Olivia, a 19-year-old asylum seeker from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has been at the Dilley Immigration processing center in Texas for more than four months. She described her experience in detention as feeling like 48 hours each day. ‘Another day passes, another night comes,’ she said. ‘And sometimes I feel that this nightmare is not going to end.’

Detention Life: Sleepless Nights and Nightmares

According to Olivia, the nights in detention are the hardest. She said she used to scream in her sleep during the first weeks after her arrest, but now she struggles to sleep much at all. ‘At night, when no one is paying attention, everyone is asleep, that’s when I can cry,’ she said. She paces and cries until she’s too exhausted to keep her eyes open, usually around 3am.

Olivia said she often has nightmares, sometimes thinking about her brother Manuel, who drowned when he was eight years old during her family’s journey from South America to the US. She, her mother, and her younger siblings – Manuel, Estefania, and Joel – had fled political persecution in the DRC, stopped over in South America, and completed their long journey to the US in December 2022.

Olivia feels sad that she and her family have been through so much, kept fighting to survive, kept going even after they lost Manuel – only to end up at Dilley. Other times, she wakes up thinking about everything that has happened since her family was apprehended.

A Journey to Detention: Separation and Suffering

Five months ago, Olivia was living in Maine with her mother, Joel, who is now 17, and Estefania, 14, awaiting a final decision on her family’s asylum case. Olivia had recently graduated high school and completed a certification to become a nurse’s assistant. After the family’s asylum case was denied, their lawyer appealed the decision, but in the meantime, the family decided to leave the US and seek asylum in Canada. They were almost immediately detained at the northern border.

Olivia’s mother and siblings were sent straight to Dilley – a former medium-security prison 70 miles (113km) south of San Antonio. But because Olivia was 19, legally an adult, authorities separated her from her family and moved her from one detention center to another, and then another. She was made to wear an orange jumpsuit – just like in the crime procedurals she used to watch on TV.

Immigration officials wouldn’t answer her questions about where she was, or where her family was. In nightmares now, her mind flashes back to her time at those detention centers and the shackles she had to wear for long stretches. During a call with the Guardian, she stood up to show the scars they left on her wrists and ankles.

And she thinks about the cold. The third facility where she was held, somewhere in New York, she calls “the fridge.” Officials had confiscated her coat, so she was wearing only one layer. “I had never felt as cold as I did in this place,” she said. Now at Dilley, she sleeps with a coat on, even on warm nights, because she still hasn’t been able to escape the feeling that she’s going to freeze.

Life in Detention: A Daily Struggle

Most of Olivia’s mornings at Dilley start in the same way: she wakes up at around 6am to eat breakfast. Usually, it’s pancakes or bread, a boiled egg, milk and some coffee. It’s not great, but it’s better than what they get for lunch or dinner, so she tries to eat at least a little bit.

Then she goes back to sleep for a few more hours, until 11am or noon. When she wakes up, she usually has a headache. She needs contact lenses but her prescription expired about a month ago, and she hasn’t been able to see an optometrist, so she’s constantly straining to see. The harsh lights at the detention center make it worse.

Some days, she passes the whole day in bed – she has little energy or motivation to get up. There are a few days when she manages to walk around, or chat with some of the other young women at the facility. It was one such day, during her second week at Dilley, that she discovered that her mother and siblings were being held in a different part of the same detention center.

Another girl had invited her to walk to the library together. That’s when she heard a distant voice, calling: “Olivia! Olivia!” She couldn’t see well without her contact lenses, but she recognized the voice: “I told my friend that I had heard my sister’s voice, and she said that that could not be possible.” But Olivia couldn’t let it go. So her friend helped her locate a family counselor, who confirmed it: her mother and siblings were indeed at Dilley.

The next day, she was able to visit with them. “We hugged, my mother cried, and we talked about things that had happened to us,” she said. “We cried a lot, but at the end we laughed because we were together.” Olivia found out that every day since she had arrived at Dilley, Estefania would go outside and yell out her sister’s name – just in case. It was a stroke of luck that Olivia heard her.

After that, the officials at Dilley offered them an hour together on weekdays and three or four hours on Saturdays. The rest of the time, Olivia was alone. She often cried after seeing them. She worried about Estefania, a bubbly and active teen who loved to make art who, since coming to Dilley, had lost interest in drawing. She was angry that Joel, a promising football player who was planning to enroll in college in the fall, had suddenly changed into someone who seemed almost too grownup for his age.

When lawyers were able to secure her mother and siblings release in mid-March, Olivia said it was the “happiest day of my life.” But the day after that was the saddest. She didn’t know when she’d be able to see them again.

The Department of Homeland Security said it was within policy to shackle Olivia. The agency also denied separating families, despite being informed that Olivia had been separated from hers.