A family from southwestern Africa that was living in Washington state while seeking asylum said they were detained by immigration officials for nearly a month in a windowless cell.

The family had feared deportation and tried to cross from Blaine, Washington, into Canada. They then spent 24 days from April 26 to May 20 — in a single holding room.

OPB talked with one adult female member of the family, the mother of four children who is also in the third trimester of another pregnancy. She said she wanted to raise awareness about the conditions that she, her partner and their children faced.

“It wasn’t really a detention,” she told OPB Tuesday in a conversation conducted with an interpreter. “It was more like a jail cell. And there were six of us.”

OPB is not naming the family nor their country of origin because the family said they worry about retribution.

“My fear is that I could get in trouble and get deported,” she said. “Also, I’m pregnant, so I don’t want to be the one telling what goes on there.”

The family faces political persecution in their home country, according to attorneys with the Washington branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. The legal organization is investigating the family’s detention for potential civil rights claims.

The six-person family had one toilet in the room to share. The mother, who is diabetic, is still breastfeeding her youngest child: an 11-month-old who was born in Washington state and is a U.S. citizen under the embattled birthright citizenship legal principle.

The family had limited access to the outside world while detained, ACLU Washington attorneys said, even as their 13-year-old was so distressed that the child reportedly threatened self harm.

Meanwhile, few people knew of their detention. The family has no other relatives in the U.S. The immigration lawyer working with the family said she was abroad and didn’t know her clients were detained until after she returned. She did not respond to follow-up questions.

Immigrants rights experts worried that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, did not sufficiently help the family contact their attorney or anyone outside the Blaine facility.

Angelina Godoy, of the University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights, said she heard about the family’s detention in mid-May and could not reach the family despite what she described as “over a dozen calls” to CBP. She called it shocking that a family of six had been in border protection custody for weeks and so few people knew.

“They had no ability to contest that they were being detained,” Godoy said. “They were just held — essentially kidnapped — and released by the government when they decided to do so.”

In a statement, a CBP spokesperson said that the agency generally tries to process people within three days.

“CBP treats aliens within its custody humanely and strictly adheres to CBP’s national standards,” the spokesperson said in an email.

The spokesperson did not immediately respond to follow-up questions about whether federal officials helped the family reach out to anyone beyond their holding cell.

The detention comes as the Trump administration rewrites some Biden-era policies that aimed to protect vulnerable people in custody. The agency is on the frontlines of the president’s crackdown on immigration.

That the family was detained is less controversial than the three weeks they spent in custody along the U.S.-Canada border, at the Blaine Border Patrol Station.

The family arrived in the United States in 2024 seeking asylum. Canada, under an ongoing agreement with the United States, would have sent the family back to the United States anyway.

But the family’s claims suggest immigration officials broke current detention guidelines. Agency rules say people detained by CBP should be in custody for a maximum of 72 hours.

ACLU Washington declined to specify how the family managed to contact people outside the federal facility, citing only “community members” blowing the whistle on their care.

“There were members of the community who learned about the family’s detention at the Blaine facility and, realizing the direness of the situation, reached out to us in hopes that we would be able to help the family be released,” said La Rond Baker, legal director of ACLU Washington

Word spread to state and federal lawmakers, who told OPB that they began inquiring about the family shortly before CBP released them. The family is now back at their Seattle apartment, and they are facing an uncertain future.

Shortly after the family’s release last week, attorneys with the ACLU Washington contacted them by phone and took statements. The family told the organization that they had felt isolated.

“They weren’t allowed really any access to attorneys or communication with the outside world,” Baker said. “Every aspect of this is concerning and should concern every person.”

From immigrants to detainees

The family fled their home country less than a decade ago, fearing they were a target of political persecution after a family member had been killed, an ACLU attorney said.

The mother, father, and two oldest children — ages 13 and 10 — hail from southwest Africa. The family initially fled to Brazil, where a third child was born.

Last year, they sought asylum in the United States. To get asylum, they had to physically be present in the country, file an application and go through an interview process.

Attorneys said immigration officials determined that the family had a “credible fear” of returning to their home country. Asylum seekers must remain in the United States while their cases are in process.

In Washington state, they briefly settled at a church in Tukwila where many asylum-seekers find refuge. Rev. Jan Bolerjack said the family’s stay was without incident. They settled shortly before the mother gave birth to her youngest child.

“They arrived traumatized. A bit bewildered with being in a new place,” Bolerjack said.

According to Bolerjack, the family first lived in the church, then a tiny home-style shelter nearby. Eventually, they graduated to their apartment in the Seattle area.

But the family’s path to asylum grew more complicated this spring. Border agents and the family have proffered different explanations to what happened. Federal immigration court records are not publicly accessible.

According to the family and ACLU Washington attorneys, a judge requested more information about the case that an immigration attorney wasn’t able to provide. The case is open, they said.

CBP, on the other hand, said the case was closed after the immigration attorney “never provided the information” to the judge. “So the case was closed and the immigration judge ordered them to be removed,” a spokesperson said.

The family’s immigration attorney did not respond to OPB’s requests to see the federal records.

Fearing deportation, the family tried to flee once again — this time to Canada.

“They were detained because they were attempting to leave the country, which is what they thought the government wanted from them,” said David Montes, an ACLU Washington staff attorney.

The room where the family was held had two benches, a family member said through the interpreter. Montes was also authorized to speak on the family’s behalf.

“I asked the family to describe how big that cell was, and they said that if their 13-year-old laid down, he could just about reach the walls with his feet and head going both directions,” Montes said.

The family said they shared a single toilet in the cell.

“There was no way to not be seen going to the bathroom other than to simply ask the other people to turn around,” Montes said.

Mother and father slept on mats on the floor, Montes said, along with the younger children. They didn’t have adequate bedding until the mother brought back sheets from a hospital visit related to her pregnancy.

The children, Montes said, suffered from being confined for multiple weeks. The 13-year-old at one point told guards he wanted to hurt himself, and family members say guards ignored him.

“They’d be in the cell all day, never having the opportunity to get out or go outside; or have the kids play or anything like that,” Montes said.

According to Montes, the mother said “because they were trapped in there so long, she would be banging on the door to try to get the guards to open the door and that they largely ignored them.”

In those conditions, the mother continued to breastfeed her 11-month-old. She is at high risk for preeclampsia, a condition that can threaten both the mother and the fetus, Montes said.

The CBP spokesperson said border agents checked the holding room regularly for “cleanliness, temperature and general welfare.” They said they provided sleeping mats and blankets according to their policy.

Immigration attorneys who work in the Pacific Northwest say the U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility in Blaine, Washington, is not designed as a detention facility to hold people long-term.

Elizabeth Benki, directing attorney of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, said risky pregnancies can be reason enough to release someone. But she cast doubt on the agency’s authority to keep the 11-month-old in custody for three weeks.

“CBP has the authority to release anyone in their custody,” Benki said. “Certainly, U.S. citizens cannot be detained long-term by CBP.”

Release and questions about care

The questions surrounding the family’s detention stem partly from the fact that immigration policies have been in flux since the second Trump administration began.

When asked about how CBP cared for the southwestern African family, a spokesperson said everything was done according to the agency handbook.

While agency policy says they should release detainees within three days, the spokesperson said that “some cases are unique and require CBP to hold some individuals longer than normal.”

Neha Desai, of the National Center for Youth Law, said it’s common for the federal agency to blow by the 72-hour policy like they did with the family from southwest Africa.

“We have seen, time and time again, children detained for far longer than those 72 hours,” Desai said. “It’s important to remember that Customs and Border Protection facilities were not designed for long-term detention of everyone. They were really designed for short-term processing of adult men.”

There is less wiggle room for border agents when it comes to detaining children, however. The federal government has been locked in a settlement agreement since 1997 that ensures detained children are given basic necessities like toothbrushes and potable water. They also ensure children have access to legal representation while being detained.

That agreement — called the Flores settlement — is a binding contract with oversight from a federal judge. Desai said the family’s three eldest children would be covered by Flores.

On Thursday, the administration asked a federal judge to end the Flores settlement agreement. In their filing, government attorneys said the settlement is hindering its ability to enforce immigration laws. They said that halting judicial oversight wouldn’t lead to a rollback of standards.

And earlier this month, CBP’s acting commissioner issued a memo rescinding four Biden-era policies designed to improve care for vulnerable detainees, including pregnant people. The policies outlined how and when to give detainees access to food and water; and mandated fresh diapers and baby formula.

The agency wrote in an internal memo that the policies were “obsolete.”

Those moves stand to harm detainees who— like the family held in custody in Blaine, Washington — don’t speak English or Spanish as their first language, said Jennifer Ibañez Whitlock, senior policy director at the National Immigration Law Center.

“They are totally isolated from both the outside world and the staff that’s there,” Ibañez Whitlock said.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained pregnant women about 4,600 times from 2016 to 2018, according to a 2020 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Of those, 68% of the detentions lasted one week or less.

It’s not clear exactly why CBP released the family on May 20, but they did so after word had reached the ears of immigration attorneys and politicians.

Officials with U.S. Sen. Patty Murray and Washington Attorney General Nick Brown had begun asking CBP to explain the family’s status, multiple sources said.

Rather than responding in writing, CBP instead made a late evening phone call that said only that the family would be put in an “alternate detention plan,” sources said.

The family was then released to their Seattle home, sources said. They plan to continue pursuing their asylum claim.

“I hope people will seriously think about what happened here, and think about ways that we can engage lawmakers to make sure it never happens again,” Baker said.

Conrad Wilson contributed to this report.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/05/28/like-a-jail-cell-family-of-six-detained-at-washington-state-border-facility-for-more-than-three-weeks/