit in the head with a pistol and left with a broken elbow. Certain religious community members who knew he was gay vandalized his home. He went to the authorities, but even when they broke down his door, the police refused to file a report or offer assistance.
Realizing he was on his own, Elias sought psychological help. Ultimately, he made the difficult decision to flee Ecuador and seek asylum in the United States in 2023. His journey through Colombia, Panama, Central America, and Mexico was dangerous; at one point, he and others had to hide for days to stay safe. After presenting himself at the U.S. border, he was released with an ankle monitor and lived in Albuquerque for 16 months. A judge later acknowledged that he was on the right path and set a 2027 court date, but immediately after leaving the courtroom, plainclothes ICE officers detained him without explanation.
In detention, Elias and others face mistreatment. As he explains, “Muchos nos tratan mal” — many guards treat them poorly — and “Tenemos una historia, y hemos venido por proteger nuestras vidas”. The conditions wear people down, and Elias himself experienced panic attacks. He asked to be placed in solitary for his own safety but was ignored; instead, he relied on the support of friends in detention to recover.
Medical care is often inadequate. People with serious conditions are given nothing more than pills — “Pastillas, no más”.
Above all, Elias wants the chance to defend his asylum claim. He reminds others that despite the treatment they endure, “Somos personas, somos humanos” — we are people, we are human beings.
Elias is currently detained at the Otero County Correctional Center.
Javier
Javier and his brother were on their way to work early that morning. Before heading to the job site, they stopped at two hardware stores to pick up materials tools, supplies, the kind of errands construction workers run every day. Nothing unusual.
But once they got back on the road, something felt wrong.
The same cars kept appearing behind them. They made turns. The cars followed. They stopped again. The cars were still there.
By the time they arrived at the worksite, the vehicles were waiting. Then the sirens came.
The men who stopped them were uniformed. Still, Javier describes them as infiltrated not because they were hiding, but because they blended into ordinary life. The state had issued him a driver’s license. He had recently renewed it. On paper, everything about him looked normal.
They weren’t there for Javier. They were there for his brother.
When his brother stepped out of the car, he told them he was on the phone with his attorney. That didn’t matter. They detained him anyway. Then they turned to Javier.
“Who is he?” “My brother.”
They ordered Javier out of the vehicle. They searched him. They questioned his documents. They told him he had no right to speak, no right to call his family, no right to notify anyone not even the Mexican consulate.
From that moment on, time broke apart. Javier was handcuffed, shackled at the hands and feet, and moved like cargo. Through processing rooms. Into holding cells. Into places so cold people called them ‘the freezer’. Aluminum sheets instead of blankets. No privacy. No explanations. Just waiting.
He was transferred repeatedly, without warning. Each move stripped away a little more certainty. One of those transfers was to Torrance County Detention Facility.
Torrance was different.
Men were kept in chains even while being processed. They were counted over and over again, sometimes four or five times, as if they weren’t people, just numbers that couldn’t be trusted to stay still. The food was scarce and often inedible. Water was rationed. Sleep came in fragments, if at all.
The guards varied. Some were young and apologetic. Others older, openly hostile, made it clear they saw the men in front of them as less than human.
One guard told them plainly: “You’ve lost all your rights.”
Javier watched people unravel there. Men who had been detained for months, moved from jail to jail, lied to repeatedly about seeing a judge or going home. Some cried. Some stopped speaking. Some stared at the floor for hours.
Javier got sick. So did many others. Headaches. Fever. Coughs. There was no real medical care. Sometimes detainees helped each other in secret sharing medicine, praying together, rubbing Vicks on each other’s temples to dull the pain.
Eventually, Javier was deported.
Not gently. Not safely.
He was released into Ciudad Juárez wearing flip-flops, holding paperwork that marked him as newly deported—paperwork that, he believes, made him a target.
That’s when the fear truly set in.
He had heard the stories. People kidnapped minutes after deportation. People extorted, beaten, disappeared. He himself had lived something similar years earlier. He knew what could happen.
So when he crossed into Mexico, Javier ran.
He ran until he saw his family’s car. His wife. His children. Thirty years after building a life in the United States, they found each other on the street crying, shaken, relieved.
“You’re free,” his children told him. “You’re in your country.”
But Javier didn’t feel free.
Back in Mexico, he couldn’t work. His documents were outdated. A single letter error in his birth record blocked everything: employment, banking, stability. He depended entirely on family and small donations just to survive. Prices were high. Wages were low. Trust was gone.
His wife is a U.S. citizen. His children are U.S. citizens. They are a mixed-status family, now separated by a border, by policy, by indifference.
“The hole this leaves isn’t just financial,” Javier says. “It’s emotional. My children don’t have their father there anymore.”
Javier shares his story not for sympathy, but as a warning.
This is happening, every day.
Caballero*
Caballero left his house on a Friday evening, just before six. He was on his way to church, like he was every week. The sun had not fully set when he noticed a patrol car parked on the side of the road. He thought nothing of it and kept driving.
A few blocks later, the patrol car followed him.
The officer said his taillights were too dark. Caballero didn’t argue. He handed over what he had. Minutes later, he was in handcuffs. That same night, he was taken to a county jail in Florida.
He stayed there for twenty days.
He had no criminal record. He hadn’t stolen anything. He hadn’t hurt anyone. But a new law required that anyone without documents who passed through a jail had to wait for immigration authorities. No bond. No timeline. No explanation.
Those twenty days were hard. He shared space with people accused of drugs and theft—things he had never been involved in. He wasn’t used to that world. Sleeping was difficult. Breathing felt heavy.
Then immigration came.
Paperwork. Forms. Pressure. “Sign,” they told him. “Fighting your case won’t help. You’ll be deported anyway.”
Caballero didn’t sign. Because he didn’t sign, they moved him.
First to Tampa. Another jail. One night. Then a bus. Long waits with his hands restrained. After that, Alcatraz, as they called the detention center. They arrived at night. They changed his clothes to orange. A brief medical check. No one slept. At six in the morning, they were locked in.
He spent more than a month there.
People began to get sick—flu, fever, coughs. There was no medicine. When someone’s fever rose too high, they used wet rags on their heads. Caballero got sick for a week. For two days he didn’t get out of bed. He didn’t eat. No one checked on him.
One day, without warning, they put him on a plane to Texas.
Tents. Five minutes of phone time a day. Showers every three or four days. Then another transfer to a facility in Texas that he remembers as “Montana.” A large cell with more than sixty people. Chinese. Turkish. African. Haitian. Some had been detained for over a year. That’s when Caballero realized his story was not unique.
Months passed.
Outside, his family was falling apart. He had been the sole provider. They sold what little they had to pay attorneys. They lost the house they were in the process of buying. His wife was sick, lupus, diabetes, trouble breathing. His children kept asking when he was coming home.
After weeks of transfers, they moved him again. This time to New Mexico, to Cibola County Correctional Center. Caballero remembers it as a split facility, one side for people in immigration proceedings, the other for criminal incarceration. For the first time in months, they were allowed outside for a few hours each day. It was quieter. The confinement felt different. Not better, just different.
In January, he was released, six months after leaving his house for church.
The judge released him because of his wife’s medical condition. It wasn’t a victory. It was a pause. He returned home happy and anxious at the same time. He couldn’t work yet. He was still waiting on paperwork. Still waiting on permission.
“The first thing people should have ready,” he says now, “is phone numbers written down on paper. I saw so many people who had no one to call.”
When asked what he would say to those still detained, he doesn’t talk about laws.
“Have faith,” he says. “Don’t give up.”
Caballero made it home, but he knows there is no guarantee it couldn’t all begin again.
Aguilar*
For sixteen years, “Aguilar” built his life in the United States—the place he grew up, studied, worked, and built a family. He talks about that time with pride: maintaining good credit, holding jobs, staying focused on responsibility. “I work and study and do everything like an American,” he says. His life here felt rooted and steady. And then one mistake—one he took responsibility for in criminal court—pulled him into the machinery of immigration detention.
He has now spent more than six months in the Torrance County facility, which he says feels nothing like a “detention center” and everything like a prison. Aguilar describes living in a place where your movements are constantly controlled, where hours can pass inside a cold cell, and where basic needs become a daily fight. Meals come in tiny portions, he says, because staff assume families will send money for commissary. Before he ever received commissary, he had already lost more than 20 pounds. “You can’t feed a grown person with that small quantity of food,” he says.
Inside Torrance, signs promise access to things like the library or necessary supplies—but the reality seldom matches the words. Asking for those rights often leads to write‑ups, and too many write‑ups can land someone in solitary confinement, where people emerge sick and starving. Aguilar says that good officers often leave quickly, unwilling to be part of a system that treats people with so little dignity. Many others, he adds, seem to hold immense power with almost no training.
Now, the facility has removed tablets—the only way people in custody can request medical care. Aguilar is sick with a cold, but guards tell him it’s “not their problem.” Without tablets, access to medical attention becomes even harder, deepening the fear and uncertainty inside.
Still, the hardest part of detention isn’t the hunger or the cold. It’s the separation from the people he loves most. His mother, his fiancée, his child—they are in the United States, waiting and worrying. “My mom is sad, my whole family is sad,” he says. They fear for his safety if he is sent to Mexico.
After months of waiting, Aguilar says he just wants release—whether in the U.S. or back in his birth country. “I need to get out of here,” he says. “It’s not easy for someone who didn’t commit a crime to stay over six months in this prison.”
Aguilar hopes that sharing his story will help people understand the human cost of immigrant detention—the weight carried by families, the harm done inside these facilities, and the resilience required to endure them. He wants people to know that those inside are more than detainees: “We’re people. We deserve to be treated like people.”
Melika
Melika was 20 years old when she left Iran. She did not leave chasing wealth, comfort, or status. What she wanted was far more modest and far more urgent.
“Just freedom,” she explains. “Not a better life. Just a normal life.”
In Iran, Melika says, daily life for women is defined by restrictions so constant they become invisible to outsiders. Simple acts riding a bicycle, walking freely, moving through public space without fear, carry consequences. She loved her country, its culture and history, but living as a young woman meant negotiating limits at every turn. She wanted to stay and fight for change, she says, but safety came first.
When Melika arrived in the United States, she believed she would be protected. Like many asylum seekers, she trusted the idea that if you explained why you were fleeing, someone would listen. Instead, she was detained.
Not for weeks. Not for months. For three years.
When asked what was hardest about detention, Melika does not point to a single moment of abuse or cruelty. She talks about time.
“The waiting,” she says. “Time is going, and you are doing nothing. Your life is just… paused.”
Detention followed a strict routine: early mornings, lights out at night, meals at set hours, short windows of recreation before returning to the dorms. It felt like jail, she says but without the clarity of a sentence.
“If you do something wrong, at least you know how long you have to stay,” Melika explains. “But here, you don’t know. You are just waiting. Until when?”
There were no meaningful programs, no real opportunities to learn or work. The hours stretched endlessly. Some people cried. Some shut down completely. Others tried to disappear. Melika survived by learning, practicing English, picking up Spanish from television and from the people around her. Her first language is Persian, but language became a way to stay connected to the world beyond the walls.
“You have too much time to think,” she says. “That’s what breaks people.”
Melika was not alone when she arrived. She came with her father, and they sought asylum together. For nearly a year, they were detained in the same facility. Then, without clear explanation, her father was released.
Outside, he did everything the system asked of him. He worked. He complied with appointments. He tried to stabilize his case. He even found a job as a security guard at a university. It seemed, briefly, like things were moving forward.
Then came the call.
Around June or July, near Melika’s birthday, she learned her father had been arrested again. He had gone to an ICE appointment in San Francisco and was taken into custody without warning.
“No information,” she says. “No date. Nothing.”
Today, her father remains in detention, Melika believes in Arizona, calling when he can, always with the same message: there are no updates. No hearing date. No answers.
Meanwhile, Melika’s mother and sisters are still in Iran, where leaving the country without the father is dangerous and often impossible. The family is split across borders, bound together by phone calls and uncertainty.
For Melika, detention is not just confinement, it is uncertainty as punishment.
“You ask. You wait. You send requests. No answer,” she says. “After a while, you don’t even care if it’s yes or no. You just want an answer.”
She also noticed how conditions changed over time. Recreation was reduced. Resources disappeared. Small comfort balls to play with, basic supplies, were slowly taken away.
“It’s simple things,” she says. “But they make everything tighter.”
During detention, Melika’s relationship to faith also changed. In Iran, she says, religion was often used as a tool of control, pushing her away. In detention, with nothing but time, she found a different connection quiet, personal, and sustaining.
“You think about your life,” she says. “You think about God. You need something to hold onto.”
Now out of detention herself, Melika lives with a contradiction: freedom on the outside, and the constant fear of what is happening inside to the people she loves most.
When asked what she would say to those still detained—those sitting in the same waiting she endured for three years, her answer was careful, not rehearsed.
“Keep fighting,” she says. “I promise you, something will change.”
Melika lost three years of her life to detention. What remains is not just a story of survival, but a warning: a system that does not merely detain bodies, but detains time, families, and futures, often without explanation.
Nelson
Nelson R‑B’s story begins “en una casa de cartón,” (in a cardboard house) where he and his brothers helped their single mother run a small tortilla business. “Era la forma que sobrevivíamos.” School was secondary to survival, yet even as a child, Nelson knew his path: “Prometí a mi mamá que iba a seguir adelante y ser un gran hombre por ella.”
His dedication caught the attention of his school principal, who encouraged him through graduation and into university. “No olvido de dónde vengo,” he would say, even as he left for Managua to study science. He became a math teacher and sent money home—“Así sobrevivía”—until a borrowed camera changed everything.
Working alongside a professional photographer, Nelson discovered journalism. He documented protests, violence, and the disappearances that shook Nicaragua. But bearing witness brought danger. Authorities confronted him with photos of his young daughters, warning: “O tu trabajo, o tu familia… Te estamos vigilando.”
Threats escalated to violence and kidnapping attempts. Nelson fled with his family, seeking asylum in the United States. He worked wherever he could, most recently as a construction employee at Alligator Alcatraz in Florida—until the day he returned home to find ICE agents waiting. “We don’t care. You’re an immigrant and you do not have the right to be here,” he was told before being detained.
Since September 2025, Nelson has been held at the Cibola County Correctional Center, battling chronic pain and illness with little medical care. He once endured three days of fever alone before being taken to a hospital where no one spoke Spanish.
Still, Nelson insists on telling his story. He believes his voice matters—not just for himself, but for others like him. “Quiero ser una voz de la comunidad,” he says. “Nos quedamos sin defensa.”
His resilience is not just survival—it is a reminder of how far one man will go to keep a promise made in childhood, and how deeply the fight for dignity continues.
Richard
When Richard fled Nigeria, he carried little more than fear and the hope of survival. Persecuted by both the military and the government, he describes those final days back home simply: “I was running for my life.” The United States represented refuge, safety, and the possibility of rebuilding. In Rio Rancho, he worked with elderly residents and maintained his immigration requirements, checking in with ICE as instructed. “I always went,” he said, “until this last one when I missed the appointment because my lawyer said she hadn’t heard from ICE.”
That missed appointment changed everything.
For the past three months, he has been held at the Torrance County Detention Facility — a place he calls isolating and painful. “Detention is not good for anyone,” he explains. “I feel so assaulted and rejected.” The hardest part is being separated from his wife and 2‑year‑old child. He worries about the burdens his absence places on his family. “I know that I should be taking care of them,” he says. Reading is one of the few ways he can cope with the waiting.
Around him, many others face similar anguish. Some cannot speak English; most have no clear understanding of what lies ahead. “So many of us are just hanging, confused, not knowing our fates,” he says. The uncertainty deepens the sense of despair. People from across the world, many fleeing danger, arrive believing America represents strength and protection. Yet inside Torrance, disappointment and fear overshadow that belief. “We really need help,” he says. “We are just waiting for someone to come to our rescue.”