Washington, DC – There were shackles at her wrists. Her waist. Her ankles.
The memory of being bound still haunts 19-year-old Ximena Arias Cristobal even after her release from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody.
Nearly a month after her arrest, the Georgia college student said she is still grappling with how her life has been transformed. One day in early May, she was pulled over for a minor traffic stop: turning right on a red light. The next thing she knew, she was in a detention centre, facing a court date for her deportation.
“That experience is something I’ll never forget. It left a mark on me, emotionally and mentally,” Arias Cristobal said during a news conference on Tuesday, recounting her time at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia.
“What hurts more,” she added, “is knowing that millions of others have gone through and are still going through the same kind of pain”.
Rights advocates say her story has become emblematic of a “dragnet” deportation policy in the United States, one that targets immigrants of all backgrounds, regardless of whether they have a criminal record.
President Donald Trump had campaigned for a second term on the pledge that he would expel “criminals” who were in the country “illegally”.
But as he ramps up his “mass deportation” campaign from the White House, critics say immigration agents are targeting immigrants from a variety of backgrounds — no matter how little risk they pose.
“The quotas that they are pushing for [are] creating this situation on the ground where ICE is literally just trying to go after anybody that they can catch,” said Vanessa Cardenas, the executive director of America’s Voice, an immigration advocacy group.
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