Around six thirty in the morning on October 28, Miguel Barreno López, a Spanish citizen, was driving to the Indian food factory where he worked near the city of Carol Stream, on the outskirts of Chicago. He was accompanied by three other people, all Nicaraguans. Suddenly, a vehicle approached them and forced them to stop. Barreno immediately sensed what was happening. “These are not the police,” he thought to himself. They were ICE agents (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), the paramilitary units to which the administration of the President of the United States, Donald Trump, has given free rein to pursue and detain foreigners in irregular situations. Thus began “a hell” whose way out he began to glimpse after reporting his abandonment in a phone call to EL PAÍS.
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More than six months have passed and on Sunday, May 3, Barreno landed in Madrid. While crossing the Atlantic sitting in seat 29-D on American Airlines flight number 126, without luggage or a backpack and with a safe-conduct kept in a folder, he reviewed the Kafkaesque ordeal in which he was trapped and glimpsed a new life in Spain. Barreno spent Christmas in a detention center in the State of Indiana and turned 39 in another correctional facility, surrounded by common prisoners, in Kentucky. In his account, sitting at a table in a fast food restaurant in Terminal 4 of Adolfo Suárez Barajas airport, dates, images, and emotions pile up.
Barreno lived with his partner, Leticia Centeno, in an apartment in Chicago. He had been earning 800 dollars [about 684 euros] a week for years. “There I had my car, I was up to date with payments and insurance. We were workers, we paid the apartment at the end of the month, we went out on weekends, we went out to eat, we went shopping. The usual, but all that before, because we were not being pursued,” he recounts. They met in Madrid, where he grew up, about a decade ago. She is Nicaraguan and, when she decided to return to her country first, and then migrate to the United States, Barreno chose to follow her. He bought a ticket to Chicago, entered as a tourist, and stayed. Since then, in November 2017, he started from scratch. His passport and ID expired, but he got a driver’s license and with that documentation he was able to live without major complications in a city considered a “sanctuary,” like New York or Los Angeles, because of their welcoming policies for migrants.
It was precisely through the driver’s license that ICE agents obtained his immigration history. Barreno clearly remembers those moments, starting with the knocks on the window. “Bang, bang, bang. I kept quiet because I thought: ‘I have my rights and they haven’t read them to me.’” However, the methods, expeditious at best, of this federal body do not allow replies nor silence. And what came next shows that, in reality, for ICE, he had no rights.
They asked him if his tourist visa was expired and he answered yes. He was then transferred, along with the other passengers, to the nearest detention center. “Once there, an agent interrogated me and gave me a date to appear before the court on November 17. Then they took us to a room with dozens of people in a small space. They had to put a fan on because many people were suffocating. And around four in the morning they transferred us, handcuffed and footcuffed. Like in the movies.”
The next stage was the Brazil detention center, a municipality in Indiana. There he waited until the November 17 hearing, which was held by video call from that prison. “I appeared without a lawyer. The judge told me I had no options to apply for asylum and that I have no children born in the United States. I had nothing there, really. I also had no criminal record, so the only way to end this, she told me, was voluntary departure. At no time did she mention deportation,” he assures.
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Towards a way out
Barreno held on to that idea, although he was ultimately deported and is banned from returning to the United States for at least 10 years. After appearing before the judge, he awaited the administrative resolution of his case, which according to his account remained in limbo between local authorities, ICE, and the Spanish Consulate in Chicago, although Spanish diplomatic sources in the United States maintained they had offered him a safe-conduct as early as November. In any case, after spending Christmas in the Indiana center, after Epiphany an official notified Barreno: he was going to be released. “It was on the 7th or 8th, I thought I was leaving, but it was not yet arranged. They told me they were transferring me to another jail, in Kenton County, Kentucky.” There he spent almost four months living with common prisoners and 15 other foreigners awaiting expulsion. The center, used for temporary detentions, had no cells but separating modules. “If something happens to me in that jail, they hit me, anything, what do I do? How do I defend myself? I really had a hard time there, really bad. Being without freedom is the worst thing that can happen to you. It’s like everything goes out. Your contacts go out, your heart goes out, your life goes out, you degrade yourself to the ground,” he recalls.
It was at the end of March when the Chicago Consulate located him again in that center, from where he could make a daily 15-minute call. “They told me the only thing needed was a document [to prove my identity]. My passport was expired, although luckily I had my ID in my wallet, also expired. So they made a copy and sent it,” he recounts. “After that, they called me again and this time it was the final one, now yes they were going to take me to Chicago. There at the Consulate, the consul and his wife received me, very kind. They made the safe-conduct and shook my hand.”
Barreno, however, still had to wait another week in custody, as ICE bought him a ticket for May 2. They accompanied him to the airport, up to the boarding gate. He arrived in Madrid wearing the same clothes he had on the day of the detention, sneakers, a black hoodie, and gray jeans. In an envelope, a handful of belongings: a leather keychain with the Nicaraguan coat of arms in relief, the mobile phone, a smartwatch, the safe-conduct, and the deportation orders.
—How do you feel?
—Do you know what it means to me to talk to you, to talk to anyone and have everyone understand me? That’s it.
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