Back from Dilley ICE facility, WA 11-year-old and dad tell their story

SPOKANE — It seemed at first like a normal day.

Karla Tiul Baltazar, a Spokane 11-year-old who likes to draw and play volleyball, got dropped off Jan. 9 at her elementary school by her dad, Arnoldo Tiul Caal. He wasn’t there to pick her up after school, like he said he would, but it happened sometimes. Her dad worked as a roofer and jobs came up.

She walked 15 minutes to her home, a duplex on a quiet street. Arnoldo was there and told her what had happened.

Immigration got him,” Karla recalled. Then came the second part of her dad’s news: They would get her, too.

The fifth-grader needed to pack a suitcase and go with her dad to U.S. Border Patrol’s Spokane headquarters. Once there, she and her dad were fingerprinted. From there, the Guatemalan asylum-seekers would be taken to the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, a family detention center in the Texas desert about 70 miles south of San Antonio.

Closed by the Biden administration, the Dilley detention center reopened under President Donald Trump last year. Hundreds of children from across the country have since been held there, according to ProPublica and The New York Times, including, the Minnesota 5-year-old who was taken into Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody last month wearing a bunny hat. His story brought widespread attention to the government’s detention of children.

In Washington state, ICE took into custody roughly 90 kids between the start of Trump’s second term and mid-October, according to a Seattle Times analysis of ICE figures released to the Deportation Data Project through Freedom of Information Act requests.

A 1997 legal settlement stipulates that detention of immigrant children generally be limited to 20 days. The Trump administration is seeking to have the settlement terminated, saying in legal papers it is outdated due to new regulations it says ensure good conditions for detained children, according to ProPublica.

Facing a lawsuit in federal court over Karla and Arnoldo’s detention, ICE released them without explanation in early February pending the resolution of their asylum case. They had been detained almost a month.

A week later, they spoke with The Seattle Times about what they had experienced, from a night they slept on the floor in a Spokane holding cell to weeks they spent in the sprawling Dilley complex, where kids formed transitory friendships while killing time barely interrupted, if at all, by school.

Arnoldo, who spoke in Spanish, said they gave up their home when he and Karla were detained. They were staying at a hotel, paid for by a nonprofit advocating for them, Latinos en Spokane. Karla, whose long brown hair hung loose, spoke in English. She was just home from school.

She was remarkably composed considering what she had been through. Some kids held at Dilley have started wetting their beds again or engaged in self-harm, according to a New York Times op-ed by Columbia University law professor Elora Mukherjee. Karla seemed resilient.

Initially, when her dad told her to pack, “it was kind of confusing,” she said. “But I wasn’t scared.” She knew about detention. ICE had earlier detained her uncle.

She put into a suitcase clothes, watercolors, drawing paper and two stuffed animals. She wanted to show them to her little sister, who lived in Guatemala with their mom because, Arnoldo said, he didn’t have money to bring the whole family to the U.S. As Karla packed, she knew she might be going back to Guatemala.

She has not seen her mom and sister since she and her dad left Guatemala in 2019, when Karla was 4, to seek asylum in the U.S. They are members of an indigenous group that has faced harsh discrimination in Guatemala, according to advocates.

Karla and Arnoldo crossed into the country illegally, the Border Patrol said in an email, asked to explain their January arrest. In 2019, however, immigration authorities who arrested them after they crossed the border released them pending the outcome of removal proceedings, according to ICE documents included in a court filing.

The Border Patrol said Arnoldo missed 10 ICE check-ins since then and therefore was terminated from an alternatives to detention program that allows people to live in the community with certain requirements while their cases are pending. Latinos en Spokane Executive Director Jennyfer Mesa, who has been working closely with the family, said he missed some check-ins because of technical problems with an app ICE sometimes uses for those appointments.

When he was arrested in January, Border Patrol agents stopped Arnoldo just after he had dropped Karla at school. Taken to the agency’s Spokane headquarters, he pleaded with agents to let him get her.

“What’s going to happen to her?” he said. “Who’s going to feed her when she gets home?”

Agents agreed to his request, threatening a $10,000 fine if he didn’t return the next day, according to Arnoldo.

When he did, with Karla, they spent a night in a cold room, she said, sleeping on futon-like mats. Then came the transfer to Dilley, flying on a commercial airline without handcuffs but with two agents keeping watch.

They arrived at the privately run detention center, whose fenced-in trailers and dorm-like units are spread over 55 acres. Karla and Arnoldo had a room to themselves with bunk beds, a sink and a TV. They were unable to access their belongings, including Karla’s stuffed animals. Suitcases were stored away to be returned upon their deportation or release. The facility provided clothes: sweatpants, shirts, a sweater.

Their door was not locked but they were restricted to one area of the facility, Karla said. They had access to a dining hall, an outdoor yard where she played volleyball, a recreational room with a PlayStation console and board games, and a store they could visit once a week to buy chips, soda and other items.

School — for an hour a day and not divided by grade-level — was optional, Karla and her dad learned. “Teachers just show you movies,” Karla said.

They opted out. “What is she going to learn for just one hour?” Arnoldo asked. To him, it seemed like children at Dilley had no choice but to waste time. He lamented that his daughter was, as he put it, jailed through no fault of her own.

The first few days for Karla were rough, Arnoldo said. Many people around them were sick and some were quarantined, he noted. ICE confirmed two cases of measles while they were there. Karla escaped that infection but developed a fever, cough and sore throat. She started vomiting.

Normally, he said, it took 24 hours to get medical care but he implored agents to do something sooner and was able get her a nurse’s visit and medicine. Karla recovered.

“Little by little, she started getting used to things,” Arnoldo said.

She watched a lot of TV. She made friends. They ranged in age from 9 to 17 and were from Russia, China, Mexico and elsewhere, she recalled. They all spoke English. Together, she said, they had fun.

Talking about the experience, she did not complain. The lights were on all night in her and Arnoldo’s room. “My dad did not like that because he can’t sleep with lights on,” she said, mentioning nothing about her own sleep.

When asked how the food was, Karla said, “I would say good.” They could choose as much as they wanted from a buffet with items like hamburgers, tacos, hot dogs and sometimes fruits and cookies.

Some people who have been detained there have said they found worms in their not-very-palatable food, according to Mukherjee, the Columbia law professor, and various news reports.

The worst part of being at Dilley, she said, was having to say goodbye to friends. If she saw them being picked up late at night, that would mean they were being deported, she said. If they left in the morning, their family might have decided not to fight their case and agreed to leave the country.

On Feb. 5, it was her turn to leave. It was a Thursday, Karla and Arnoldo’s day to shop at the store, which opened at 8:30 a.m. They started lining up at 6. “When we got back to the room, an officer told us we were leaving,” Karla said.

Five days earlier, a federal judge had ordered the release of Liam Conejo Ramos, the detained 5-year-old Minnesotan, and his dad, also detained. The order was scathing about what it called “the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, even if it requires traumatizing children.”

Dan Gividen, a Texas lawyer who filed the lawsuit seeking Karla and Arnoldo’s release, sees the timing as significant. The government may have released the pair to avoid another critical judge’s order, he suggested.

Karla said she was happy to get out but felt bad for friends she left behind. Some of them had spent much longer at the detention center than she and her dad did — “four months, five months,” she said.

Karla and Arnoldo were put on a bus that took them to a shelter. Mesa, of Latinos en Spokane, and another organization staffer traveled to Texas to pick them up. They flew together back to Spokane.

Teachers from Karla’s school gathered at the Spokane airport to greet them. They brought gifts, balloons and a welcome sign. One gave her a big hug.

She seemed to readjust to school quickly in the following days. “I got to say hi to my friends, Karla said.

She and her dad moved out of the hotel Monday and into a new home rented by Latinos en Spokane. Donations from community members who had heard about their detention waited for them on the porch: blankets, towels, laundry detergent, soap and stuffed animals. They got a bed and other furniture from a Latinos en Spokane staffer who was moving and didn’t need them anymore.

Karla and Arnoldo made the bed together. Then, Karla laid three stuffed animals on it.