Editor's note: This is the first blog in a series of stories from inside the Otero County Processing Center, based on interviews conducted in the summer of 2024 by Colorado College students: Alex Reynolds, Sandra Torres, Karen Henriquez Fajardo, and Michelle Ortiz. We are grateful for their invaluable work on this project.
Juvenal Junior Reyes Villegas—Junior, as he prefers to be called—was held in the Otero County Processing Center when we spoke with him in June 2024. A 24-year-old geology and civil construction student from Venezuela, Junior fled political persecution after participating in student protests. One day, Venezuelan police forced him into their patrol truck and gave him a chilling ultimatum: pay extortion money within 24 hours or be killed. Junior had no choice but to escape to Colombia. His journey to seek safety in the United States involved a harrowing trek through the Darién Gap, where he witnessed fellow travelers fall from cliffs to their deaths.
But the trauma didn't end at our border. Despite passing his asylum screening interview, Junior faced an immigration judge who repeatedly accused him of gang membership based solely on his tattoos. When the psychological strain of detention became unbearable, he requested deportation, desperate to help his struggling family. The immigration judge denied even this plea for release. At the time that we spoke with him for this story, he was still in detention—five months after he was ordered deported.
"Otero uses solitary to disturb the detainees...it's psychologically damaging."
Junior is one of the hundreds of people held on any given day in immigration detention in New Mexico. His experience illustrates the systemic abuses that plague these facilities. One day in the spring of 2024, guards pulled Junior and other Venezuelans from their beds at the Otero facility without explanation. Junior spent 17 days arbitrarily held in solitary confinement in a cramped two-by-three-meter cell, where bright lights burned 24/7, making sleep nearly impossible. It took a hunger strike for Junior and the others to learn that ICE had never even ordered their isolation—it was, they claimed, a "miscommunication."
"Otero uses solitary to disturb the detainees," Junior said. "I've seen people break down and cry there. It's psychologically damaging. They make you feel worthless.” He described guards who mock detained individuals’ English, pepper their speech with profanities, and openly discriminate against Venezuelans, telling them they don't belong in the United States.
This is the reality of ICE detention in New Mexico. While Junior maintained his spirits by reading his bible, giving haircuts to people detained alongside him, and dreaming of opening his own barbershop, he struggled daily with the prolonged separation from his daughter, who kept asking when he would come home.
During his time in Otero, Junior dreamed of his release from detention. The first thing he would do, he said, was to call his family and eat his favorite meal, a parrilla (barbecue) with an ice-cold soda. He hoped to find work to help his family and, one day, to live his childhood dream of attending a Yankees game.
Image of Junior and his loved ones. Photo courtesy of Junior and his family.