Sitting on a couch in a one-story house near the immigration detention center in Aurora on a recent rainy weekday, J.R.V. began to retether himself to the life he was ripped from nearly five months ago.
At his feet, tan work boots were in a plastic bag with his name written in Sharpie. He had last worn them on a Saturday morning in December when a sheriff’s deputy arrested him as he was driving to a construction site in Florida. They were a reminder of how quickly life changed.
J.R.V., 40, spent about three days at the county jail followed by 12 at Alligator Alcatraz, the infamous, new immigrant detention center in the Florida Everglades, where he said detainees suffered in freezing conditions. From there, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement took him on a four-day odyssey by airplane to detention centers in Texas and Arizona with a stop in Louisiana — chained at the hands, feet and the waist with little access to a bathroom — before he arrived in Aurora.
He never saw his driver’s license, passport or work permit again.
After 127 days there, during which he got little sleep and struggled to stay connected to his family, a guard inside the Aurora detention facility, operated by the private prison company GEO Group, awoke him saying, “You’re going home.”
