Bluesky

In late February, in Charlotte, North Carolina, unidentified federal agents burst into a home, without a warrant in hand, apparently looking for an undocumented immigrant whom they had on their snatch list. He had recently moved into another apartment in the building, and 20-year-old Allison Bustillo-Chinchilla, the oldest of four siblings in the home, told the agents that he was no longer there.

As the agents searched the house, Allison called her mother and asked her to hurry home from her nearby job on a construction site. A few minutes later, her mother, Keily Chinchilla-Alegria, who had fled Honduras with Allison and a son more than a decade earlier, arrived back at the house. The agents were still there.

Instead of leaving to follow through on their original pursuit, the agents turned their attention on Keily and her children. They took Keily, Allison, and Allison’s 17-year-old brother into custody and left the two younger boys—one of whom is autistic—with neighbors. Then they sped off to a local detention facility.

Over the next few hours, the agents repeatedly berated Keily, who was told, she has said on Facebook and other media, that she, her two noncitizen children, and her two US citizen children, should all self-deport to Mexico. She told them that was improbable given that she wasn’t Mexican. They also told her, she said, that even if they released her and her son with ankle bracelets, so that she could look after her three younger children, as an undocumented immigrant over the age of 18 Allison would remain in detention—even though she apparently had no criminal record, had recently graduated from a community college with a nursing assistant’s degree, and had been awarded a financial scholarship to a university in Georgia (which she had to turn down because of her immigration status).

Shortly afterward, Allison was indeed formally processed into detention. As she succumbed to what her mother describes as a panic attack, hyperventilating and sobbing, the young woman—who would likely have qualified for DACA had the program not stopped accepting new applications several years ago—was processed and sent to the privately run Stewart Detention Center, in Lumpkin, Georgia.

The attorney who is working on Allison’s federal habeas petition argues that this was never about public safety but is rather about ICE agents, under pressure from their bosses, wanting to make their daily arrest and detention quota. “It’s just one more instance of ICE filling their quota come hell or high water, without regard to individuals, without regard to families,” she told me.

Numerous reports in recent years have detailed horrendously poor conditions at Stewart, and other privately run detention facilities, ranging from overcrowding to the point of people having to sleep on the concrete floors to serious medical issues going unaddressed and ambulances not being called even in life-threatening situations. CoreCivic, the private company that runs Stewart, strongly disputes these charges. In response to questions on these conditions, CoreCivic’s public relations team said in a written statement that its staff “takes seriously their role and responsibility to provide high-quality healthcare, available 24/7 to the individuals in our care,” that food menus offered to inmates “are reviewed and approved on a regular basis by a registered dietitian,” and that “every individual in our care is offered a bed.”

Keilly and her 17-year-old son were released hours after being detained. But Allison Bustillo-Chinchilla has been held in the Stewart facility since late February. She is reportedly suffering from an array of worsening medical conditions, including dangerously low blood pressure. Yet the feds remain intransigent.

In June, ICE denied Allison’s petition to have her paroled back into the community. The reason that Jarvis McMillar, acting field office director in Atlanta, gave was that “imposition of a bond or other conditions of parole would not ensure, to ICE’s satisfaction, your appearance at required immigration hearings pending the outcome of your case.”

Again, to reiterate: Allison Bustillo-Chinchilla isn’t a criminal; she has a sterling academic record, is a trained nurse’s assistant, and has been admitted to a four-year university. The ICE form used to deny her parole did not tick off, as rationale for the denial, evidence of past criminal activity, activities suggesting she was a risk to national security, or concerns that she posed a public safety threat. It did not tick off the box saying she had presented false ID or given a made-up address. She is as enmeshed in her local community as can be, and, with her training as a nurse’s assistant, ought to be considered an asset to North Carolina. If she doesn’t qualify for parole after being accidentally caught in an ICE dragnet that was aimed at someone else, it’s hard to see who does.

But as is becoming increasingly obvious, the Trump administration has no interest in fair outcomes. It is explicitly adopting a white nationalist agenda aimed at limiting who can come into America and who can stay in America, redefining the American story itself and how it is understood. This week, for instance, without any congressional input or any public notice, the administration dramatically tightened the process for approving visas, adding an entirely subjective criterion that applicants couldn’t harbor “anti-American” sympathies. It is up to individual officers to determine what qualifies as an anti-American attitude, which under this administration could, one has to assume, be something as innocuous as liking a post that mocks Trump, or arguing that Trump’s immigration policies are slanted against non-white immigrants. The administration also revamped—again with no public or congressional input—the citizenship process to allow federal officers to make a sweeping subjective judgement about applicants’ “moral character.” Meanwhile, on social media, Trump went after the African American History Museum in Washington for devoting too much exhibition space to the negative consequences of slavery and not enough space to detailing how great and exceptional the United States is.

That’s the context in which Allison Bustillo-Chinchilla’s story must be understood. She is collateral damage in a war that the administration is waging to remake the US immigration system to be ever more hostile to non-white, non-affluent immigrants. She is collateral damage, too, in a retelling of the American story that has no room for the aspirations and the hopes of today’s DREAMERs and no space to acknowledge the complexities, and the often vast injustices, of the country’s history.

It’s in that context that a felon president, found liable for sexual abuse and found guilty of multiple felony counts, can dare to impose a good-character test on immigrants. It’s also in that context that masked men, who refuse to identify themselves, can dare to detain a young nurse’s assistant, who ought to be covered by DACA, and that ICE bureaucrats can then deem her to be too great a flight risk to release from detention.

This is sordid, grubby, gratuitously cruel behavior. None of it makes the country great again. It is, in fact, behavior that should make every American desperately ashamed.