The Girl in the Glass Box

by James Grippando

  “We won’t know until I talk to the deportation officer assigned to the case.”

  “You’re a lawyer. If ICE won’t let her out, there has to be something you can do! Can’t you make them do it? Can’t you sue them and make them let her go?”

  “I—”

  “Of course!” said Abuela. “My grandson will get your mother out. Don’t you worry about that.”

  Jack was about to inject the usual legal disclaimer—“We’ll see” or “I’ll do my best”—but before he could open his mouth, Beatriz sprang from her chair and threw her arms around his neck.

  “Thank you, Mr. Swyteck. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

  “Pobrecita,” said Abuela.

  Jack glanced at his grandmother and drew a breath. “You’re welcome” was all he could bring himself to say.

  Chapter 4

  “How you like Club Fed so far, chica?”

  Julia glanced at the detainee in the next bunk. There were forty-two women in Julia’s pod—seven rows of bunk beds, three up and three down. All detainees wore orange jumpsuits; most were Hispanic. Julia had landed in the bunk beside a Bahamian woman who seemed nice but never shut up, and who liked to call her chica. The woman’s name was Nellie.

  “Nice,” said Julia.

  Nellie laughed so hard it echoed off the windowless walls of solid concrete.

  “What’s so funny?” asked Julia.

  “You are, chica.”

  Julia felt anything but funny. Exhausted. Angry. Depressed. But not funny.

  Transport and processing had taken all night and into the morning. After the open-field tackle on her front sidewalk, ICE officers locked her in the back of the van, and then they just sat there—literally, just sat there for nearly five hours. The van didn’t move. All Julia could figure was that ICE was playing a game of “wait and see,” betting that eventually Beatriz would come out. Or maybe they thought someone truly dangerous was inside. They finally tired of waiting and took her someplace in Miami—whether it was a local police station or an ICE facility, Julia couldn’t say—for fingerprinting, paperwork, and collection of personal items. She spent the next four hours in a holding cell with eleven other women. Sometime in the middle of the night the guards came, emptied the pen, and loaded the women onto an old school bus. The windows were painted black, so there was nothing to see. Julia fell asleep for some period of time during the trip, though she wasn’t sure how long. When she woke, the bus unloaded and Julia found herself in the yard, standing in the shadow of a guard tower outside the gates to what Nellie called “Club Fed.”

  “Did you meet your deportation officer yet?” asked Nellie.

  “No.”

  “You will. Soon. Just remember: they are not your friend. Everything you say to them, they will figure out a way to use it against you.”

  Julia didn’t feel much like talking, but she suddenly realized that Nellie might be a source of something that so far had been in very short supply: information.

  “How long you been here?” asked Julia.

  “Seven months.”

  Puchica. “Why so long?”

  “That ain’t long. The lovely Miss Brazil over there?” she said, indicating two rows over. “Ten months. Next to her, Miss Trinidad and Tobago? Over a year. Things don’t move fast here. The first thing ICE does is decide if your case meets the requirements for expedited deportation, which is, like, boom, you’re gone. If you’re not one of those quickies, you land here, and these folks ain’t in no hurry to see you go. Every night you sleep in that bunk, ICE pays them eighty-five bucks.”

  Julia blinked, confused. “ICE pays who?”

  “This place.”

  “What is ‘this place’?”

  Nellie laughed again. “You kill me, chica.”

  “I’m serious. I saw the sign. I know it’s Baker County. But what is that?”

  “It’s a county-owned jail. You think this little shithole town in the middle of nowhere needs a jail with five hundred beds? They fill the place up with you, me, and all these other warm bodies.”

  “How far are we from Miami?”

  “Miami? Shit, chica. You a long way from Miami.”

  Julia must have slept longer on that bus than she’d realized.

  “I need to call my daughter. When do they let us use a phone?”

  Nellie laughed again. It was annoying on some level, but Julia gave her the benefit of the doubt. After seven months in this factory of broken spirits, anyone would be desperate to find something to laugh about.

  “Is there no phone?”

  “Oh, yeah. There’s a phone. You gotta pay the girls from Honduras ten dollars to use it.”

  “They own the phone?”

  “Sort of. They see you use the phone, they come collect the phone tax. You don’t pay, you spit out your teeth.”

  Julia was no stranger to gangs and their highly effective methods of collection.

  “I really need to talk to my daughter.”

  “Join the club.”

  “You have a daughter?”

  Nellie’s expression changed. Even forced laughter seemed a remote possibility. “She’s three.” Nellie settled back onto her bunk, clasped her hands behind her head, and looked up at the ceiling. “I miss her so much.”

  Julia felt compelled to say something encouraging. “You’ll be together soon, I’m sure.”

  Nellie shook her head, still staring at the ceiling. “No. I’m gonna lose her.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “It’s true. The legal aid lawyer told me.”

  “You have a lawyer?”

  “Yeah. We all do. A really nice young lady from Jacksonville who volunteers her time.”

  Julia looked around her pod. On her way to her assigned bunk, the guard had taken her past the central tower, an octagon-shaped surveillance station overlooking eight pods that stretched out like the spokes of a wheel, each as big as Julia’s, each filled to capacity.

  “There’s one lawyer for everybody?” asked Julia.

  “Yeah. Unless you can afford your own. Which I recommend. These volunteers mean well, but you can end up like me. Screwed.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because it’s true. I got picked up for shoplifting at the mall. Public defender told me to take a plea to get no jail time. What he didn’t tell me is that taking the plea would get me deported. Karen—she’s the nice legal aid woman from Jacksonville—tried to keep me here on what they call humanitarian grounds, because I have a daughter. We lost my appeal last week. She says there’s nothing more she can do for me. Just a matter of time ’til they need my bed for somebody new.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “Haiti.”

  “You don’t sound Haitian.”

  “I was born in the Bahamas, but my parents were Haitian, so the Bahamas says I’m not a citizen.”

  “Do you know anybody in Haiti?”

  “Nope. Don’t speak the language, either. Get yourself a good lawyer, chica. That’s my advice.”

  “How am I supposed to pay for a lawyer?”

  “I dunno. Make like the girls from Honduras and find yourself a racket. Ten bucks here, ten bucks there. It adds up.”

  The irony struck her. Thousands of people fled the hell of El Salvador’s gangs every day. Now she was stuck in legal purgatory, forced to pay a “phone tax” to the girls from Honduras.

  A guard approached, and he seemed laser focused on Julia. He stopped at her bedside. “A-one-eleven-six-zero-zero-eighteen.”

  Julia didn’t immediately comprehend.

  “That’s you, chica. You’re a number now,” said Nellie.

  Her all-important alien number. “Right,” said Julia. “That’s me.”

  “Let’s go. Time to meet your deportation officer.”

  Julia rose from her bunk.

  “Hey, chica,” said Nellie. “Remember what I told you: not your friend.”

  Julia nodded in appreciation, and
then followed the guard down the concrete corridor.

  Chapter 5

  “Found her,” said Jack.

  Jack had checked the ICE detainee locator before going to bed on Wednesday night, and he checked again first thing the next morning. He was surprised and relieved to get a hit, and he immediately called Julia’s sister to share the news with her and Beatriz. His next move was to call Theo Knight.

  “Dude, it’s Jack.”

  Theo was Jack’s best friend, bartender, therapist, confidant, and sometime investigator. Jack especially liked to use Theo on pro bono cases. Theo worked cheap, sometimes refusing any pay at all, trying to pay back a debt that Jack recognized as no debt at all.

  Theo was a former client, a onetime gangbanger who easily could have ended up dead on the streets of Overtown or Liberty City. Instead, he landed on death row for a murder he didn’t commit. Jack had literally saved his life. With his civil settlement from the state, Theo went on to open his own tavern—Sparky’s, he’d called it, a play on words and a double-barreled flip of the bird to “Old Sparky,” the nickname for the electric chair he’d avoided. Sparky’s had done well enough to get him a second bar. Of course Theo needed a second bar. After four years of living eight feet away from death, Theo had developed a simple credo: Anything worth doing is worth overdoing. Though Jack often cringed at the things Theo said and did, he’d come around to accepting the fact that he needed a little bit of Theo in his life.

  “You up for a road trip?” asked Jack.

  “Where to?”

  “Macclenny.”

  The line went silent. Theo had hung up on him. Jack suddenly recalled that Macclenny was about ten miles away from the town of Raiford and Florida State Prison, where Theo had lived on death row. Jack redialed, and Theo immediately picked up, his tone laden with incredulity.

  “Seriously? A road trip to Macclenny?”

  “It’s a seven-hour drive. I need a driver.”

  “Oh, hey, no problem. And can we stop at the museum of Confederate memorials on the way up?”

  “Theo, I’m doing this case for free, and I have work to do for my paying clients on the way up. Help me out.”

  The pro bono button was the right one to push, and Jack knew he had his driver as soon as Theo asked, “What’s the case about?” At six-feet-six, Theo could be intimidating as hell, but he was pretty much a pushover for a story like Beatriz’s. They were on the road by nine thirty. Jack phoned the visitation office, confirmed that attorneys could visit without an appointment, and left a message for Julia to call him. He wasn’t technically Julia’s lawyer until she said yes, but Jack put the odds of her saying no right up there with the likelihood of Theo making it all the way to Macclenny without mentioning their last case for an immigrant.

  “Hey, whatever happened with Ricardo?”

  They hadn’t even left Miami-Dade County.

  “You really want to know?”

  “Yeah. Kid was cool.”

  Ricardo Fuentes was a nineteen-year-old Mexican college student who dreamed of making it on Miami Beach as a stand-up comic. He had a pretty good run with his deportation shtick—the twenty-first-century version of gallows humor—until ICE caught his act, figured out that he’d overstayed his visa, and deported him.

  “You can visit him next time you’re in Chalupa.”

  Jack’s cell rang. It was from the Baker County Facility. He thought it might be Julia, but it wasn’t.

  “Mr. Swyteck,” a woman said in a southern drawl, “this here is ICE officer Cindy Johnson”—Aaahs offisuh—“badge number fifty-seven, four-two-oh-six. I am the deportation officer for Julia Rodriguez.”

  Jack thanked her for calling and jumped straight to the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. “Has ICE determined the amount of Ms. Rodriguez’s bond for release yet?”

  “Well,” she began. Wha-ell.

  What followed was an entirely unnecessary but seemingly unstoppable recitation of the various levels of priority that ICE assigned to detention of detainees under the Immigration and Nationality Act, from those convicted of capital murder to the catchall category of those who “otherwise obstruct immigration controls.” Jack interrupted her a few times to get specifics about Julia, but she persisted undaunted, as if reading from a script. Theo continued to drive somewhere north of eighty m.p.h. as Jack took notes. They were passing Yeehaw Junction when, finally, Officer Johnson delivered the bottom line.

  “Say that again,” Jack said into his phone.

  She did. Jack asked a couple of follow-up questions, but the ICE officer had “no further information at this time.” The call was over. Jack put his phone away.

  Theo glanced over from the driver’s side. “What’s the verdict?”

  Jack was still trying to process it. “Julia Rodriguez is a Level One detainee.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Aliens who pose a danger to national security or a risk to public safety.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Jack glanced out the window at the passing cow pastures. “It means she’s ineligible for release on bond.”

  Chapter 6

  Jack and Theo rolled into Macclenny around dinnertime.

  The town was basically one street—a strip mall and a few mechanic shops—just under an hour’s drive from Jacksonville and ten minutes through fields and forest to the Georgia line. For ICE, Macclenny was perfectly located: not too close to a metropolitan center with a high density of volunteer lawyers who make the work of deporting people more difficult, and easily reached by interstate from anywhere in the Southeast, where immigration is forever on the rise.

  Theo was hungry, so they stopped for dinner at a Mexican restaurant on Sixth Street. A cheery waitress greeted them.

  “What kind of tequila you got?” asked Theo.

  “I’m sorry,” she said with a big smile. “We don’t have tequila.”

  It was downhill from there. Jack ordered the chicken enchiladas. Theo went for the beef tacos.

  “What kind of Mexican restaurant has no tequila?” Theo said, grumbling.

  “What kind of Mexican restaurant has no Mexicans?” said Jack.

  Theo looked around, checking out both customers and servers. “Damn straight. This whole town’s like a Latin-free zone.”

  Classic Theo: a bit overdone, but pretty much spot on. Baker County was over 80 percent “white only” (non-Hispanic, no mixed race), and nearly all the rest of its twenty-seven thousand residents were African American. The vast majority of its Hispanic immigrant population was locked up at Florida State Prison or the county jail.

  It was dark when they reached the detention center, and lights from the low-slung, four-building facility glimmered on the prairie like an ocean freighter in the night. Regular visitation ended at six p.m., so the parking lot was empty as Jack and Theo pulled up. Attorneys could visit until ten p.m., but the vast majority of detainees were unrepresented, so there was only one lawyer ahead of Jack at the intake window. When his turn came, Jack identified Theo as his legal assistant, which drew a double take from the intake officer. Her thoughts quickly went in the wrong direction.

  “There’s no physical contact allowed.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your ‘legal assistant,’” she said, making air quotes. “He’s not a boyfriend, is he?”

  Theo sidled up to Jack and put his arm around him. “You got a problem with that, sweetie?”

  Jack pushed him away. She’d clearly meant no contact between detainees and visitors, but Theo had flustered her, and she buzzed them through the security door.

  A neckless ICE officer named Winston met them on the other side. “How we all doin’ tonight?” he said with a Cajun accent.

  “Fine,” said Jack.

  “Would be better if that Mexican restaurant served tequila.”

  “Let it go, Theo,” Jack muttered.

  Winston laughed. He knew the restaurant and raved way too much about the enchiladas, which really weren�
�t that good, but Jack agreed, just to be agreeable. It was like buying insurance, in case Theo hauled off and said something to piss the guy off.

  Winston checked the name on Jack’s badge. “Swyteck, huh? You related to Harry Swyteck?”

  “I’m his son.”

  “You don’t say? Good man, Harry was. I worked down at FSP when your daddy was governor. Busy time. Gotta respect a man who has the courage to flip the switch on Ol’ Sparky—that’s what we called the electric chair, back in the day when an execution was an execution.”

  “Ah, the good ol’ days,” said Theo.

  Jack was fresh out of law school when Governor Swyteck signed the death warrant for Theo Knight, not to mention several other of Jack’s death row clients who weren’t nearly as lucky—or as innocent, for that matter.

  Winston took them down a long hallway, at the end of which they passed a barred window that looked out to a gravel yard. Puddles of standing water glistened in the security lights.

  “Had rain today,” said Winston. “Girls missed their hour of rec time. Makes ’em restless being cooped up all day, so you boys behave yourselves. Know what I mean?” he said with the wink of a dirty old man.

  Jack caught Theo’s eye, shooting him a look that said something along the lines of You can kick his ass now.

  Winston led them up a flight of stairs to an elevated octagonal guard booth at the hub of the surrounding pods. The walls were lined with panes of one-directional glass, each providing a clear view of the pods below. It was like looking down on a rat maze, women and guards maneuvering their way around one another and past the bunks and fixed tables that were laid out with linear precision. Jack wondered how these detainees coped with the lack of privacy. Even when men were not watching through windows, a guard in the watchtower booth sat with eyes glued to the screens, scrutinizing the captured images of women with no place to go.

  A second guard joined them as they continued down the corridor to the attorney visitation room. They happened by a woman in her cell who was getting dressed. Jack averted his eyes to respect what little privacy she had, but her bare back attracted a leering glance from Winston as they passed.