Part 1: Love in a Time of Absurdity
The first time ICE arrested him, one morning in November 2017, Dy (pronounced Yee) was getting ready to go to work. His wife, Tammy, was about to take their baby to the pediatrician. Chari had a rash, and this being their first child, the two young parents were doting and careful.
The phone rang. It was Dy’s mother, saying some police officers were at her house looking for Dy. She put one of them on the phone with Tammy. They were ICE agents and the one on the phone told her that Dy had been randomly selected to come out to the field office to verify his address. This was odd, since Dy had just gone to an ICE check-in two weeks before. Dy had an order of supervision, meaning he had to check in with ICE, typically once a year on a date they told him. The officer told them to stay put and wait for the agents’ arrival.
The couple gathered all of Dy’s documents: I-94, Social Security card, driver’s license, proof of previous report date. Pieces of paper documenting his life story as a refugee from Vietnam, assimilated to the United States. Most of us go through control points when we travel only. Not randomly, in our homes, like this.
Dy was holding Chari when three vehicles pulled up and the couple opened the door to welcome them. They told him to hand the baby to Tammy. They insisted that Dy had not updated his address when the couple purchased their house, and that he would have to go in to update it. They told Tammy to go get Dy’s shoes, socks, pants, and a jacket. When she came back, they were already putting Dy into one of the cars. She wept as she passed his belongings to an officer, and held Chari tight as they drove Dy away.
Dy spent five months and twenty-one days in immigrant detention before ICE finally released him after public attention and a habeas corpus petition. Chari was twice as old when her father came home.
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The second time ICE arrested him, it was the first fall of Trump’s second term in office. Dy retained counsel and his lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition as well as a request for a 180-day review when it became clear that he would be in detention past six months. Six months is usually when people know what’s going to happen to them, but this time, there was no information, and several things about the courts and the feds’ mass deportation agenda to be worried about.
In April, I went to Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, to speak with Dy in person.
Lumpkin is about a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Atlanta, south on Interstate 85. The standard freeway lined with nondescript green trees on both sides that characterizes long drives in the South. You pass Fort Benning along the way.
Once the largest immigrant detention center in the US, Stewart is the biggest thing that the town of Lumpkin and Stewart County have going for them. Built in the 1990s by a private company now known as CoreCivic, it’s meant to house just under 2,000 people but has had 2,300 at times this last year. The county gets a dollar a day for each person detained at Stewart. That’s a lot of revenue for a very poor county, roughly a quarter to a half of its budget.
The guards at the reception were all Black and Brown women. One of them had an accent that I guessed meant her first language was Spanish. I chatted with her a little and learned she’s been working there for seventeen years. She drives 45 minutes from Columbus to start work at 5am. It’s a working class job in a working class, small American town.
Checking in at reception means filling out a bunch of forms and turning in your ID and letting them inspect what you’re carrying in. No phones, no recording devices, no purses. I brought a blank notebook and my pouch of pens. My passport, in case they didn’t accept my driver’s license. You must take your shoes off and put everything through a scanner. Get escorted through a metal gate by a guard, who lets you into a tiny visitation room with a plexiglass window and a phone receiver on each side.
Dy walks in and beams at us through the window. Tammy had told him I was in town but he didn’t expect to see us today. I haven’t seen Dy since summer 2018 when I went with him to his local church for a special Sunday service. We can’t hug or shake hands as one would do in normal life, but Dy has an infectious smile and sunny disposition, and it just feels right to do some jovial catching up before we sit down to talk.
My colleague, Phi Nguyen, is an attorney at Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, representing Dy in his current habeas corpus petition. She has legal issues to update him on and to get updates from him on.
I have congratulations for him about his family. Tammy is eight months pregnant with their fourth child. Even ICE detention cannot stop the love between these two or the community they build around them. With Dy behind bars, they organized a gender reveal party using what they could. At home, Tammy put colored balloons in a box. Dy had his unit mates guess the baby’s gender by choosing a red or blue Kool-Aid stick, the kind available in commissary. If they guessed right, they got to keep it. All the guys gathered round the small iPad used for video calls in the communal room, and on the other side, Dy and Tammy’s three kids opened the box to let the balloons out. A boy! Their picture-perfect family symmetry – two girls, two boys, a beautiful mother, a loving father, both hardworking parents and the kindest Christians, homeowners and taxpayers – broken by the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.
I ask Dy to go over the details of his ICE arrest twice so I can get them right. He’s been checking in regularly once a year, as is required by his order of supervision. It’s a routine, simple check-in. Go in to the field office in downtown Atlanta, first floor. There’s even a kiosk now where a machine can process the check-in. But last fall, ICE sent him an unusual letter, asking him to come in on the 14th of October, even though his next scheduled report date was in November. The letter didn’t arrive until the 15th. Dy went in on the 16th.
Others had told him he was a fool to go. Hide out until Trump’s out of office, they said. Outside the building, a group of people from an immigrant rights organization warned Dy not to go in without an attorney. But he and Tammy had already discussed it and decided that he would go in good faith and abide by the law.
What waited for Dy was essentially a trap.
At the ICE field office on the first floor, they looked at Dy’s letter and told him to go up to the third floor. On the third floor, the lights were out and no one was there. He went back to the first floor and told them this. Then the ICE officers who had seen him in the elevator spoke to the first floor receptionist. He was sent back up to the third floor. This time the lights were on and there was a receptionist, and an officer booked Dy, with no explanation. Several Laotian men were also arrested, all with a letter to appear on the 16th.
They were all taken downstairs to the parking lot and processed for holding. Dy waited four hours in the sallyport, his blood sugar dropping while everyone else had been moved to the holding room. Dy tells me this is a room, about twenty by twenty feet, where as many as thirty people are held for four days, no hygiene, no beds, before they are transferred to detention centers elsewhere. Because of Dy’s pre-diabetes and the fact that ICE had already forgotten Dy for hours, they decided to put him on that day’s bus to go directly to Stewart, where he could get medication.
These unnecessary emergencies are common in ICE operations these days. Dy says, “They are always discombobulated. There’s always a new officer.” Orders from the top to make arrests have created a logistical dilemma for the agency and a humanitarian crisis for immigrants.
Dy’s lawyers have filed his standard 180 day review to determine whether his detention is justified, and no response from ICE has come yet. How does he maintain his courage and positivity?
He plays soccer during the one hour they’re allowed in the yard. A bit of cards, the Vietnamese national card game, tiến lên, with pals. Keeping track of the other Viets in detention, translating and passing along information about habeas corpus and other updates. And reading.
“I have a nickname here. They call me Library,” he laughs. When new inmates arrive and are looking for something to read, people tell them, “Go to 207, Library.” He’s gotten in trouble for having too many books.
“How many books are you allowed to have?” I ask. Apparently, only five at a time. He has to donate books at the mail room in order to receive more. Since one of his books is his bible, and two more these days are bible study guides, that’s a pretty frequent turnaround for the two remaining books. We talk for several minutes about the logistics of sending books to the detention center for inmates to read.
The only time Dy’s smile falters, and only for a moment, is when I ask how his mom is doing. He tells me that when she came to visit him, she blamed herself for his misfortune. “It was because I didn’t take care of you enough,” she cried. He tells me, for the first time, about his difficult teenage years. Being wild and acting out. They were poor, his mom worked two jobs, and he didn’t have a father to be an authority figure. Running away from home at thirteen, after his mom hit him once, to try to discipline him. Her moving to Atlanta for a fresh start when he was fourteen, and him falling in with more bad influences. Dropping out in the tenth grade. Living with friends, seeing his mom only on holidays, when she phoned him to come home to eat. Run ins with the law. And then in his early twenties, five years in prison.
That’s when he met Tammy. First it was the pastor at his mom’s church, who learned about Dy and asked to come visit and pray with him. Then other parishioners sometimes came with the pastor, among them a young woman named Tammy. The two fell in love, and after Dy was released on parole, they continued to get to know each other for another year, before they married.
I don’t know if Dy’s mother heard his pleas to not blame herself, but to be proud of who he has become. I do hear the conviction in Dy’s voice when he says that you can’t change the past, but you can look forward to the future.
The baby is due in May. Dy’s brother is getting married this summer. His nephew too. A season of joy, and yet Dy knows, because he has been paying attention to stories of who is getting released, that no one from Stewart seems to be getting out. All of the habeas cases at Stewart go to one judge, who is appointed for life. Dy says softly, “I had to let my wife know I might be missing out.” At the end of this summer, Dy turns forty.
I ask him how he keeps his spirit strong. He reads his bible every day, he tells me. His favorite passage is Psalms 23:
The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing.
He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside quiet waters,
he refreshes my soul.
He guides me along the right paths
for his name’s sake.
Even though I walk
through the darkest valley,
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff,
they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
Surely your goodness and love will follow me
all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord
forever.
Dy tells me his greatest challenge is knowing Tammy has to hold down everything without him right now. I’m looking forward to meeting the other half of this love story, and hearing from her.
