A British tourist held for nineteen days in Trump's United States speaks out: "I woke up from the cold in the cell."

WashingtonWhen Rebecca Burke She was handcuffed and loaded into a van to the immigration detention center in Tacoma, near Seattle, just 36 days after Donald Trump had returned to the White House. The British artist had been detained by immigration agents (ICE) when she tried to enter Canada through the Pacific Highway land port. "I had heard about the cases of tourists and people with legal visas who had been detained by ICE when trying to enter the country. But I was leaving the United States. At no point had it considered that I would end up detained for 19 days in an immigration detention center," Burke explains in a video call with the ARA since she was deported on March 17 on a commercial British Airways flight.

The 28-year-old is one of the many cases of foreigners who during the three months of Trump's administration have been detained or returned despite having a legal visa. In March, the story of German tourists Jessica Brösche and Lucas Sielaff broke. They were arrested by ICE upon entering the southern border and detained for 46 and 16 days, respectively. Canadian Jasmine Mooney, who had been crossing the US border for years for work and had a work visa, was also detained for two weeks without explanation. An Australian with a work visa who had been living in the country for years told The Guardian who left for his sister's funeral and when they tried to return they wouldn't let him in. They were not allowed into the country because they had messages critical of Trump on their cell phones.But unlike all those cases, Burke was leaving the United States when she was arrested.

The artist had left everything behind to embark on what was supposed to be the trip of a lifetime for four months as a backpacker. For almost six weeks, she stayed with two families in exchange for helping them with housework. It's a type of tourism managed through the Workaway website, which is based on cultural exchange. "When she tried to enter Canada on February 26th with a tourist visa and mentioned that she had arranged her stay in Vancouver via Workaway, customs officers returned her to the US side. "I think they misinterpreted that I was going to work, and that's why they told me to apply for a work visa." Burke handed Burke's passport to ICE officers, and they classified her as an illegal immigrant. I was very scared, I didn't understand what was happening, and they didn't give me much of an explanation. They told me I had broken the law and that I would be returned to the UK on the first deportation flight." But instead of boarding a plane, she ended up in a single-person holding cell at the customs port. After several interrogations, they cut her shoelaces.It is a common practice, even with children as young as five years old.–, they made her sign a series of papers and sent her to the immigration detention center in Tacoma.

"I couldn't believe what was happening. I was in shock and very tired. By the time they sent me there, it was already nighttime. I insisted that I would pay for my own deportation flight that same day, but they wouldn't let me. Normally, when someone is removed from the country, that option is given-. Arrested at noon, she estimates that she arrived at the Tacoma ICE detention center around midnight. The only things I was able to keep were my glasses, shoes without laces, a hair tie, and a book I had in my backpack. They gave me some kind of yellow two-piece uniform: long pants and a short-sleeved shirt. I even had to change my underwear into one they gave me," Burke explains. She struggles to remember arriving at the center due to her nervousness and state of shock: "Everything was surreal." After completing paperwork and having a nurse check her condition, she was transferred to a sort of giant ward with other women who had been held by the criminal. Burke estimates there were about 100 of them, sleeping in this two-story ward with a sort of inner courtyard lined with metal tables in the center.

"At first, when I arrived, I was in a cell, where you shared a toilet with the person you were assigned to. But eventually, I moved from the cell to the bunk beds, and at one point, 22 of us were sharing a single toilet. I felt like the facility was overcrowded," Burke recounts. Her cellmate was Rosa, a Mexican woman in her fifties who barely spoke English. "She was so nice... When I arrived at 5:30 in the morning, I accidentally woke her up when I entered the cell, but she got up right away and started helping me make my bed and asking if I was okay. I was crying, and she said, '"No cry, no cry". Rosa, as she explained, had been held in the immigration center for a year.

Burke recounts how in addition to changing her clothes, they also gave her a box with a blanket, a plastic cup, a bar of soap, and a sheet about the place and the rules and another one that said: "That's not. Information about the objects to which we were entitled, I discovered that we were missing things. I had a sweatshirt and I never washed it because the blanket was too thin and I would wake up from the cold in the cell. It was very cold. At night, in fact, it seemed like they turned on the air conditioning. Also, they never turned off the light. At night they only dimmed it, but we had to sleep with our arms over our eyes or cover our faces with clothes," she recalls.

The constant light, combined with the fact that the tiny windows faced a wall, made her lose track of time. "It felt like Groundhog Day. One day went by, and then another, and you didn't know if it was morning or afternoon, except for the fact that there was a big clock in the middle of the room." One way she found to pass the time was to start drawing. "I made portraits of all the women there. Many of them would come in, and when they saw me drawing, they would ask me to do a portrait of them. It was from that that I decided I would make a comic about my confinement." When Burke entered the center, she didn't know when she would leave. "I thought it would be quick, but when I heard the stories of other women who had been there for weeks, months, even a year, I saw it wasn't. Remember the case of an American woman originally from the Philippines, Luellen, who worked at a cancer hospital. She had a work visa, but she was still detained for a case that has been delayed even more."

Burke notes that her return to the UK was accelerated when her story broke in the press and the British Embassy began to intervene. "From what I spoke to the other women, they did a lot of things with my case that they don't normally do. For example, an ICE officer came to talk to me in the bedroom and informed me exactly about the flight."

On March 17, they finally came to look for her. "They gave me back my things, I changed my clothes, and they handcuffed me again. This time they also put a chain around my waist and glued my hands to the chain. And they also put ankle braces on me," she recalls. "I had to shuffle along, with an officer holding my arm because I couldn't walk properly because the chains were so tight." They took her to Seattle Airport, where she was directed through an area separated from the lobby and passenger control. "They had me waiting in a small room where you could see my bags." They didn't remove the chains until I boarded the plane, and her passport was given to the cabin crew to hold until I landed on British soil. "I remember when I sat down in my seat I started crying with relief."

Now Burke is banned from entering the United States for ten years. "I don't think I'll ever want to go back, either. Now I'm going to focus on making the comic to tell the story of all the women I met at that center."