The Girl in the Glass Box

by James Grippando

  Julia climbed into the driver’s seat. The passenger’s-side door didn’t open from the outside—Julia had bought the car that way—so she reached across the front seat, lifted the handle, and pushed it open for Beatriz.

  “I forgot my algebra book!”

  “Ay, Beatriz. Where is it?”

  “On the kitchen table.”

  “Do you need it?”

  “Yes! Do you want me to flunk algebra?”

  Julia sighed and handed her the key ring. “Hurry!”

  Beatriz raced into the house. Julia waited, squeezing the steering wheel tightly, as if it were a stress-relief ball, and nervously checking out every passing vehicle.

  Hurry it up, girl.

  There was no way to know if or when ICE was on its way. But she had to take McBride at his word. It was common knowledge that immigration raids and deportations were on the rise. In the Little Havana neighborhood alone, more undocumented immigrants had been arrested in the last three weeks than in her first six months in America. Julia knew two women personally who’d been picked up and given the choice between voluntary deportation or a months-long wait in jail for an immigration hearing. They took the one-way flight to San Salvador.

  She blasted the horn, but still no Beatriz. “What the heck are you doing in there, girl?”

  Julia’s heart was pounding, and then it sank. She didn’t like the look of the approaching vehicles. A Miami-Dade police car led the way. Behind it was a white van with a wide blue horizontal stripe on the side—the markings of Homeland Security. They were a half block away and closing fast. Instinct told her to duck down behind the dashboard, but Julia froze for a moment—just long enough for law enforcement to spot her.

  The orange swirl of the police beacon hit her in the eyes. A blaring siren pierced the neighborhood. Julia had no car keys; she couldn’t make a run for it even if she’d wanted to. But Beatriz’s words suddenly replayed in her mind: ICE can’t enter anyone’s house unless they have a search warrant from a judge.

  Julia slid across the bench seat and jumped out of the car on the passenger’s side. The police car and ICE van screeched to a halt in the street. Julia launched herself across the sidewalk and ran as fast as she could toward the house. The front door opened. Beatriz screamed from the doorway. Julia was ten feet from her daughter when a man twice her weight took her down like a linebacker making an open-field tackle. Julia hit the ground hard.

  “Don’t move!” the ICE officer shouted.

  “Mami!” Beatriz screamed.

  Unless they have a warrant.

  “Shut the door, Beatriz!”

  “No, Mami!”

  “Beatriz, just shut the door! Now!”

  The ICE officer grabbed Julia by the elbow, yanked one arm behind her back, and cuffed her wrist.

  “Quieto!” he shouted in bad Spanish—Key, Ate, Toe—as he cuffed the other wrist.

  Julia was on her belly and bleeding from where her chin had hit the concrete. But she had a clear line of sight to the front door and could see the tears in Beatriz’s eyes.

  “Go!” she shouted, purely on adrenaline.

  Beatriz disappeared behind the closed door. Another ICE officer charged toward the house and banged on the front door. Julia was close enough to hear Beatriz fasten the chain lock on the inside.

  Good girl.

  The ICE officer commanded her to her feet and told her to get in the van.

  Only then did Julia begin to feel the pain.

  Chapter 3

  On Wednesday morning, Jack Swyteck went food shopping with Abuela. This wasn’t just the dutiful grandson taking his grandmother to the grocery store. This was Jack’s biweekly lesson in Cuban culture.

  “What you like for eating, mi vida?”

  Mi vida. Literally it meant “my life,” and Jack loved being her vida. “Camarones?” he said.

  “Ah, shreemp. Muy bien.”

  It had been their routine since Abuela’s arrival from Cuba, Jack speaking far less than perfect Spanish and Abuela answering in broken English. Over the years, he’d improved from about a C minus to a B plus in Abuela’s gradebook, doing the best he could for a grown man who was half Cuban by blood but had been raised 100 percent gringo by his Anglo father and stepmother—which was precisely the point of his trips with Abuela to la tienda.

  Mario’s on Douglas Road was the neighborhood market in an area that began to establish itself as Cuban American with the first wave of immigrants in the 1960s. Decades later, after hundreds of small Hispanic businesses had been squeezed out by El Walmart, La Target, and the like, Mario’s Market was virtually unchanged, owned and operated by the Sires family since the Nixon presidency. A cup of café con leche was still just thirty-five cents at the breakfast counter in front. Nine aisles of food were stuffed with the basic essentials of life, including twenty-pound sacks of long-grain rice, bistec de palomilla sliced to order, delicious caramel flan topping, an assortment of cooking wines to satisfy the most discerning chefs, and glass-encased candles painted with the holy images of Santa Barbara and San Lazaro. Established customers could buy on credit, and the best Cuban bread in town, baked on the premises, could be purchased straight from the hot ovens in back. All you had to do was follow your nose or, for the olfactory deprived, follow the signs and arrows marked pan caliente. Jack had driven past the store a thousand times on his way to the courthouse, and he would have kept right on driving for the rest of his life had his grandmother not come to America and opened a whole new set of doors for him. Abuela always seemed to be preparing a meal or planning the next one, as if on a mission to make up for living nearly half her life under Fidel Castro with virtually nothing to cook and nothing to eat.

  Jack’s life had changed drastically since that very special day when he’d first laid eyes on his maternal grandmother. Jack had since married. He and his wife, Andie, had given Abuela her only great-grandchild. His law practice was actually making money, though Jack was still a bit too ideological for his own financial good—still a sucker for fighting the good fight for clients who could never pay him, everyone from homeless children to death row inmates. Abuela liked to call him Doctor, a title of respect that old Cubans showed abogados.

  Abuela was now well into her eighties, forgetful at times but still Jack’s window to the past—to his mother’s roots. Of course, there would always be the gaping hole of a life that was never lived, the tragedy of a mother who died of preeclampsia soon after bringing her son into the world. Jack’s father had told him stories about Ana Maria, the beautiful young Cuban girl that Harry Swyteck had fallen head over heels in love with. Jack knew how they’d met; he knew about the fresh yellow flower she used to wear in her long brown hair; he knew how jaws would drop when she walked into a party; and he knew that when someone told a joke, she was the first to laugh and the last to stop. All of those things mattered to Jack, but even on those rare occasions when his father did open up and talk about the wife he’d lost, he could offer Jack only a snippet of her life, just the handful of those final years in Miami. Abuela was the rest of the story. When she talked of her sweet, young daughter from Bejucal, her aging eyes would light up with so much magic that Jack could be certain that Ana Maria had truly lived. And Abuela could be certain that she still lived, the way only a grandmother could be certain of such things, the kind of certainty that came when you took a grandchild by the hand, or looked into his eyes, or cupped his cheek in your hand, and the generations seemed to blur.

  Jack carried the bagged groceries to his car, helped Abuela into the passenger’s-side seat, and got behind the wheel.

  “There’s a girl for you to meet,” she said as the engine started.

  Jack smiled sadly. Abuela had once been so determined for Jack to meet “a nice Cuban girl” that she’d phoned into Cuban talk radio and shared his phone number live on the air. They’d been having a very good morning so far, but this remark had rekindled Jack’s fears that her mind was slipping in old age.

  “Ab
uela, you know I’m married now, right?”

  She rattled off something in Spanish that was far too advanced for Jack’s ear, but he got the gist of it, something to the effect of, You might think I’m a crazy old woman, but I have a photographic memory, which could well have been true, except that Abuela still shot in film, so to speak, and not everything got developed.

  “This girl’s name is Beatriz,” said Abuela. “She’s fourteen years old. And she needs your help, Doctor.”

  Jack met with Beatriz in Abuela’s dining room.

  Abuela was a frequent customer at Café de Caribe and had heard about Julia and Beatriz Rodriguez from a barista named Elena. “My grandson will help,” Abuela had promised, which of course was before she’d even bothered to check with Jack. Not that Jack had a say in the matter: he’d found Beatriz and her aunt waiting in a car outside Abuela’s apartment upon their return from Mario’s Market. Abuela was right in one respect: most immigrants depended on volunteer lawyers who were willing to represent them for free. Unlike people held on criminal charges, immigrant detainees are not afforded the Sixth Amendment right to legal counsel. Since deportation is not formally considered a punishment, but an administrative consequence for violating a civil law—crossing the border—they have no right to an attorney paid for by the government.

  Beatriz’s aunt Cecilia helped Abuela put away the groceries in the kitchen while Jack spoke in private to his prospective client. Beatriz was a bright young girl and fluent in English. The conversation was going just fine but for the fact that every ninety seconds Abuela would poke her head into the room and say the same thing in Spanish: “You can help this poor girl, right, Jack?”

  Nobody could say pobrecita like an abuela.

  “Do you know where ICE took your mother?” asked Jack. He and Beatriz had moved past the preliminaries, and it was time to get to the important questions, though Jack was mindful that he was speaking to a child.

  “No. Nobody knows. That’s why I’m so scared. Do you think they could have deported her already?”

  “How long has she been gone?”

  “They picked her up two days ago.”

  Less than forty-eight hours. “The only way she’d be gone that quickly is if she’s been deported in the past.”

  “As far as I know, this is the first time she’s been to this country.”

  “That’s important,” said Jack. “What nationality is your father?”

  “Salvadoran. Like my mom and me.”

  “Is he still in El Salvador?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is he alive?”

  “No idea.”

  “When is the last time you saw him?”

  “I . . . I don’t remember.”

  Jack made a few notes on his pad, then continued. “How long have you been in Miami?”

  “Since July.”

  Jack counted in his head. “About seven months. How is it that your English is so good?”

  “My mother was a housekeeper for a UK businessman and his family for over ten years. They had a daughter my age. They were hoping I would teach her Spanish, so they let us play together. The girl was nice, but honestly she was a little lazy. My English ended up much better than her Spanish.”

  “I can relate.” Jack was thinking of his trips to Mario’s Market and Abuela’s lessons in Cuban culture. He shifted subjects. “Tell me how you got here—to Miami, I mean.”

  Beatriz sighed, as if overwhelmed by the question—or, more likely, the journey.

  “My mom saved up for two years. One day she came to me and said, ‘We leave tonight.’ We got on a bus to Guatemala, and when I woke up the next morning we were at a town called Tecun Uman. From there you have to cross the river to Tapachula, Mexico. It’s a bizarre place. Dozens of rafts made out of tractor-tire inner tubes. If you speak Spanish, it costs a dollar to cross. Two dollars if you want a raft with no guns or drugs on it. If you’re from Haiti or Africa—I even met some people from Nepal—it’s ten dollars. My mom nearly flipped when I loaned five dollars to a girl from Nigeria: ‘Beatriz, we still have four thousand kilometers to go!’”

  Jack pulled up a map on his iPhone. Forty-three hundred, to be exact.

  Jack listened as Beatriz recounted the journey. The first thinning of the ranks was on the Mexican side of the river, where migrants in the hands of unscrupulous smugglers parted company with their cash and landed in the Tapachula detention center, Latin America’s largest, where they awaited deportation to their home country. The luckier ones continued north in groups of five or larger, by bus or on foot, up the “Mexican corridor” and all the way to the U.S. border. Along the way there were the handlers, the cons, the gross men with an eye for pretty thirteen-year-old girls who looked “fresh.” Fear became their friend; they were afraid to stop moving, and even after they crossed the border, speed was critical. Any undocumented immigrant detained within one hundred miles of the U.S. border was subject to expedited deportation. Beatriz and her mother spent their last dollars on a bus trip from Texas to Miami. After all that, her mother had landed in a detention center—the crock at the end of the rainbow.

  “What have you done so far to find your mother?”

  “My aunt has been asking around, trying to figure out where to start.”

  “There’s actually a website,” he said, as he accessed the Internet on his smartphone. “I use the bureau of prisons online inmate locator all the time.”

  “My mom is in prison?”

  Effectively she was, but Jack tried to be sensitive. “I’m talking about the ICE detainee locator. It’s different from the bureau of prisons.” Sort of.

  Beatriz provided her mother’s full name and date of birth, which Jack entered.

  “Hmmm.”

  “What does ‘hmmm’ mean?” asked Beatriz.

  “Looks like your mother is not in the system yet. That’s nothing to be alarmed about. ICE has over forty thousand beds in the detention program. It can take a few days for an update.”

  “Why doesn’t she call my aunt and let us know where she is? Isn’t she allowed to make a phone call?”

  “I’m sure she’ll call as soon as she can. Making a call from a detention center is not as easy as it sounds.”

  “What’s it like in one of those places?”

  Jack didn’t see any point in trying to sugarcoat it. “It’s a jail, basically.”

  “Will she be safe?”

  Jack hesitated. Did detainees inflict violence on other detainees? Every day. Were there reported cases of male guards assaulting female detainees? Hundreds of them. Would Julia get all the medical attention she needed? Maybe. Maybe not. The inside of an ICE detention center was like the dark side of the moon, completely off the map except for the rare instances of abuse so appalling that they blip onto society’s ethical radar.

  “Your mother sounds like a woman who can take care of herself,” said Jack, opting in the final analysis for a little coating of sugar.

  “Will there be men in there with her?”

  “That’s an excellent question, Beatriz. Some facilities are for men only, like Krome Detention down in Homestead. That could be why it’s taking a while to get your mom into the online database. They need to find a bed in a facility that takes women.”

  “And children?” she asked with trepidation.

  “That’s where immigration law is hard to separate from immigration politics. One thing I can say is that children stopped at the border have bigger problems than you do. Especially where you have an aunt who’s legally in this country and willing to take you in.”

  “So, what will happen to me?”

  “How long can you stay with your aunt?”

  “She’s finishing a master’s degree at Florida International University this year. I’m guessing her student visa expires when she graduates.”

  “We’ll sort that out. But let’s take one step at a time. First, we have to help your mother.”

  Abuela rushed in from the ki
tchen, hugged Jack, and planted a kiss on his cheek. “Gracias, mi vida! I knew you would help!”

  Obviously Abuela had been eavesdropping on a privileged lawyer-client conversation, but Jack let it go. It wasn’t lost on Jack that his own mother was not much older than Beatriz when Abuela had put her on an airplane for a better life in Miami—and they had never seen each other again.

  “Yes, I will help.”

  Cecilia entered the room. “And to your question, Beatriz: of course you can stay with me.”

  Abuela wasn’t the only eavesdropper.

  “Gracias, Tía,” said Beatriz.

  Cecilia hugged her niece, and it suddenly seemed as though they were holding each other up. Jack wondered how many minutes, not hours, of sleep they’d had since Julia disappeared.

  “How long will this whole process take?” asked Cecilia. “Until we know if Julia is being deported or not, I mean.”

  “It varies. But I would expect it to be months before Julia has a final hearing.”

  “As far as Beatriz having a place to stay, my student visa is good through next December.”

  Eleven months. “You should look into renewing it. This could take more than a year. Especially now that Julia has a lawyer on her side.”

  “Will Julia stay in detention all that time?”

  “Not necessarily,” said Jack. “ICE could release her if she posts a bond. It’s like getting out on bail before a criminal trial, except this isn’t a criminal case.”

  Beatriz shook off her fatigue, alarmed again. “What if ICE decides not to release her?”

  “We don’t know that yet.”

  “But let’s say they don’t let her out? Can I visit her?”

  “I wouldn’t recommend that anyone who’s not legal visit an ICE detention center. Cecilia is fine.”

  Beatriz shrank. “Well I’m not fine. You mean I can’t see my mom?”

  “Not while she’s in detention,” said Jack.

  “So it could be months before I see her again.”

  “I didn’t say ICE won’t release her on bond.”

  “You didn’t say they will.”