Berenice left Honduras ready for the risks of crossing the border but like many families hope dissipated upon learning of life in captivity indefinitely in the US

It’s not as though the weeks leading up to Berenice’s suicide attempt in a US immigration family detention center in Texas were a bed of roses.

She’d fled her native town, Tocoa in Honduras, after her family had received death threats from a local gang.

she entered Mexico she had to grease the palms of Mexican immigration officers with $400, then as she left the country into the US, crossing the Rio Grande in a flimsy inflatable raft, she had to pay again, this time $800 to the Mexican drug syndicate the Gulf cartel.

ICE, calls the Dilley detention center in south Texas a family residential facility; the migrant mothers who are held there regard it as a prison. ICE considers the space into which Berenice and her daughter were put with three other families a private room; she calls it a cell.

In Berenice’s case, a bond of $5,000 was set by an immigration judge. Having spent all her money on the journey and bribes in Mexico, she had nothing left