On a sweltering August afternoon in Aurora, Colorado, César and I sat across from each other on uncomfortable stools in the GEO detention center¹ visiting room, separated by thick plexiglass. César wore his detention center-issued uniform—navy polo shirt, scrubs, black crocs—and fiddled with the silver cord connecting the old-fashioned phone receiver to the wall. He slumped in his seat, and I noted how different he seemed from just a month before.

Then, although he was still suffering due to injuries he sustained when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents violently assaulted him and his wife, Arleth, in front of their eight-year-old son, Cesitar, as they exited their final asylum hearing in Denver’s Federal Courthouse, César had struck me as energetic and hopeful. Now, six weeks into his imprisonment, he seemed noticeably diminished.

“Every day is the same, the same, the same” [lo mismo, lo mismo, lo mismo], he told me. Lots of people here are depressed. We don’t know what to do, so we just lie there staring at the ceiling. We don’t eat.”

Even more distressing to César than the conditions at GEO, though, was the fact that he was languishing there with no court date and no word about his asylum appeal—so far, he hadn’t even had the opportunity to see a judge. Even then, César knew that judges were ruling that immigrants who crossed the border “without inspection” weren’t eligible for bond. So, César said, “I am just hoping for a miracle.”

Although I have been accompanying Denver-based immigrants in deportation proceedings since 2017, I had spent relatively little time in GEO until the spring of 2025. Since the Trump administration started ramping up detentions and targeting newer arrivals who were released into the United States to pursue their asylum claims under Biden, GEO became an all too familiar place.

In their Denver apartment, Arleth was doing her own kind of waiting. We spent long hours at her kitchen table during those late summer weeks, tallying donations for their legal case, researching legal options, trying to predict what might come next. If César were granted bond, could we raise the funds to pay it? Could ICE detain Arleth and their child Cesitar in the meantime? What if bond were denied? Would life ever go back to normal?

It was another month until César finally had a bond hearing. Unlike the dozens of other detainees in the stuffy courtroom, César had community supporters present as well as an attorney who made an argument about why, contrary to the judge’s rulings in the preceding weeks, she did have jurisdiction to grant César bond. César looked nervous as his lawyer spoke and even more nervous as the DHS attorney made her own argument in a perfunctory monotone. The whole proceeding lasted maybe twenty minutes. The judge said she would issue a decision by the end of the day.

After the hearing, César was permitted a short visit with his lawyer, and she waived us over to join. The lawyer seemed hopeful, and therefore so did César. I took furious notes on what she said about the legal options, how the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Office of the Principal Legal Advisor (OPLA) were in “open collusion” to deny bond based on the Matter of Yajure Hurtado, how certain judges were still arguing they had jurisdiction to grant bond, and how the Bureau of Immigration Appeals (BIA) was sometimes siding with those judges. I knew the rule inside GEO was to have absolutely no contact with detainees, but when the guard turned his back, I couldn’t resist the urge to hug César.

From GEO, I went straight to Arleth’s; I wanted to be with her when the decision came in. Together, we tried to decode my notes and the legal language and piece together clues, but of course neither of us could say what any of it meant for César. And Arleth was distracted: she was also trying to sort through how to get dinner on the table, pay bills, and find Cesitar the psychological support he needed post-assault. When the lawyer called a few hours later, she reported that César’s bond had been denied.

What followed were agonizing weeks of fragmented information, shifting timelines, and silence—from César’s lawyer, from ICE, from César’s deportation officer. César and Arleth both became increasingly desperate. Accompanying them, I felt impotent. Arleth couldn’t fathom surviving in the U.S. as an undocumented single mother at risk of detention herself, and she kept setting and resetting internal deadlines for a decision about whether to stay or leave.

In late September, when César had been detained for almost ninety days, his attorney unexpectedly told him he might be eligible for bond again as part of a redetermination hearing. To Arleth, the new possibility felt less like an opening than like a cruelty. She had all but decided to return to Ecuador—without telling César, since she knew DHS surveilled every conversation, she had already bought plane tickets for her and Cesitar. But now, there was yet another “horizon,” as she put it—another round of decisions, uncertainty, and hope. “Estoy cansada,” she said. “Desgastada.”

Even more confusingly, Arleth didn’t know if she even wanted César to be released if it meant he had to wear an ankle monitor, or grillete. “I’m not prepared to see my husband with a grillete,” she said, crying. “Because despite all the limitations we’ve always had, we’ve done everything honestly . . . Mentally, I’m not prepared for him to look like a delinquent. Because he’s not.”

In early October, the redetermination bond was also denied. César asked to be deported as quickly as possible, and Arleth finalized plans for her and Cesitar to fly back to Ecuador a week later. “Hice lo que humanamente podía,” she said. I accompanied them to the airport, but it was only when they arrived safely in Quito that César learned that his wife and child had left the United States.

Knowing that Arleth and Cesitar were safe in Ecuador and not at risk of detention in the United States anymore was an “alivio total,” as César put it. “When I heard they had made it, I could finally take a breath.” A few days after their departure, a federal judge struck down the policy that had been used to deny him bond—part of what immigration attorneys called a “clean sweep” of five rulings in six days against the Trump administration's detention practices. For César, though, the ruling came too late.

Despite multiple requests for deportation and inquiries from his lawyer and congressional office, he continued to languish at GEO. Nothing he did seemed to get him any closer to being reunited with his family.

On a Sunday in November, I got a call from one of César’s cellmates telling me that César had been moved from GEO: his deportation was finally underway. Excitement and relief felt perverse under the circumstances, but at this point, deportation was the best possible outcome. I searched for César in the ICE Locator System, but he had disappeared.

When César finally surfaced in Ecuador, weeks later—after being transferred among multiple facilities, shackled, and mistreated—I watched a video Arleth sent of Cesitar running through a bus station to reach his father for the first time since the courthouse five months earlier. I watched it over and over.

During one of my last GEO visits with César, he summed up the whole experience: “Ha sido una tortura.”