Credit: Maria Sotomayor

For more than 600 days and two Christmas holidays, Marlene and her seven-year-old son Antonio have languished in indefinite detention at Pennsylvania’s “Berks Family Residential Center,” a glorified term for an immigrant prison. Her child has been granted Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS), which the U.S. government says is supposed to “help foreign children in the United States who have been abused, abandoned, or neglected.” But instead of sanctuary, or even a fair hearing, Marlene and her son face open-ended incarceration and “expedited removal” orders, compounding the trauma they endured when they were forced to flee their home in El Salvador under threat of gang violence.

“My son always asks me when we are going to be able to get out of here and be with our aunts and uncles,” Marlene told AlterNet over the phone from Berks, using pseudonyms for herself and her child in order to protect their privacy. “It’s a really hard thing psychologically for him to be here. It’s not easy for a boy of seven years to […]