Seven months ago, 20-year-old Allison Bustillo says she was at home in Charlotte, North Carolina, taking care of her younger brothers, ages 17, 9 and 8, when FBI agents arrived.

Scared, Bustillo said she and her brothers stayed inside a room as agents yelled for them to open the door. She asked for a warrant three times, but she was never shown one. The agents kicked the door in and pulled Bustillo and her siblings out of the house, including her 9-year-old brother, who has autism and requires support.

“They were just pointing firearms at us like we were criminals,” Bustillo told the Ledger-Enquirer on Aug. 9.

For nine hours, law enforcement officers detained Bustillo and her family, joined by her mother, as they searched the home.

The agents told her and her mother that they were looking for the previous resident of the rental, Bustillo said, and no one in her family was implicated in the crime being investigated.

After about nine hours, despite not being implicated in any crime, the family was turned over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

ICE eventually placed her at the Stewart Detention Center, about 40 miles from Columbus and hundreds of miles from her Charlotte home. What has ensued for Bustillo, according to her account, is a seven-month fight for badly needed health care, decent food, better access to a lawyer and a chance for the young woman who has no criminal record to get back to her life.

How college student, longtime US resident wound up in ICE custody

Bustillo’s family arrived in the United States from Honduras in 2014. They were paroled into the country, which means they were given temporary permission to enter based on urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.

Bustillo was 9 years old when she arrived in the U.S. At the time of her detainment, she was attending Cleveland Community College in Shelby, North Carolina, to become a nursing assistant.

She wasn’t able to benefit from the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, often referred to as DACA, because it stopped accepting new applications during President Donald Trump’s first term, North Carolina-based attorney Helen Parsonage, who is representing Bustillo, said in a Facebook post.

Bustillo’s academic performance also earned her a scholarship offer to attend Gardner-Webb University in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, Parsonage said on Facebook.

Bustillo’s mother and her 17-year-old brother were allowed to go free, with her mom being monitored with an electronic device. But Bustillo, because she was over the age of 18, was separated from her family and sent to the Alamance County Detention Center in North Carolina before her transport to Stewart Detention Center, she said.

There, she had to wait in a small room. Bustillo was fed “really cold, horrible jail food,” she said, and had a bathroom that was “very dirty and unsanitary.”

She was classified as an ICE detainee and given a green uniform, indicating she had no criminal record. After about a day waiting in the federal prison, Bustillo was handcuffed and searched before being put on a bus.

With no ICE detention center in North Carolina or South Carolina, Bustillo and others were transported to Stewart in Lumpkin.

Inside the Stewart Detention Center

Bustillo spent almost a full day on the bus from North Carolina to Georgia. She was the only woman in the group of detainees.

“They only fed us water, bread and cheese,” she said.

When they arrived at the Stewart Detention Center at about 6 p.m., they were ushered into a room where Bustillo slept on the floor the whole night, she said.

“We were waiting for them to let us out,” Bustillo said. “They wouldn’t until the next day.”

Early the next morning, the group was seen by medical staff. Bustillo said she was given a blue uniform, meaning she had no criminal record.

In the following months, Bustillo said the living conditions began to wear the 20-year-old student down as her mental and physical health declined.

Before being detained, Bustillo said she already suffered from scoliosis and severe anxiety.

“I have a nerve pinch in my neck, which makes half of my body fall asleep,” she said. “And every time I get upset and start having a panic attack, that part of my body becomes very weak. I just feel very tired.”

Complaints of lacking medical treatment

Bustillo has not received treatment for her nerve problem because she doesn’t have access to a specialist in the facility, she said. And she isn’t the only detainee who has spoken out about a lack of medical care at Stewart Detention Center.

Georgia resident Rodney Taylor, a double amputee who was detained in Atlanta, has been in custody since January.

Taylor was born in Liberia. Shriners International brought him to the United States as a child to have extensive surgeries for disabilities to his arms and legs, according to a news release Parsonage sent to the Ledger-Enquirer on Sept. 16. He was born missing a right foot, and his left leg was clubbed, missing a kneecap and tibia. One of Taylor’s hands had only a thumb.

“He had over a dozen surgeries in all — including an above the knee amputation of his left foot and a below the knee amputation of his right,” the news release says.

He was detained based on a 30-year-old criminal charge, for which he received a full pardon from the Georgia Board of Pardons and paroles, according to Parsonage.

Taylor told Amilcar Valencia, executive director of El Refugio, people with disabilities lack accommodations at Stewart Detention Center.

El Refugio is an organization in Lumpkin that provides support for immigrants at Stewart Detention Center through hospitality, visitation support and advocacy.

Valencia visited Taylor on July 27, he said during an Aug. 12 demonstration ahead of a hearing for Taylor.

“He was complaining about the broken air conditioning at this facility,” Valencia said. “He was telling the staff they needed to fix this air conditioning for a month, and they did not listen.”

Taylor’s unit also flooded, Valencia said, which posed a threat to his prosthetics. The response was to put him in solitary confinement, he said.

The detention center has not provided Taylor with the appropriate medicine to prevent chafing of the amputation site, Parsonage wrote in the Sept. 16 news release, adding that he is not able to use a wheelchair because of his limited ability to use his hand.

“As a result, he is not able to effectively move around the Stewart Detention Center,” she said in the release. “He has lost weight in detention, he is often unable to make it to commissary and meals, and he cannot move about the facility to see to his daily needs, including routine self-care such as showering.”

Martin Rosenbluth, a Lumpkin-based immigration attorney who represents Bustillo, told the Ledger-Enquirer that Stewart Detention Center is overcrowded, the food is substandard, the people inside lack health care access and attorneys struggle to communicate with clients.

Immigrant alleges retaliation from officers

Another problem is the way staff treat detainees, Bustillo said. Every day, officers yell orders at them “military-style,” banging on metal, she said. This happens all hours of the day and night and disrupts her sleep, Bustillo said.

It’s made her paranoid and causes panic attacks, she said.

One detainee, Laura Aldarenga, 29, tried to speak to the officers about the conditions.

Aldarenga was taken into custody in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and had been detained in the Stewart Detention Center for eight days at the time of her Aug. 9 interview with the Ledger-Enquirer. She reported seeing one of the female detainees working to clean a shower with staff standing over her.

“(They) made the lady that cleaned the showers just scrub, scrub, scrub,” Aldarenga said. “And she was screaming at her, like, ‘That’s not how you scrub. You have to do it better.’ It’s humiliating for the people who are here.”

The morning of Aug. 9, Aldarenga tried to speak up about the treatment.

“I had to be the voice today for everybody because a lot of people were complaining about the same things,” she said.

Aldarenga said she tried to speak to the officers with “respect and education” but was met with retaliation. The officers said she was trying to “incite other people to disrupt,” Aldarenga said. She was told that she would be moved to another area of the facility with the more “dangerous” people, she said.

“(They’re) trying to make me scared that if I speak again, they’re going to put me with the dangerous people, and maybe, something is going to happen to me over there,” she said.

In July, U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) launched an investigation into human rights abuses in U.S. immigration detention after his office received or identified over 500 reports of alleged human rights abuses against people held in the Department of Homeland Security, the Bureau of Prisons, Health and Human Services facilities, county jails and federal buildings across 23 states and territories.

Instances included deaths, physical and sexual abuse, mistreatment of pregnant women, inadequate medical care, and overcrowding, according to a news release.

The Department of Homeland Security, which is the parent agency for ICE, denied the findings in Ossoff’s inquiry.

“Senator Ossoff’s false allegations of subprime conditions have been debunked time and time again by DHS,” Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said in an Aug. 7 statement. “ICE detention facilities have higher standards than most U.S. prisons that detain American citizens. All detainees are provided with comprehensive medical care, proper meals, and are given the opportunity to call their family members and attorneys.

“These false allegations are garbage and are part of the reason ICE agents are now facing an 1,000% increase in assaults against them.”

DHS published a response on its website, which it says debunks claims of abuse and poor conditions in detention facilities.

ICE had not commented further for this story prior to publication. When asked about the raid at Bustillo’s apartment before she was taken to Stewart Detention Center, the FBI directed the Ledger-Enquirer back to Homeland Security and ICE.

‘Exhausted’ detainees willing to concede

The conditions in Stewart Detention Center largely are intentional, Rosenbluth claimed.

“They have no incentive to do anything at all about the deplorable conditions because it’s part and parcel of their strategy to get people to leave on their own and give up,” he said.

The biggest challenge, especially in the past few weeks, is the Trump administration’s policy of denying bond hearings to immigrants, Rosenbluth said. In early September, the Board of Immigration Appeals upheld the policy.

While it was a policy before the board’s decision, Rosenbluth said, individual immigration judges had the discretion of whether to enforce it. This now has changed.

“Anybody who ever crosses the border without permission — even if they’ve been here 20 years and have a family, job, are homeowners and pay taxes — can’t get out on bond anymore,” he said. “There’s no possible way to get one.”

This goes back to “incarceration as a litigation strategy,” Rosenbluth said. People who are able to get out on bond would be in a better position to fight their case, he said. But when they are incarcerated, they are more likely to give up.

For Bustillo, after fighting for her freedom since February, she asked the judge during an Aug. 26 hearing to let her self-deport. She plans to return to Honduras via a commercial flight and will meet up with her grandparents upon arrival, Rosenbluth said.

“People are exhausted,” he said. “People are discouraged. People are depressed.”

‘This is the woman who pours your coffee at Waffle House’

Bustillo arrived in Honduras after being allowed to take a commercial flight Sept. 15 following almost seven months in Stewart Detention Center.

She was happy to see her grandmother for the first time in 12 years, Bustillo said in a Sept. 19 text message. They had kept in contact only via video calls while her family was in the United States. She was happy to get to travel to Honduras, Bustillo said.

“It felt like I could breathe again,” she said. “It felt like such a relief after being locked up for seven difficult months.”

Most immigrants who are detained are not criminals, Rosenbluth said. As of June, 65% of people ICE arrested had no criminal convictions, according to data from the Cato Institute, and 93% had no violent convictions.

“These are not dangerous criminals,” Rosenbluth said. “The government is lying to them. These are their neighbors. These are their children’s friends’ parents. This is the woman who pours your coffee at the Waffle House. These are people who are very much integrated into the community and should not have been targeted.”

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