It started off as a routine family trip to the supermarket.

On Saturday, March 8, a woman named Sarita hopped into the car with her two kids and her 19-year old brother to drive from their home in Detroit, Michigan to do some shopping at the local Costco and get some lunch.

A few minutes into the drive, the GPS instructed them to turn onto the Ambassador Bridge, which is a one-way toll road that connects the U.S. and Canada. Sarita says she quickly realized her mistake as American immigration agents approached — they’d accidentally typed in directions to the Costco in Windsor, Ontario, on the Canadian side of the border.

Map of Costco’s in the Detroit and Windsor, Canada area

Google Maps/Screenshot by NPR

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Google Maps/Screenshot by NPR

Accidentally driving onto the Ambassador Bridge to Canada from the Detroit-area is a common mistake. Locals say it’s an area that is always under construction and can be confusing.

But for Sarita, it was a life-altering wrong turn: she and her brother are both Guatemalan immigrants in the U.S. without legal status. She requested NPR only use her first name because she fears retaliation for speaking with the media.

For the next five days, Sarita said she and her children were held in a windowless office space, in a one story building between the toll plaza and the bridge, with no access to legal counsel or communication with her consulate.

Her two daughters, ages 1 and 6, are both American citizens. As a result of that wrong turn, she says her family lived through a nightmare that “felt like a kidnapping.”

Advocates NPR interviewed say Sarita’s detention illustrates how the Trump administration is bending the rules on immigration enforcement in its efforts to carry out a historic deportation campaign and immigration crackdown.

“I was in the backseat and I hugged my daughters. I started crying.” 

Sarita says she has been living in the U.S. for over six years. She is a homemaker. Her brother and the father of her children work as roofers in the Detroit area. No one in the family has a criminal record in the U.S., and yet, as they drove toward immigration officials, Sarita says she immediately understood what this wrong turn meant. “I was in the backseat and I hugged my daughters. I started crying.”

U.S. immigration officials told them to get out of the car and directed them to an office building by the bridge, on the Michigan side of the border. She and her daughters were separated from her brother. Sarita says U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents told her she was going to be deported, but that she had a right to talk to a lawyer.

She informed officers that both her daughters are U.S. citizens and said they gave her the option of sending them home. “They told me I could call someone to pick them up, but at that moment I did not want to let go of them.” She says she began spiraling into a panic. “I felt I’d lost my head. Some of the agents were nice, others screamed at me when I was giving them my fingerprints. I was so scared, my hand was shaking. I was not well.”

As midnight rolled around, about 12 hours after her arrest, Sarita says she and her daughters were given dinner: a cup of ramen noodle soup to share between the three of them. They were taken to a windowless office space where they were given cots to sleep on. She says she again asked for that promised call to her lawyer. “They said I had to wait. They made me sign something and told me I was admitting that I had entered the U.S. illegally, and that I wanted to keep my daughters with me.”

Increasing reports of U.S. citizen children being detained 

Sarita says she had no idea where she was being held.

Her lawyer, Ruby Robinson of the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, pulls out a map of Detroit and points to an office building right next to the Ambassador Bridge, on the U.S. side. “It’s used for office spaces, and as we are learning, it’s also being used for short term and now longer term detention,” Robinson says.

In recent months, advocates and local immigration lawyers have increasingly been receiving tips about these types of detentions at the Ambassador Bridge offices – people who accidentally drive onto the toll plaza, as well as migrants seeking asylum in Canada who are turned back. They end up detained in these office spaces for extended periods of time.

“We have reason to believe that about a dozen families have been detained just at this crossing,” says Miriam Aukerman, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Michigan. “We have reason to believe this is happening elsewhere along the northern border, but we can’t confirm. The transparency issue is very real.”

Aukerman says they’ve been trying to get an answer from U.S. Customs and Border Protection for over a month and, so far, have received no response.

But agency officials insist CBP was following protocol.

“When individuals violate immigration laws, their choices make them subject to detention and removal,” assistant commissioner Hilton Beckham told NPR in a written statement. “In this case, an illegal alien was encountered at the Detroit Ambassador Bridge after driving into Canada without travel documents. She admitted to unlawfully entering the U.S in 2018. Per policy, CBP worked to find a suitable guardian for there [sic] U.S. citizen children; however, she initially chose to keep them with her, prolonging the detention period.”

In response to Sarita’s case and other reports, U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., has requested a site visit. “No matter their immigration status,” she told NPR recently, “a person has rights in our country,” referring to the legal right of all people on American soil, immigrants and non-immigrants alike, to due process.

In the past, Aukerman says, someone like Sarita would have been given a notice to appear in court — the first formal step toward a deportation order. The person would then be released under some form of supervision. That has changed, Aukerman says. “This administration has an obsessive focus on detention,” she says, “in this case, detention in conditions that are not suited for long term attention for adults, much less children.”

Former CBP commissioner Gil Kerlikowske says five days is an unusually long time for the agency to hold anyone in detention — particularly at an inspection facility that is not equipped for it.

“You have the evidence. Make a determination and then make a decision as to what you’re going to do,” Kerlikowske says. “To be held for that length of time seems particularly inappropriate.”

Kerlikowske believes the Trump administration may be pushing to fulfill President Trump’s campaign promise of mass deportations. But the pressure to boost immigration arrest numbers has clashed with the reality on the border, where illegal crossings have plummeted. “Those numbers are way down,” Kerlikowske says. “Then lo and behold, the numbers for deportation are also going to be way down. Now there seems to be an awful lot of what you would call collateral damage like this family.”

Because ports of entry are considered temporary holding areas, not detention facilities, lawyers say CBP has a policy of not allowing legal counsel into these types of sites.

Even more concerning, advocates say, is that places like the one where Sarita and her family were confined are unprepared to handle children. The U.S. has protocols for detention of children in federal custody, including the 1997 Flores Agreement. It requires that minors in the custody of immigration agencies be housed in facilities that meet certain standards and are the “least-restrictive setting appropriate to the child’s age and special needs,” among other requirements. But the agreement was partially terminated in July of last year. In addition, last week the Department of Homeland Security shut down three watchdog agencies that investigated complaints about detention conditions.

However, Aukerman points out that Sarita’s children are not immigrants – they are U.S. citizens. “The harsh reality is that this administration’s brutal attack on immigrants is also an attack on U.S. citizens, because many families are of mixed status. So when you have a war on immigrants, that is also a war on families and it turns into a war on children, including U.S. citizen children.”

For Sarita, who found herself detained in a facility with no children’s clothing or diapers, the situation quickly spiraled.

72 hours in detention: “I don’t know where I am. They won’t tell me”

By Monday afternoon, Sarita says she began to reconsider her decision to keep her daughters with her. “They wouldn’t let us out of the room, except to go to the bathroom or shower.” She says the only window was in the hallway, on the way to the restroom. “That’s when my daughters could see the sun. It made me so sad.”

The Ambassador Bridge spans the Detroit River between Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit, Michigan.

Geoff Robins/AFP via Getty Images

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Geoff Robins/AFP via Getty Images

That evening, she says, she was allowed to call her children’s father, who lives in Detroit.

“We’ve been looking for you,” he said. “Where are you right now?”

She told him she had no idea. “I don’t know where I am. They won’t tell me. I only know I am under a bridge. It’s a big bridge, it goes to Canada.”

They decided he should take the kids. When she hung up, she let an agent know. They brought her paperwork to sign away custody of her daughters.

By Monday night, no one had come to pick up her daughters, and her 1 year old was starting to get sick.

“I started pleading: ‘Please let my daughters go.’ “

Sarita says that night she asked agents for medicine to help with her daughter’s rising fever. She was told they had none.

On Tuesday, as she and her girls were being escorted to the bathroom, she saw her brother. Up until that moment, she says, she had no idea what happened to him after he was arrested. “He was in shackles. He had just showered.” She believes he was being detained at an office in the same building complex. “My eldest daughter, she said: ‘Mama, look.’ I covered her eyes,” Sarita says, sobbing.

After seeing her brother, she says she began to panic for the well-being of her kids. She started pleading with the CBP officers to let her daughters go. “I told them please, they are getting sick.”

She says the agents told her they had no updates on when her daughters could go.

By Wednesday morning, the family’s fifth day in detention, her daughter’s fever was rising and her other child had developed a cough. “It was cold in there at night,” Sarita explains. They were sleeping in cots and, she says, meals usually consisted of a cup of instant noodle soup, macaroni or oatmeal.  
CBP agents began trying to coax her to take the girls back to Guatemala, Sarita says. She reminded them that her daughters are U.S. citizens, and that the conditions were not fit for children. “They cannot live off instant noodles. They are getting sick. They are bored and crying,” she says she told officers.

“It felt like a kidnapping”

Sarita says she began to lose track of time. “I don’t remember on what day, but I asked them, ‘You told me I could speak to a lawyer. Why can’t I see a lawyer?’ They would just tell me they couldn’t give me that information. It felt like a kidnapping.”

She says she refused to budge despite pressure to take her daughters back to Guatemala. By Wednesday night, at around 10 p.m., the children were released to her sister-in-law.

Once they were gone, she says she felt despair.

“They moved me into another office space,” Sarita says. “It was cold. The bathroom smelled unbearably bad. I no longer wanted to eat, I couldn’t sleep. Understand that I had never been separated from my daughters. It is a pain that is so ugly.”

On Thursday afternoon, to her surprise — after more than five days in custody — she was informed she would be released.

She says she was handcuffed, and driven to another building (she’s not sure where) and told to sign a notice to appear in court in June. That will begin formal removal proceedings, which could eventually lead to a deportation order. Then they let her go and her sister-in-law picked her up. Her brother remains in detention and has been told he will be deported back to Guatemala.

Her attorney says he is mystified by her treatment and release, but most of all, he’s concerned about others who might be held in this office building.

Back at her house, Sarita says she wakes up in the middle of the night thinking about the office building by the bridge, and how many other people might be there. “I watch my girls. They can sleep now. The eldest asks about her Uncle. She asks if he’s still in shackles. I tell her no, don’t you worry.”