COLD AS ICE

Carolina Ciru told herself it was going to be okay when she saw the flashing blue lights in her rearview mirror on a Friday afternoon in February. Ciru, a 42-year-old Honduran immigrant, had been stopped before while driving near her home in Lawrenceville, Georgia. The last time, she’d told the officer she didn’t have a driver’s license, and he wrote a ticket and told her to find someone to drive her home. But this time was different. Ciru was arrested for driving without a license, a misdemeanor. She was handcuffed, put in the back of a police cruiser, and delivered to the Gwinnett County Jail in Lawrenceville. Her 22-year-old daughter, Valerie, tried to pay bail but was told her mother would not be allowed to leave.

Three days later, Ciru was driven three hours south to the Irwin County Detention Center, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. In May, she told me over a video call that she was certain ICE would release her. “They have to let me out of here,” she said. “I think they will.” Ciru, who has diabetes and a pacemaker for a heart condition, had arrived at Irwin just as the pandemic was approaching; by the time we talked in May, the coronavirus was spreading inside the facility. Her health conditions put her at clear risk. “I should not be here during this,” she said. “I should not be here at all.”

Ciru lived with her partner and her five children about 30 miles east of Atlanta. She had been in the United States for 25 years, most of them in Gwinnett County. “Gwinnett is my home,” Ciru said. “It is where everything in my life is.” Her 13-year-old twins and teenage son were at home with her partner, as was her 20-year-old son, who is autistic and prone to seizures. “Nobody else can keep him safe,” she said. “I am the one who cares for him.”

Inside Irwin, Ciru had befriended a group of women from Gwinnett County who had also been detained by ICE after being arrested by local police. Monica, who was born in Uruguay, had been picked up on a domestic assault charge, even though she said she was defending herself from her abusive husband. Camila, a Dominican woman, had been charged with credit card fraud and turned over to ICE as she awaited trial. (I have changed their names at their request.)

All of them were in immigration detention not because federal agents had staked out their homes or caught them in a workplace raid,