News photos and text story about a pregnant doctor running a COVID-19 intensive care unit in Los Angeles
The post A pregnant doctor navigates COVID-19 fight in low income Los Angeles first appeared on Lucy Nicholson - Visual Journalist.
]]>By Kristina Cooke and Lucy Nicholson
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – After putting a coronavirus patient onto a ventilator to help him to breathe, Dr. Zafia Anklesaria noted to herself that her baby never kicked during emergency procedures.
It was not until she was back in her office and had removed most of her protective equipment that he made his presence known.
Anklesaria is seven months pregnant with her first child. The 35-year works as a co-director of the intensive care unit at CommonSpirit’s Dignity Health California Hospital Medical Center, a downtown Los Angeles hospital that mostly serves lower-income Hispanic and African-American populations.
The hospital’s 22-bed COVID-19 intensive care unit has been at or close to capacity since the end of March. Some nurses are pulling 24-hour shifts due to the high volume of patients in critical condition, she said.
“The socio-economic class that we serve, people tend to live in close quarters, they don’t really have the privilege of good social distancing, and they are tending to get more infected as a result,” Anklesaria said.
People living in the highest poverty areas of Los Angeles county are dying of COVID-19 at more than twice the rate of those in the wealthiest areas, according to data from the county’s department for public health.
Anklesaria’s 12-hour shift starts at 7 am. She works four days a week on average in the ICU and another one to two days doing pulmonary consultations with patients.
After getting an update from the night shift she begins her rounds, donning and doffing her personal protective equipment as she enters and exits patients’ rooms. Nurses check on her regularly, making sure she is hydrated, properly protected and takes breaks to eat.
“I don’t think I could do this job pregnant without their help,” Anklesaria said. She has been lucky to have an easy pregnancy and the baby has been “really well behaved.”
“You’ve allowed your mom to do her job very well,” she said to her belly.
She worries, though, that the baby will hear the stress and frustration in her voice as she goes about her day.
“So I do try and reassure him when I get time to myself, I look down and say it’s all good, we’ve got this,” she said.
Still, there are physical limitations: she is slowly finding it harder to stay on her feet for long periods of time and often comes home with backache.
A WORRIED HUSBAND
One May morning she had good news – one of the hospital’s first COVID-19 patients, an employee who had spent almost four weeks on the ventilator, was ready to have his tracheostomy tube removed.
“Yay, you did it, you are officially liberated!” she told 65-year old Vicente Arredondo as she removed the tube.
When she returned home, exhausted, her husband Aryan Jafari, 30, held back the dog as she dashed to the shower. She initially brought up the possibility of isolating herself from him, but he wouldn’t hear of it.
He worries about her and the baby, but “he is fortunately understanding of me wanting to and needing to work,” she said. “This is a job we sign up for. If we don’t do it, who’s going to do it?”
Jafari is an engineer and best convinced by data, so she has sent him studies suggesting pregnant women and babies are not at a greater risk from the coronavirus. She has promised her family if any evidence to the contrary emerges, she will step away from the ICU.
Anklesaria, who comes from a family of doctors in India, has been in the United States since college. Her parents still live in Kolkata and she worries they won’t be able to come for the birth.
Due to the virus, she has to go to her prenatal visits alone, though her husband has joined her ultrasound appointments via FaceTime.
He gives her written questions for her obstetrician to answer: can she do this, can she do that?
“The answer is always: ‘yes’.”
For photo essay see reut.rs/2LT5afr
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News photos and text story about a Guatemalan who died trying to migrate to the U.S. through the Arizona desert
The post Deadly crossing ends American dream for Guatemalan migrant first appeared on Lucy Nicholson - Visual Journalist.
]]>By Andrew Hay and Lucy Nicholson
Each year, hundreds of migrants die trying to cross illegally into the United States from Mexico. Misael Paiz, a Guatemalan migrant, tried to make his way through one of the deadliest crossings in the Arizona desert in September. Reuters retraces his journey and a desperate attempt by the U.S. Border Patrol agency to rescue him.
The 911 emergency call came in to the U.S. Border Patrol’s Tucson station around midnight. Joselino Gomez Esteban’s voice crackled through an older cell phone from somewhere in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, the final stretch of a 2,000 mile (3,218 km) migration from Guatemala. Gomez said he was lost. He needed help. His nephew had collapsed, wouldn’t respond.
Each year hundreds of migrants die trying to cross into the United States from Mexico. Thousands more need rescuing. The Border Patrol tallied 294 deaths in fiscal year 2017, the last year for which data is available. But experts believe the actual figure is far higher. Some who die are never found.
A quarter of those known deaths – 72 people – came in the Tucson border sector, where summer temperatures routinely hit triple digits. Between October of 2017 and October of 2018, the Tucson Border Patrol launched 923 rescue operations, a 22 percent rise from a year before, according to an agency official.
Finding Gomez, 43, and his nephew, Misael Paiz, 25, would prove difficult. The cellphone Gomez used did not provide his GPS coordinates. Using the cell phone towers that transmitted the 911 emergency call did little to help; the signal had bounced off towers up to 100 miles (161 km) away.
Headquartered in a modern two-story brown brick building, the Tucson Border Patrol sector is responsible for 262 miles (422 km) of sweeping desert, canyons and cactus-studded hills. Gomez and Paiz could have been anywhere in this territory. Agents were not even certain they were on the U.S. side of the border.
The sector has a staff of 4,200 at its disposal, backed by helicopters and unarmed drones, with technology ranging from motion and image sensors to cameras able to spot migrants from seven miles (11 km) away. It is one of the busiest sectors on the border for apprehensions and rescues of illegal migrants as well as seizures of marijuana. More than twice a day, on average, agents launch rescue missions.
At times, rescues turn to recovery efforts. Deaths come mostly from heat stroke in summer, hypothermia in winter. The dead are taken to the Pima County medical examiner’s office.
“We see this day in and day out,” said Greg Hess, the county’s chief medical examiner.
Sometimes only bones are recovered; sometimes identifications are impossible. When they can, the office arranges for the return of remains to family members back home.
Two weeks earlier, Gomez and Paiz had set off from Aguacate, a struggling Guatemalan farming town of 1,500 people near the Mexican border. The following account is based on more than two dozen interviews with family members, government officials, border patrol agents and human rights workers.
Paiz, a restaurant cook who had worked in Mexico, hoped to find work in the United States and send money back home. His uncle, Gomez, planned to join his wife and three children in South Carolina. He had been deported two years earlier and tried and failed three times since to make it back. This would be his fourth attempt.
“The family is disintegrating because here we don’t have work,” said Paiz’s father, Miguel Domingo Paiz, 59.
Domingo knows that leaving for a better future is a life-or-death gamble. His eldest son Ovidio was shot dead in Mexico last year after moving there to find a job.
In recent years, the number of Guatemalans caught crossing illegally into the United States has risen steadily from about 57,000 in 2015 to nearly 117,000 in 2018, and is second only to apprehensions of Mexicans. The figures, experts say, reflect a greater willingness among Guatemalans to brave the perils of migration to escape rising violence, poverty and political turmoil.
Paiz told his twin brother, Gaspar, that he made an initial payment of $500 to a smuggler – known as a “coyote” – who promised to get him across the border. He would owe another $5,500 if he made it.
After making their way to the Mexican town of Sasabe on the border with Arizona, Paiz and Gomez waited 12 days for their turn to cross with a guide, according to family members.
In one of their last phone conversations, Paiz told his father: “Soon it will be my turn.”
After crossing and walking for about six hours, Paiz began to complain of a severe headache. He collapsed next to a dirt track called Cemetery Road.
Their guide poured water over Paiz’s head. When that didn’t help, he took off with three other migrants in their group. Gomez stayed with his nephew.
Gomez’s efforts to revive his nephew failed. He called family members in Aguacate, told Paiz’s mother to pray. Then, knowing it would mean another failed attempt to rejoin his family, Gomez placed the 911 call.
At first light on Sept. 10, helicopters launched by U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Pima County started scouring known migrant paths in the area. An elite Border Patrol medical unit set out across the desert.
Following the 911 dispatcher’s instruction, Gomez lit a fire in the hope that it could guide the rescuers. But it burned hot and clean, producing little smoke.
It wasn’t until 1:30 that afternoon that agents got word that a rancher had happened across the two men.
A short while later, Border Patrol agents reached the location and took Gomez into custody.
They took Paiz away in a black body bag.
The Pima County Medical Examiner would later determine Paiz succumbed to heat stroke. Seven weeks after his death, Paiz’s body was flown to Guatemala City, a journey paid for by the Guatemalan government. His coffin arrived along with a half dozen others, all bearing remains of Guatemalan migrants.
A Red Cross ambulance transported Paiz’s body on the 12-hour drive along primitive roads from the capital to Aguacate. His family followed behind in a bus.
“We always played together. We would go to the mountains together to collect wood,” said Gaspar, his twin. “We discussed which one of us would goto the U.S. and decided it would be Misael.”
In Aguacate, some 250 people met the ambulance transporting Paiz’s body. They stood in ankle-deep mud and pouring rain as eight men lifted his coffin out and took it into the family home.
Text story editing by Bill Tarrant and Paul Thomasch
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News photos and text story about a aging prisoners in California
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Photography by Lucy Nicholson. Reporting by Sharon Bernstein.
California prison inmate Richard Arriola (below) does not remember the digestion problems that drove him to the doctor on a recent morning, or details of the conviction for child molestation that sent him to prison at age 88.
Arriola is one of about 18,400 inmates over the age of 55 in California prisons, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
It is a swelling population that has led authorities to take the first steps toward creating a dementia unit at the state’s main prison medical facility in the San Joaquin Valley city of Stockton, Reuters has learned.
“We have identified a specific need for a specialized unit for our dementia population and are in the very early phases of concept development,” said Elizabeth Gransee, spokeswoman for California Correctional Health Care Services.
The wing would mark a shift from California’s earlier efforts to treat prisoners with cognitive decline, relying on inmate volunteers and a modest staff to help them rather than a more expensive medical unit.
Reuters visited two California prisons recently to look at the challenges states face, as improved medical care, long sentences from tougher crime laws, and a steady increase of older adults entering prison has contributed to an extraordinary rise of elderly inmates.
In California, seven percent of the state’s 130,000 prisoners were over the age of 60 in 2016, the most recent year for which data is available, compared to just 1 percent 20 years earlier, according to a report by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
“We and all of the jails and prisons around the country need to be able to do a better job with individuals who have cognitive impairment,” said Dr. Joseph Bick, chief medical executive at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville.
Throughout the United States, states are grappling with similar challenges as prisoners age. Inmate medical costs amount to about $3 billion per year nationwide, according to a recent report by the state of Georgia, where medical care for inmates over the age of 65 costs $8,500 per year, compared to $950 for those who are younger, the report showed.
Nationwide, 44 percent of inmates over the age of 50 have disabilities, compared to 27 percent of prisoners overall, a 2015 report by the Department of Justice shows. About 20 percent have cognitive disabilities, the report showed.
Prisoners with cognitive decline can require round-the-clock care and help with dressing themselves, brushing teeth and going to the restroom. Because prison life – and for many, life on the streets before prison – is so difficult, inmates are considered geriatric after the age of 55 in California and many other states.
Arriola, who is housed with about 2,600 prisoners with chronic conditions at the California Health Care Facility in Stockton, came on a Thursday morning in May for a follow-up visit with a gastroenterologist. But he talked distractedly to the doctor, and said he did not recall having stomach problems.
It is not an uncommon situation at the Stockton facility, where physicians and nurses are trained to work with an increasing number of patients experiencing cognitive decline, said Dr. Anise Adams, the chief medical officer.
About 500 prisoners are being treated for dementia or Parkinson’s Disease in California prisons, including 200 at Stockton, officials said.
“It’s hard for them to explain to the nurses what they want or how they feel,” said inmate Scottie Glenn, 47, who participates in a program in which able-bodied inmates help those who are ill.
On a recent May morning, Glenn, who is serving 25 years to life for murder, was assisting a wheelchair-bound inmate who needed to see a doctor. Sometimes, he writes letters for inmates, or helps them to communicate.
Older inmates’ needs have led the state to build a large dialysis center, stock hundreds of wheelchairs and offer assistance with hearing and declining vision. Stockton’s medical facility has a physical therapy center, and a palliative care unit is set to open in the next few weeks.
The California Medical Facility in Vacaville set up a hospice decades ago during the AIDS crisis, which now houses more inmates dying of old age diseases, officials said. The state expects to spend about $26,000 per inmate on health care next year.
Once a dementia unit is set up, California would follow New York, which opened one for its much smaller prison population in 2006. New York spends about $2.7 million annually to care for 29 patients in the unit, the state corrections department said.
California officials say it is too soon to know how much the unit they hope to create will cost, but it would not be difficult to re-purpose an existing ward for use by dementia patients.
Such patients wake up in the middle of the night not knowing where they are, requiring trained staff to comfort them. Others behave in ways that normally get an inmate in trouble, such as batting away a doctor’s hand during an injection.
In a normal prison ward, that is considered assault, said Captain Paul Vasquez, whose job includes reviewing behavioral issues at the Stockton facility.
Inmates can be handcuffed, lose privileges and even be sent to the Security Housing Unit, where prisoners are kept in near-isolation, he said.
“We need to learn to respond to them a different way – and not in a regular mainline type of prison,” Vasquez said.
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News photos and text story about DACA recipients in Los Angeles
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By Lucy Nicholson
As U.S. President Donald Trump and congressional leaders discuss the fate of some 700,000 immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children, the young people whose lives hang in the balance fret about their future.
Reuters spoke to five people covered by the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program. Many older members of the group, nicknamed “Dreamers,” balance college classes and jobs amid a looming March 5 deadline set by Trump to repeal the program unless Congress preserves it.
“I knew DACA was going to be rescinded, or at least I thought it was, the day he won the election,” said Javier Hernandez Kistte, 27, referring to Trump’s anti-immigration stance during the 2016 presidential campaign. Kistte arrived in the country with his family from Mexico City when he was 8 years old.
Trump wants tighter restrictions on immigration that he deems necessary to improve national security and protect the jobs of working class Americans. Supporters of the DACA program say eliminating it would punish people who were too young to know the consequences of their family’s decision to move to the U.S. and remove productive people from the economy.
Last week, senior White House officials outlined a plan that would offer a path to citizenship to about 2 million young illegal immigrants. The proposal also called for a border wall and curbs on some legal immigration programs, measures some Democrats have called unacceptable.
Some DACA beneficiaries said they did not realize where their families were headed when they set off for the United States.
“My parents told me we were coming to Disneyland,” said Karla Estrada, 26. “We did not go to Disneyland.”
Living under the radar and working illegally, several of the young people recalled rough, impoverished neighborhoods, and seeing family members suffer depression or abuse drugs.
Barbara Hernandez (center), 26, of Santa Ana, California, said she had a brother who was fatally shot in a flurry of gang violence.
“That threw our family into a really big depression and my mom and my dad separated,” she said.
DACA, which took effect in 2012, allowed Hernandez to work in education, but she quit her job when Trump said he was rescinding the program.
Brian Caballero, 25, lives in a converted ambulance on the campus of California State Polytechnic University in Pomona near Los Angeles, where he is pursuing a degree in electrical engineering.
Martha Valenzuela, 23, was brought to the U.S. when she was 2 years old. She has no memories of Mexico.
DACA allowed her to get a driver’s license and to leave an informal job at a taqueria where she earned less than minimum wage. Now she works for a public relations firms as an account coordinator.
Looking at the possibility of the program being eliminated, Valenzuela is balancing preparations for a possible return to Mexico with activist work aimed at preserving DACA.
“It takes guts to have a dream and it takes guts to fight for it,” she said.
Writing by Sharon Bernstein
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News photos and text story about an immigrant living in a sanctuary church
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By Lucy Nicholson and Ben Gruber
MANCOS, Colorado (Reuters) – Rosa Sabido stares out a church window pondering her future and worrying about her ailing mother.
For nearly two months since taking sanctuary at the United Methodist Church in Mancos, a small town in the mountains of southwest Colorado, Sabido, 53, has lived in a cramped room with a makeshift shower. She sleeps beneath a mural of Noah’s Ark in what used to be the church nursery.
Sabido leaves her room to use the toilet, or stretch her legs in the garden, or attend worship services, but if she steps off church property she risks arrest by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
Sabido has been battling to stay in the United States for most of the last 30 years after crossing the border illegally from Mexico. In 2002, a judge ordered her to leave the country under a “voluntary deportation” order, a decision she appealed through a succession of courts and lost at every point.
Since 2011, ICE has granted her one-year deportation stays that allowed her to stay in the country, but when she applied for another one last April it was denied.
Sabido is out of legal options, but she is determined not to leave. “I will plea, I will cry, I will ask to whomever to let me stay by my mom,” she said in an interview with Reuters at the church.
“This is home. This is where I live. This is where I have my life settled. This is where my parents are.” Sabido’s mother and stepfather are naturalized U.S. citizens.
“It took me by surprise,” Sabido’s mother Blanca Valdivia said of her daughter’s decision seek sanctuary at the church. “The only thing we could do is support her because she supported us. But it’s difficult. It’s difficult because we need her.”
Immigration officials have a long-standing policy of not conducting enforcement operations in sensitive locations such as places of worship, but they have little sympathy for those illegally living in the country.
“The moment law enforcement starts carving out exemptions is the moment the rule of law starts to erode,” said acting ICE director Thomas Homan in a June press briefing, adding that a “final order from a federal judge needs to mean something or this whole system has no integrity.”
About 800 congregations in the United States have offered to give sanctuary to immigrants facing deportation, according to the Church World Service’s Immigration and Refugee Program. Sabido is one of at least 12 immigrants currently taking shelter in churches, according to the group.
Pastor Craig Paschal says the decision to turn his church into a sanctuary, and a focal point in the nationwide immigration debate, was not easy but he considered it a Christian duty.
“When we have laws that are devaluing people and criminalizing people we have an obligation. It’s certainly not comfortable, it’s not easy, but that’s who we are called to be,” he said.
Church members bring food, their pets and activities such as yoga classes to keep Sabido company. Congregation member Sue Ryter, 74, says she sees the church’s action as a matter of conscience.
“Slavery was a law and it needed to be changed and there were laws like women couldn’t vote. That law needed to be changed, and this is one of those laws,” Ryter said.
Some Mancos residents disagree. “I believe that it’s way too easy to get into this country,” said Roy Jarboe, 69, who supports Trump’s immigration crackdown.
“I believe that if you are harboring a criminal you are breaking the law, and the people at the church should be arrested,” he said.
Sabido, who worked as a church secretary, a tax preparer and a cook over the past three decades, says one reason she took sanctuary was to highlight the plight of millions of immigrants like her.
“I have tried so many years. I don’t want to give up right at this moment. I want to keep on trying. I want to give everything, what is left of me in this fight,” she said.
Click reut.rs/2eKkJZG to see a related photo essay
Reporting by Lucy Nicholson and Ben Gruber; Editing by Sue Horton, Toni Reinhold
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News photos of legal migrant farmworkers in California's Central Valley
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On an overcast spring morning, about 40 Mexican men turned out in the pre-dawn hours to board a bus for California’s Salinas Valley where they would harvest 16 acres (6.47 hectares) of lettuce over the next three days.
Hector Manuel Morales, 20, came north from Mexico to work the fields with his three cousins. He said his family worried about his journey, spooked by President Donald Trump’s talk of a crackdown on illegal immigrants. But he does not anticipate problems.
While about half of U.S. crop workers are in the country illegally, Morales and the other men have H-2A visas, which allow them to work temporarily as seasonal agricultural labourers on American farms.
“We are not violating any law here in the U.S.,” he said. “We come to work.”
His co-worker Rafael Gonzalez Arredondo, 23, said listening to Trump’s statements about Mexico was “difficult, but we are going to show him that Mexicans are hard working people, that we are not what he says.”
The men came to the country through a labour brokerage company, Fresh Harvest, which brings in H-2A laborers to work on farms in need of temporary workers. This year, the company’s owner, Steve Scaroni, says he expects to bring in about 4,000 workers.
Companies like Fresh Harvest are attractive for farmers who want to employ legal workers but do not want to deal with the considerable government red tape and regulations associated with the H-2A program. Employers who bring in workers on the visas must provide them with free transportation to and from the United States as well as housing and food once they arrive. Wage minimums are set by the government and are often higher than farmers are used to paying.
Still, Scaroni says he could find work for even more people if he had enough housing.
While use of the H-2A program has steadily increased over the past decade, it still accounts for only about 10 percent of the estimated 1.3 million farmworkers in the United States, according to government data. In 2016, the government granted 134,000 H-2A visas.
Alfredo Lopez Granados, 27, from Michoacan, Mexico has come north to work on an H-2A visa five times. He misses his family back home, he says, but the decision is not difficult.
“Once you are here,” he said, “in one day you make more than you make in a week in Mexico.”
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News feature story about an Iraqi immigrant hoping to become a U.S. Border Patrol Agent
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Reporting by Ben Gruber and Lucy Nicholson. Writing by Melissa Fares.
At a training facility in the middle of a desert in New Mexico, aspiring border patrol agent Stevany Shakare sprinted laps in 103-degree Fahrenheit weather as her instructors shouted at her to run faster.
Shakare, a 23-year-old from Iraq, is one of three women in a class of 20 at the U.S. Border Patrol Academy in Artesia, New Mexico. They are powering through an intensive 112-day training program, in which agents must master firearms, high-speed, off-road vehicle chases, immigration law, conversational Spanish and gruelling physical tests.
They are preparing to track, apprehend and arrest immigrants and drug traffickers attempting to enter the United States illegally.
“I am obviously very short and tiny,” said the petite Shakare, surrounded by men who appeared twice her size. “But I’m trying and giving it my all – that’s all that matters.”
In 2004, at the age of 10, she fled her home after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Her family settled in Michigan where she graduated from Wayne State University with a degree in criminal justice.
“Had I stayed in Iraq, I probably wouldn’t have ended up to where I am today,” said Shakare, who said she learned English watching “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” on television.
“Probably wouldn’t have gone to college, wouldn’t have gotten a degree. I feel like I owe my life to this country,” she said.
U.S. President Donald Trump has pledged to crackdown on illegal immigration and strengthen security along U.S. borders, particularly with Mexico. The Department of Homeland Security in February announced plans to add more than 5,000 border enforcement agents to the current force.
Chief Patrol Agent Dan Harris, who runs the academy, said a major increase in violent crime along the southern border in the past year encouraged many to become border patrol agents.
Shakare said she now has the full support of her parents, both of whom plan to watch her graduate in November.
“They weren’t OK with it at first. It was the dangers of the job and being away from home. But eventually they realised this is what I wanted to do,” Shakare said.
“My mom tells all of her friends, ‘This is what my daughter is doing!’ She’s excited about it.”
[See image gallery at blog.lucynicholson.com]
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Feature photos of prisoners caring for shelter animals in a former jail
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Reporting by Lucy Nicholson. Writing by Patricia Reaney.
Kristina Hazelett had cats, birds and hamsters growing up, but she never knew much about dogs until she started serving a several-month jail sentence for drug possession.
The 35-year-old inmate is part of a small team of women prisoners in Phoenix, Arizona who work with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office Animal Safety Unit (MASH). The program is designed to help comfort and train mistreated and neglected animals rescued from deplorable conditions.
But the rehabilitation goes much farther than helping the abused animals.
“Along the way, we provide the rehabilitation for not just the animals but for the inmates as well,” William Sibole, a detention officer with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, told Reuters.
Six days a week the women in the program are transported to the animal shelter in a former men’s jail where rows of cells, some adorned with dog portraits and animal murals, have been renamed Bow Wow Way, Purr Lane, 2nd Chance and Ruff Road.
Since the former men’s jail was converted into a holding center to provide a safe haven for the animals in 2000, thousands of mainly dogs, cats and horses have been cared for and adopted.
Tiger, a pit bull terrier rescued from a dog fighting ring, became the beloved mascot for MASH during his nearly nine-year stay, before leaving to live with a family.
Once the animals are healthy and social some of them may be taken by detention officers to another program at the Maricopa County jail facilities to interact with other prisoners.
MASH said it is the only agency in the United States that investigates animal cruelty complaints, rescues the animals, houses and cares for them and arranges adoptions.
Hazelett and the other women in the female-only program that lasts at least 30 days are interviewed and rigorously screened before they are accepted. They work with detention officers and animal care technicians to acquire the training skills necessary to get the dogs ready for adoption. Some of the hundreds of graduates have gone on to jobs in the pet industry. Two are studying to become vet technicians.
“I get so much out of it, probably more than the dogs do,” Hazelett said in an interview. “It’s very therapeutic for me as well, not just them, which was an unexpected, pleasant surprise.”
For Aubrey Herrera, a 31-year-old woman serving time for a probation violation for theft and drug charges, caring for the dogs is the highlight of each day.
Patience is what she said the program has taught her.
“These dogs are locked up just like we are and they need love just like we do,” she explained. “It’s not about us when we come here. It’s about the dogs and making sure they’re taken care of and loved and bathed – that they know what it’s like to feel loved.”
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News photos of a media tour of Adelanto Immigration Detention Center
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Reporting by Lucy Nicholson. Writing by Daniel Wallis.
Roberto Galan, 33, paid a trafficker $3,000 to smuggle him into the United States from El Salvador for the first time as a teenager in 1997.
Since then, he has been deported twice but has returned each time.
Now he is once again in deportation proceedings, being held at the Adelanto Detention Facility near San Bernardino, California, along with more than 1,800 other immigrants awaiting hearings or deportation after being arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
Galan, who has convictions in California for selling marijuana and possession of a firearm, wears a red outfit at Adelanto, showing he is a “high risk” detainee, one who has committed a serious offence and spent time in state or federal prison. Others wear blue, signifying they have no criminal convictions or very minor misdemeanors on their record, or orange, which denotes a more serious crime but not a felony.
“I don’t want them to deport me … I want to stay in the United States with my family,” Galan said at the center where he has been in custody for 20 months. Galan’s mother, wife and two young children live in the United States legally.
“They feel bad because we want to live together.”
Galan expects a decision on his latest appeal this month.
“I see people trying to stay here, fight their case for two, three, four years, more than four years, and then (they are) denied everything,” he said of the center, the largest immigration detention facility in the state.
After taking office in January, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on border security that, among other measures, called for promptly deporting illegal immigrants after their apprehension, and keeping them in custody until that can be arranged.
A razor wire fence rings Adelanto, which is run by Geo Group Inc, a Florida-based company that owns, leases and manages correctional and detention facilities.
At the facility, some of the detainees could be seen chatting over meals of rice and refried beans, while others sat alone in silence. Two men shared a pair of headphones to watch television, and others played dominoes.
About 240 of the detainees at Adelanto are women. In their dormitory, one curled up on a bed reading a novel while another folded clothes. Two of the women read news reports about a hunger strike at an immigration center in Tacoma, Washington, 1,000 miles to the north.
Adelanto detainees have access to an on-site law library, a medical clinic, religious services, and a recreation area where they can play soccer and basketball. In the center’s visiting area, a large world map hangs on a wall.
The detention facility also has six courtrooms where federal immigration judges conduct removal hearings in person or by videolink.
David Marin, a senior ICE official based in Los Angeles, said little had changed in day-to-day operations at Adelanto since Trump took office.
“There have not been any major changes since the change in administration,” Marin said. “We are still focusing on arresting criminal aliens. That’s our commitment to public safety.”
[See image gallery at blog.lucynicholson.com]
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Feature photos of California's self-ordained "weed nuns," who are on a mission to heal and empower women with their cannabis products
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The Sisters of the Valley, California’s self-ordained “weed nuns,” are on a mission to heal and empower women with their cannabis products.
The sisterhood stresses that its seven members, despite the moniker, do not belong to any order of the Catholic Church.
“We’re against religion, so we’re not a religion. We consider ourselves Beguine revivalists, and we reach back to pre-Christian practices,” said 58-year-old Sister Kate, who founded the sisterhood in 2014.
[See image gallery at blog.lucynicholson.com]
The post The Weed Nuns of California first appeared on Lucy Nicholson - Visual Journalist.
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